NewsSuper Furry Animals / Rings Around The World reissue
3CD set with 33 previously unreleased tracks
Ratings
Rings Around The World, the fifth studio album from Welsh quintet Super Furry Animals, has been remastered and will be reissued and expanded in September for its 20th anniversary.
The 2001 album was the band’s major label debut (released on Epic) and was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize in that same year.
The singles were ‘(Drawing) Rings Around The World’, ‘It’s Not The End of the World?’ and ‘Juxtapozed with U’. Paul McCartney and John Cale make cameo appearances on the album too.
The 20th anniversary release sees the album remastered from the original tapes and re-released on 2LP vinyl (there’s no bonus seven-inch as per the original vinyl first pressing). The three-CD deluxe edition should be of great interest since this is where all the bonus material resides, and there’s a lot of it; 33 previously unreleased tracks including remixes, demos, and outtakes (full track listing, below).
This reissue includes sleeve notes by Keith Cameron with new band interviews. Rings Around The World is released on 3 September 2021, via BMG. Leave your initial feedback on the three-CD set by rating this release at the top of this post.
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Super Furry Animals
Rings Around The World - 3CD deluxe edition
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Super Furry Animals
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Just got this album today as an early Xmas present! Sounds (and looks) wonderful on vinyl. Thanks to Kliph and everyone else involved. Merry Christmas!
Anyone else experiencing distorted sound from the LP1 of the vinyl reissue? LP2 plays great, so just wondering were other people experiencing the same sound?
My copy has some surface noise and clicks across both LPs, and LP2 is slightly warped too. Playback is good for 90% of the album, but the 10% with noise is distracting.
Discogs reviews seem to suggest this may be common to the pressing itself.
https://www.discogs.com/Super-Furry-Animals-Rings-Around-The-World/release/20075032
It’s disappointing that quality control for a lot of vinyl releases seems to be wildly inconsistent.
Just to update…after a couple of plays, my LP1 really sounded a whole lot better, so may have just been static issues. The record sounds great now, with no noise distortion. Great Album
Have spent the weekend playing the vinyl repress and the expanded CD of ‘Rings Around the World’. I loved this album when it came out but hadn’t played it in years. It was like reconnecting with an old friend! Was great hearing the B-sides again and really enjoyed the demos too.
Big thanks to Kliph for the insights and background to the reissue.
As others have said, almost all the remixes were previously on the DVD, which probably explains why it’s not included in this new package.
The contents of the DVD weren’t included because the original film elements could not be found, therefore there would be no upgrade in quality. I mean, I found the original, uncompressed 5.1 mixes, so there could be a sound upgrade, but that would open up other issues because then I would want to upgrade the stereo mix as well, but as this is a new high resolution master taken from brand new tape transfers, it wouldn’t line up. I noticed that as I was reassembling the record. I had the original on a timeline so I could match all the gaps and crossfades exactly and I had to keep moving the original album around because this new one runs ever-so-slightly slower than the original. It’s not noticeable at all, but it is about 9 seconds longer overall.
I just bought the original DVD-V for £2.83 on eBay.
Love a bit of 5.1!
Apparently the Digital release is actually a Deluxe Digital release split into 2 with 2 different release dates totalling around 75 tracks…
How does one access the link to pre-order this? Can’t find it anywhere…
The first part is showing in Amazon & iTunes, it has a lot more remixes on it but none of the demos so I assume the demos will be expanded for Part 2 of the Digital release which will apparently be out on Fri 24 September 2021…I haven’t seen a tracklisting for that part yet tho…
BMG insisted on splitting up the digital release because there’s a lot that will only appeal to the super-duper fans and they didn’t think it fair to charge everybody who wanted it in high resolution for all of it if they didn’t want some of the super nerdy stuff. I wish it could all come out on the same day because I don’t want anyone to buy the CD to get stuff that will be coming out a few weeks later digitally, but BMG is a label that constantly puts out stuff and keeps their head above water and I’m just a fan of the band, so I trust them.
OK, here’s something that most people don’t seem to remember: On the original vinyl from 2001, side 3 was playing backwards (from center to edge). Do you know if they’ve done the same thing with the reissue?
Apparently not…
Nope. All 4 sides play from the outside in. The focus was on improved sound – and I think people will be happy when they hear it. I was certainly pleased when I listened to the test pressings.
Also, there are 2 different masters. There’s the digital master that is used for the CD and the high res digital and all streaming sites and then there’s a more dynamic master that was done for the vinyl. “Why didn’t you make all of them more dynamic?” Well, we did, BUT there’s a crunchiness that happens when things are compressed and I wanted to honor the band’s original intentions.
