As no one seems to have noticed, I just wanted to inform you that the vinyl re-issues of the Factory years have been released in Germany yesterday.
I ordered them all from Amazon Germany and reveived them today. They are all pressed on 180g vinyl and include a voucher for MP3 downloads of all the tracks. The vinyl quality and sound seems quite good to my ears - they are definitely louder and clearer than the Factory releases.
The inevitable letdown are the sleeves: It seems like the re-issues were treated much less carefully than the lovingly re-constructed Joy Division covers from 2007. All the inner sleeves are printed on standard paper, there are no cut-outs on the back cover of Power, Corruption and Lies. The Brotherhood cover is the 'updated', i.e. identical version to the CD re-issue. But the real shocker and major disappointment is Low-Life: This time they've managed to mess up the typeface on the front cover - quite like they did on the back cover of the nineties' London CD versions!! It's plain to see that the original "Neuzeit" font was replaced by a default typeface, which happens when you haven't got the correct typeface loaded on your computer. Therefore the spacing between the letters isn't right anymore and the type reads like "Or derne w" (well, not quite as the two words are placed on top of each other, but you get the picture). Absurdly, the type on the back cover and the labels is correct.
One could have thought that after the disaster of the CD versions someone at the record label would have been extra-careful to at least get the vinyl versions 100% right...
On the plus side: The printed content on all inner and outer sleeves is identical to the Factory issues, there is no extra London Records copyright blurb placed anywhere to ruin the design. There are no barcodes printed on the sleeves as well.
Let's see if the Low-Life sleeve will be corrected for the UK release, which according to Amazon UK should happen on 24th August. But I wouldn't have high hopes on it.
Anyway, it could have been worse - the records itself seem to be fine. But there's still a bitter aftertaste... again...
