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Back in the late ’80s, the London Chamber Orchestra recorded a series of albums on Virgin Classics, which then marketed them more like rock releases than classical.

Each album in the 9-disc series had distinctive, templated covers. The LCO moniker occupied a corner in big Helvetica type with an abstract image dominating the remaining surface. It was a far cry from the yellow label branding of Deustche Grammphone or the low-budget art of Naxos.

These albums are long out of print, the recordings butchered on various compiled reissues. The ensemble’s reading of Vivaldi’s concerti and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante pop up on other EMI Classics releases.

One album has managed to maintain its integrity despite numerous reissues and cover changes: Minimalist. In fact, the album is scheduled for another reissue on Feb. 12, 2013.

Of the discs in that original series, Minimalist was the only one to feature modern music from American composers. At the time, major labels were finally coming around to minimalism, with Nonesuch cornering recorded premieres by Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams.

Minimalist was one of the first albums not released by Nonesuch to focus on these three composers.

I had actually bought the album around the time it was released — as a Christmas gift for my piano teacher. I didn’t get around to buying a copy for myself till 2012, when I found an original Virgin Classics pressing at Silver Platters.

By then, 23 years had passed since that initial gifting. Back then, I had only listened to a scant number of works from each composer. Today, only two of the works were unfamiliar to me.

Minimalist was intended to be a crash course in the works of Glass, Reich and Adams, and it serves that purpose well. Although each composer has been tagged with the minimalist brand, their individual writing styles couldn’t be any more different.

Adams doesn’t go for the level of abstraction as Glass and Reich. Reich’s harmonic language is more adventurous than Glass or Adams, his rhythms more syncopated. But Glass is the most accessible, his harmonic and rhythmic language clearest of the three.

LCO selected the right works from each composer to highlight these differences.

Adams’ Shaker Loops strikes just the right balance between intellectual rhythmic exercise and programmatic storytelling. It’s certainly a good choice as an introduction to his output.

Reich’s Eight Lines highlights the signature syncopation that drives his work, while being just the right length to fit on a minimalist showcase.

Company is one of Glass’ most recorded works, and LCO jumped on that bandwagon early. It’s too bad so many other chamber orchestras followed in their wake. Thankfully, LCO also include Glass’ Façades.

The only odd man out is Englishman David Heath. He’s no minimalist, and the dissonance of his contribution, The Frontier, clashes with the harmonies of his American counterparts.

It’s also the most interesting work on the disc. There’s a bit of a rock attitude underpinning The Frontier, and it’s a nice contrast to the high-mindedness of the preceding works.

Despite that jarring addition — or maybe because of it – Minimalist hangs well together as an album. So well, in fact, it’s been immune to butchering. (Mostly — some of these recording appear on other EMI compilations.)

Looking back, I made the right choice giving this album to my piano teacher. I’d probably direct other curious listeners to it in the future.

Oriental Love Ring first formed in Honolulu in 1988, and the only recording of theirs I possessed was a single track from a cassette compilation titled No Place to Play. For all I knew, it was the only recording by the band that existed. But that song, “Damage”, was so damn good, it made me a fan.

Too bad I was still too young to see them play live. By the time I had that independence — more commonly known as “college” — the band had already split up.

I no longer have a cassette player, but the Hawaii Punk Museum made No Place to Play available online. On a lark, I decided to search the web for Oriental Love Ring and discovered the band had reunited and released an album of new songs in 2010.

“Damage” hinted at what the band could achieve, and In This World fully realizes it.

There’s not a single dead spot on the album. Guitarist Beano Shots wrote or co-wrote the lion’s share of the tracks, and his melodic gift hasn’t dimmed since his days in the Squids.

Peter Bond sounds perennially youthful with his soaring tenor, and he and Shots weave their guitar riffs beautifully on such tracks as “Prayers to an Empty Sky”, “Disconnected Girl” and the title track.

Not surprisingly, Bond’s contributions to the album, “I Know You Know”, “Take Me to the Moon” and “Tonight”, have the bite of his later band, Spiny Norman.

Original drummer Bryan Brudell used electric drums on “Damage”, forever dating the song (in a good way, as far as I’m concerned.) Larry Lieberman opts for a more organic sound, and he’s in lock step with bassist Chad Ikezawa.

In This World arrives 20 years after Oriental Love Ring first split up. The band says they’re doing this out of fun, and it sure does come across in the finished product.

This album is also something of a weird wish fulfillment for me. Oriental Love Ring were playing at Wave Waikiki at a time when I was still learning how to drive. “Damage” spurred my imagination and made me wonder about all the stuff we didn’t hear. As it turns out, some pretty damn good music.

War Requiem by Benjamin Britten has always been a work I wanted to hear when I first read about it in a textbook during high school. Back then, CDs were replacing vinyl as the listening medium of choice, and War Requiem was too lengthy to fit on one disc.

For a student on a limited income, a double-disc set was beyond my budget. Eventually, I would forget about it.

