The Return of the Durutti Column

The music is classic and poignant, but a few notes about the 2014 reissue: though labelled "special edition" and priced at 20 dollars, it just comes in a regular jewel case. I was expecting an outer cardboard box perhaps emulating the cover art of the original release. Secondly, the 10 "bonus tracks" are actually 5, as the other 5 are actually repetitions of Side 2 of the album so as to "emulate" the running orders of the different editions of the original LP. That being said, the sound quality is GREAT and the booklet is very nice, with quotes from Vini Reilly, Tony Wilson, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and others.

The first album from the Durutti Column, this introduced their truly unique sound to the world. No one else sounds quite like this, which makes the Durutti Column all the more precious. Sparkling spider webs of guitar weave intricate patterns in a most beautiful fashion.

this is Manchester from old times on new feelings from a fortcomming vinyl long playing kontekst mirror. I , Aamong manyslisteners have a pioner in this guitarplaying musician. I really get a nerve inside me,. that shivers of joy, listening to the mann.so fantastic sound with sublime play of a guitar that i love for the future.......................so ......peace, love and harmony.

Enjoyable guitar work. Haunting but not as memorable as I was hoping.

Well done. The kind of reissue we all look for. Looks good, sounds great. First shipment was damaged, second one was a beauty!

It's hard to fathom that this utterly original work of ethereal guitars, primitive synth fx and electronic percussion first saw the light of day on Factory Records, the home of apocalyptic post-punkers Joy Division. Poles apart musically, if not ideologically, Durutti Column nevertheless stands alongside Joy Division as yet another late 70's group trying desperately to avoid the cliches of a rock culture that had at the time disintegrated into facile entertainment and crass commercialism. As such, when it was initially released in 1979, The Return of the Durutti Column defied categorization. Intimate, inventive and defiantly non-commercial, the disarming serenity and fragility of songs such as "Sketch for Summer," "Katharine," "Sketch for Winter" and "In D" simply had no other musical analog in 1979. At a time when the art of rock guitar had devolved to reconstituted power riffing and egotistical, self-absorbed soloing, Vini Reilly's painterly brush strokes with his beloved Les Paul etched sonic canvases that even 30 years later still swirl with brilliant, impressionistic acrylics and cool, muted pastels. Pure and pristine, Reilly's evocative, self-effacing approach to sound construction recalls the technical restraint and melodic invention of such master fusion guitarists as Terje Rypdal (particularly "After the Rain") and Fred Frith (Guitar Solos I & II), though without the latter's sometimes annoying avant-garde pretensions. If the young Picasso had painted with a guitar...well, you get the picture. Incidentally, the inclusion of the exceedingly rare 12-inch "Lips that Would Kiss" (two tracks of propulsive beatbox-fueled proto-dreampop) makes this CD release all the more appealing and perhaps even preferable to the original vinyl edition. Though Reilly's intensely personal guitar explorations may be a bit eccentric for some people's tastes, the fact that The Return of the Durutti Column is still available proves that at times there is justice in the universe.

Quite simply one of the most beautiful albums ever recorded. The complete antithesis to fellow Factory artists Joy Division, and yet a perfect complement at the same time. Much has been written about the circumstances of the recording session, but never have a series of improvisational noodlings sounded so cohesive. Ethereal, jazzy, sublime melodies that refuse to be relegated to the background. Every time I play this album I stop what I'm doing and listen. It is the only album I can think of that seems to exist out of time: it could have been recorded yesterday, or a hundred years from now.I recommend you track down a John Cooper Clarke track called 'Belladonna' (from 'Snap, Carckle and Bop') which features another fine Vini Reilly guitar contribution.I bought this album back when it came out, on vinyl in its sandpaper cover. Even though I have the remastered CD, I still love to play my beat-up vinyl version. Somehow the pops and ticks fit in comfortably with Martin Hannett's synth work.The sandpaper cover and the title? Thank the Situationist International for the inspiration. The SI were a bunch of 60s French artist-radicals who were a big influence on the Punk Movement. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were fans, and you can see the influence in their punk fashions and in the Sex Pistols graphics of Jamie Reid. British SI member and noted art historian Tim Clark taught Art History at Leeds University and apparently counted members of Gang of Four and Mekons amongst his students, though they tend to deny a direct SI influence. And of course Factory Records' Tony Wilson was also an SI devotee...The SI sporadically published a magazine called 'The International Situationist' - one issue had a sandpaper cover, the idea being that it would destroy everything around it.They loved to subvert images from popular culture by manipulating them - 'detournement' was the term they coined. One such image was a film still of two cowboys on horseback that had been redrawn as a cartoon. Dialogue balloons were added, saying (my translation):- What are you working on right now?- Some reification- I see, that's serious work, with heavy books and lots of papers on a large table- No, I drift, mainly I drift.This image was a sticker inserted in the Factory Sampler EP and was also a poster distributed to people on the Factory mailing list, I think.The original image was a poster put up around Strasbourg University during a student strike in October 1966. The caption underneath read 'La retour de la colonne Durruti' - The return of the Durruti column.Note the different spelling. Who was Durruti and what was the Durruti Column? If you're interested, google 'Buenaventura Durruti'...The cowboy was a popular image during the punk era. McLaren and Westwood printed a Sex Pistols T-shirt featuring two naked cowboys, and the Gang of Four's first album cover contains a series of subverted western movie stills. For more information, I highly recommend Greil Marcus' book 'Lipstick Traces', and if you can find it, an article he wrote about the punk cowboy motif he wrote for Art Forum back in the mid-80s.Maybe this review ain't much use, but I hope it's of interest!

I have this with the sandpaper sleeve on vinyl, but it is pretty crackly now and my record player is in the attic. Sketch for summer is as beautiful as I remember it, and there is a lot of beauty in the rest of the album, but not much variety.

Well, as Mr R himself says, he and Martin didn't really know what they were doing. And that's maybe why, when it works, there are some serendipitous moments that are poignantly beautiful, probably more so than if they had been more purposefully contrived.

This is a very different sound from the usual every day stuffGreat sounds for nighttime

This is my first Durutti Column purchase. I am quite a late starter, as I am a big fan of most of the other Factory Records artists from that time. Overall I find this album is quite drifty and backgroundy. The guitar is very shoegazey which I love, but most of the tracks don't do a great deal.

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