Label Review. 

2019 album. Deluxe book style package. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Robbie Robertson, distinguished solo artist, producer and former member of Americana pioneers The Band, will release ‘Sinematic’, his first album in eight years which he produced himself. It promises “an enthralling set of songs exploring the darker corridors of human nature.” The album draws inspiration in part from Robertson’s recent film score writing and recording for the much-anticipated crime epic ‘The Irishman’, directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s also inspired by the upcoming feature documentary ‘Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band’, based on his bestselling 2016 memoir, ‘Testimony’.

The opening track “I Hear You Paint Houses”, is a duet with Robertson’s longtime kindred spirit Van Morrison. The song is about the confessed hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and takes its title from the mob slang for hiring a hitman, as in spattering walls with blood. Robertson’s opening line “Shall we take a little spin/To the dark side of town?” sets the scene for an album addressing stories of villainy, vice, destruction and despair. Says Robertson: “I was working on music for The Irishman and working on the documentary, and these things were bleeding into each other. I could see a path. Ideas for songs about haunting and violent and beautiful things were swirling together like a movie. You follow that sound and it all starts to take shape right in front of your ears. At some point, I started referring to it as ‘Peckinpah Rock,’” he notes, in reference to the late film director Sam Peckinpah.

Highlights include “Dead End Kid”, on which Robertson recalls the challenges he faced as a young man who was a member of a First Nation and Jewish gangster family; “Shanghai Blues”, which addresses China’s notorious Green Gang mobster Du Yuesheng; the moody “Street Serenade”, described by Robertson as a “sinphony”; and the edgy, electronic “The Shadow”, which pays homage to Orson Welles’ entrancing radio crime drama of that name, which ran from 1937 to 1954.

There are some other notable guest appearances on the album, with further vocals by Glen Hansard, Citizen Cope, J.S. Ondara and Laura Satterfield; contributions by musicians Jim Keltner, Derek Trucks, Frédéric Yonnet and Doyle Bramhall II; and producer Howie B, who adds electronic textures to several tracks. The songs, and their stories, are narrated by Robertson in his distinctive tones, largely accompanied by bassist Pino Palladino (John Mayer Trio, The Who), drummer Chris Dave (D’Angelo, Adele) and keyboardist Martin Pradler, who also mixed the album. Afie Jurvanen provides guitar and backing vocals with vocalist Felicity Williams, a regular collaborator with Jurvanen in his band Bahamas.

Label Review.

2019 album. Soul/funk.

Our Overview.

Tom McGuire and the Brassholes make music which takes inspiration from classic 70s funk and soul, and proponents of the modern funk movement such as Vulfpeck and Snarky Puppy. It is however so much more that simple revivalism. It combines strong musicianship, musicality and groove with thoughtful meaningful songcraft. Tom McGuire & The Brassholes are an eclectic, modern-soul-funk, 8 piece band from Glasgow, Scotland and are releasing their self-titled debut on their own Slug Recordings Label. Headed by keen skater, lumberjack-attired soul bearer, Tom McGuire, the funky collective of “killer animals from hell”, consists of a colourful, hilarious bunch of wonderfully talented, animated young men.

“Funk” is often (perhaps fairly) considered as music which provides a distinct stylistic texture and a platform for strong musicianship, but no real substance. Similarly, music in which musicianship is at the forefront can be exclusive and alienating, holding appeal to fellow musos only, to the lament of those who look for more. Tom McGuire and the Brassholes provide more. There are grooves here, there is filthy get-down debt-to-James-Brown funk here, there is frivolous good-time dancing music here, but there is also a man's soul and story, laid bare, heart on sleeve themes that have relatable emotional power for those who wish to dig into it. There are no blatant cliches here about dancing or getting it on or being in clubs. Instead there is clever lyricism and heartbroken storytelling in the vein of Tom Waits or Nick Cave.

The band consists of some of the greatest young talents of the Glasgow scene and the musicianship is indeed strong. The grooves are supplemented by top of the game arrangements. Collaboratively written, they put a spotlight on the individual players, allowing their characteristics and personalities to shine through. This is not simply a faceless band backing up a singer, all elements are integral.

There is thematic consistency and a broad narrative that runs through the record. At its most lofty, it tells a story of being lost in a world devoid of meaning and eventual convalescence through love and realisation of what it means to live in the moment; an exploration of what it is to be alive. The vehicle for this is the visceral, unintelectulaisable power of the groove and the pure unadulterated honest direct delivery of soul. It stands as a cohesive whole, but also as a variety of exciting individual pieces of filthy barnstorming funk from hell.

Says frontman Tom “A terrifying, radical leap of a life decision precipitated the making of this album. I abandoned the significantly more sensible and secure path I had set out for myself in order to finally dedicate all of my energies to my own music. Very aware of what I have sacrificed to be able to do it, I have made every possible effort to ensure that it is the best that it can be. For once I find myself where I'm supposed to be. What a soul singer must do is absolutely channel every bit of his life and experience into his voice and the song and that's what I have done here. This record has substance in that it is not simply a recording of songs, but also a version of myself, from a time that can not be repeated.”

Label Review. 

The Complete Transatlantic Recordings 1969-71. 

Our Overview. 

Whether recording as a solo performer, a member of Stealers Wheel or as one half of The Humblebums (the other half, being Billy Connolly), the late Gerry Rafferty was always a master craftsman, leaving behind a dazzling portfolio of songs headed by huge hits “Stuck In The Middle With You” and the equally timeless “Baker Street”. Although early success eluded him, it was during his time with the nominally folk-oriented Transatlantic label that Gerry learnt his craft, sharing space with Connolly on two Humblebums albums before the superb 1971 solo set ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’

In addition to every album track, stray B-side and remixed single, we’ve added a cache of previously-unreleased songs and alternative versions (including two early versions of “Who Cares”, a song that would later turn up in substantially different format on the second Stealers Wheel LP) taken from a bunch of multi-track masters that have been gathering dust in Transatlantic’s archives for the last fifty years.

With a host of hitherto-unheard songs and performances, the first-ever complete reissue of ‘Can I Have My Money Back?’ (previous attempts have substituted an unauthorised overdubbed “Mary Skeffington” in place of the original, far superior album version), ‘Who Knows What The Day Will Bring?’ is nothing less than a complete, unexpurgated document of Rafferty’s adventures in the recording studio between 1969 and 1971, with all tracks taken from the master tapes.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Blues Rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview.

Since launching her recording career in 2009 Kansa artist Samantha Fish has quickly established herself as a rising star in the contemporary blues world. Samantha’s prodigious gifts as a genre-bending singer, songwriter, and electrifying guitarist have inspired tremendous acclaim from critics and her peers and have earned an abundance of awards for the young artist. The charismatic young American singer-guitarist-songwriter has earned a reputation as a rising guitar hero and powerful live performer, while releasing a series of acclaimed albums that have shown her restless creative spirit consistently taking her in new and exciting musical directions. Now, with ‘Kill Or Be Kind’, Fish is poised for a major breakthrough. 

Anyone who has ever heard Fish’s previous albums knows that she has earned a place in the top rank of contemporary blues guitarists and that her voice can wring the soul out of a ballad and belt out a rocker with roof-shaking force. And, rest reassured, those virtues are fully in evidence on ‘Kill or Be Kind’. But each of the songs on the album does far more than simply provide a setting for Fish’s pyrotechnics. They tell captivating stories, set up by verses that deftly set the scene, choruses that lift with real feeling, and hooks that later rise up in your thoughts, even when you’re not aware that you’re thinking of music at all. It’s the kind of songwriting that emerges when raw talent is leavened by experience and aspiration, and when a committed artist genuinely has something to say. Those qualities make ‘Kill or Be Kind’ a genuine artistic breakthrough for Fish.

“That was my mission on this album: To really set these songs up so that they have a life of their own,” says Samantha Fish about ‘Kill or Be Kind’, her sixth solo album and her debut on Rounder Records. “Strong messages from the heart – that’s what I really set out for.” Indeed, what comes across immediately on hearing the album is the extraordinary level of songcraft on its eleven tracks, the way these songs are so smartly put together to deliver a potent emotional impact.

“I think I’ve grown as a performer and as a player,” she explains. “I’ve become more respectful of the melody. You can go up and down the fret board and up and down your vocal register, but that’s not going to be as powerful as conveying a simple melody that people can really connect to and sing themselves.” To help bring those elements to her music, Fish sought out high-quality songwriting collaborators – the likes of Jim McCormick (who has worked with Fish before and also written for Luke Bryan and Keith Urban); Kate Pearlman (who has worked with Kelly Clarkson); Patrick Sweeney; Parker Millsap; and Eric McFadden. The result is an album on which each song is distinct, but the complete work hangs together as a coherent, entirely satisfying statement. “When you get to this point in your life as an artist,” Fish says, “it’s good to work with others, because it makes you stretch. I think you hear a lot of that nuance on the record, songs that have a pop sensibility to them, hooks that really pull you in.”

The edgy roots music album was recorded at Royal Studios in Memphis and produced by three-time Grammy winner Scott Billington and mixed by two-time Grammy winner Steve Reynolds. Boasting 11 original songs ranging from the Mississippi technostomp of “Bulletproof” (played on cigar box guitar) to the sweet Memphis R&B of “Trying Not To Fall in Love With You,” the album features co-writes with Jim McCormack, Eric McFadden, Parker Millsap, Katie Pearlman, and Patrick Sweany and is sure to establish Fish as a potent force in roots music. 

The New York Times called Fish “an impressive blues guitarist who sings with sweet power” and “one of the genre’s most promising young talents.” Her hometown paper The Kansas City Star noted, “Samantha Fish has kicked down the door of the patriarchal blues club” and observed that the young artist “displays more imagination and creativity than some blues veterans exhibit over the course of their careers.”

Label Review. 

2019 album. Fun funky & fresh! Features Alison Limerick. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Since 1993 Brooklyn Funk Essentials have been fusing soul, hip hop, spoken word, jazz and, of course, funk for 25 years and over 6 albums, the most recent release being the spectacular ‘Stay Good’. During this time they have made a name for themselves as electric performers, exhilarating their loyal and broad fanbase with performances on every continent. Made up of musicians, singers and poets from around the globe, the group is an all-star-team famously mixing styles like soul, jazz, latin and house - all rolled into one ferocious funk fest. If it grooves, they will funk it!

Following 2015’s reunion with Dorado and the success of ‘Funk Ain’t Ova’, the bands new album ‘Stay Good’, a fun, funky and fresh collection of tracks featuring throughout are the powerful and soulful vocals of Alison Limerick, now a full time member of the band. Lati wrote and produced her debut hit ‘Where Love Lives’. They begin a European tour in September and visit the Americas early next year.

Established in the early ‘90s by Arthur Baker and Lati Kronlund, Brooklyn Funk Essentials were regulars of New York’s vibrant club scene when their debut album, ‘Cool & Steady & Easy’, hit the shelves. Released by pioneering funk and electronic taste-makers Dorado Records and combining classic funk’s raw, mind-bending basslines, peak-era disco’s euphoric vocals and early hip-hop’s observational lyricism, the album and its follow up, ‘Make Em Like It’ topped charts around the world.

BFE have released five other studio albums, that along with massive critical praise, have earned them Grammy nominations and ‘Album Of The Year’ acclaim. Their songs have also been used in several films and TV-shows, such as ‘Starsky & Hutch’, ‘The Sopranos’, ‘The Blacklist’ and ‘The Basketball Diaries’. But perhaps most notably, their amazing live shows have given them a worldwide loyal fan-base.

Label Review.

2019 album. Produced by Tony Visconti.

Our Overview.

Influential multi-dimensional folk guitarist and singer-songwriter Ralph McTell is two years into his sixth decade as a recording artist, Ralph McTell releases his new album Hill Of Beans. 74, Kent born, Croydon raised, much travelled & unassuming, Ralph remains an English musical legend. Known for his virtuoso guitar style, he is a prolific and gifted songwriter. With a style that invites you into a unique world, he weaves a narrative that is both significant and poignant. In the time honoured fashion of an artist who has always defined his own artistic terms, ‘Hill Of Beans’ is a work of grace; experience and learning, natural poise, deep substance, the core of its harmonic and melodic riches contained in voice, songs and six stringed guitar glory.

His first album of originals since 2010’s acclaimed ‘Somewhere Down The Road’, ‘Hill of Beans’ reunites McTell with producer Tony Visconti, who was there right at the start of McTell’s recording career. The latter day reconnection came after a chance meeting in London earlier this decade. “It was just lovely to see him,” reflects McTell.

“One day I’m at home and the email arrived, it said, “Dear Ralph, I’m working with that old reprobate, you remember him?” Visconti was referring to David Bowie - a figure who looms as large in the producer’s career, as the song “Streets Of London”does in McTell’s. ‘Hill Of Beans’ contain 11 tracks - Visconti’s production has allowed McTell to find the measure of songs gathered from the past 10 years but including one written in 1978, another in 1988.

“Tony is a wonderful producer, he treats all his artists with the same consideration, courtesy and respect’ says Ralph, sounding like a well satisfied man. As he ought to.

Ralph has influenced hundreds of folk singers in Great Britain, Europe, and the U.S. Fortunately, people in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to connect to his vast body of excellent original work, and not just "Streets," which has been recorded more than 200 times by artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, and even the angry punk group Anti-Nowhere League, and is still McTell's most requested song.

“British Folk legend reunited with producer Tony Visconti…The beguiling ‘Hill of Beans’ finds McTell in authoritative form throughout, offering sage narratives and poignant memories” Uncut

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD, Deluxe CD, and a Box set. 

Our Overview. 

For several years, UK based pop rock outfit Keane ruled the airwaves and the charts with their melodic and introspective songs. After a ‘Best Of’ collection in 2013, the group went on hiatus as lead singer Tom Chaplin embarked on a solo career. The birth of this new album came as something of a surprise even to the band. Chaplin missed his old sparring partner Tim Rice-Oxley. “I found myself wondering how I had come to let this very enigmatic and important relationship in my life drift,” Tom says.

Meanwhile Tim found his life falling apart and from the ashes had written an album’s worth of incredibly personal songs fuelled by humour as well as pain. When Tom, bassist Jesse Quin and drummer Richard Hughes heard the songs, they were immediately drawn to them both sonically and lyrically.

“‘Hopes and Fears’ [their debut album] was a break-up album too, but it was about a break-up when I was 19,” Tim explains. “It’s a bit different when you’re older and you’ve got kids – your whole little world shifts on its axis.” First single, ‘The Way I Feel’, like the other ten tracks on ‘Cause and Effect’, is an emotional and remarkable slice of life, and reminiscent of the very best of Keane. It’s an exciting period for one of the country’s best bands and a very welcome return.

Label Review.

