* Remastered repress. Comes with printed inner sleeve. * In Praise of Learning, the third Henry Cow album, released on Virgin in 1975, is where the band's politics and its music fused into a single hard object. It followed a brief, consequential merger with the pop trio Slapp Happy: after the collaborative Desperate Straights, the two groups joined, then came apart again, leaving Henry Cow with a vocalist for the first time in the extraordinary Dagmar Krause. Recorded at the Manor in February and March 1975 with Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves, Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper, plus guests including trumpeter Mongezi Feza, it gave song a central place in the band's work without softening any of its difficulty.

Its centre is Hodgkinson's Living in the Heart of the Beast, a fifteen-minute composition originally conceived as an instrumental. Peter Blegvad was asked to supply lyrics, conceded he was out of his depth, and Hodgkinson wrote them himself: a sustained, unflinching argument set to music that moves between dissonant attack and held suspension, carried by Krause's voice. Around it sit Frith's Beautiful as the Moon; Terrible as an Army with Banners and the brief, caustic War, an Anthony Moore and Blegvad song later covered by The Fall, while the second half opens onto harsher, freer ground.

This is Henry Cow at their most militant and most demanding, a record that asks the listener to drop received habits at the door. The third in ReR Vinyl's reissue series of the Virgin albums, following Leg End and Unrest, carefully remastered and faithful to the original. A landmark of European experimental rock.