Wax Wishes: Four albums we insist 2025 gives their rightful reissue
Photo Courtesy of Greg Stitt
In 2024, we saw reissues of four classic local albums in celebration of their 25th anniversaries: The Creature Comforts’ Teaching Little Fingers to Play, The Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About, Main Street Saints’ Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, and Ultimate Fakebook’s This Will Be Laughing Week. Each vinyl release saw the albums getting various deluxe treatments, including remastering, new artwork, and the inclusion of bonus tracks.
For 2025, we’ve selected four other albums we’d love to see receive the same treatment for their respective 25th anniversaries. The year saw a massive number of releases, including the debut album from Manhattan power-pop teens Podstar, the sole full-lengths from pop punks The Revolvers and indie rockers Proudentall, and a sprinkling of EPs from the likes of Jade Raven, Kristie Stremel, and Trucker.
Additionally, Shiner’s Starless would have obviously made this list had it not already received a reissue on high-fidelity vinyl alongside Splay, Lula Divinia, and The Egg last August via Spartan Records, but here are four albums well worth the time and money required to turn them into wax suitable for spinning on your turntable.
Reflector—Where Has All the Melody Gone? / Prelude to Novelty
The post-band life of Lawrence indie rockers Reflector is fascinating. Jake Cardwell would join the short-lived supergroup Tijuana Crime Scene with the Get Up Kids’ Rob Pope, fellow Reflector member Harry Anderson, producer Ed Rose, and engineer Alex Brahl before forming The Belles with The Creature Comforts’ Chris Tolle, then on to The Caves and The Conquerors before coming to where he is now with power-poppers The Whiffs.
Photo Courtesy of Greg Stitt
Harry Anderson would be part of The People, who changed their name to The Golden Republic and appeared on one track of the split-off band The Republic Tigers, as well as a brief stint in Koufax. Jared Scholz would form The Trelese, and is now senior pastor at Lawrence’s Greenhouse Church.
All that being said, at one point, Reflector seemed like they were going to be the next big thing from Lawrence. The Prelude to Novelty EP heralded a new direction for the band after several single releases in the late ’90s, and it was cemented with their sophomore full-length, Where Has All the Melody Gone?
Sadly, in between recording and release, the band broke up, with a farewell show opened by The Casket Lottery and Kill Creek.
Ideally, for this reissue, we’d give it the full remaster treatment as a double LP, with one disc each devoted to the EP and LP, respectively. Give the jacket matte-finish to make it classy and mimic the original LP on Status Recordings, and see what kind of reminisces we can pull from the band members about their late teens through their early twenties for the liner notes.
Ruskabank—I Don’t Think You Hear Me, Though
Photo Courtesy of Greg Stitt
The last time this Manhattan ska band performed was in 2008—a solid eight years after the release of their second album. While their 1998 debut, This Took Some Time, will always be more remembered thanks to the crowd favorite and radio staple “My Friends,” their sophomore outing is arguably the stronger of the two. Thanks to the triple-shot of “Cheer Up,” the title track, and “Give It Up,” it gets off to a strong start, and the follow-up triptych of love and relationship tunes showcases some of the strongest work from the band.
Ruskabank’s ska was always something of an enigma in the local scene of the late ’90s and early ’00s, eschewing the usual traditional or punk trappings favored by most of the other local artists. Their power-pop approach to the genre meant that you could put them on a bill with fellow Little Apple bands Ultimate Fakebook or Podstar with minimal side-eye from the audience. Not for nothing did I Don’t Think You Hear Me, Though come out on Noisome Records, which featured both acts.
Due to the passing of trombone player Dave Studnicka battling complications from multiple sclerosis in July 2019, it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever see the band reunite, but, in a perfect world, we’d get a vinyl release of this to celebrate its anniversary.
Add in a bonus seven-inch with their cover of Truck Stop Love’s “How I Spent This Summer Vacation” from The Local Music Show Presents Radio Rage compilation and the live recording of “In A Very Bad Place” from Loaded in Lawrence 2002, and you’ve got the perfect package.
Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys—The Spectacular Sadness Of
Originally distributed via Chicago’s Bloodshot Records, the second offering from Kansas City honky-tonk purveyors Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys sees the band really coalescing just a year after their debut, Forever Always Ends. Keeping things in line with their debut, the first song on the release shares its title, and the album as a whole really leans into the “spectacular sadness” of it all.
Photo Courtesy of Greg Stitt
Rex—also known as former Giants Chair frontman and guitarist Scott Hobart—still dabbles in country strains with Rex Hobart & the Honky Tonk Standards with a monthly slot as part of The Ship’s Honky Tonk Tuesdays, but that project leans hard into covers, and we’d really love to see audiences rediscover this gems of a record. As a contemporaneous review in Time Out stated, “Rex displays the songwriting abilities of a barstool bard with a Ph.D. in hardcore country… and the pedal steel work here alone is worth the price of admission.”
With the exception of a two-song seven-inch on Bloodshot entitled Playin’ A Coupla Hard Luck Favorites, featuring covers of Freddy Fender’s “Wasted Days And Wasted Nights” and Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys have heretofore never had a vinyl release, so with this, it deserves a full lux and deluxe edition as it’s done redux.
The jacket should absolutely be a full letterpress reproduction of the album art, with all the heavy tactile stimuli it evokes. Drop it on 180-gram vinyl to make this sucker an absolute brick of a record, as well.
The Hefners—Repop!
Photo Courtesy of Greg Stitt
The initial Middle Class Pig vinyl release of Lawrence garage rock act The Hefners’ sophomore album is a masterclass in odd packaging choices. The vinyl is on ultra-heavy duty 220-gram vinyl, perhaps the weightiest pressing in our collection, but the jacket itself is flimsier than several European compilations of dubious legality on the other side of the room. The record is still going strong two and a half decades later, while the jacket looks as though it came out of the roughest bargain bin this side of a back highway antique store.
The music, however, is still absolutely rocking. Eschewing the brevity of their debut single first full-length, Lay Off This Is The Old Man’s Private Poison, The Hefners’ songs here frequently surpass the two-minute mark, and as good as Lay Off was, this effort is more polished and better recorded. There’s actually a low end to this record, rather than the tweeter-destroying sound that predominated The Hefners’ previous releases.
Recording live to two-track was certainly a perfect decision for the band, making for a full sound, letting all of the instruments be equal in the mix, rather than the keyboard being front and center. Album opener, “Up In My Room,” starts the record off with a head-wagging, hip-shaking, rev-up complete with harmonica. And while there are a fair share of hit-and-run tunes for which the band was originally known, The Hefners hit some slower material on Repop!, and it certainly helped to round out their sound, with a cover of The Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” serving as a standout.
A genuine reissue of this album would come in a proper jacket, which doesn’t fall apart at the slightest sideways glance, and a bonus bootleg of a party at 13th and Ohio in October of 2000 when The Hefners stopped playing so people could watch Radiohead perform “The National Anthem” and “Idioteque” on that night’s episode of Saturday Night Live. That bootleg doesn’t exist, but since we’re dreaming, why not dream big?