Early singles pre-Atlantic Records and live concert recordings. This new retrospective includes rarities from the Rex, Ace, Crazy Cajun labels, and rare live band and solo performances of Dr. John's greatest hits.

Our Overview.

2019 Release featuring the indomitable legend Mac Rebennack aka. Dr. John’s early singles pre-Atlantic Records and live concert recordings previously unreleased in North American and Japan. Known for music that was spiced with his gravelly vocals, mixed with a gumbo of blues, R&B, rock and with a bit of New Orleans voodoo thrown in for good measure Dr John was a one off. This new retrospective includes rarities from the Rex, Ace, Crazy Cajun labels, and rare live band and solo performances of Dr. John’s greatest hits. A treat for fans old and new.

Born Malcolm John ‘Mac’ Rebennack, he learned piano and guitar as a child. As a musician, he was schooled by local legends like Walter ‘Papoose’ Nelson (Professor Longhair’s guitarist), guitarist Roy Montrell, keyboardist James Booker and Cosimo Matassa (whose J&M Studio was the hub of the city’s recording scene). Rebennack became one of the first white session men on the local scene. Working in L.A. with producer Harold Battiste, a fellow Crescent City expatriate, he created the character of Dr. John the Night Tripper, a voodoo sorcerer and healer. His first album, ‘Gris-Gris’, masterfully evoked the mystical spirit of back-alley voodoo in a musical setting of otherworldly ‘N’Awlins’ swamp funk. It meshed perfectly with the age of psychedelia in which it was released.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Garage rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Australian alt rockers Rocket Science have finally broken their musical hiatus and are releasing their new studio album ‘Snake’ and again they are pushing the new material further out with their billowing live sound, evergreen energy and a deep commitment to existing in the present. This new record sees Rocket Science back and in sharp form. A fusion of post-punk, psych and garage, ‘Snake’ describes a decaying post-postmodern world, railing against the system like all good rock’n’roll should.

It’s been 10 years since their last album and they’re back from outer-space: tougher, wilder and sharper than ever. Snake sees Rocket Science at the height of their powers, charged with a cosmic energy born of a unique alignment between four exceptional musicians. A collaborative work, recorded by the band’s guitarist Paul Maybury. 

Mixing improvised moments with post-punk, garage, space rock and dark imagery. The songs reflect a decaying post-postmodern world, that is both self-destructive and in denial. With themes ranging from disillusion, disgust, fear and betrayal; to drugs, disability, gender and existential panic, Snake is a record in and of its time, railing against the system like all good rock’n’roll should.

Label Review.

2019 album. Folk with a punk ethic.

Our Overview.

Revolution Calls…as it has for English singer-songwriters Chris While & Julie Matthews for 25 years. In case they’ve so far passed you by, they are the longest-lasting female duo in Britain and have played more than 2,500 gigs, appeared on over 100 albums, written hundreds of original songs and reached millions of people around the world. With an unrivalled musical partnership and gathering numerous nominations, awards  and critical acclaim along the way, highly respected by their fans and peers alike, Chris and Julie will be celebrating a quarter of a century as one of the best and most enduring duos and now, 25 years after their debut, they sound as fresh and vital as ever on their new album, ‘Revolution Calls’.

Chris & Julie are generally regarded as folk/singer-songwriter but their outlook is more akin to the DIY philosophy of punk. Their story is remarkable, one of two empowered women doing it their way, without compromise. They run their own label and publishing company; record and produce their albums from their own studio; perform all their own material, and have always valued their complete autonomy and creative freedom. And all from a small village near Sheffield, nearly 200 miles north of the London-centric UK music industry.

'Revolution Calls' is as brave as it is rich, and represents yet another creative stride forward for the duo. The songs are varied and colourful and draw inspiration from the overtly political (Shake The Money Tree) to key social issues (Landfill) and real-life human stories (Two Halves Together). Collaboration with world-class musicians from a range of genres, including bassist Neil Fairclough (Queen) and electric guitarist Johnny Heyes (Mica Paris), results in a contemporary yet mature sound and feel that is bursting with energy. Whether building through the anthemic Coming Out or releasing on the Joni Mitchell-dreamlike Long Lost Friend, While and Matthews have never sounded more ‘them’.

Even the cover art is ‘Chris and Julie’ to its core - a thought-provoking piece of self-effacing agit-prop. And they’re not kidding anyone that they are 16 years old (if you look closely you’ll spot the slippers!). But..... and this is important: there is nothing bland or saccharine about While & Matthews or their music. They enjoy a healthy agitation after all these years. They are best friends, but they argue and disagree. Authenticity (individual and together) is a top priority.

Their story is inspirational to young women and empowering to older women in equal measure. Revolution Calls is the work of two women doing what they do best. And to those ears While & Matthews may be reaching for the first time - listen without prejudice, and join this celebration of longevity, equality, empowerment and commitment to the muse, yeah!

Label Review. 

Nina Simone Sings The Blues - Silk & Soul - ‘Nuff Said - Nina Simone & Piano - To Love Somebody - Black Gold - Here Comes The Sun - Emergency Ward - It Is Finished.

Our Overview. 

After seven albums for Philips Records, “the High Priestess Of Soul” Nina Simone signed a new deal with RCA Records which saw her through to 1974 - probably her most challenging and controversial period. Her first album for the label: ‘Nina Simone Sings The Blues’ contains “Backlash Blues” one of her civil rights tunes. Later albums for RCA contained material by contemporary pop writers like The Bee Gees, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, George Harrison, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, & Chip Taylor.

Most of these were pieced together by the label blending studio and live recordings in an attempt to make coherent collections. They did a pretty good job as the discs in this set attest. On her final album for RCA, ‘It Is Finished’ (1974) she explored African percussion, sitars and the strange, chilling visions of the maverick Bahamian musician Exuma. By this time she had given up on her music career and was living in Liberia. She would return to the scene in 1978 on CTI Records.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

As a follow up to his well-revered holiday album ‘Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar’, Joel Paterson will release a collection of vintage instrumental, guitar-centric covers of songs from the Beatles’ catalogue, entitled ‘Let It Be Guitar! Joel Paterson Plays The Beatles’. The album features the guitarist’s signature blend of vintage jazz, exotica, blues, rockabilly, western swing and country, and uses classic Beatles songs as a sonic template for the mid-century musical journey.

‘Let It Be Guitar!’ showcases fresh new arrangements of these familiar tunes, employing a wide variety of musical styles and guitar sounds, paying tribute to Paterson’s biggest influences including Les Paul, Chet Atkins, Jorgen Ingmann, James Burton, Buddy Emmons, Ernest Ranglin and many more. Of the inspiration for the album, Paterson says, “This is the guitar record I’ve always wanted to make. I love the Beatles and their artistry and attention to detail in the recording studio-and I love all-things-guitar. So, I had a great time diving into these amazing songs, coming up with my own arrangements, and at the same time paying tribute to some of my favorite guitarists and vintage recording techniques of yesteryear.”

The album’s liner notes were written by singer/songwriter and fellow vintage appreciator J.D. McPherson and give further explanation of the project, “Each of Joel’s interpretations of these songs are concise, genre-bending, stylish tone poems, mixing both Joel’s and the Beatles’ own century-spanning inspirations into one zesty musical stew. Contained within certain tracks, you may even find nods to other instrumentalists who have delved into the Beatles’ body of work... It’s almost the meta-sonic equivalent of a Liverpudlian Rube Goldberg* drawing.”

*Best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

One Eleven Heavy are releasing their sophomore studio album ‘Desire Path’ again it is an album that’s an unabashed, triumphantly affectionate recreation of what Gram Parsons called Cosmic American Music – the country, folk and blues-informed psychedelic rock of the late 1960s and early 70s.

Naming their band after a short story about a plane crash might have been a mistake. Because, for transatlantic, country-infused rockers One Eleven Heavy, it’s been two years of trials and near-death experiences. Which just doesn’t seem fair for a band of notorious nice guys and positive souls already encumbered by an average commute of 3,000 miles per member to even get to rehearsal. 

Take the final day of sessions for their lauded debut album, ‘Everything’s Better’, when bass player Dan Brown was hospitalised after being crushed by his own bass rig for example. Or the final day of their debut tour, across the East Coast and Midwest of America, when the band was almost killed after an allegedly ‘shitfaced’ driver rear-ended their van at high speed somewhere in Delaware, on the way to a gig at Chris Forsyth’s Philadelphia venue Jerry’s On Front. 

Yes, One Eleven Heavy is lucky to be alive. And you only need to listen to the music on this, their brilliant second album ‘Desire Path’ to understand that’s how the band feels. Because it’s a wry, occasionally biting, but always joyful celebration of human endurance and the ability to overcome. 

Nick Mitchell Maiato’s album opener, ‘Chickenshit,’ deals with lazy acquiescence to attention-seekers. Pianist-cum-drummer Hans Chew’s first songwriting contribution to the band, ‘Fickle Wind,’ externalizes the band’s raison d’etre by questioning society’s drive toward constant change. Meanwhile James Toth fires off image-laden witticisms about the unnecessary difficulty of human interaction in ‘Too Much, Too Much,’ mocking fashion-conscious Marxists at the same time as he laughs at his own ‘cacti-withering row(s) with (his) old man.’ 

The musicianship is a step up from their raggedy, but already accomplished, debut, too. The album is laced with lush three-part vocal harmonies and two-part harmonised guitar licks, recalling those classic Allman Bros runs at the same time as it brings to mind timeless classics by Hendrix, the Stones and, of course, the Dead. Brooklyn, NY-based pedal steel player John Bohannon guests on a couple of tracks. Guitarist Nick Mitchell Maiato reaches new levels of guitar heroism on closing track – the Santana-esque ‘Three Poisons’. Meanwhile pianist Hans Chew also takes on drummer duties in the absence of regular hired hand Ryan Jewell who couldn’t make the session and more than earns his keep. The rhythm section of Chew and Dan Brown swings so hard, it almost doubles over on itself! 

It may well be a miracle that the sessions for this album took place at all. But, for One Eleven Heavy, being miraculous is a goal worth striving for. And the only route to it is by the Desire Path. Take it.

One Eleven Heavy on this recording are Nick Mitchell Maiato, James Toth (Wooden Wand), Dan Brown (Royal Trux) and Hans Chew.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Americana. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

That thin line between then and now has seen journeymen Giant Sand release 27-ish albums, their latest, ‘Recounting The Ballad Of The Thin Line Men’ has them turning the clock back to 1986’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Line Man’, picking over the bones and making a whole new soup. All these years on, the latest incarnation of Giant Sand: Howe Gelb (guitars, piano) Tommy Larkins (drums) and Thøger Lund (bass), have dusted off the old vinyl and re-imagined those heady days - they’ve polished these buried gems, reignited some truculent tirades and rekindled an ageless angst.

The revamp re-orders the tracks, drops a couple and adds “Reptillian”, a previously lost song hailing from their album’s 25th anniversary re-issue, a tune that opens proceedings and basks in all its crinkly glory. There’s also two takes of “Tantamount”. The unique thing about Giant Sand’ is they make it all their own, they sound like no-one else. The songs remain the same, but somehow completely different. Howe: “We were a fine storm. The greatest storm in terms of tumultuous velocity and pelting bluster. It proved unstoppable... for a minute”.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Blues Rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

British blues rock guitarist and singer-songwriter Danny Bryant has been developing his music craft since the age of 18 when he became a professional guitar player and now the acclaimed musician is releasing his stunning new album ‘Means Of Escape’.

Bryant, who has been described as a “National Blues Treasure” by Classic Rock magazine, returns with his most powerful collection of songs to date on this his 11th studio release. Making his debut as a producer, the guitarist assembled a truly stellar collection of world class personnel to help him to craft an album that he has been, “waiting his whole career to create.” 

Engineered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Ian Dowling (Adele, KT Tunstall) and recorded at Lincolnshire’s famed Chapel Studios, “Means of Escape” features nine tracks of blistering Blues rock of the highest calibre. From the thundering opening bars of “Tired of Trying”, to the haunting melody of the closing instrumental, “Mya”. The entire album is an emotional rollercoaster that hits you right between the eyes and straight through the heart. 

The album burns with energy and emotion from the start and never fades. From the primal cry of “Too Far Gone”, to the explosive slide playing of “Hurting Time”, Danny Bryant is at the top of his A game. Mastered at London’s world-famous Abbey Road Studios by Grammy award-winning Sean Magee (Gary Moore, The Rolling Stones), Bryant has finally captured the raw energy and excitement of his live shows. 

“This album was a joy to make from start to finish,” says Danny. “I can honestly say I’m proud of this piece of work more than anything I have done in my 20- year career. Music is my release in the world, it’s my way of surviving, it’s my means of escape.

“I wanted these songs to retain their urgency and excitement and not get lost in over production. For the sessions, we used my regular road band (both four-piece and Big Band formats) and, for the most part, that is how we made the album - minimal overdubs and lots of fun and passion.

“Once the album was recorded, the sessions were then mixed in Nashville by the legendary Eddie Spear. Eddie has worked with a whole host of bands such as U2, Rival Sons, and Chris Stapleton, and across many genres. I am a fan of his mixes. The brief was to achieve a clear, powerful and modern sounding studio album. I’m proud of the results."

Label Review. 

2019 album. New Orleans rhythms, Chicago blues, and early 70s rock n’ roll. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

“I just wanted to be honest about everything, from my musical influences to my story,” muses Neal Francis. After years of dishonest living - consumed by drugs, alcohol, and addiction - such sincerity is jarring from the 30-year-old Chicago-based musician. Liberated from a self-destructive past and born anew in sobriety, Francis has captured an inspired collection of songs steeped in New Orleans rhythms, Chicago blues, and early 70s rock n’ roll.

There is a deep connection between Francis’s childhood - his obsession with boogie woogie piano, his father’s gift of a dusty Dr. John LP - and the songs he’s created. The result is an astonishing collection of material without parallel in the contemporary funk and soul scene. The influences are unmistakable: the vocal stylings of Allen Toussaint and Leon Russell; the second line rhythms of The Meters and Dr. John; the barroom rock ‘n’ roll of The Rolling Stones; the gospel soul of Billy Preston; the roots music of The Band.

Francis pays tribute to the masters but has his own story to tell: “It’s the life I’ve lived so far. I’m doing this to fulfill a drive within myself, but also to pay tribute to the gifts I’ve been given. And it comes from a place of immense gratitude. I’ve been given so much in my life, especially in the last two years, that this feels like a bonus.”

Label Review.

2019 album. Indie rock. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

New Zealand singer songwriter David Kilgour is a guitar god for guitar atheists. He’s worthy of worship, but his style neither demands nor expects it, all of which only serves to increase his otherworldly cool. Four decades into his career, Kilgour remains as creatively restless as ever. Wherever that drive takes him next, you’ll want to follow.

