Front 242 – Official Version

This sounds amazing. I wish all my records sounded this good. Definitely do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

Does anyone know what sources they used for this release? I have a US original, but would consider getting this if it was better.

This does sound great on vinyl. My only problem is the low sound floor. Have to increase volume accordingly

How is the sound quality? Has anything been changed? Pressing ok?

Bought it myself. Excellent. Everything done right. Sound is good, vinyl without any problems. Perfect. Overall a little better than the '87 pressing.

An absolutely amazing groundbreaking album. This pressing is also top notch. Get it!

Mostly very good album. I think the stars were in line when they made Masterhit. Probably the best Front 242 song ever made (there are others that are certainly debatable for the top spot!), in my opinion. That bubbly synth bass is perfect and the modem sounds help complete it.

If someone have original sleeve of this vinyl in good condition to sell, pm me please

EBM pioneers Front 242's third album 'Official Version' came at a time when the band were on the cusp of greatness. This 1992 reissue from the 'Epic' collection features the record in full as well as a few bonuses for your trouble so you get a little more bang for your buck.
Opening with the soundscape 'W.Y.H.I.W.Y.G." (What You Hear Is What You Get) the album gets off to a fine start offering up a wide open production featuring toe tapping synths and anthem ready vocals. Much of the runtime is either made up of tracks such as these and shorter punchy instrumentals that imprint on your soul. 'MasterHit', 'Television Station' & 'Quite Unusual' immerse you into early Electronic Body Music and goad you into checking out more of their work. The album also includes the original CD release's bonus tracks - both 12" versions of single 'Quite Unusual' and 'Agressiva' - as well as the first 2 tracks from the 'Masterhit' release, both of which add percussive depth to their original counterpart.
With the 80's being such a wealth of electronic music Front 242 managed to forge a line in the sand with this album by creating a new sound that is equal parts Depeche Mode, Thrill Kill Kult & Art Of Noise, but offering up a no nonsense broadsword motion across the genre. If you are new to both the band and the genre this is probably the best place to start as it will give you a fair idea of what these headhunters are all about.

This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the third album from Front! Hooray! So, where's the deluxe box set with remastered vinyl and cd, outtakes, demos, live versions, mixes, posters, stickers, batches, lanyards, etc.? What, nothing? Okay, F242 are not U2 (actual 30th anni of an album) or other bands who are celebrating anniversaries with re-releases.

Back to the music ... I bought this album in spring 1988, one year after the official̶ v̶̶e̶̶r̶̶s̶̶i̶̶o̶̶n̶ release, just after I visited a Depeche Mode concert in february 1988. A german teen mag stated, F242 was ing DM, and the ing act really blew my mind! But what I saw was Nitzer Ebb! So the album I grabbed, was nothing like the ing act I saw ... but it was (and still is) so good and also blew my mind. Like nothing I heard before! It's hard to think oneself back 30 years, aged 17 then. music was everything, it is nearly today!

But what was I hearing back in the days? In 1985 I became a big Depeche Mode fan, also listened to Erasure, Yazoo, Yello, Human League and The Art Of Noise. And there we have the two edges where Front was, synth pop & noise. In fact, this album really is a good blend of Pop & Noise. I sure wasn't aware of the term EBM that days, who cares about drawers anyhow!

This album is for me timeless.

And in 1999 I had a webpage and dedicated one entry to this album. Here's the rough translation from those days:

12 years back, the term Techno is far away from the meaning it has today. Kraftwerk picked it up and merged it was Pop for their song Techno Pop. Also Front 242 was filed under Techno or Industrial or Electronic Body Music. On their third album, you hear dance tunes (clubsmasher Masterhit) more calm tunes (Television Station) and a song like Slaughter, with heavy use of orchestra samples. The drawer EBM really fits well. The artwork of the vinyl is also very pleasing, which is dominated by pictures developed on a computer screen. Sadly that artwork wasn't featured on the re-release from 1992. But there was a extra inlet where Front are pointing out, that they don't want to be mentioned with like fascim, nazism and neo-nazism. This wrong image of Front 242 must have been made by journalists who just made up their own mind looking only at the outfit of the band.

It's 1987. The Soviets are still trying to explain Chernobyl away, Reagan is now having to use proxies in Congress to explain away Iran-Contra, the US continues to reel from the Challenger disaster and Apartheid is in full control of South Africa. Government has become a series of press conferences and investigative "task forces", of course there's no reason for you citizens to ever worry or dream of questioning their explanations. After all, they are the official versions, who'd be stupid enough to doubt things... especially when these events keep happening all over the world with only the names changing. The outcome is the same.

Meantime, I'm downtown in a club on about four hits of blue lightning when a voice comes out from the smoke and strobes proclaiming:

You know me, and I sure know you, every one of ya!

Like the voice of God himself coming across the dance floor, backed by rhythms and bass lines so powerful that there was no choice but to capitulate and the party. A party which not only had hordes of angsty looking militaristic males (guilty) stomping but females, loads of them. Even more interestingly, everyone who did so wasn't white, which is something the modern EBM/Industrial scene likes to sweep under the carpet and pretend isn't the norm now. Don't believe me? Go to one of their nights or one of their shows and tell me what you see, go on, take a good hard look. They never have and they never will.

Back then, artists made sure there was a place for all at the table.

Front 242 had been at it for some time before they changed the landscape of electronic body music (a term they coined) once and for all. They'd had some success in Europe but where I was at in the god-forsaken guitar dominated United States no one had any time for them. The last dying tides of the New Wave had been swept away by the time 'Official Version' appeared and those surviving new romantics were looking decidedly bloated and jumped on bandwagons whenever possible in a desperate attempt to remain relevant. Unlike where we find ourselves now in the musical world, 242 chose to shed their skin and leave behind whatever hints of it they may have had.

With infinite patience they decimated their technology and reduced their previous sound to a primal collection of aggressive perfection. Gone were the self-conscious overtures to what had come before. Bressanuti, Codenys, Jonckheere and De Meyer refined what they composed until it became the glistening, jagged blade which cut the throat of complacency. Listen up closely and you'll hear where their love affair with techno began. In some kind of strange alchemy between the burgeoning white label scene, the New Beat scene and the iciness of minimal synthetics a new hybrid was brought to life and loosed upon the unsuspecting. Nothing was left to chance and no variable was ignored, even the smallest details were given priority with songs such as "Slaughter", "Television Station", "Red Team" and "Rerun Time" being every bit the measure of those timeless classics "Masterhit" and "Quite Unusual".

The opener was no dullard, either. "W.Y.H.I.W.Y.G", to me, is probably the best example of 242's stylish jump with that roving bass and devastating kick just knocking the wind out of you and then taking control of your body until you can't fight it anymore. Move! This is the message of 'Official Version'. Do not sit about waiting for the changes you want in your music and world, you must be proactive. It's all out there for the taking if you have the will; oddly, it was their follow up 'Front By Front' which achieved the break through for them here in the States. I regard that one as just the leftovers from the feast it's predecessor served up. Tastes vary, of course, but if you forced me to pick just one of their albums to keep it would be 'Official Version'.

The times change but their work continues to anticipate and confound even the best-laid designs of commerce and it's nefarious legions.