RID OF ME and 4-TRACK DEMOS vinyl reissues due August 21.

https://www.fnac.com/a14833577/PJ-Harve ... licable|L1

https://www.fnac.com/a14833576/PJ-Harve ... nyle-album

I don’t understand comparing her to Patti Smith, Suzi Quattro, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which is what is what I think is happening in the description for the demos, but whatever. Can anyone translate from the French?

Also it looks like Caroline Records is handling both of these, at least for France (or the EU)?

^ Ooh, thanks!

I wonder who will be doing the remastering on this one.

EXACTLY.

Perfectly stated, thanks.

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A complaint I have about TBYML and Is This Desire?, which no one else ever seems to voice.. and I don't understand why, I can't be alone in this..

The bloated, over-saturated bass. It's just far too over-whelming on some tracks, destroying ever other sound in its path. And the better your speakers or headphones are at reproducing the full bass spectrum, the more overbearing it sounds.

'Catherine', for one example. I adore that song, but I must adjust the bass down several notches in order to listen to this track.

Polly's great fondness for guttural bass notwithstanding, I gotta think that this was a mixing issue where the monitoring speakers were either improperly positioned within the room in relation to the mixing desk (creating a bass null) or those speakers were simply inadequate with respect to bass output. Which in either scenario, the engineer/mixer might have felt it necessary to boost the bass more in compensation if either of those flaws were present and they didn't recognize the issue.

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Rid of Me and 4-Track Demos out on August 21st:





Rid of Me:



4-Track Demos:

i thought that maybe the whole catalogue would be reissued in the fashion of Dry / Dry Demos, including CD’s in the same kind of digipacks, and with additional demos in every case, but i’m confused with this vinyl-only announcement. there were Rid of Me songs in demo form that weren’t released, plus a bunch of unreleased songs from the same period. i understand that 4-Track Demos can be considered its companion, but then it would have been special to add a separate disc to it with the rest of the 1991-92 demos. today's announcement leaves me wondering, since it leads to think there won’t be bonus material for these two because one includes most of the demos of the other already

At this point I'm very confused by this statement from the first official announcement:
"For the first time, each of PJ Harvey’s album demos will be available as a stand-alone album on vinyl, CD and download".
I'm afraid it only applies to Dry Demos and 4-Track Demos, which in fact we are getting as stand-alone reissues
(though they should have used both instead of each, to make it more clear).

Plus, no bonus material has ever been officially announced, that was just a guess we made when we saw the tapes on Instagram.
I hate to say this but the campaign has been cunningly orchestrated to make us all excited over nothing new, unless you are fan of vinyls.

uh-oh... you might be right. i'm reading that sentence the way you mean it and i think i'm ready to foget everything we've been fantasizing lately. it was too good to be true...

EDIT: even if that's that, why would they put emphasis on the fact that 4-Track Demos will be available as a stand-alone reissue, if it's always been independent from Rid of Me unlike the Dry Demos?

Using the word ‘each’ when they really meant ‘both’ Dry and Rid Of Me only, would be a huge error that I doubt they would’ve made. Seems odd that Polly wouldn’t have caught that herself, considering she’s clearly involved in these reissues and has always overseen the promotional material and copy for each release.

You're right, I didn't read it that way. To be honest, I'm mostly excited about getting the early albums on vinyl; I wasn't planning on buying physical copies of the demos LPs anyway since it's not exactly something I like to put on a turntable -- a digital version for quick reference would be sufficient for me.

I still hope we'll get a bonus disc for every release because each of PJ Harvey’s album demos sounds different to me than each of PJ Harvey’s demo albums. Semantics. But as some people have already mentioned in this thread, it sounds almost too good to be true and poses a question of 'what exactly is a demo?' given the fact that some of her later recordings were demos transferred to a studio with additional instrumentation added in the process (like "I Think I'm a Mother").

I guess we'll know next month when they announce TBYML.

Scrolling back on her FB page, this is from May 28:

PJ Harvey will re-issue her entire back catalogue of studio albums on vinyl as well as release separate 'Demos' albums – featuring demo versions of each album track, available for the first time as a complete stand-alone alone collection – on vinyl, CD and download over the next 12 months.

This states explicitly "demos for each track published on all her albums", I don't know how else it could be interpreted.
Yet so far we are not getting demos for ALL the songs on Rid Of Me... Something doesn't match.





What if it's just a marketing ploy?

I doubt Island would try to 'trick' fans with such a marketing ploy. Maybe "demo versions of each album track" was an exaggeration / mental shortcut for "additional disc featuring home recordings of some of the songs released on the proper album". TBH I'd rather hear some unreleased tracks (as was the case with 4TD) than demos of, say, "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" or "Electric Light" which probably sound just like the album versions.

Well, it doesn’t make much sense as a marketing ploy, because it’s not like there’s currently an option to pre-order the entire catalogue, thinking you were going to get demos for all songs only to learn later that it was just a ploy to take your money. That would be a marketing ploy. As it stands, no one is going to be tricked into buying demo-less reissues when they don’t want to?

Further, I would point to the copy you highlighted yourself as reason to think demos for subsequent albums will be released:



Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if some releases featured a mix of B-sides and demos. Nothing concrete making me think that, aside from the Rid Of Me/4TD release already deviating from the “demos for each song on the album” template.

This, exactly. I would also rather have the B-sides from TBYML on vinyl than demos for a lot of those songs. I prefer so many of the B-sides over many of the album tracks. And I’d love to hear “Clothes”, “He’s Just My Type”, the original recording of “Long Time Coming”, and other assorted unreleased recordings listed on her cassettes.

also for this Rid of Me + 4 Track demos
there's no extra unreleased photos as was for Dry, am I right?