It’s official: the Vinyl Revolution has been fought and won. 2021 was the first year since 1987 that the vinyl LP outsold the CD. Vinyl pressing plants can’t keep up with demand for new product. Consequently, 2022 should be another boon year for grooved plastic, but there are several platters I’d particularly like to see and hear in the coming year. Here are ten (actually, more than ten) of them:
1. The Beatles’ Anthologies-Expanded
Despite a bit of a COVID-related hiccup in 2020, a big, beautiful box of Beatles has become a new annual tradition. This year saw the release of an anniversary set devoted to Let It Be, and the vinyl edition is the first of these to completely mimic the CD one, right down to the inclusion of a hardcover book. What will come next is a bit of a floating question mark. Logic dictates that now that Sgt. Pepper’s through Let It Be have received their obligatory deluxe boxes, series-mastermind Giles Martin will next skip back to the beginning and start remixing the early Beatles records. However, Martin has said that the fact that the early Beatles albums were recorded on two-track machines limits the options for remixing them (never mind that he has already remixed a bunch of pre-Pepper’s tracks for projects such as the remixed edition of Beatles 1 and the Yellow Submarine Songtrack).
That’s actually fine by me, since I’m perfectly happy with Giles’s dad’s original mixes (at least the mono ones) of most of these albums, which are readily available to record hunters with an ebay or discogs account. I also haven’t been bowled over by most of the bonus material on these sets since the best of The Beatles’ outtakes had already been released back in the mid-nineties on the Anthology sets. Unfortunately, these sets are out of print on vinyl and very expensive on the secondary market, especially if you want Anthology 2 and Anthology 3, by far the most listenable installments of the series. So I would like to see all three Anthologies return to print for a reasonable price tag, and if I’m not getting greedy, I’d like to see them expanded with a few of the prime outtakes that didn’t make it to any of the Deluxe box sets. One of my main issues with this year’s Let It Be box is that it did not include interesting bootlegged items such as the best band-version of “All Things Must Pass”, “Watching Rainbows”, or “Mean Mr. Mustard/Madman”. An expanded Anthology 3 might be the last opportunity to finally right that wrong.
2. The Who- The Road to Tommy
While this year saw Universal Music finally learn its lesson regarding the importance of vinyl and release the Let It Be box in its vinyl edition in the exact same state as the CD edition, the record company still has a long way to go when it comes to The Who. One of UMe’s highest-profile releases of 2021 was the Super Deluxe edition of The Who Sell Out. On CD, it was a big, booming box loaded with mono and stereo mixes, singles, demos, and outtakes. The 108 tracks included on the CD set were boiled down to a scant 51 for the two double-vinyl LP sets (one stereo, one mono) released in conjunction with the big CD box.
While a vinyl set including the remaining 57 tracking omitted from vinyl would be nice, I’d most like to see a stand-alone vinyl release of the disc from the box set dubbed “The Road to Tommy”. This disc includes an album’s worth of tracks The Who recorded between sessions for Sell Out and Tommy, functioning as a sort of recreation of the scrapped 1968 album that producer/manager Kit Lambert tentatively titled Who’s for Tennis to capitalize on that year’s Wimbledon Tournament. While that title is even worse than “The Road to Tommy”, the set contains such delightful Who oddities as “Dogs”, “Faith in Something Bigger”, “Fortune Teller”, “Melancholia”, and the superior long version of “Magic Bus”. As I wrote in my review of the vinyl stereo edition of The Who Sell Out, a Record Store Day release of “The Road to Tommy” on vinyl would be a winner.
3. The Monkees- Missing Links- Expanded Collection
Record Store Day 2021 did see the vinyl releases of The Monkees’ three outtakes collections on vinyl, two of which had only been previously available on CD, but the single-LP editions that Friday Music put out were less than ideal. Friday sourced its three Missing Links volumes from digital files. The Monkees manager and gatekeeper Andrew Sandoval was cut out of the process. The albums were also grossly overpriced at around $40 for single-LPs and produced in such limited quantities that they can only be purchased now for even more inflated prices on the secondary market. Fingers crossed that Sandoval will be able to wrestle these albums back from Friday and somehow get them out with optimal sound and in reasonable quantities. I also wouldn’t mind some bonus tracks. In fact, I'd already mapped out how such a collection might look way back in 2019.