It’s been a couple of years since the co-helmsman of The Clean and The Great Unwashed gave fans anything new to fawn over, but his eleventh solo album is a total charmer. The atmosphere of ‘Bobbie’s A Girl’ does feel a bit mysterious. Largely missing the jangly distortion of Kilgour’s other work, the album’s ten songs exude a hazy warmth, with a light psychedelia that recalls ’60s outfits like The Byrds and The Velvet Underground.

"It's moody - as in low, subdued," says David Kilgour of his new album. ‘Bobbie’s A Girl’ is a quieter affair than fans may associate with the pioneer of New Zealand indie rock. “I tended to shy away from too much guitar playing for a point of difference and to mix things up for myself a little,” Kilgour continues. The style set in at the beginning of sessions, as he and the Heavy Eights (i.e., longtime collaborators Thomas Bell, Tony de Raad, and Taane Tokona) headed to Port Chalmers Recording Services with producer Tex Houston. “We have worked on these songs for a number of years now, so that’s different because I usually can’t wait to get them out,” Kilgour says. Why the delay? Like with the themes of the album, Kilgour doesn’t want to elaborate too much. “Everything’s related to the music and mood,” he says, “but I’d rather not say how. I like a little mystery.”

Opener “Entrance” floats wordlessly on acoustic guitar, whose ringing chords slightly mask the deft fingerpicking beneath it. “Smoke you right out of here” picks up the pace, but “Crawler” rolls in like a storm, its organ and fingerpicked guitars creating an ominous sound until a chorus of “aaaahs” lightens the mood. Only four songs have lyrics. “I kind of wanted a rest from verbalising everything, like listening to yourself going, ‘Blah blah blah blah…,” Kilgour says. The guitar quietly shimmering between channels, the music seems to speak more than the words. “Ngapara,” the closing track of ‘Bobbie’s A Girl’, is his favourite song on the album. It’s a loping instrumental carried by thickly distorted guitars and heavy reverb. Like the rest of ‘Bobbie’s A Girl’, it feels both a part of Kilgour’s previous work, and just outside of it.

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD..

Our Overview. 

Grammy-nominated veteran California skate-punk rock trio Blink-182 are releasing their long awaited new album ‘Nine’, the bands eight studio album which features the band’s current Tom-DeLonge-less lineup, which has been in place since 2015: Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker, and Matt Skiba (of Alkaline Trio fame). 

Blink-182 are known for playing catchy melodies, as well as their satirical toilet humour. Known as a band that plays up–tempo songs with prominent major–chord harmonies, often digitally mixed, to provide a much cleaner sound than typical punk/rock recordings generally employing distortion and ragged analogue mixes to achieve the opposite effect and their new album follows on in true Blink-182 form. "I think we're taking everything that we've done in the past and building on it. Which is what we want to always be doing. The album will be more experimental than some past material," vocalist Mark Hoppus said. 

Albeit the title has left some fans scratching their head regards the title, should it not be named ‘Eight’? So Hoppus took to Reddit to explain “NINE. this is our ninth album, as decided by me and travis,” he began. “some count buddha, some not. some count the mark tom and travis show. some count greatest hits. some count dogs eating dogs. i’m counting buddha, cheshire cat, dude ranch, enema of the state, toypaj, untitled, neighbourhoods, califronia, and now NINE.” Mark continued “Nine is also the number of universal love. and the number of uranus. remember to like and smash that subscribe button, or whatever it is the kids say now”.

Label Review.

1954 album with 11 bonus tracks.

Our Overview.

American jazz trumpeter Chet Baker was known for his silvery fingered trumpet playing and his wonderfully soft and heartfelt voice, a primary exponent of the West Coast school of cool jazz in the early and mid 50s came to prominence with the Gerry Mulligan quartet in 1952.

The release of this American Jazz Classics will be a delight for fans old and new. This release presents the complete original LP ‘Chet Baker & Strings’ (Columbia CL 549), which marks the trumpeter’s first experience recording with a string orchestra. This is a six-panel digipack collector’s series - inside booklet Chet Baker - ‘Love Walked In/Chet Baker & Strings’ - complete album + 11 bonus tracks.

The album also features such important jazz luminaries as Zoot Sims, Jack Montrose, Bud Shank, Russ Freeman, and Shelly Manne with a Plus String Orchestra arranged by Marty Paich, Jack Montrose, Shorty Rogers & Johnny Mandel. Five tracks that complete the sessions but were not included on the original album (three alternate takes and two rare unaccompanied vocals by Baker) have been added here. Also included are six bonus tracks, consisting of two alternate versions of songs from the album, and a complete 1959 date by Chet with strings.

* From the same sessions but not included on the original LP.

** Bonus tracks (18-23): 18: Chet Baker (tp, vcl), Russ Freeman (p), Carson Smith (b), Bob Neel (d). Los Angeles, March 7, 1955. 19: Same line up Live at the Tiffany Club, Los Angeles, August 10, 1954. 20-23: Chet Baker (tp) with Len Mercer’s Orchestra & Strings. Milan, Italy, September 29, 1959.

Track Listing:

1. You Don’t Know What Love Is

2. I’m Through With Love

3. Love Walked In

4. You Better Go Now

5. I Married An Angel

6. Love

7. I Love You

8. What A Difference A Day Made

9. Why Shouldn’t I?

10. A Little Duet For Zoot And Chet

11. The Wind / Trickleydidlier

12. You Don’t Know What Love Is (alternate Track)*

13. You Better Go Now (alternate Track)*

14. A Little Duet For Zoot And Chet (alternate Track)*

15. Blue Room (unaccompanied Vocal Version)

16. Spring Is Her (unaccompanied Vocal Version)*

17. You Don’t Know What Love Is (1955 Vocal Version)**

18. The Wind (1954 Quartet Live Version)**

19. Goodby**

20. I Should Care**

21. Autumn In New York**

22. My Funny Valentine**

Label Review. 

2019 album. American folk. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Hiss Golden Messenger hails from Durham California and is fronted by singer-songwriter and bandleader MC Taylor who once again delivers a sublime artistic work with his new studio album ‘Terms Of Surrender’. Describing Hiss Golden Messenger is like trying to grasp a forgotten word: It’s always on the tip of your tongue, but hard to speak. Songwriter and bandleader M.C. Taylor’s music is at once familiar, yet impossible to categorise: Elements from the American songbook the steady, churning acoustic guitar and mandolin, the gospel emotion, the eerie steel guitar tracings, the bobbing and weaving organ and electric piano provide the bedrock for Taylor’s existential ruminations about parenthood, joy, hope, and loneliness. And then there’s an indescribable spirit and movement: Hiss Golden Messenger’s music grooves. There’s nothing else quite like it.

For over ten years, Taylor has spearheaded this prolific, perpetually evolving group. He’s toured and recorded relentlessly, earning devotees along the roads, deep in festival pits, and across the seas. “The work that I do requires me to be in a certain emotional place,” says Taylor. “My music depends first and foremost on being in a heightened emotional state and putting my vulnerability on display.” This vulnerability is also central to Taylor’s steadily growing fanbase, which continues to discover universal themes in his deeply personal work. The critical acclaim and attention for Hiss Golden Messenger and barn-burning performances on Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Seth Meyers affirm the emotional power of Taylor’s work. This raw emotion is especially apparent on Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album, ‘Terms of Surrender’. 

‘Terms’ follows Taylor’s journey through a tumultuous year of trauma and psychological darkness, hoping and working towards redemption and healing, and the conflicting draw of home and movement. “Another year older,” Taylor sings on album opener “I Need a Teacher.” “Debt slightly deeper. Paycheck smaller. Goddamn, I need a teacher.” Later, Taylor tracks the complex dynamic between father and grown son on “Cat’s Eye Blue,” singing, “Is this wicked word too bad to be spoken? You let the heart attack in. One taste and it’s broken.” He later pivots towards his relationship with his own daughter on “Happy Birthday, Baby.” 

Taylor says that he wanted to make ‘Terms of Surrender’ “a wandering record. I wanted where we recorded it to mirror the searching spirit of the music.” Having written upwards of 40 songs in motel rooms, his studio in Durham, and a secluded cottage outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, 10 songs were chosen. Includes regular collaborators Phil and Brad Cook, Josh Kaufman, and Matt McCaughan and new friends like Jenny Lewis and Aaron Dessner (of The National). Hiss Golden Messenger songs create feelings to which devoted listeners attach their own meanings and memories with each repeated spin. Throughout ‘Terms of Surrender’, those feelings range from fearful to celebratory. But perhaps the title track with its refrain of “I’m gonna give it/ but don’t make me say it/ It’s one thing to bend it, my love, but another to break it” best summarises the nature of Taylor’s work as a musician, father and spouse, and cultural communicator on this album.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Kscope. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

In recent years, French atmospheric, experimental progressive rockers Klone have built their name on making music that’s as deeply introspective as it is sonically powerful. ‘Le Grand Voyage’, the sextet’s first release for UK post-progressive specialists Kscope, is an album brimming with that sense of searching and self-discovery. The 10 tracks on the bands 8th studio album is awash with their trademark dark guitar tones and epic brooding soundscapes living up to its name in unabashed no-stone-unturned existential exploration.

‘Le Grand Voyage’ is a dynamic album of intense, cinematic journeys that explore nine unique landscapes, switching between dark, luminous, heavy and powerful sounds. It is inspired by duality: earthly and spiritual journeys, life and death, resilience and relenting, love and animosity - human nature and all its paradoxes. 

Talking about their 8th studio album “Our music allows the listener to travel and ask, ‘What is the spirit? What is the matter?’ and those kinds of questions,” says guitarist Guillaume Bernard. “The title refers to the wandering of the mind. It all came our singer [Yann Ligner] who came up with something in English like ‘The Great Journey’. We all liked the meaning but weren’t sure how it sounded. Eventually we realised it would be easy enough for people to translate and understand in our native tongue.”

Much of the inspiration on stand-out tracks Breach, Keystone and Hidden Passenger came from pondering the great philosophies of life, those eternal unanswered questions like who we are, where we are going and, ultimately, what happens next. It was the uncertainty and confusion surrounding mortality, the notion that something or nothing awaits us, which felt like an unlimited creative playground for the French art-rockers. 

What came out the other end was bold in sonic ambition, twisting dark guitars and electronic ambience into a modern masterpiece that feels excitingly new, yet in many ways feels like a contemporary take on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. Now is an exciting time for progressive music, says Guillaume, because audiences are open-minded. “We don’t have to respect any particular rules when making this music.”

“Sometimes rock music has no soul,” explains Guillaume. “That’s why bands like Anathema are so important – they can go deep enough to touch their audience. We try to have the same sincerity of our music. I think you have to be reaching for something higher, possessed by something stronger and deeper…”

Higher. Stronger. Deeper. When you hear the music, it all makes perfect sense.

The experimental progressive rock / metal group have built themselves an international fanbase as a result of acclaim within the music press and excellent live shows across Europe, Australia and the US. They have supported the likes of Gojira, Devin Townsend Project and Anneke Van Giersbergen, and have some exciting touring booked this summer, including performances on Mainstage 2 at Hellfest Open Air (FR), Festival Le Lavoir Electrique (FR), Into the Grave Metal Fest (NL) and Euroblast Festival (DE).

Label Review. 

This comprehensive compilation features the band’s eponymous album, all the non album A and B sides , plus three previously unreleased tracks produced by Anne Dudley, and a previously unreleased 61 minute concert recording from 1983. Also included all nine 12 inch remixes , plus two bonus remixes of “Iko Iko” created in 1989 (when the song was featured in the film “Rainman”) on CD for the first time. The DVD contains the promo videos , and the booklet features extensive reminiscences by the band members , along with photos and ephemera from their own collections. Edsel.

Our Overview. 

Formed in 1980 from the ashes of the Two Tone label act The Bodysnatchers , The Belle Stars a seven piece, all singing, all playing, all female combo signed to the legendary Stiff Records label in 1981. Their early singles failed to chart at home in the UK but by 1982 they began to find success with songs like “Iko Iko” and “The Clapping Song”. However their greatest success came in early 1983 with the huge smash “Sign Of The Times” which scored throughout Europe and the US and Australia.

“Sign of the Times” was followed a month later by the band’s eponymous debut album, which contained a mix of original songs and cover versions, including Bob and Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” (covered three years later by the Rolling Stones on Dirty Work) and Al Wilson’s “The Snake”. However, “Sign of the Times” proved to be the peak of the band’s success. Each follow-up single was less successful than its predecessor: Despite this, the band continued to tour throughout Europe. However, the lack of success took its toll, and the band eventually broke up although in 1989 the band had a belated hit in the US when “Iko Iko” was used in the film ‘Rainman’ and it reached the Top 20 in that country..

Label Review. 

1962 album with 6 bonus tracks. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

King of modern jazz, the American pianist Bill Evans forged a style of his own from the 1950s on and was one of the most influential musicians in jazz history. And the release of a limited edition of ’Interplay’ presents the complete original Bill Evans album.

The dates showcased the pianist with several great players, including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Philly Joe Jones. Evans and Freddie Hubbard had both participated Oliver Nelson’s wonderful 1961 LP The Blues and the Abstract Truth, and in April of 1962 they would both play the Benny Golson LP 'Pop + Jazz = Swing'. 

'Interplay' marked their third and final recorded collaboration. The only known alternate take from the sessions, as well as a complete date taped the following month with a similar formation (but with saxophonist Zoot Sims in place of Hubbard), have been added as a bonus. BILL EVANS, piano FREDDIE HUBBARD, trumpet JIM HALL, guitar PERCY HEATH, bass PHILLY JOE JONES, drums. 

Recorded Nola Penthouse Studio, New York, July 16 & 17, 1962.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Chelsea Wolfe has always been a conduit for a powerful energy, and while she has demonstrated a capacity to channel that somber beauty into a variety of forms, her gift as a songwriter is never more apparent than when she strips her songs down to a few key components. As a result, her solemn majesty and ominous elegance are more potent than ever on ‘Birth of Violence’ her seventh album.

Her austere beginnings were gradually bolstered by electronics and filled out with full-band arrangements. The music became increasingly dense and more centered around live performances. Her latest album, ‘Birth of Violence’, is a return to the reclusive nature of her earlier recordings “I’ve been in a state of constant motion for the past eight years or so; touring, moving, playing new stages, exploring new places and meeting new people - an incredible time of learning and growing as a musician and performer,” Wolfe says of the era leading up to ‘Birth of Violence’. “But after a while, I was beginning to lose a part of myself. I needed to take some time away from the road to get my head straight, to learn to take better care of myself, and to write and record as much as I can while I have ‘Mercury in my hands,’ as a wise friend put it.”