I recall this also being Mojo magazine’s album of the year.
Some more details from the compiler, Gliph, here – https://twitter.com/kliphscurlock/status/1417933413827366914?s=21
Standout comment:
The high res digital version weighs in at somewhere around 75 tracks. I personally recommend this for the ultra deep dive into the making of the record.
I hope to God Kliph stays involved & the Record Company remain committed to releasing the final 4 SFA albums in similar fashion, Kliph’s work on these reissues has been nothing short of biblical…
Would then love for him to go all the way back & overhaul Ffa Coffi Pawb’s catalog in a lovingly similar fashion
More biblical than a Liam Gallagher tweet
Well, there are only 2 more records that were on Sony that BMG now own. The other 2 were on Rough Trade, so we’ll have to see what those labels want to do. I hope BMG choose to reissue Phantom Power and Love Kraft, but I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch. I think I’ll be able to talk Rough Trade into doing Hey Venus! and Dark Days/Light Years, especially as Gruff is still on the label, but one thing at a time.
Um, my name is Kliph with a K. Gruff is Gruff with a G, but we’re very different people even though we are good friends and play music together a lot.
Rings at last available again on vinyl. SFA no fuss release on vinyl. Purple would have been nice but………… Thanks for the info Paul
CD interesting and as gives you a choice of building your own boxset
The pink and purple was a gimmick Music On Vinyl chose to do when they licensed it from Sony Holland, which had no right to license it out in the first place. Apparently they have the original stampers that were used to press the original 2001 edition, but I’ve always thought that sounded like shit. It took some doing and some feelings were hurt, but I’m glad that release was killed because this one wouldn’t be happening if that one had…..and this one sounds far superior.
I missed the 90s and 00s and bands like SFA and Charlatans just passed me by.
It’s probably a phenomenon that happens for many people, when you leave school or college, get your first job, get settled, married, kids, and before you know it you are in your 40s and you are still listening to music from your child/young adulthood and have missed the last 20 years.
Then you look back and find it difficult to relate to much of the music from new bands that transpired while still collecting the music of the bands we loved even though the newer material isn’t as good while struggling to find new music that demands repeated plays.
Meanwhile, I am waiting/hoping/fantasizing about 40th anniversary deluxe editions of some seminal albums from 1981, most notably Human League – Dare (hoping), Ultravox – Rage in Eden (waiting), OMD’s Architecture and Morality (fantasizing) – all with 5.1 or Atmos mixes.
Great shout. I’d argue 1981 was the greatest year for music!
I would argue 1981 was one of the worst years for music for the same reasons.
I wonder if the LP will retain the inside-out side 3. I’m guessing yes, given that Guerrilla also had a trick-play feature (which the original release did not).
Apparently not, this is going to be a ‘Gimmick-Free’ release…hence no bonus 7″ recreation either…
No, all 4 sides play like normal records do. There was the opportunity to do the inside-out “hidden track” gimmick with Guerrilla because that side was short and it was keeping with how they hid that track in the pre-gap of the original CD, but that was just a one-off. The goal with the LPs is to get them back in print (so people don’t have to pay stupid amounts of money for the originals, which all sound terrible to me) and make them sound better.
Really happy how SFA has been reissuing their albums consistently and with such great content. This is the next best thing to a box set for me. Wish more bands would follow suit. Bands like the charlatans who just seem to reissue things randomly and with wild differences in quality. And now their label seems to have abandoned cd’s so I have these old jewel packs on the shelf.
SFA deserve to be talked about alongside the all time greats and this album might be their crowning achievement. Only place I’ve even heard about this release is SDE Gruff and SFA official don’t even post about it it’s weird.
The way they’ve handled all their reissues – from Fuzzy Logic, Radiator, Guerilla to Mwng plus the BBC set and even their last best of – has been great.
My only niggle is that I only found out today that there is a difference between the CD version of Guerilla and the digital edition, which (as a moderate completist) has irked me.
Yeah, sorry about that…..sort of. There were just a few too many songs to fit on the 2 disc set and I didn’t want to just put them back in the vault to wait for the “25th anniversary super deluxe with 4 more unreleased songs”. More of this stuff may be released on vinyl as time goes by if there seems to be the interest, but there will be no new “deluxe” versions of any of these records because that’s a bullshit move to pull on fans. So…..yeah……there were just a few too many songs and BMG didn’t want to make it a 3 disc set (which I understand as I would have struggled to fill a third disc with interesting stuff), so the extras are only available digitally. All of the best stuff went on the CDs, so unless you’re a hardcore fan, you can rest easy without those extra versions.