4. P.P. Arnold- The Immediate Collection
Ex-Ikette P.P. Arnold was one of the key artists on Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label. Her gruff, unabashedly emotional belting makes everything Oldham had her record a volatile cocktail. It would not be unreasonable to opine that no one but The Beach Boys should be allowed to record “God Only Knows”, since it's one of the most perfect recordings in pop history. Yet Arnold not only recorded her own version, but she did it beautifully, devastatingly. Unfortunately, you’ll have to do a lot of digging and spending to get it on vinyl these days. Arnold’s two Immediate albums—The First Lady of Immediate and Kafunta—are due for a really nice vinyl reissue, since they haven’t been available on vinyl since the eighties, according to Discogs. A new generation of vinyl aficionados needs to hear such stunning tracks as “(If You Think You're) Groovy”, the definitive version of “Angel of the Morning”, and yes, Arnold's mighty version of “God Only Knows”.
5. Suzanne Vega- 99.9F° - Expanded
6. Shudder to Think- Get Your Goat (and beyond)
7. Sloan-Smeared
Not to belabor this whole thirtieth anniversary thing, but of all the vinyl reissues on this list—anniversary or otherwise—the one I can most see happening in 2022 is a thirtieth anniversary vinyl release of Sloan’s first album recorded in the days when they were as indebted to My Bloody Valentine as they were to Cheap Trick. Because of its noisy arrangements, Smeared is a bit of an outlier in the discography of Canada’s greatest power pop combo, but tunes such as “500 Up”, “I Am the Cancer”, “Sugartune”, and “What’s There to Decide?” are as delectable as anything the group would ever record. Sloan's Murder Records reissued Navy Blues on vinyl for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2020, so a thirtieth anniversary release for Smeared seems pretty natural.
8. Angelo Badalamenti- The Best of the Twin Peaks Archives
Composer Angelo Badalamenti recorded hundreds of dreamy cues for Twin Peaks and its accompanying film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me released in 1992 (oh boy, another thirtieth anniversary). Many of these have seen official release, and on vinyl no less. Even Twin Peaks: Season Two Music and More, originally released only on CD in 2007, saw a special Record Store Day vinyl release on Rhino Records in 2019 (complete with an atypically lousy and lazy cover redesign by Twin Peaks-co-creator David Lynch). However, there are still tons of excellent Twin Peaks music that has never been released on any physical format.
These 212 tunes were released as MP3s back in 2011 for an absurdly economical $9.90 via Spinshop.com and were still available as of 2017, when I finally splurged on them. However, Spinshop.com is now down and no one buys MP3s anymore anyway. They do buy vinyl though! While it’s probably unreasonable to expect that all ten hours of music would find its way onto vinyl—and, frankly, I wouldn’t want that anyway since there’s so much repetition (twenty versions of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” alone!)—but a more concise double or triple LP with the cream of the unreleased crop would be damn good.
9. Guided by Voices in the ’00s
2021 was a pretty good year for vinyl-collecting Guided by Voices fans. Scat Records reissued the band’s breakthrough album, Propeller, on vinyl and announced a campaign to reissue the four albums that proceed it in the years to come (though the major labels’ rush to commandeer the Vinyl Revolution has thrown a sad crimp in that plan). TVT Records released a beautiful double-LP reissue of 2001’s Isolation Drills. Now I’d like to see that trend continue over at Matador, the label that has dibs on 2002’s Universal Truths and Cycles (twentieth anniversary!) and my personal favorite of the groups’ ’00s LPs, 2003’s Earthquake Glue.
10. Guided by Voices- Suitcase
And since we’re on the topic of Guided by Voices, I’d also like to make an appeal for a less likely release. Despite the band’s prodigious output of proper albums, Bob Pollard and the gang still have a legendarily massive backlog of outtakes. Many of these have seen release on GBV’s Suitcase series, a collection of four box sets— four box sets!—of rarities. Much as I was when wishing for more Twin Peaks outtakes on vinyl, I am not unrealistic and do not expect these four, four-disc box sets to see vinyl release in their entireties. Also, as would be the case with a faithfully reproduced Twin Peaks Archives on vinyl, there’d be a lot of dross since the Suitcases contain their fair share of failed experiments and crashed aircraft. So I’d be happy with any combo of the best of the outtakes from the Suitcase sets, the Hardcore UFOs box set, or the group’s sundry singles and EPs I included in this old post.
Have a happy, vinyl-stacked 2022.