‘Birth of Violence’ is the result of this step out of the limelight. The songs stem from humble beginnings - little more than Wolfe’s voice and her Taylor acoustic guitar. Her longtime musical collaborator Ben Chisholm recorded the songs on a makeshift studio and helped fill them out with his modern production treatments and the occasional auxiliary flourish from ongoing contributors Jess Gowrie (drums) and Ezra Buchla (viola). The album opens with “The Mother Road,” a harrowing ode to Route 66 that immediately addresses Wolfe’s metaphoric white line fever. It explains the nature of the record—the impact of countless miles and perpetual exhaustion—and the desire to find the road back home, back to one’s roots. Songs like “Deranged for Rock & Roll” and “Highway” offers parallel examinations on the trials and tribulations of her journeys while the ghostly “When Anger Turns to Honey” serves as a rebuttal to self-appointed judges.

“These songs came to me in a whirlwind and I knew I needed to record them soon, and also really needed a break from the road,” Wolfe says. “I’ve spent the past few years looking for the feeling of home; looking for places that felt like home. The result of that humble approach yields Wolfe’s most devastating work to date.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Rock. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

Over the last 18 months the Kris Barras Band have become one of the hottest and fastest rising rock acts in the UK. He had stopped as an MMA fighter and self-released his 2016 debut album, he was playing pub venues to 20-50 people playing ZZ Top covers amongst originals, did a handful of blues festivals, played London only twice (as a support artist) and his aim was to get played on Planet Rock Radio. He was close to giving up on music, the next album was his one last shot. ‘The Divine And Dirty’ was released on Provogue on 23 March 2018.

Then the ball started rolling. The Kris Barras Band have played 4 UK headline tours, supported Beth Hart, Joanne Shaw Taylor, and this led to slots with GUN, King King, The Magpie Salute and Therapy? plus Jonny Lang & Walter Trout on Provogue’s Rockin’ The Blues festival tour. After winning Planet Rock’s Best New Band Award, Kris was invited to becoming a special guest presenter for 2 shows.

If this wasn’t enough, Kris also joined Supersonic Blues Machine as lead singer/guitarist in July 2018 and toured Europe with the band and Billy F Gibbons! He features on the upcoming ‘Road Chronicles: Live’ album. Kris Barras - from MMA fighter to hottest rising rock act in the UK. From “wanting to be played” on radio to being a presenter!

Label Review.

Country pop. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Light in the Attic Records is releasing the country pop mavericks’ Lee Hazlewood archival series with this stunning album: ‘400 Miles From L.A. 1955-56’, a collection of previously unknown intimate recordings, never intended for release. Lee sings, plays guitar and even presses the record button on the tape machine. Lee was one of the music world's most irascible geniuses during a long, fruitful career and these tracks are rural sketches and small town dreams, captured in an innocent time before the path ahead was clear.

Phoenix, Arizona 1955…a twenty-five year old disc jockey and fledgling songwriter, Lee Hazlewood, is trying to break into the music industry. He takes Greyhound bus trips to Los Angeles to pitch songs, only to be rejected each time. Undeterred, Lee starts a record label called Viv Records. Running the label out of his house, Lee finds the artists, writes the songs, produces the sessions, arranges the pressings of the records and handles distribution. Recently discovered tapes in the Viv Records archive yielded an unbelievable find, the earliest known recordings of Hazlewood singing his songs…Lee’s first demo! The mysterious and bountiful tapes featured Lee singing early unheard compositions and a complete first draft of his “Trouble Is A Lonesome Town” song cycle that would become his first official solo album in 1963.

These songs rewrite Lee’s recorded history, adding a new first chapter to his saga. For Hazlewood addicts, hearing these early tracks and the embryonic version of “Trouble Is A Lonesome Town” is akin to finding an early draft of the Old Testament.

“That’s beauty of Lee’s songwriting. It lives on. People will hear it for the first time, even though it’s fifty years old or whatever, if it’s good enough and strong enough, they’ll accept and like it as much as if it was just created. That’s the wonderful legacy that Lee has. It’s wonderful to look back and make all this early work available. To put “Boots” and all those other LHI songs into perspective. That it all started somewhere and this is where.” – Arizona Music Historian and record producer, John Dixon.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Soul / jazz / tropical collective. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Since first arriving on the Canadian scene at the turn of the millennium, the Souljazz Orchestra has never stopped pushing the limits of its signature sound: an explosive clash of Soul, Jazz, Afro, Latin and Caribbean styles, unleashed by blaring majestic horns, dusty vintage keyboards, and an arsenal of earthquaking percussion. And now The Souljazz Orchestra return with their ninth brand new studio album for our troubled times, ‘Chaos Theories’. Now this is a fierce one - a mix of future soul, tropical groove and free jazz improv, all approached with a bit of a post-punk vibe...

Always known for their uncompromising social and political messages, the Canadian collective hit harder than ever on 9 new tracks, outing the hypocrisy of modern day politics, police brutality and the everyday struggle of the working man. Led by chief songwriter and arranger Pierre Chrètien, the band continue to evolve their sound, drawing on a broad palette from their trademark Latin, Afro and Caribbean styles to some of the UK’s political sounds of the early ‘80s, the era of The Clash, The Police, 2-Tone and frontline reggae. “We were basically messing around with the idea of creating our own brand of Afro-punk”, remembers Chrétien, “something with the aggressive, in-your-face energy of punk rock or free jazz, but still backed by the hypnotic, pulsating grooves of tropical music." The album takes the listener from carefully targeted sonic missiles to more reflective thought-provoking moments. ‘Police The Police’ starts the offensive: “I wrote this after my neighbour was beaten to death by Ottawa police during an arrest,” explains Chrétien. “The authorities downplayed the incident and the officers were working the next day like nothing had happened.” ‘House Of Cards’ takes a thinly veiled swipe at the current US administration on an infectious disco groove: “lies within lies within lies… like so many Russian dolls”; ‘Boat Rockers’ challenges us all to look beyond accepted norms and ‘General Strike’ documents the frustrations of the working class as the pay gap gets increasingly wider; ‘Slumlord’ shines the spotlight on dodgy landlords while the brilliant closer ‘Well Runs Dry’ laments modern day living, with its confused pace and mundane obsessions, remembering simpler days gone by. 

Meanwhile, years of relentless touring have formed the Souljazz Orchestra’s live concerts into the stuff of legends – more often than not culminating in ecstatic, sweat-soaked, cathartic affairs, mixing pulsating arrangements with eruptive improvisations. Leading their field for 17 years, The Souljazz Orchestra have constantly moved forward and remain an in-demand live band worldwide. ‘Chaos Theories’ is their 9th album, is released on LP, CD, cassette and digital / streaming and is mastered by The Carvery. LP format comes as a special dark blue vinyl edition. The band tour Europe and Canada during September, October and November 2019. 

Label Review. 

2019 soundtrack also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

‘Days of the Bagnold Summer’ is the latest outside-the-box accomplishment from storied Glasgow 6-piece Belle and Sebastian, comprised of Stuart Murdoch, Stevie Jackson, Sarah Martin, Chris Geddes, Richard Colburn, Dave McGowan, and Bobby Kildea. The last two years have seen them go against conventional practice by releasing a trilogy of EPs to some of the best reviews of their career, and launch and curate their own four-day music festival at sea in The Boaty Weekender, continuing the individualist streak that has characterised them from day one.

‘Days of the Bagnold Summer’ began life as a 2012 award-winning graphic novel by Joff Winterhart, was turned into a feature film and the directorial debut of Simon Bird (“The Inbetweeners”, “Friday Night Dinner”), and is now a wonderful, rich, bittersweet, and warmly welcoming original soundtrack album by Belle and Sebastian.

The announcement arrives with first single “Sister Buddha’” and its accompanying video (above).. The anthemic song is led by shards of melodic guitar and Stuart Murdoch’s compassionate lyrics and soaring vocals, telling of a protagonist in search of an escape from “the thrills, the pills, the circus ring” of daily life, brimming with a message of inner strength and solidarity.

‘Days Of The Bagnold Summer’ features eleven brand new Belle and Sebastian songs, as well as re-recorded versions of classics “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying,” originally appearing on 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, and “I Know Where The Summer Goes,” from 1998’s ‘This Is Just a Modern Rock Song’ EP.

‘Days Of The Bagnold Summer’ is set for release in 2020 and features Monica Dolan, Earl Cave, Rob Brydon, Alice Lowe, Tamsin Greig and Elliot Speller-Gillot. It’s a tender, touching and acutely observed coming-of-age story, which tells of a heavy-metal-loving teenager’s holiday plans falling through at the last minute, leading to him having to spend the summer with the person who annoys him most in the world: his mum. 

Label Review. 

2019 album. He has played with Nick Lowe, Van Morrison, Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, Dave Edmunds and countless others. He’s currently with Slim Chance. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Attempting to designate a musical category for Watkins is not without its challenges, but Nick Lowe once observed that he could be filed as “the missing link between Paulo Conte and Howlin’ Wolf”. Another beacon of taste - Bob Dylan - proclaimed himself a fan by playing two solo cuts on his Theme Time Radio Hour saying (without a hint of irony) that “Geraint Watkins is my favourite English piano player.” There you have it...high praise indeed!

For so many years a keystone of the bands of Nick Lowe, Van Morrison, Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings, Dave Edmunds and countless more, Geraint Watkins is also a revered creator of his own sublime music, much of which has already been perfectly captured in a handful of solo albums. For 2019’s ‘Rush Of Blood’ album, Geraint found a new and unlikely collaborator in the form of Simon Ratcliffe of The Basement Jaxx to push his boundaries even further. This unique aggregation - aided by some master musicians has produced what will surely come to be regarded as the finest yet of Watkins’ solo projects.

Label Review.

2019 album. Rock. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview.

Brooklyn four piece Bethlehem Steel are releasing their explosive self-titled, second full-length ‘Bethlehem Steel coming out this fall on Exploding In Sound Records, which follows their 2017 debut ‘Party Naked Forever’. The new album builds on the subtleties at the band’s core in ways the band had never explored without losing the wide range of raw and cathartic emotion they’re known for.

The New York based group Bethlehem Steel, create music that breaks free from the anxiety, unhealthy relationships, and toxic masculinity around them to simply be itself; powerful, deeply personal, and untamed. There’s no holding back Rebecca Ryskalczyk’s songs, which are bold and triumphantly pushed to their breaking point.

The 10-track effort captures the latest incarnation of Bethlehem Steel, which has expanded to a four-piece after bringing in new member Christina Puerto. Not only did the additional musician enrich the group’s sound, but Puerto ended up having a profound impact on the album’s themes. Specifically, it was Puerto’s tight bond with guitarist/vocalist Becca Ryskalczyk that influenced a good chunk of the lyrics. Ryskalczyk explained:

“A lot of the lyrical content on this album is uncomfortable. It’s about men, and being taken advantage of, or abandoned or fucked over. I’ve been playing with the boys in the band for many years and they have always been sympathetic to my experiences, but there are certain things about what women experience that they will never understand, and having another woman as part of the band brought a different comfort and a sense of solidarity. Based on what’s happening in my life, I would still probably have sung about these things, but I don’t know what it would have been like without Christina. It wouldn’t have felt as powerful.”

Bethlehem Steel which was originally made up of Rebecca Ryskalczyk (vocals/guitars), Jon Gernhart (drums) and Patrick Ronayne (bass), the band was joined by Christina Puerto in 2018 on guitar and vocals. Puerto and Ryskalczyk’s songwriting plays off each other in brilliantly balanced ways that are outspoken and vulnerable, while counterpointed by a muscular fury. Bethlehem Steel is prepared to take on the world once again with 10 diverse and honest tracks about processing one’s experiences and trying to take care of yourself.

Label Review.

2019 debut album. Soul. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The Ashton Jones Project’ features some of the countries most talented and burgeoning musicians, who’s live performance credits include artists such as Cory Wong, Beverley Knight, Joss Stone & Pee Wee Ellis. The group is a hardworking, funky soul nine piece and ’Toast’ is a debut album filled with energy, humour and honesty and fronted by the inimitable presence of Ahston jones, who has justly been acclaimed as “One of the UK’s finest singers, a voice dripping with soul”.

Their hotly anticipated album ‘Toast’ has been 2 years in the making and features 11 tracks of original heartfelt goodness, it is a contemporary interpretation of classic soul, funk & jazz, commencing a run of original releases spanning 2019. What really impresses on 'Toast' though is the variety. Apart from the funk, the album boasts plenty of beautiful ballads and sweet mid-tempo items on which no expense has been spared on production.

Along with support slots for Grammy award winning ‘Shalamar’ and the legendary ‘Incognito’, The Ashton Jones Project has also appeared at a number of internationally recognised festivals including Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Ashtons’ voice has featured in 2 major TV adverts for Amazon UK and with his debut album he has arrived as a solo artist. The singles “Good Thing Guaranteed” and “Hard Work Dedication” have racked up over 100,000 streams in total, with plays on 6music and specialist soul stations.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Rock. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Brandon Williams’ second full-length record as Chastity, ‘Home Made Satan’ , is a new direction for the Whitby, Ontario-native. It’s an emotional and political concept album from the perspective of a young man who’s spent too much time alone, inside, isolated from the world. It’s about fear, and radicalization; an intense meditation on youth and extremism in an increasingly irrational and violent Western World.

Williams, who produces all his own music, set out to create something with a strong cinematic nature. “It’s so visual to me,” he says. “I’m scoring this picture I have, and trying to get it as close to people’s ears as it is in my mind.”

The new songs are gothier and poppier than ever, recalling ‘80s staples like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees. ‘Home Made Satan’ has got “a bit more eyeshadow” than 2018’s genre-bending shoegaze-meets-post-hardcore ‘Death Lust’ , and it’s got pop-punk hooks for days. ‘Home Made Satan’, with its lines about commies and American masochism and the Christian right, is meant to sing along to.

And when you do, you’ll mostly be singing about America. About hyper alienation and xenophobia, about the people who don’t have access to community, how people get stuck in their own worlds and become afraid of what’s outside. “It constantly feels like America is falling apart,” Williams says, and that affects the whole world.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Folk. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

New Jersey bluesman, singer songwriter Jonah Tolchin is joined by number of notable guests on ‘Fire’s For The Cold’, his fourth studio album which yields some of the most beautiful melodies and emotive offerings Tolchin has ever delivered throughout his steadily evolving career. ‘Fires for the Cold’ shares an emotional trajectory that resonates every step of the way.

Jonah Tolchin has wrestled with a wellspring of emotions in his 26 years, and in the process, has consistently found the means of integrating his sentiments into his songs. It’s been a relatively brief progression as far as his career is concerned, but the maturity and musical progression he’s tallied in that short time has been shared in sync with his coming of age. On ‘Fires for the Cold’, Tolchin lays bare the conflicts and quagmires that have engulfed him over the course of the last few years. Indeed, by his own admission, it’s been a difficult time. The ending of a marriage and an upheaval in his mindset left him shattered, confused and struggling to find the solace that had eluded him for too long a time. 

