5 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Bob Weston (vinyl remaster)

This collects two prior releases – a Skin Graft rerelease of Nai-Ha, which included a Zeni Geva / Steve Albini team-up band called Superunit, playing two tunes, as a bonus LP; and a live record billed to ZG and Steve called ‘All Right, You Little Bastards!.’

And actually this presses to vinyl a previous Cold Spring rerelease of the same exact material in 2018, though across all of this, it’s the first time for the ‘Bastards!’ record to be on vinyl.

The two links above cover reviews for the music content. This is a remaster specifically for vinyl, by a Mr. Bob Weston, but I don’t have the Cold Spring disc or the Bastards! album for comparison. As I’ve recently experienced with a Weston remaster of an Albini recording, I admittedly don’t hear a lot of difference between this work and the other SG Nai-Ha, but I didn’t go side-by-side. Either way: we got a remaster specifically for this release, and that’s very cool; it doesn’t necessarily bump the rating up (I’m a bit split on the recording in general, so evaluating the remaster, besides my ignorance of the other versions, is tough), but certainly doesn’t detract from it.

So, additionally: we get very lovely packaging that mixes together artwork from the above mentioned versions with some color tweaks and additional materials, an equally curated OBI strip, and the main draw: full-ass liner notes from Mitsuru Tabata (I think reprinted from elsewhere, but still) covering bits and pieces of Steve’s history with the band, and a new Rob Syers comic that, apparently, tells the tale of Superunit. (Sure, Rob.)

The whole thing speaks to the love of this stuff Mark Fischer and crew put into the label, especially when it’s legacy acts like this – formative bands that shaped the whole no-wave scene. Lastly… the physical edition of this was a Record Store Day exclusive. I’m mixed on this, because that means not everyone can get one, but the record is a good choice for that – its contents are available elsewhere, and it’s being made available digitally, making it truly a collectors’ thing, and collectors will make the trek to a store. I did.