After the disappointment of the aborted purple vinyl reissue a couple of years back, this is really welcome news. I love this album, and look forward to this and the next one, but I’m most excited about Love Kraft getting a vinyl reissue and hopefully a reassessment as a genuine five-star lost classic and their best album, which is exactly what it is.
The Music On Vinyl issue wasn’t approved by the band and was licensed by a branch of Sony who had no right to license the record in the first place. We killed it because BMG told us straight up that if that came out, they wouldn’t put up the money for us to do it right. Since CDs were king at the time they made all of their albums, they were all mastered in 44.1/16 (up through Guerrilla) or 44.1/24 (Mwng onwards) and those same masters were used to cut the LPs from. I totally understand the frustration and disappointment of having to wait a couple of years (and I tried to get BMG to go ahead and hurry up and let us at least remaster the album for vinyl and get it out there, but they wanted to wait), but I really think you’ll find it has been worth the wait.
I appreciate value for money, but equally, I do prefer it when a reissue just contains the original album on disc 1, rather than tagging on some B-sides. But maybe I’m just being picky! But that aside, another great reissue set from SFA, putting other reissues by other artists (who potentially have much bigger budgets) to shame!
I would have preferred to have 1 disc just be the album and put all the bonus stuff on other discs, but if I had done that, a lot of things wouldn’t have been released on CD because BMG was adamant that Fuzzy, Radiator and Guerrilla would be 2 disc sets. They bent with this one because it’s their biggest selling album worldwide, but I guarantee if they continue and let us do Phantom Power and Love Kraft, they’ll be 2 disc sets again.
Outstanding album, better than anything Oasis, Blur or Pulp have ever done. The last three songs are so beautiful they make your heart stop. When you see how much is charged by other artists record companies for a 3CD set this is a benchmark in content and price for them to follow. If you have not heard this buy it, you will not be disappointed.
Well, that fragile happiness
Keeps me from forgetting
That this fragile happiness
Keeps me afloat when I’m sinkin
Yum.
“better than anything…Blur…have ever done.”
Great album, but there are at least three albums by Blur which are better than this.
I think Rings Around The World is more eclectic than any of Pulp or Blur’s output but overall I’d put Different Class and maybe Parklife/Modern Life/His’n’Hers above it.
I always struggled to connect with Blur emotionally. Albarn’s output outside of Blur has been much more to my liking. I love both the Good, Bad & the Queen albums, Plastic Beach & Robots. I saw Blurs first tour at The Cambridge Corn Exchange and they were terrible, I love noise (I saw Loveless at the same venue, genius) but everything sounded the same and was really ramshackle and not in a good way, Albarn seemed only interested in looking cool (not much changed there then) but the quality and diversity of his work since is remarkable.
Only a few great songs by Pulp for me and if you don’t find Jarvis Cocker’s awkward, literal, bad mime performing endearing (which I don’t) its very distracting. Like Jarv is though.
Two half great Oasis albums followed by decades of the two children clogging up the media with their spat is disappointing.
None of them continue the Townsend, Davies, Strummer & Weller (and Albarn & the Gallagher’s will see themselves that way)
SFA are very, very cool and Mwing is very beautiful.
What is your favourite Blur album and why Tim, I’ll give it another go.
Someone once remarked that the best British pop music in the 90s was a battle between sincerity and adventurousness, and Blur had all of the latter but none of the former (and only two or three bands had both). I’d put the self-titled, Parklife and 13 as my top three – I’m drawn in as much by Graham Coxon as Damon Albarn, as he’s always playing something interesting even if the singing irritates (I’m mostly immune to that now!). What I’d also say is that their B-sides and scattered tracks give a more complete picture of their talent, and each of those three albums have some great B-sides that complement them really well!
This would have been an obvious thing to release on BluRay audio I’d have thought – given that the surround sound mixes already exist (on the DVD release) .
… and it’s a great surround mix too!
I answered this up above, but in case you didn’t/don’t see it…….
All of the original film elements are missing, so all we have video-wise are the compressed videos from the DVD.
I do have the uncompressed 5.1 mix, so there could be an upgrade there……however the new master of the stereo mix won’t line up because it’s taken from fresh tape transfers and this new master runs ever-so-slightly slower than the original, which I only noticed while reassembling the album and matching all the gaps and crossfades and whatnot. The new master is about 9 seconds longer than the original, so that’d be a huge pain in the ass to try to get everything synced up again……and with there being no upgrade of the visuals, it just seems pointless to me when £2 used copies of the DVD are plentiful.
