Product Description
There’s a 2025 remastered reissue with bonus tracks here
- Susan Sleepwalking
- St. Catherine
- The Fisherman
- Song for Krista
- With Louise
- The Turning
- Seven Days From Now
- Karen Said
- Rainbows
- Susan Slept Here
- A Turner Sky
Burying the Carnival - Transformation
- The Spiral of Silence
- Left to Right
- Every Seventh Wave
- Angel of the Odd
- My Friend
Holy Dance single - The Holy Dance
- Whitefriars
Please note that there is a saw/drill through the spine on one side. These came back from our distributor this way. Don’t worry, though, the band still receives full royalty on these sales!!
Imagine it’s 1985 again, when listening to progressive alternative music meant hearing bands like New Order, OMD and Depeche Mode. Moody synth-pop groups dominated the imports from Europe, and in the American midwest a relatively unknown band was traversing the same territory. Quietly following their own course of musical exploration, The Arms Of Someone New created music that was mellowly melodic, somewhere between pop/rock and New Romantic. Equipped with simple synths, drum machines, guitars and vocals, The Arms Of Someone New provided an American take on what we now fondly look back on as the classic “eighties” sound – a sound undergoing renewed interest and resurgence.
The Arms Of Someone New’s primary member, Steve Jones, was also a founding member of the Chamapign/Urbana, IL, based-band Area (which has four successful reissues on Projekt: Archive)
A review from StarVox.net
I have a deep unfillable void in my heart that only vintage Gothic rock and the early music of 4AD can fill. I was very young when all this stuff originally surfaced, but thankfully, the music is still available for a latter generation to appreciate. The Projekt Archive, a subsidiary of Projekt Records as you could guess is responsible for re-issuing back-catalogue releases from bands such as Attrition and Area, and their latest restoration project is for the mid-eighties band The Arms Of Someone New.
The band formed as a duo and the two members Mel Eberle and Steve Jones collaborated from Boston to Champaign, IL respectively. Other contributors of the band were Lynn Canfield and Henry Frayme, who with Jones went on to form Area. So its all rather interesting how the two bands overlapped. But the Arms Of Someone New never really broke and were left on the backburner as the members focused on Area and other outlets and projects. The master tapes were left undisturbed until now, and the band’s collective material has at last seen the light of day.
The Arms Of Someone New: That easily wins the award for most striking and unusual moniker, and the music without a doubt lives up to be as avant-garde and introspective as expected. In the arms of a new lover, you find something daring and unexplored, yet something recognizable and comforting, as love is essential to us all. There is a similar effect with this kind of music for me, as I have discovered something ‘new’ to my ears and in that embrace waits a familiar sound that I utterly adore.
The music is comparable to the traditional Xymox 4AD sound and the earliest recordings like “Ceremony” and “In A Lonely Place” by New Order. Incidentally, New Order’s album title “Power Corruption & Lies” was punned by AOSN with their release Love, Power & Justice. Their minimalist soundscapes are comprised of reverberated male vocals, tight simplistic drum programs, vintage synths and strummed guitar doodles that definitely overwhelm the listener with the long disappeared yet passionately revered “cult” sound of Goth’s early days. Projekt has re-issued two CDs, the first of which is the band’s debut ten song full-length, entitled Susan Sleepwalking, which also contains eight additional tracks taken from their Burying The Carnival EP and the “Holy Dance” single. The Susan Sleepwalking CD is primarily more mellow and reserved, with a greater focus on synth drenched ambiance. The second reissue Love, Power, & Justice is probably the better of the two to start with, as it is more upbeat and has a stronger rhythmic presence.
Regardless, both CDs are incredibly worthwhile collections. Here is a band that could have lost the battle to history and remained in 4-track purgatory, haunting the closets ofthe busy musicians who never had the opportunity to solicit their work appropriately. But thankfully, their music has been made accessible again for a new generation to discover, and I highly recommend these two CDs to fans of 4AD, vintage alternative, and Goth rock.
The Arms of Someone New: Love, Power & Justice (CD)
Area: Fragments of the Morning (CD)
Reviews Editor –
From Dusted
From the first notes of “St. Catherine,” Susan Sleepwalking sounds like a record unstuck in time. From the way the vocals are drenched in so much echo you feel like you’re listening to someone singing from inside a cave, to the swelling, almost seasick keyboards and the tinny, thin drum machine rhythm, it’s a record that could have existed at almost any point in the last 50 years. It could be a lost punk-punk classic from late 1970s Manchester or a darkwave mixtape created in a Brooklynite’s bedroom during the COVID lockdowns.
Instead, Susan Sleepwalking was made by The Arms of Someone New, a trio of college kids in Illinois and released in fall 1985 by Office Records. And a few weeks ago it came out in a deluxe, three-CD reissue for its 40th anniversary via Projekt Records.
While the band had released a couple of cassettes and a 7” single before this, Susan Sleepwalking shows a band forming a unique sound with a mix of simple instrumentation, lo-fi sound, and an utter disregard for cliche. The way songs like “The Fisherman” or “The Turning” are built around simple elements like drum machine, guitar, keyboards and vocals gives them a certain charm: it’s unassuming and unpretentious. It wears its influences on its sleeve: a mix of Low-era Bowie, early Ultravox, and a Joy Division 45 played at the wrong speed, with maybe a sprinkling of Martin Rev’s solo work. But it never sounds like any one of those specifically so much as a stew that picks and chooses what it needs from them.
Indeed, the music throughout Susan Sleepwalking takes after its title: it’s slow, deliberate and foggy like a half-remembered dream. The vocals are sometimes indistinct and hard to parse but add to this music’s somnambulistic charm. They’re another layer of ambience to a record that’s already drenched in a moody, late-night vibe. So, while listeners may not always be sure what the songs are about, the lyrics may be beside the point. After all the best performance here is the instrumental one: “With Louise.”
For Susan Sleepwalking’s 40th anniversary, Projekt Records gave it a fresh reissue: the original album has a shiny new remastering job and it’s bolstered with two extra discs. One is a collection of odds and ends: period tracks, outtakes and demos. The third disc is a 2025 re-imagining of the record by the two surviving members of The Arms of Someone New — Jones and Eberle; Rudd passed away in 2020.
Neither of the two extra discs are essential. The third one is subtitled Susan Dreaming and is a record that borders New Age and Ambient, the sort of thing that’s Projekt’s bread-and-butter. The second disc shows that all the best material from this period ended up on the album proper, although it does more than double Susan Sleepwalking’s running time.
However, all these extras don’t weigh down this reissue so much as reinforce the original’s charm. For a brief moment in 1985 three kids channeled their influences and quietly released a record that’s held up better than it had any right to. There’s no trappings of 1980s college rock cliches here: the drums don’t have that thin, sharp sound and the guitars aren’t running through all kinds of pedals and distortion. The music takes its time to unwind and wrap itself around you but it never sounds like a product of its era. And it’s never sounded better to boot. -Roz Milner