dot_fennel | [music] REVENGE - One True Passion 2.0 (LTM)

My friend Douglas likes to say that all things are reissued "in the fullness of time". I've come to believe that he's right about this, but his adage says nothing about anomalies like this one: a surpassingly inessential side project by New Order bassist Peter Hook has been anthologized with a whole disc of bonus tracks, while New Order's actual albums have never gotten the rarities-and-b-sides treatment. I mean, those New Order records are still in print, so maybe that doesn't count, but still...

The "2.0" conceals a clever detail: instead of working from the original running order of the two discs (an album and an EP) collected here, they have-- as far as I can tell-- just put all Revenge's good tracks on the first disc, and the less-good tracks, the ones that wouldn't have surfaced until this reissue if history had gone correctly the first time, on the second disc. Some of the rarities are there, sure, but so are several of the tracks on my old One True Passion that made me skeptical about whether I'd really enjoyed the good parts as much as I'd thought.

For a pop reissue, I think that's a great idea. Taken to its logical conclusion I suppose it would have appalling results in the world of literature (e.g. each of Dickens' novels reprinted with half of its length transferred to appendices).