Great to see the CD being taken seriously again with this release and the new Judas Priest box set (JP a little on the expensive side)
Unfortunate that the JP set hasn’t received much attention here to date. I’m sure the SFA release is great for fans but surely a 42 disc set from a band celebrating a 50th anniversary is newsworthy. Maybe I’ve missed something in which case I apologise or possibly the wheels of promotion need to turn more readily in the JP camp (no pun intended) I dunno, but when Garbage, Supergrass and SFA warrant a news link without mention of JP then I can’t help but think somethings amiss…
John Prine? My folks love him but SDE has a hip audience ;)
I think it is 20 unreleased tracks. The outtakes and the demos.
I’m pretty sure the B-sides have been previously released.
The remixes appear mostly (entirely) to be from the Rings Around the World DVD-A. I’m sure most of them only appeared on the DVDA, but they have been previously released.
I’d really like the ‘untitled’ track from the 7″ single. I didn’t buy the LP at the time (DVDA was the future!) and it is a shame the bonus track is not being reissued. The original LP costs about £250 when available so I’m not Massively keen on buying it for one track which possibly isn’t that great anyway.
It was DVD-Video, not DVD-Audio. It featured lossy 5.1 mixes in Dolby Digital and DTS.
The track on the 7″ was a single lock groove taken from “All The S**t U Do” – the full track is included here so it’s all good. I have the original double and the 7″ is funny, almost a mickey-take of the type of bonus 7″s that often came with LPs back then but in 2021, it would be an unjustifiable waste of vinyl.
Thanks. I did not know that.
Agreed! The inability to justify the use of petroleum for a slab of vinyl with only one groove is why that wasn’t replicated. My idea got shot out of the water because we couldn’t find anyone who was willing to try to cut it.
Isn’t the 7″ just a locked groove of the B-side All The Shit U Do? It’s not so much a song as a few seconds of sample.
The publicist has been pretty “creative” with what he considers previously unreleased. I argued with him that it was a cheap move to call things that were b sides or were on the DVD “unreleased”, but he has the ears of the press and I don’t, so there you go.
It’s the first album I bought on 5.1, a pity they haven’t put that mix on a Blue Ray with all these extras.
The artwork says 33 unreleased tracks, though most of the remixes were on the DVD edition (which had 16 remixes). My USA copy has all the b-sides on disc 2.
Very excited about this, the other SFA reissues have been amazing and this is such a great album.
The 40 unreleased tracks claim is slightly misleading as it seems to count the remixes which were previously available on the DVD (though I think 2 on the 3CD set are previously unreleased).
There’s also a digital release which skips the demos, but includes all the remixes on CD3, a handful of others that were released on the DVD, and a bunch of additional unreleased ones too.
It does mean though if you want the vinyl, plus all the unreleased tracks (which I do!), you have to buy 3 formats… but I guess still cheaper than most deluxe box sets and lots of great content!
Actually, there will be a second digital collection that comes out 3 weeks after the LP/CD and digital which will have all of the rest of the stuff that’s on the CDs plus a bunch more that wouldn’t fit on the discs. Unless you’re married to physical product, I would strongly recommend skipping the CDs and getting the LP and both digital collections as you’ll get everything AND in high resolution (except for the remixes which only exist in 44.1/16 and some of the demos and other ephemera which exist in 44.1/16, 44.1/24, 48/16 or 48/24 and have all been upsampled to 96/24 to keep the bit and sample rate consistent throughout the collection so as not to trip up players that don’t like switching between bit and sample rates a lot.)
Finally! Until it’s featured in SDE, it ain’t fully true as far as I’m concerned.
This (as with the Furries’ super-cousins recently announced In It For The Money redux) is the examplar of a reissue – a generous bounty of unreleased material, fully using up 3CDs. With the vinyl spruced-up too. Demos, outtakes and remixes alike for fans of each type. Only slight surprise and disappointment for me is that there doesn’t seem to be any early versions of Juxtapozed With U, which for me, was their perfect pop moment.
Almost all the remixes have all been released before – they were extras on the 2001 DVD edition of the album (I think the Catatonia remix wasn’t on there) . There is some hidden track fun (I won’t spoil it) but I still don’t think there are 40 unreleased tracks.
Will be having this, no question. It’s between RATW and Radiator for their finest album and, yet again, SFA showing how this kind of thing should be done. They’ve always given their fans good value.
Not so interested in the demos, but definitely interested in the remixes!
Some of the demos are really fucking cool, in my opinion. The rest are just pretty damn cool. But people like different stuff, I reckon. I, personally, like (maybe) 3 of the remixes and couldn’t care less about the rest of them – BUT they were part of the original “vision” of the original super indulgent monstrosity of this record, so it made no sense to leave them off.