“Every record I make is like a record in time,” Tolchin explains. “It recounts the things that I’ve observed and experienced between the last album and the current one. It’s painful for me to talk about the last few years. It’s even painful to write about it. But singing and strumming about it? That’s different. That’s the main way I feel that I’m able to interact with the impossible emotions. It’s the greatest gift that music has given me throughout my life.” 

Given those circumstances and by Tolchin’s own admission, making the album wasn’t easy. Writing the songs became a kind of catharsis, one that found him sharing his most intimate feelings and, in turn, searching for a resolution and the answers he’d been searching for. 

“I’m not about writing songs that aim to get a certain reaction or to specifically please anyone,” Tolchin insists. “I found that for myself, and for this record, it has been important to delve into the depths of my emotions and confront them head on. The album became a healing process. I’m sure that other people go through similar things, whether it has to do with today’s culture or their own relationships. After all, we live in a crazy world. We’re forced to create our own meaning of existence. I found it was okay not to know everything, and it was okay to let things go.” 

Fortunately, he found all the support he needed once he was ensconced in the studio. Recorded at Carriage House Studios and co-produced with Grammy winning musician, engineer and producer Sheldon Gomberg, the album includes a number of notable guests - Jackson Browne and Rickie Lee Jones - both of whom lend their voices to a stunning and sublime cover of Little Feat’s “Roll Um Easy.” Sara Watkins sang on two other songs, “Supermarket Rage” and “Honeysuckle.” Several A-list players - drummer Jay Bellerose, Little Feat guitarist Fred Tackett, Pedal steel player Greg Leisz and guitarist Ben Peller - lend their efforts as well.

Label Review.

2019 album also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Chicago’s five-man indie rock collective Twin Peaks have dextrously embraced change since their formation in 2010 when the band members were in high school who rose to prominence on the Chicago DIY music scene playing low-budget shows and house gigs throughout the city. And after a hiatus of three years, the in demand Twin Peaks are releasing their new album, ‘Lookout Low, via Communion Records and with their fourth album, the sonic and creative leap the five-piece takes feels like a total revolution in their youthful sound.

Where their last LP, 2016’s Down In Heaven, and 2017’s Sweet ‘17 Singles compilation were adventurous and compelling updates on their youthfully raucous formula, their fourth album, ‘Lookout Low’ feels like a total revolution. Their most deliberate and seamless record yet, the album is a collaborative triumph, propelled forward by Twin Peak’s near-decade-long bond. 

For ‘Lookout Low’, the five of them - guitarists Cadien Lake James and Clay Frankel, bassist Jack Dolan, multi-instrumentalist Colin Croom, and drummer Connor Brodner - committed to work countless hours in their studio and practice space. Meeting daily, they demoed 27 songs and relentlessly rehearsed them, eventually whittling down to a select ten tracks. The album was recorded and cut live over three weeks in Wales with legendary producer Ethan Johns (Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon, Laura Marling, White Denim) at Monnow Valley , who lauds Twin Peaks as “the best Rock and Roll band I’ve heard for a very long time.” Already a well-oiled live unit, the band’s mission was to capture the exhilarating vibe of their shows. Often, they thrived on the thrill of live recording, going with the magic of the original first take. This life-affirming burst of adrenaline seeps into every facet of the LP. 

Label Review. 

2019 album. Experimental rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Over the past decade, Polish quartet Trupa Trupa have brought poetry to their hypnotic, psych-rock songs and almost every song on ‘Of The Sun’—the bands’ magnetic fifth album—lands like an anthem, with barbed hooks driven by an italicised rhythm section and a chimera of crisscrossing harmonies. Throughout its propulsive 12-song sequence, this is an album that never lets up. From the relentlessly pulsing “Long Time Ago” to the deep glisten of “Longing,” ‘Of The Sun’ is an unbroken string of hits in Trupa Trupa’s idiosyncratic, self-made universe. 

But just beneath the surface of these often bright and always indelible songs, there is a world teeming with nihilistic considerations, slyly dark humor, and survivalist self-assurances – all subtly nestled into bold refrains and reflected back via complex, secret textures. The setting of Gdańsk is a crucial philosophical and aesthetic touchstone for Trupa Trupa. A city with a convoluted history of German and Polish rule and self-sovereignty, it is itself a living testament to the turnover of human toil. It’s also the homeland of Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose system of metaphysical will inspired Nietzsche and, in turn, Trupa Trupa. Klaus Kinski was born nearby, too; singer Grzegorz Kwiatkowski considers his Werner Herzog-directed film, Fitzcarraldo, one of the best movies ever made. Kinski tries in vain to amass a fortune by piloting a steamship over a mountain into the rubber bonanza of the Amazon. It is a portrait of great effort and pathetic failure, of strain sublimating into nothing. Along with the notions of Beckett, hints of Syd Barrett, and the knotty complications of Wire, these emotions ripple through ‘Of The Sun’, a radiant album about the damnation of mortality.

Trupa Trupa has grown inordinately in both confidence and execution during the last half-decade. Spurred on by a democratic process, where no one is the real leader and all ideas and influences are funneled into the same rich sound, Trupa Trupa channel a multiverse of feelings into captivating four-minute spans. Throughout 'Of The Sun', they stare into the dark and summon a light of their own, making the struggle feel not just tolerable but deceptively triumphant.

'Of The Sun' was recorded, produced and mixed by Michal Kupicz during October and November 2018 in Gdańsk, Poland at Custom 34 studios. Trupa Trupa is Grzegorz Kwiatkowski (vocal, guitar), Wojciech Juchniewicz (vocal, bass guitar, guitar), Rafał Wojczal (second guitar, keys), and Tomasz Pawluczuk (drums).

'Trupa Trupa made their first international appearance in 2015 with the album “Headache” published by a British label Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records. A year later, they signed to French Ici d’ailleurs, where they released a remastered version of “Headache” on vinyl. In 2017, in cooperation with their British and French labels, the band recorded and put out “Jolly New Songs”, which was also published by the Japanese label Moorworks. In recent years, Trupa Trupa have toured extensively, playing at the SXSW, Primavera Sound, Iceland Airwaves, Colours of Ostrava, Waves Vienna, Eurosonic, Liverpool Sound City, to name just a few.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

Devendra Banhart’s new album, ‘Ma’, is his first since 2016’s ‘Ape in Pink Marble’. Bursting with tender, autobiographical vignettes, ‘Ma’ displays a shift from the sonic experimentation of his previous albums to an intricate, captivating story-telling and emotional intimacy. Banhart favours organic sounds to accompany his voice and guitar, the arrangements bolstered by strings, woodwinds, brass, and keyboards.

The album is one that addresses - often in a beguilingly oblique way - the unconditional nature of maternal love, the desire to nurture, the passing down of wisdom, the longing to establish the relationship of mother to child, and the consequences of that bond being broken. Banhart doesn’t approach the album’s maternal theme in a literal way; rather, by contemplating it, alluding to it, regarding the concept of motherhood from different angles, he has fashioned an album of multiple, intertwining narratives. Its concerns are both personal and global, with subtly autobiographical looks at life and death and ruminations about the precarious state of the world. The many light-hearted moments of Ma are balanced by deeply melancholic, even sombre ones. Three tracks are in Spanish, the language that is as much Banhart’s native tongue as English, and one in Portuguese.

Banhart, who spent his childhood in Venezuela, has been profoundly affected by the poverty and despair he’s witnessed there. His concern over the dire situation in his motherland drew him back to the Spanish language: “My brother is in Venezuela, my cousins, my aunts and uncles. They are just holding their breath, in gridlock standstill. There’s this helplessness. This place that has been a mother to you, that you’re a mother to as well, and it’s suffering so much. There is nothing you can do but send out love and remain in that sorrowful state.”

Label Review.

2019 album. Jazz/disco/soul/reggae.

Our Overview.

The in-demand New Zealand native, producer and multi instrumentalist Lord Echo (aka Mike Fabulous) has been flexing his dual-mastery of 60's production techniques and modern dancefloor aesthetics for over a decade now, through a flowing blend of boogie-laced Funk, disco-primed Reggae, futuristic Soul, and timeless African rhythms. Originally released in 2013 ‘Curiosities’ is now available as a DJ friendly double LP for the first time. Soundway Records completes the Lord Echo album collection, finally reissuing the second album in the trilogy from Lord Echo.

A diverse, yet grounded LP chock full of head-turning sounds, ‘Curiosities’ further pushes Lord Echo's repertoire into the realm of the inimitable, and is sure to pique the interest of discerning music lovers from down-under to the big apple.

‘Curiosities’ picks up right where ‘Melodies’ 2010 left off, with the sun-drenched psychedelic dub sounds of tracks like "Bohemian Idol" (featuring vocals by Toby Laing of Fat Freddy's Drop), and the jerky funk vibes of cuts like "Digital Haircut" and "Street Knowledge". The album provides a wealth of DJ fodder, with forward thinking 70s-inspired disco tunes such as "Molten Lava" (featuring the soaring vocals of Leila Adu), as well as analog Afro-infused burners like "What Is That Feeling" and "Put It In My Head" (complemented by the golden-voiced Mara TK of Electric Wire Hustle fame). Down-home spiritual jazz/electronic meanderings ("Ghost Hands", "Arabesque") provide a counterpoint to Echo's driving cover-version of the Pharoah Sanders & Leon Thomas classic "The Creator Has a Master Plan". His inspiring take on the track is uplifted by the soulful singing of Lisa Tomlins (who's notable vocals on Echo's rendition of Sister Sledge's "Thinking Of You" made it a standout hit from his ‘Melodies’ album).

The finely-tuned collaborations throughout Curiosities underscore Lord Echo's pivotal position in the thriving New Zealand music scene. "I generally only work with people I know quite well personally", says Echo humbly. That personal and organic approach to creating his music is revealed as the album unfolds, layer by delectable layer. "I made this record primarily with DJs in mind," he continues. "They are generally people who really love music and are often obsessed with various aspects of it. I'm not making music for people for whom it's just some background noise in their lives, I'm making music for people for whom it IS their lives. And for better or worse, I guess I am one of those people."

Label Review. 

Official film (2018) telling the story of John Lennon’s 1971 album ‘Imagine’. Also available on Blu-ray. 

Our Overview.  

Above Us Only Sky reveals the depth of the creative collaboration between John and Yoko on John’s ‘Imagine’ album, bringing the period to life while at the same time outlining the relevance of the music and their message to a contemporary audience. The film examines how the art, activism, politics and music of the pair are intrinsically entwined, with full cooperation from and exclusive access to Yoko Ono and the John Lennon Estate.

Featuring never-seen-before footage of John and Yoko, new interviews and archive material, Above Us Only Sky illustrates how the underlying message of the album was one of radical engagement, and that it is as relevant today as ever. Featuring John, Yoko, George Harrison, Phil Spector and David Bailey; and new interviews with Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon, Klaus Voormann, Jim Keltner, Alan White, Jack Douglas, Dan Richter, Tariq Ali and Elliot Mintz.

Label Review.

2019 album. Folk. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Following 2017’s critically acclaimed ‘Love Versus’ album, Leeroy Stagger has emerged with ‘Strange Path’, his most ambitious and philosophical creation yet an album on which he has surrounded himself with some of the best players in the business.

To say that Canadian musician Leeroy Stagger’s life journey has followed a strange path would be a bit of an understatement. 17 years as a singer-songwriter and 10 years sober, with two kids, a home in Lethbridge, Alberta, and a world-class recording studio to go with it, he’s far removed from the hard-living twenty-something who started on this musical path.

The name Strange Path applies as much to Leeroy’s unexpected route from the British Columbia punk scene to southern-Alberta singer songwriter as it does to the album’s own evolution. Following from 2017’s Love Versus, itself a creative re-emergence after a years-long fog of anxiety and depression, Strange Path is the end result of a triple-album’s worth of scrapped demos, and a spirit-reviving retreat inwards. It’s also Stagger’s most ambitious and philosophical creation yet, a veritable self-help book pulled from a lifetime of struggling towards the light and brimming with the hard-won joy at the heart of his recent renaissance. It’s an album full of sharp hooks and sharper insight, and the first single “Strange Attractor”’ rides that line right to the end.

“Nothing is permanent when you really stop and think,” says Leeroy. “The home we live in, the car we drive, the children we raise, the art we make and the skin that we’re in. It’s not forever, it’s barely real, and that’s ok to me because I’ve been shown the truth of it all. In seeing that it’s not that big of a deal, this has shown me how beautiful it all is. It’s precious, impermanent and beautiful. “Strange Attractor”’ is about the unseen nature of impermanence and the sacredness of the life we live.”

In making ‘Strange Path’, Stagger surrounded himself with some of the best players in the business, including drummer Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Elliot Smith, Los Lobos), longtime collaborator Tyson Maiko, Paul Rigby (Neko Case, Garth Hudson, Jakob Dylan), Ryland Moranz and Michael Ayotte. The album was mixed by five time Grammy winner Ryan Freeland (Ray Lamontagne, Bonnie Raitt, Rodney Crowell) Brad Barr of The Barr Brothers shared producer’s chair with Leeroy on four of the eleven tracks.

Label Review.

21 tracks all recorded for the broadcasting legend. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Post punk heroes Echo And The Bunnymen are releasing ‘The John Peel Sessions 1979-1983’ performed in the formative years of the band - original line-up of Ian McCulloch (Vocals), Les Pattison(Bassist), Will Sergeant (Guitar), and 1980 saw Pete De Freitas (Drums) joining the band. Formed in Liverpool in 1978, this collection of 21 tracks are from the very beginning of the indie alt/rock bands existence, leading up to their critically acclaimed 1984 album ‘Ocean Rain’. During this period (1979-1983) for the band, they became one of the most important bands of the post-punk scene.

John Peel saw the Bunnymen supporting The Fall at the Factory club in Manchester on 20th July 1979 and helped to bring the group to a wider audience. According to guitarist Will Sergeant:"He was enormously influential in bringing the Bunnymen to the public. You can't imagine us getting anywhere without having done the early Peel sessions. We treated them as demos too, they were dead important for us in discovering and recording our sound. But he was more than that. He was important as a fan, because everyone listened to him."

After the DJ played early versions of 'Pictures On My Wall' and 'Monkies' by the original lineup of the Bunnymen, with drum machine, the band would record seven sessions for Peel and also perform at a special gig for his 60th birthday.

Will Sergeant explains, that these recordings could quite simply be some of the most significant in the bands career - “Without John Peel sessions, Echo And The Bunnymen in my opinion, would not exist! It’s that simple. The band got so much support from him and John Walters (Peel’s producer). Recording a Peel session was essential to the development of our songwriting skills while at the same time giving us amazing exposure and self-belief.” 

