Label:
Warp Records
Release Date:
21/10/2013

Soooo Boards of Canada yeah? Music has the Right to Children, whew, what an album! Er, OK we’ll level with you: when the list of albums up for review this week came around there was a suggestion of some nice shiny free vinyl for us poor old DiS staff writers. We were also less than subtle about hinting at it when the e-mail went in to the PR. Alas, I haven’t been sent any.

If all of this sounds like a spoilt music journo bitching and whining about not getting any free stuff then, well, that’s kind of the point. After all, what’s the point in reviewing this reissue of an album that featured in the upper echelons of Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 90s” list and made its way on to Mojo’s “100 Modern Classics”? An album fetishised by DiS’s readers, contributors and a million like-minded others? With no new material or even flashy new packaging to speak of, what’s new to say about it, let alone for fans to splash out hard-earned cash on?

Fans, presumably, are the target of this reissue, as it’s unlikely anyone heard a track from this year’s Tomorrow’s Harvest on Radio 2 and wanted to check out the back catalogue. Perhaps younger visitors to sites such as this, who read the (much-deserved) praise heaped upon this year’s release and wondered what the fuss around these guys was? If so then the original release is still out there and available. So is the 2004 reissue. A remaster is wholly unnecessary because let’s face it, very few albums released either in 1998 or since then have been so gloriously, perfectly produced as Music has the Right to Children.

It’s a 9-or-10/10 album, but so what? With literally nothing new to review since that 2004 version added ‘Happy Cycling’, what do you want me to talk about? There’s nothing I can say that Mike Diver didn’t earlier this year. You already know it’s a landmark album in its genre and that it’s treated with almost cultish reverence. There are tomes written on it that won’t be improved with any thoughts on a near-identical version of something that’s been out there for you to hear for 15 years anyway. Bugger giving it a score.