Alex Ross devotes a chapter of his book The Rest Is Noise to Britten, which got me thinking about War Requiem again. Armed with 12 eMusic download credits, I finally got to listen to the piece 20 years after learning about it.

So how is it?

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If you’re a newcomer to the works of Hüsker Dü — as I am — don’t start with Zen Arcade.

That was my mistake. The critical scuttlebutt says this sprawling double album is essential listening in the Hüsker Dü oeuvre, but given the way it was recorded — in 85 hours with mostly first takes — it’s a hot mess and not necessarily a good first impression.

Said scuttlebutt also indicates New Day Rising is the band’s best album, and if I started there first, I would have become a fan sooner.

Zen Arcade tried to be many things at one time, something New Day Rising avoids by concentrating on being fast and hard. The band’s sound changes little from track to track, Bob Mould’s thin guitar slicing through the strangled bottom end of bassist Greg Norton and drummer Grant Hart.

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It’s taken me more than a decade to resume my exploration of Emmylou Harris’ earliest work, and I wanted to blame Elite Hotel, her second album, from scaring me off. In reality, the fault lies with Pieces of the Sky.

Harris’ stunning debut threaded together songs from diverse eras and genres with a seamless performance that still sounds rich many decades later. It left such an impression, Elite Hotel, which I also bought at the same time, didn’t have much of a chance.

Nor did any of her other early albums.

Thanks to the convenience of online stream (RIP Lala), I got around to listening to Luxury Liner, Harris’ third album. Why did I wait so long?

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I grew up with this album but only tangentially.

I bought a 7-inch single of Camouflage’s "The Great Commandment" without really knowing what I was getting. (That was the equivalent of visiting a site such as thesixtyone back then.)

I played it for my brother who was into Depeche Mode at the time, and he ended up buying the band’s debut album Voices & Images. I played it for another friend of mine, who then bought the album on cassette.

I pretty much take Depeche Mode on a case-by-case basis, a behavior rooted in the idea that the band "belonged" to my brother, and Depeche Mode-adjacent bands suffered from guilt-by-association as a result. When I found Voices & Images in the bin at Cheapo Discs during SXSW 2009, I decided to give it a shot.

Damn, those Germans can be a dark bunch.

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For nearly 21 years, only one work defined my perception of Alfred Schnittke — his third string quartet, which Kronos Quartet recorded for its third studio album Winter Was Hard.

It took a long while before I got around to listening to the rest of his string quartets, but once I did, I became curious about his other works.

So off to eMusic I went to download a number of recordings on the Bis label, and the richness of his string quartets were amplified by the heterogeneity of his orchestrations.

Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso I is often cited as a major work, and it’s easy to hear why. His "polystylistic" writing can get dense, melody peeking out of clouds of harmony, dissonance giving way to consonance, only to dissolve back into a hazy texture.

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My introduction to ABC was not the dapper Chic-meets-punk sophistication of The Lexicon of Love. No, it was the cartoon-y Chic-meets-DX7 trash of How to be a Zillionaire!

I bet if the order were reversed, I would find How to be a Zillionaire! thin, vapid and grudgingly appealing. As it stands, I still like Zillionaire!, but I question how I could have gone so long without knowing the wonder that is The Lexicon of Love.

It’s tough not to compare ABC with another band influenced by disco and punk — Duran Duran. Where the latter skewed its formula closer to the rock side, the former went for something more glamorous.

Between the lush strings, disco beats and funk guitars, The Lexicon of Love screams "fashion." Producer Trevor Horn’s imprint can be heard all over the album — a few more guitars and some gayer content, and The Lexicon of Love could have morphed into Welcome to the Pleasuredome.

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Back when I worked at Waterloo Records, I would stock Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea and think, "This album looks really precious."

The ornate cover art struck me as indier-than-thou, and the mouthy title all but screamed pretension — and that may very well be the case.

In an attempt to burn through some eMusic credits, I downloaded the album in late 2008, and I haven’t stopped playing it since. I loaded it into my iPod, and I’ve not deleted it. It’s still in my CD wallet, and I always cycle out newer acquisitions with older ones.

Sometimes I’m skeptical of near unanimous critical praise. In this instance, I was wrong.

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I had forgotten about this live album till it was reissued in 2008. It’s something of a punctuation mark in the U2 ouvre, a snapshot of a band at the apex of its youthful vigor. I never got around to listening to Under a Blood Red Sky when I was first exploring the U2 discography 20 years ago, and a remastered release was the perfect opportunity.

It has since revised my perspective about the band.

As previously explained, I didn’t get into U2 till far into its career, and my remembrances of the band aren’t as linear as anyone who’s been a fan since day 1 or day 3. I couldn’t take anyone who seriously who couldn’t take The Joshua Tree seriously. But after listening to Under a Blood Red Sky, I can totally understand, if not agree on some level.

Producer Steve Lillywhite does an admirable job capturing the vitality of the then-young rockers in the studio, but Under a Blood Red Sky finds U2 in its best element — on stage. If staples such as "I Will Follow", "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Electric Co." felt urgent on record, they became blisteringly so in the arena.

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