Track Listing:

LP 1

Side One

1 Read It In Books (John Peel Session)

2 Stars Are Stars (John Peel Session)

3 I Bagsy Yours (John Peel Session)

4 Villiers Terrace (John Peel Session)

5 The Pictures On My Wall (John Peel Session)

6 All That Jazz (John Peel Session) 

Side Two

1 Over The Wall (John Peel Session)

2 All My Colours (John Peel Session)

3 That Golden Smile (John Peel Session)

4 Heaven Up Here (John Peel Session)

5 Turquoise Days (John Peel Session) 

LP2

Side One

1 Taking Advantage (John Peel Session)

2 An Equation (John Peel Session)

3 No Hands (John Peel Session)

4 Silver (John Peel Session)

5 Seven Seas (John Peel Session) 

Side Two

1 The Killing Moon (John Peel Session)

2 Nocturnal Me (John Peel Session)

3 Watch Out Below (John Peel Session)

4 Ocean Rain (John Peel Session)

5 My Kingdom (John Peel Session)

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD, and seven inch box set. 

Our Overview. 

The amazing Chrissie Hynde displays yet another volte face in her incredible career with the release of her new covers album ‘Valve Bone Woe’ which was produced by Marius De Vries and Eldad Guetta and recorded with the Valve Bone Woe Ensemble at Air Studios in London. The album features 14 tracks written by a stunning array of classic songwriters and innovators, including Brian Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Hoagy Carmichael, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, Nick Drake, Ray Davies and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Chrissie explains: “I’m not hugely interested in branching out into other musical genres, being a devout rock singer and such, but jazz is something I grew up around (thanks to my bro) and I’ve always had a soft spot for it. I often bemoan what I regard as a decline in melody in popular music and I wanted to sing melodies. Plus, I have a penchant for cover songs, it’s the surprise of singing something that I didn’t think of writing myself that turns me on. Jazz got side-lined by Rock & Roll in the 60’s, but now the demise of rock seems to be heralding in a newfound interest in it, the most creative and innovative musical forms of the 20th century. I’m happy to jump on the bandwagon.

Label Review.

2019 album. Americana.

Our Overview.

American singer-songwriter Amy Speace bares her soul on her new heartfelt album ‘Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne’. Written while on tour in Germany, the title track of her new album has the Americana folk singer highlighting the ups and downs the life of a musician often entails.

The new album finds Speace focusing on the other side of that so-called dream. The real side, filled with an ever-shifting balance of struggle and joy. Produced by longtime collaborator Neilson Hubbard and recorded during the final weeks of Speace's pregnancy with her first son, Me And The Ghost Of Charlemagne captures Amy Speace at her most nakedly honest, with sparsely-decorated songs that double down on her larger-than-life voice and detail-rich songwriting. It’s an album about the colliding of dreams and reality, full of characters making sense of their lives when something is lost and then found. Really, it's an album about the trials and triumphs of an artist's journey - a journey that's no longer focused upon the destination, but upon the actual trip itself.

It’s an album about the colliding of dreams and reality, full of characters making sense of their lives when something is lost and then found. Really, it’s an album about the trials and triumphs of an artist’s journey - a journey that’s no longer focused upon the destination, but upon the actual trip itself.

Amy Speace is a modern folk-singer whose music nods to the genre's 1970s glory days, she has spent two decades chronicling the high marks, heartbreaks, and hard roads of a life logged on the road. She's been a tireless traveler, chasing the dream from the coffeehouses of New York City to larger stages across the globe. Along the way, she's built an international audience without the help of a major label, relying instead upon a touring schedule whose milestones include Glastonbury Festival, NPR's Mountain Stage, and a yearly average of 150 shows.

Discovered and mentored by folk-pop icon Judy Collins during the early 2000s, Speace left her career as a classically-trained Shakespearean actress and, instead, kicked off a string of acclaimed albums, including Songs for Bright Street, The Killer in Me, and How to Sleep in a Stormy Boat. Championed by The New York Times, NPR and other taste-making outlets for her solo work, she received further acclaim as a member of Applewood Road, a harmony-heavy trio whose self-titled album became a critical success in the UK, earning a five-star review from The London Sunday Times.

Label Review. 

This strictly limited edition box set comprises of 10 rare internationally released seven inch singles, including an extremely rare seven inch promo copy in a lift off lid box.

Our Overview. 

Slade were one of the biggest UK bands of the early 1970s, capitalising on the Glam Rock explosion of the time with outlandish clothes and a string of huge foot stomping singles - 12 consecutive Top 4 singles in the UK between 1971 & 1974, nine of which are featured in this seven inch single box set. They are all performed by the band’s classic lineup of Dave Hill, Don Powell, Noddy Holder And Jim Lea.

The roots of the band can be found as early as 1964 and in only two years the aforementioned ‘classic’ line-up were together. After several years on the circuit and a few name changes later the new decade saw a change in fortunes for the group once they had shed their brief ‘skinhead’ look. Their breakthrough hit “Get Down And Get With It” hit the UK Top 20 in the Summer of 1971 and after their next single “Coz I Love You” hit the UK top spot they never looked back and vied with T.Rex and David Bowie as the league leaders in the Glam Rock stakes.

Once their star began to fade in the mid-70s they continued to rock out, occasionally breaching the mainstream every now and then until the early 90s when frontman Noddy hung up his hat. The current line-up of the group still features original members Dave Hill and Don Powell. and continue to pump out the classics.

Track listing:

2. Take Me Bak ‘Ome / Wonderin’ Y  (Germany)

3. Mama Weer All Crazee Now / Man Who Speeks Evil   (France)

4. Gudbuy T’Jane / I Won’t Let It ‘appen Agen  (Germany)

5. Cum On Feel The Noize / I’m Mee I’m Now And That’s Orl  (Italy)

6. Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me / Kill ’em At The Hot Club Tonite  (France)

7. My Friend Stan / My Town  (Spain)

8. Everyday / Good Time Gals  (Belgium)

9. Far Far Away / O.K. Yesterday Was Yesterday  (France)

10. Night Starvation / When I’m Dancin’ I Ain’t Fightin’  (UK).

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

With a string of top 40 hit singles and albums in the 1990s, epic pop pioneers, My Life Story received huge critical acclaim with their brand of grand, orchestral pop, leading many artists of the Britpop era to feature them on their records. Heading up this clever, witty and beautiful wall of sound is the charismatic frontman Jake Shillingford, famous for his sharp tongue and even sharper suits. Vocalist and songwriter Shillingford has co-written and co-produced the highly anticipated album ‘World Citizen’ alongside guitarist Nick Evans creating a new and distinctly rockier sound.

My Life Story has had a varied and illustrious past: playing the main stage at Glastonbury and the orchestra collaborating with acts such as Marc Almond, Morrissey, The Pogues and The Wonderstuff, amongst many other incredible achievements. Never ones to completely stand still, in 2016 the band released a brand new single “24 Hour Deflowerer” and gained a whole host of new fans and devotees on the back of this and a two-year run of 90s nostalgia festival dates throughout the UK. Always a hugely popular and tight live act thanks to high-energy singalong favourites including “12 Reasons Why I Love Her”, “Strumpet”, “Sparkle” and “The King of Kissingdom”. This boost in profile spawned requests for a new album.

Taking a break from writing film and TV music, Jake and the band crowd-funded their fourth studio album, the first in nearly two decades, in August 2018 through PledgeMusic. After the unexpected collapse of Pledge the band, undeterred, returned to their DIY roots and started all over again. Recording the new album was an exciting and creative period, not least because the tools of creativity have moved on a bit since the 90’s. As Jake says: “It was fantastic to be back in the studio with Nick, but working away from film and TV scores and onto something more personal and visceral. Having a live orchestra on the album was very important to us but this time we recorded the strings in Budapest via Skype, which was something I’d never have imagined back in the 90s.”

“’World Citizen’ was composed during the recent chaotic global news landscape where reality as we thought we knew it is constantly being reinvented... In dark times we find safety in what we know and understand. It’s about returning to the sense of the self, the freedom and simplicity of nature and the clarity and honesty of love and union. Ultimately, I’d say the theme of the album is searching for truth in a world full of lies. Even if that’s a personal truth.”

My Life Story have taken all their best and familiar attributes and moved the boundaries further outward with maturity and bold insight. As Jake says: “I’m really proud of the album, it sums up where the band is today and is a modern take on My Life Story. It progresses well from our last album twenty years ago and fans will see enough of the MLS they know and love but in the real world of today”.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Bat For Lashes - aka Natasha Khan - releases her fifth studio album, entitled ‘Lost Girls’, and it is another brilliant full-length in Khan’s incredible, acclaimed discography, mixing sounds she’s always loved - heavy bass lines, synth arpeggios, Iranian pop beats, cascading choruses - with some of her finest songwriting to date. It’s an album full of romance, an homage to Los Angeles, to being a kid in the 80’s, to films that touched and changed her life.

‘Lost Girls’ sees Khan dreaming up her own fully formed parallel universe, creating an off-kilter coming of age film in which gangs of marauding female bikers roam our streets, teenagers make out on car hoods and a powerful female energy casts spells and leave clues for us to follow. Khan says: “The album is ‘The Bride’s [her last album] mischievous younger sister, widescreen in scope and bursting with Technicolour intensity. It’s an album for driving in the dark; holding hands at sunset; jumping off bridges with vampires; riding your bike across the moon.” The album is also a dreamlike world rife with female energy and populated by roaming gangs of female bikers.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Alt-Folk. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Renowned for involvement with the Ant-folk music, as one half the band Moldy Peaches, American singer-songwriter Adam Green also stands on his own as a solo performer and has recorded 10 albums, many of which have become cult hits and now the New York songwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, and poet is releasing his tenth studio album ‘Engine Of Paradise’ and reimagines the baroque orchestral style of his early 2000s era records.

‘Engine of Paradise’ is Adam Green’s first new record since 2016 when he released the soundtrack to his re-imagining of Aladdin. The new album—recorded in Brooklyn by Loren Humphrey—features contributions from Florence Welch, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and MGMT touring member James Richardson. A new graphic novel called ‘War and Paradise’ will be concurrently released with the album. Both projects will be released through Danger Mouse’s imprint, 30th Century Records.

Adam’s songs have been performed by artists as diverse as The Libertines, Carla Bruni, Kelly Willis, Dean & Britta, and Will Oldham. His 2005 record ‘Gemstones’ went Gold in Europe.

Green’s paintings and sculptures have been the subject of exhibitions in America, Asia and Europe, including a 2016 solo-show at the prestigious Fondation Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Green first combined his visual aesthetic, psychedelic writings and musical compositions in the ‘The Wrong Ferarri’ (2010), the first feature film shot entirely on an iPhone. The “screwball tragedy” was described by Rolling Stone magazine as “Fellini on Ketamine” and went on to feature in the curriculum of NYU’s Tisch Film School.

His second feature film, Adam Green’s Aladdin (2016) - an immersive fantasy film starring Macaulay Culkin, Natasha Lyonne, Alia Shawkat, Jack Dishel and Francesco Clemente and shot entirely on papier-mache sets - was described by Buzzfeed.com as “the trippiest movie ever made,” while RogerEbert.com called Aladdin “a movie that belongs inside a museum.” An instant cult hit, the movie was screened theatrically in a midnight movie context, at over a hundred of Green’s concerts around the world, as well as the Andy Warhol Museum in Philadelphia.

After first publishing a bilingual volume of his poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, Green’s newest book ‘War and Paradise’ is a graphic novel that combines his lyrical and visual vocabulary. The satirical war epic is about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity, and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife. Green’s 10th solo album, ‘Engine of Paradise’, is a musical exploration of these same themes.

Label Review. 

If I Could Do It All Over Again I’d Do It All Over You (1970), In the Land of Grey and Pink (1971), Waterloo Lily (1972), For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night (1973) and Cunning Stunts (1975) with 20 bonus tracks across the discs. Also included is Caravan and the New Symphonia, the 1974 live LP recorded the year before at London’s Theatre Royal, and Live At The Fairfield Halls 1974. Plus The Show Of Our Lives: Live At The BBC (2 discs). 44pp book.

Our Overview. 

Caravan, the progressive rock pacesetters who are recognised among the key innovators of what became known as the Canterbury Sound, now have a box set to their name covering their prime period in the first half of the 1970s. The original line-up consisted of guitarist/vocalist Pye Hastings, Dave Sinclair (keyboards), Richard Sinclair (bass/vocals) and Richard Coughlan (drums) and they formed in 1968 out of the ashes of an earlier Canterbury band The Wilde Flowers who also featured future members of The Soft Machine. “We all had the same goal” recalled Richard Sinclair, “to make our music, write it ourselves, and make a living from it.”

The four blended psych rock, jazz and even classical influences to create their first album ‘Caravan’ which came out on Verve originally and isn’t featured here. After they were dropped, Decca Records signed the band and issued ‘If I Could Do It All Over Again I’d Do It All Over You’ in 1970 which began the run of classic albums included here. The next album ‘In The Land of Grey and Pink’ is seen as their critical high point and garnered great reviews but as with they previous albums, failed to sell in any substantial numbers. Despite this the band continued with four more similarly ambitious albums including ‘Caravan and the New Symphonia’ which saw the group realise their classical ambitions. Despite their next album ‘Cunning Stunts’ being their first record to make the UK charts, they left Decca and Dave Sinclair quit to be replaced by Jan Schelaas.

Caravan continue today as a huge live attraction, still led by Hastings in the contemporary line-up featuring Geoffrey Richardson on viola, guitar, flute and vocals), Jan Schelhaas (keyboards), Jim Leverton (bass, vocals) and Mark Walker (drums, percussion).

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

With a discography stretching out over the last 17 years Tinariwen play music at night around the fire, back in their own country, amongst themselves and at their own pace. In those moments, the music can become like the fire - free, magical and impossible to stuff into a box. Tinariwen existed long before any of their albums were recorded and they still exist quite distinct from their discographic dimension.

‘Amadjar’, the ninth Tinariwen album, is as close as you can get to Tinariwen. And also, therefore, to the idea that things can evolve: bassist Eyadou plays a lot of acoustic guitar; percussionist Said tries his hand at new instruments and the violin that appears on several songs and reminds you of the traditional imzad is actually played by Warren Ellis. The violinist in Nick Cave’s band is one of several western guests on the album. We also hear the mandolin and charango of Micah Nelson (son of the country music giant Willie Nelson and Neil Young’s guitarist) and the guitars of Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O)))), Cass McCombs and Rodolphe Burger. The album is mixed by Jack White’s buddy Joshua Vance Smith.

