Red Red Meat’s Bunny Gets Paid, easily one of my favorite albums ever, has been remastered and re-released by SubPop as a two-disc deluxe edition. Pitchfork recently reviewed the re-release and gave it a glorious 8.9. The deluxe edition contains a number of rarities, including a dub version of the song “Mouse,” as well as an early cover of Low’s “Words,” which some have said predicates the sound that Low would later adopt.

In other good news, Red Red Meat successor Califone is set to release a mysterious new album. With the release date, title, tracklist, and just about everything else still unknown, you should go buy Bunny. You won’t regret it.

With Bunny, all of a sudden Red Red Meat seemed artier, more hidden and inscrutable. Rutili has always spoken in riddles, content to braid together phrases or even single words that sound pleasing to the ear, but here the fragmentation became more extreme. Somehow, when the syllables pile up and the flow of vowels and consonants rides the arc of the music, the effect could be sublime. “Mink-eyed, marble-eyed/ In the gauze, in the weeds/ By the drain, red on pale/ There’s a nail by the vent,” goes the chorus of “Gauze”, Bunny Gets Paid’s stone classic and a contender for the best song Rutili has written. Who knows what it means. But if you can picture a scrubby patch of weeds and in it a clump of gauze, possibly soiled, twitching in the breeze, and the disconnected image of decay stirs something in you, you’re on your way to falling in love with Red Red Meat.

Here’s an MP3 of “Gauze”, courtesy of SubPop.