‘Amadjar’ means ‘the unknown visitor’ in Tamashek, the one who seeks hospitality and who’s condemned to an inner exile, within a territory or within himself; just like the members of Tinariwen, who feel at home on the journey, around the fire with a few immutable songs.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Metal. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Channelling their love of classic heavy metal with a bruising modern edge, Swedish quintet Liv Sin launch their new album ‘Burning Sermons’ which is a riff-heavy collection; showcasing the band’s innate ability to match melody with aggressive metal with ease. Liv is in particularly fine form throughout, with a voice equally capable of capturing your heart as it is knocking buildings to the ground!

Following on from the acclaimed ‘Follow Me’ album, Liv Sin, led by the unmistakeable vocals of Liv Jagrell (ex. Sister Sin), the band return with the powerful and hard-hitting ‘Burning Sermons’. Just like with their previous album, the band invited a guest to sing with Liv in a memorable duet. On the upcoming single, ‘Hope Begins to Fade’, Liv got company by Bjorn “Speed” Strid, the well-known singer of Soilwork and The Nightflight Orchestra.

Liv Sin venture into a new chapter with ‘Burning Sermons’. An album that might surprise their fans initially as the quintet dive deeper into darker riffs with the addition of electronics, but they will definitely love the unforgettable hooks and the more pronounced melodic edge of Liv Sin, 2019!

Sweden’s Liv Sin was founded in 2016 and is led by the charismatic singer Liv Jagrell. After thirteen years fronting her former band Sister Sin through countless shows across the world, including shows with Slayer, King Diamond, Motorhead, Doro, W.A.S.P. and U.D.O., the band decided to call it quits. Not one to sit around, Liv soon got the desire to get back behind the microphone and set about finding a new band of brothers.

Their acclaimed debut “Follow Me” was released in 2017 (Despotz Records) and was co-produced by legendary German metal musicians Stefan Kaufmann (ex. U.D.O. & ex. Accept) and Fitty Wienhold (ex. U.D.O.). Showing a leaner, heavier sound, propelled by in-your-face guitar riffs combined with classic heavy metal power. Reviewers likened their sound as a mix of Judas Priest, Arch Enemy and modern American metal such as Five Finger Death Punch. “Follow Me” received a strong reception and the band hit the road across Europe as both headliner and support to industrial metal machine American Head Charge.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on Deluxe CD, Double CD with t-shirt, and Vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Status Quo’s history stretches all the way back to 1962 with The Scorpions, when members Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster were only 13! Several name changes (The Spectres and Traffic Jam) and line-ups later, Status Quo first hit the charts in 1968 and have never looked back. And now, 118 million records sold later, the group minus original member Rick Parfitt for the first release their 33rd studio album ‘Backbone’.

Some doubters said ‘Backbone’ was a record that could not be made, but the 2019 line-up of Status Quo has been through a lot, and as of today will have chalked up over 130 shows as a unit and travelled tens of thousands of miles. This is a group of musicians that is strong, that back each other up and are tighter than ever. ‘Backbone’ features of a trio songs drawn from the classic partnership of Rossi and unofficial fifth member Bob Young as well as contributions from all of the rest of the band.

A new Status Quo studio album is a cause for celebration, especially when it kicks like this one. And for the doubters? A ‘Backbone’ is also a support, a unifying element that keeps things in shape. Underlying this new record are the core desires to keep creating, to be the best and to keep playing: these are the qualities that have kept Quo at the top for so long. ‘Backbone’ will ensure that Francis Rossi and Quo keep standing proud. And, by naming the album ‘Backbone’, they’re ready for the ‘Spinal Tap’ headlines too!

Label Review. 

2019 album. Post rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Japanese four piece instrumental rock band Lite known for their thrilling and emotional compositions, progressive, edgy riffs and complex rhythms. are releasing ‘Multiple’ the bands sixth full length record. The prolific maximalists - the band's members are Nobuyuki Takeda (guitar), Kozo Kusumoto (guitar & synthesizer), Jun Izawa (bass), and Akinori Yamamoto (drums) - over the past 16 years, have established themselves as one of the most influential groups across a host of subgenres and are one of Japan’s top instrumental rock acts. Their explosive live show and tireless touring in the US, Europe and Asia along with worldwide album releases have brought acclaim from all quarters.

Though usually referred to by touchstones such as ‘math-rock’ or ‘post-rock,’ Lite has developed an uncanny ability to fuse their influences into their own unmistakable dialect that defies generic genre classification. At times, Multiple’s compositions find themselves at unlikely stylistic intersections. 

On ‘Multiple’ conversating funk riffs will interweave with challenging rhythmic phrasing, blurring the lines between lead sections, obscuring where passages begin and end. Lite’s distinct voice is emphasised in tracks such as ‘Double’ and ‘4mg Warmth,’ where melodies meander incessantly, constantly taking the listener to new territory.

While many Lite songs unfold at breakneck pace, others entertain entirely different worlds altogether. In songs ‘Ring’ and ‘Blizzard,’ the band tests the limits of their abilities with slowed-down, genre-bending forays into hip-hop and dub. On ‘Ring,’ Lite collaborated with rapper Maco Marets and singer Utena Kobayashi, where the latter’s talents were also tapped for the song’s ethereal steelpan section. As Lite has shown over nearly two decades, there exists no style that they cannot master or otherwise weave into their design.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Indie. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Singer-songwriter Christof van der Ven is releasing his second album ‘You Were The Place’ -an album immersed with expansive synths and often experimental orchestration - which was written and recorded over the three month period immediately following the end of a brief and intense romance. The tracks on ‘You Were The Place’ stand as an unfiltered overspill of emotions in the aftermath. Van der Ven captures the subtle, soft textures of recent memories, using the album as a vehicle to examine his confusion and frustration around this evolving heartache, as well as the pain and humour that comes from shared vulnerability.

It meant a less meticulous process than his previous releases, but one that forces an unravelling that is as instinctual as it is important: “I got a lot of comfort out of reading and the urge to just make the record,” he explains. “Some of the album is more intricate and complicated, some of it is really quite simple. I haven’t let myself do that before.” Recorded, produced and mixed by Marcus Hamblett (Villagers, James Holden & The Animal Spirits, Bear's Den), 'You Were The Place' features instrumentation contributions from good friends: Tommy Heap (Matthew & The Atlas, Wildwood Kin), Jools Owen (Bear's Den), Tommy Sheen, Emma Gatrill (Matthew & The Atlas, This Is The Kit, Rozi Plain) and Andrew Stuart-Buttle (Lucy Rose, Rolo Tomassi). 

Van der Ven is now based in London, splitting his time between working as a chef, playing as a touring musician with Bear's Den as well as releasing and touring his own music with the help of a strong friendship group of fellow musicians and artists.

His debut album 'Empty Handed' (2018) arrived shortly after supporting Bon Iver at the Hammersmith Apollo and ahead of joining Joan as Police Woman, Nick Mulvey, Lisa Hannigan, Talos, Willy Mason, S.Carey and Mikaela Davis as main support on selected UK and EU dates.In support of the release of ‘You Were The Place’, Christof van der Ven will be playing headline shows this autumn in The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and the UK.

Label Review.

2019 album. Folk.

Our Overview.

Ana Egge the Brooklyn based-by-way-of North Dakota singer and songwriter is releasing her new album ‘Is It The Kiss’. What’s most immediately striking about Ana Egge’s latest is its rich sonic coherence. Ana’s at the centre, but the term singer/songwriter doesn’t cover it. This is much more than words and tunes - the whole is informed by her deeply-rooted musical intelligence.

It’s only because she defies category that she usually winds up in the folk display, but from the beginning she’s been inspired by the raunchy warmth and laid-back intensity of singers such as Etta James and Ann Peebles, while emulating the strangely sturdy crystalline quality, real and true, of Dolly Parton. As a guitarist, early on, Ana dug into the picking patterns and driving right hand of Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, and Elizabeth Cotten, while also absorbing the swinging, behind-the-beat phrasing of Django Reinhardt and Ana’s influences over the course of her songwriting career are many as she explains “I’ve been inspired by the amazing songwriters and musicians that I've worked with on the road over the past 16 years. Iris Dement, Lucinda Williams, Ron Sexsmith, John Prine, James McMurtry, Steve James, Eliza Gylkison, Richard Thompson, Terry Allen, Joa.”

The country side of things is well-represented on the album by pedal steel ( Matt Davidson) and fiddle ( Alex Hargreaves) and by the songs “Cocaine Cowboys” and her affecting duet with Iris Dement on a cover of Diana Jones’ “Ballad of the Poor Child.” But, actually, this is something of a soul record. The tracks are grounded by the Brooklyn indie-all-star rhythm section of Jacob Silver and Robin MacMillan, the slow grooves are sweetened by horns like molasses (Cole Kamen-Green and Adam Dotson), and at the centre of it all is Ana’s guitar, that sounds like it knows something about how Steve Cropper and Curtis Mayfield could delicately, but determinedly, provide a sweetly-beating funky heart. Plus there are alt-guitar flashes by Buck Meek (Big Thief) and the whole is pulled together by arranger/producer/instrumentalist Alec Spiegelman (Cuddle Magic).

Label Review.

Album originally recorded in 1973 remastered with the 1981 version and 22 bonus tracks. Also two live radio sets recorded in 1972. Esoteric.

Our Overview.

‘The Complete Potatoland’ is a fabulous remastered and expanded album from Spirit -the California based, ambitious and acclaimed psychedelic band from the West Coast - who embraced and fused an eclectic cocktail of blues, country, hard rock, jazz and folk into their sound. The box set includes 4CDs featuring all of the recordings made for the Potatoland album alongside a host of previously unreleased live recordings from 1972, including a booklet with new essay and album replicates the original “adventures In Potatoland” comic book.

The album was born in 1973 following the release of guitarist Randy California’s “Kaptain Kopter and the Fabulous Twirlybirds” album (made shortly after his departure from Spirit). To promote his solo album California assembled a band to tour featuring original Spirit drummer Ed Cassidy and bass guitarist Larry “Fuzzy” Knight. Initially playing concerts in the Los Angeles area, the trio recorded two live performances at the studios of KPFK-FM in September 1972. Soon after the trio reverted to the name Spirit to undertake live work in Europe. Following these concerts Randy California and Ed Cassidy began work on the album “The Adventures of Kapt. Kopter and Commander Cody in Potatoland”.

The recordings were offered to Epic Records (who had released the Spirit albums) but they were rejected by the label. The recordings remained consigned to the vaults whilst a reactivated Spirit recorded a series of albums for Mercury Records between 1975 – 1978. Whilst in England on a subsequent solo tour, a fan presented Randy California with a petition of 5000 signatures requesting the release of “Potatoland”. Inspired by this, California revisited the original master tapes and overdubbed new parts to the music and the album saw a release in this form in 1981 on Rhino Records in the USA and Beggar’s Banquet in the UK, where it peaked at number 40 in the album charts.

This new edition of “Potatoland” gathers together both the original 1973 version of the album and the 1981 release, along with 2 CDs of the complete KPFK-FM radio concerts from 1972, all newly re-mastered. The set also features 21 bonus tracks comprising studio out-takes, demos and two songs recorded live on the BBC TV “Old Grey Whistle Test” show in 1973. The set also features an illustrated booklet with an essay by Spirit official archivist Mick Skidmore and a replica of the “Adventures in Potatoland” comic book included with the 1981 album release.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Serge from Kasabian side project. Also includes a CD insert and poster. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

The S.L.P. is the latest project by Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno, songwriter and creative force behind Kasabian. Pizzorno conceived the project while Kasabian was on a one-year hiatus, when he found himself wanting to explore the “extreme sides of my personality” as “an outlet to keep me sane.” He recorded and produced the 11-track album himself at his Leicester studio.

First single, “Favourites” is about identity in the digital age. Serge says: “We live in a time when most people are pretending to be somebody else through their online persona – and somehow this false identity drives us further from who we truly are. I was interested in how online dating is a sort of snapshot of this identity crisis. Through the speed and structure of the song, I wanted to capture the feeling of the real you inside your head trying to get out and escape during a first date. It’s a dialogue between two people who are coming to terms with their true selves through their digital interaction becoming a physical one.”

One other song released before the album, “Nobody Else” with it’s House Music feel suggests a very diverse collection of songs from the Kasabian frontman. Serge has made his intention to explore genres very clear. “I started to learn jazz chords,” he explains. “It’s so important, that innocence of just exploring and experimenting, when you’ve got that little part of you going ‘can I get away with that?’”

Label Review. 

Compilation of singles and other tracks, originally released in 1986, including lyrics and a booklet which details the history of the band in their own words. Remastered. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

There is ‘Punk’ and there is Crass, perhaps the most punk of all bands. However, they were more than just a band and they weren’t really ‘punks’. A double album of singles and other tracks, ‘Best Before 1984’ was issued after they split up and is an excellent primer to their work. It has been said that Crass were the missing link between “counterculture hippies and punks angry rhetoric”, actively promoting pacifism and vegetarianism alongside their musical output. They formed in ‘Dial House’, an open-house community near Epping, Essex, UK. Started by house founder Penny Rimbaud and young vocalist Steve Ignorant in 1977, other house members and friends joined in and the following year the collective released their debut album ‘The Feeding Of The 5000’ on the indie label Small Wonder Records. After censorship issues with the content of the record the group formed their own label to maintain full editorial control over their releases.

Crass were frequently labelled as punks over their early sound - fast tempos and distorted guitars - but with no record company pressures to be commercial they forged their own path, incorporating more complex arrangements and ear shredding sonics to their aural brew over their six year run. Some of their stunts led them into serious trouble with questions about the band being raised in the UK’s Parliament over the content of one of their releases. In 1984, Crass shut up shop with various members exhausted and feeling that they had achieved all they could. Scores of other bands have picked up the baton they laid down since but none have had the impact Crass had and they are still being discussed today.

Label Review.

2019 album. Blues. 

Our Overview.

Blues artist Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is the type of artist who comes along once in a generation and is a rising blues prodigy. With both eyes on the future and the blues in his blood, 20-year-old guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is set to take the music world by storm with his debut ‘Kingfish’. This young blues artist not only reminds mainstream audiences how deeply satisfying and emotionally moving the best blues music can be, but shakes the genre to its core.

Sprung from the same earth as so many of the Delta blues masters, Kingfish comes bursting out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, just ten miles from the legendary crossroads of Highways 61 and 49. A student of the Delta’s musical history, he is acutely aware of the musicians and the music that emerged from his corner of the world. “I do think I have an old soul, that I’ve been here before,” he says. “I’m moving forward with one foot in the past.”

Recorded in Nashville and produced by two-time Grammy winner Tom Hambridge (Buddy Guy, Susan Tedeschi, Joe Louis Walker), KINGFISH showcases Ingram’s blistering, raw and inspired guitar playing, soulful, deep vocals and songwriting. He tells stories with his solos, channeling the spirits of all the past masters while the music he makes is his own. He co-wrote eight of the album’s 12 tracks. “A lot of folks know me for my covers,” he says. “That’s why it’s important for me to release original music.” The first radio single, Outside Of This Town, is a fierce statement of purpose – both musically and lyrically – from this rising star. The songs range from autobiographical (Been Here Before, Before I’m Old) to humorous (Trouble), and from white hot (It Ain’t Right) to slow and searing (Love Ain’t My Favorite Thing). His friend and mentor, Buddy Guy, adds vocals and guitar on Fresh Out while another friend, Keb Mo, brings his warm, conversational voice to Listen, and adds his rhythm and resonator guitars to six tracks. 

With the release of his debut album, ‘Kingfish’ behind him and a major North American tour announced for Summer and Fall 2019, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is ready to blaze a trail with the blues torch that’s been passed to him. With his eye-popping guitar playing and his reach-out-and-grab-you-by-the-collar vocals, Kingfish delivers each song with unmatched passion and precision. Steeped in the rich, vivid history of the blues, he’s driven by his burning desire to create contemporary music that speaks to his generation and beyond. Kingfish is a real life 21st century bluesman who is inspired by the music of Robert Johnson, but dreams of one day collaborating with Kendrick Lamar and soul-funk bassist Thundercat. “My core is blues,” he says, “but it’s important for me to create a sound and style that is uniquely my own. I have a lot to say, so please stay tuned.”

Kingfish reinvigorates the blues with Ingram’s infectious, youthful fire. Cameos by genre icon Buddy Guy, four-time Grammy winner Keb’ Mo’ and Chicago harp master Billy Branch show this kid can hold his own with the legends.

“Is Christone “Kingfish” Ingram the future of the blues? The blues saviour is one of the most exciting young guitarists in years, with a sound that encompasses B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Prince.” - Rolling Stone

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Brain child of singer-songwriter and Grammy Award winner Justin Vernon, American indie folk band from Wisconsin Bon Iver’s new release ‘i,i’ is their most expansive, joyful and generous album to date. On his fourth album, Justin Vernon reassembles the familiar Bon Iver elements like a cubist collage, with his voice fearlessly front and center. The result is his most honest and forthright music ever.

All the familiar elements of Bon Iver (the band also consists of Mike Noyce, Sean Carey and Matt MacCaughan) are here—impressionist swells of sound, impenetrable-yet-tender lyrics, mesmerising studio tricks—and they are buoyed by Vernon’s supple baritone, the instrument he knows how to manipulate best. Acoustic guitar, horns, and piano return to prominence alongside the jittery electronics and synths that Vernon has lately favored. But the mood he conjures with these elements feels new. These songs don’t swallow you whole with grandeur; they look outward, leaving some room for the rest of the world.

The name 'Bon Iver' (pronounced "bon ee-VAIR") is a play on the French phrase 'bon hiver' meaning 'good winter'. If ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ (2007) was the crisp, heart-strung isolation of a northern Winter; ‘Bon Iver’ (2011) the rise and whirr of burgeoning Spring; and ‘22, A Million’ (2016), a blistering, ‘crazy energy’ Summer record, ‘i,i’ completes the cycle: an autumn record - autum ncoloured, ruminative, steeped. The autumn of Bon Iver is a celebration of self-acceptance and gratitude, bolstered by community and delivering the bounty of an infinite American music.

The sales and accolades are well-known - multiple Gold albums, multiple Grammys, chart-topping collaborations and festival headlines. But even more significantly, with each release Bon Iver quietly shifts the state of modern music. From the boundaries of folk, to the rules of autotune, to production work for others, Bon Iver’s fingerprint finds its way across the mainstream every time. Vernon has always been a master collaborator and on ‘i,i’ that desire becomes maximal, with guests ranging from Moses Sumney and Bruce Hornsby to Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Here, the music - and band and themes and creative space - are bigger than ever.

Label Review. 

A Good Feelin’ To Know, Crazy Eyes, Seven, Cantamos, Live, plus 5 bonus tracks.

Our Overview. 

The highly influential Poco are, along with the likes of the Flying Burrito Brothers, best known for being early proponents of what would soon become recognised as country rock. Poco were originally formed by Richie Furay, Jim Messina and Rusty Young when Buffalo Springfield split in 1968, joined by George Grantham on drums and future Eagle Randy Meisner on bass. Playing their debut at LA’s legendary Troubadour in October 1968, they signed to Epic Records in 1969. When Randy Meisner left to join the newly hatched Eagles, he was replaced on bass guitar by another future Eagle bass guitarist, Timothy B. Schmit.

This set kicks off with their fourth album, ‘A Good Feelin’ to Know’, released in September 1972, by which time they had been joined by Paul Cotton on guitar and vocals. Despite being packed with strong songs and a more commercial production than their previous albums, it resulted in disappointment for the band when it became their weakest seller to date. Richie Furay in particular grew disillusioned with the band after this.

Released a year later, their fifth LP ‘Crazy Eyes’ was issued in September 1973. Recorded at RCA Victor studios in Los Angeles, it was produced by Jack Richardson, best known for his work with Alice Cooper, Bob Seger and Canada’s The Guess Who. It would be Richie Furay’s last Poco record for more than a decade, as he was already planning to jump ship to the newly formed country rock super-group, the Souther–Hillman–Furay Band with J.D. Souther and Chris Hillman. ‘Crazy Eyes’ became their best charting studio record to date.

Their seventh album, ‘Seven’, was their sixth studio record, and first without Furay. Released in April 1974, it featured the single “Faith In The Families”. Bands didn’t hang around in the 1970s, and a mere six months later Poco followed ‘Seven’ with ‘Cantamos’, Spanish for “to sing” or “we sing”, which features the single “High And Dry”.

Switching to ABC Records for the rest of the decade, Epic released a ‘best of’ collection and then a ‘Live’ album which had been recorded shortly after the ‘Cantamos’ album in November 1974, but not released until 1976. Although going into semi-retirement in 2013, Poco continue today. Already a fertile ground for a lot of talented musicians, Timothy B. Schmit would play on his final Poco record in 1977 before he was invited to join the Eagles for their ‘The Long Run’ album, and with whom he tours with until the present day.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Singer songwriter. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Kentucky based folk-country singer-songwriter Joan Shelley - who makes music that in a word is just gorgeous - is releasing her masterful fifth solo album ‘Like The River Loves The Sea’ of which Shelley says of the collection: “These songs deal with the nest that is Kentucky. There’s a saying that goes something like, “When the world comes to an end, I want to be in Kentucky where it's always 5 years behind.” The water they say is good for distilling bourbon. There is something in the water. And what it produces in its people is alternately Dionysian and Apollonian.” 

“Woven into the melodies and rhythms of these songs are fragments of the many musical traditions that comprise what we now call Kentucky music: Irish, British, and African to name a few. The best music would be a conversation with the divine that has seen all of it, or with the oldest trees that have witnessed the whole human story. These songs are partly that conversation, at times through the lens of lovers. They are also a longing cry born of all the dividing; a call across the slowly spreading ocean. Primarily, Like the River Loves the Sea is built as a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times. The title (which comes from a song by Si Kahn) speaks of the inevitable and at times indifferent nature of love. Whether it be a physical place or an idea, everyone needs a place of comfort. One where we can look out again from that place of calm and see how to best act and to be in an uncertain world.”

‘Like The River Loves The Sea’ was recorded at Greenhaus studios in Reykjavik, Iceland with Shelley and James Elkington serving as co-producers.  The twelve songs were recorded primarily over 5 days, with Elkington and Nathan Salsburg serving as the backing band.  A pair of Icelandic sisters: Þórdís Gerður Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir added strings.

Label Review.

Future Legends, Seven Secrets, The Prince Of Heaven's Eyes & Modern Masquerades with 3 bonus tracks. Esoteric.

Our Overview.

A treat for Fruupp fans old and new, a remastered box set featuring all the albums recorded by the legendary Irish progressive rock band ‘Wise As Wisdom: The Dawn Albums 1973-1975’. The recordings of this much-loved band have become highly sought after by collectors and this four-disc set gathers all of their albums together for the first time.

Fruupp’s was one of the 70’s hardest working bands and then slipped into obscurity. Formed by Vincent McCusker - who after a brief musical apprenticeship in London - returned to Belfast and pulled together a group of largely classically trained musicians and Fruupp was formed in 1971 with it’s name created by a batch of words created form a Letraset sheet (letter rub down transfers).

The band featured Pete Farrelly (bass guitar, flute, lead vocals), Vincent McCusker (lead guitar, vocals), Stephen Houston (keyboards, oboe, vocals) and Martin Foye (drums, percussion). The band signed with Pye Records’ Progressive label DAWN in 1973 and were a much loved act on the British concert circuit, sharing billings with such luminaries as Genesis, ELO, Hawkwind, Man, Supertramp, Queen et al.

The band’s first album “Future Legends” was issued in October that year and saw the band gain a loyal following. The band’s follow up album, “Seven Secrets”, was issued in April 1974 and was a wonderful exercise in Symphonic and Melodic rock, the album was highly acclaimed upon release.

Released in November 1974, “The Prince of Heaven’s Eyes” was Fruupp’s third album and their most ambitious to date, being a conceptual work. Prior to the recording of the band’s fourth album, keyboard player Stephen Houston departed the band to be replaced by John Mason on keyboards, vibes and vocals. “Modern Masquerades” would be Fruupp’s final album and was arguably one of their most polished works. Produced by former King Crimson member Ian McDonald, the record failed to achieve the commercial success it deserved.

This re-mastered 4CD clamshell boxed set features all four albums in replica sleeve wallets and a poster.

Label Review.

2019 album. Jazz vocal.

Our Overview.

25 year old New York jazz musician Veronica Swift is making her mark on the scene as a rising star vocalist and debut release of ‘Confessions’ is testimony to the talent encapsulated in this devotee of 20s and 30s bebop and traditional swing music. On the album, alternately accompanied by Benny Green and Emmet Cohen, two of the finest jazz pianists of their respective generations, Swift showcases the powerfully expressive, deliciously evocative voice that’s garnered her so many distinguished opportunities.

But there’s more - some X-factors that, in their stealthy way, make ‘Confessions’ smarter, riskier and altogether deeper than even the most stellar Songbook record. “A master class on space and dynamics...an adept lyrical interpreter... tremendous tonal command” - JazzTimes.

At just 25 years old, Veronica Swift has built a resume that even many late careerjazz singers would envy. As a child prodigy Veronica grew up on tour with her parents, renowned jazz pianist Hod O’Brien and celebrated jazz singer and educator/author Stephanie Nakasian.  It was with them where she first appeared at The Jazz Standard, and Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola. Veronica asos recorded two CDs as a child – one at age 9 with Richie Cole and her father’s rhythm section and her mother, and one at age 13 with saxophonist Harry Allen. Veronica has performed at Jazz Showcase; gigs at top festivals including Monterey, Montreal and Telluride, where she’s headlined. And the buzz-worthy vocalist has set the jazz world on fire after her second-place finish at the 2015 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, in which she wowed judges Dee Dee Bridgewater, Al Jarreau and Patti Austin with her evocative takes on “This Bitter Earth” from the Dinah Washington songbook and the classic standard “September in the Rain.”

Veronica Swift is a young star on the rise, forging a path as jazz superstar in the making and justifiably being recognised as one of the top young jazz singers on the scene.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Rock.

Our Overview. 

Mikey Buishas known as guitarist and vocalist with Really Big Pinecone a Brooklyn three-piece, who once made squiggly and alluring songs with the band, has a new project in the guise of 0 Stars that’s releasing its debut ‘Blowing On A Marshmallow In Perpetuity’ a whimsical, dynamic, and beautiful new album.

Picking up where Really Big Pinecone left off, Buishas exhibits a mastery of a wide range of instruments: pump organ, cello, piano, flugelhorn, glockenspiel, flute, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, drums, synth and ‘ in his words ‘ ‘thunder, crumpled paper, walnuts and wood chips in a cup.’

Recorded on a ‘eternally broken reel-to-reel,’ the analog warmth in this record echoes the heartfelt lyrics that revel in intimacy. Minimal and infectious, Buishas has created a record that embraces heartache and songwriting in a way that is experimental and ambitious, resulting in a record unlike anything you’ve heard.

Label Review. 

The Story Of Naptown’s Motown (1969-1972)

Our Overview. 

Sometimes, all it takes is one man to recognize a city’s potential for an industry. In Indianapolis, that man was Herb Miller, and his business was soul and funk. He came to prominence long after Indy’s allure as a jazz destination waned. He founded LAMP Records (Layden And Miller Productions) in the late 1960s to wake Naptown [nickname for India’nap’polis] from its musical slumber.

Miller served a critical role in city’s burgeoning soul and funk scene, providing not only financial backing, but acting as a one-stop, record-making shop for artists that had, to that point, been doing it all themselves. He’s the Berry Gordy you’ve never heard of. His roster – national acts like the Vanguards and Ebony Rhythm Band alongside talented, regional acts such as the Moonlighters, Montiques, Pearls and the Words of Wisdom Truth Revue – rivaled that of any American independent and paved the way for the ascension of 80s and 90s hitmakers Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, both of whom cut their teeth with LAMP alumnus.

This is the complete collection: Every soul, funk, gospel, rock track from Indianapolis’s greatest label on a 4 CD set!

Label Review. 

2019 album. Hip-hop. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

After a hiatus of five years the Australian female rapper, singer-songwriter Iggy Azalea is releasing her new album ‘In My Defense’ and this 2019 release is dedicated to getting back to the dirty South-inspired mixtape roots that die-hard Azaleans came to love before her mainstream introduction.

The 29-year-old hasn't released an album since her commercially successful ‘The New Classic’ debut back in 2014. It's been a treacherous journey for Iggy to get to this point in her career, which included parting ways with Island Records, public breakups, photo leaks and more. After parting ways with Island Records last year and signing with Empire Late last year, she moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta to record the album, which she says is better than most of her previous work. “I’m really proud of my album,” she wrote last year. “It shits on 95% of everything I’ve ever made & its only half done.”

‘In My Defense’ really is that album that’s gonna make you wanna say fuck you to your own reflection for ever doubting you,” she tweeted. The first line of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” encapsulates a very strange, very specific moment in hip-hop history where we worried that rap music and culture were branching out in the bad way, losing the inner-city flavour that birthed them as they trickled out into less diverse, more affluent parts of the country.

“I do mix those [pop] elements, but I don't consider myself a pop star -- I consider myself a rapper; that's how I came in,” said Azalea. “With ‘In My Defense’, I wanted to hit back sonically and say, ‘Well, in my defense: I am a rapper, this is my rap project,’ and ‘In my defense: these are my roots, this is my sound, and it's not what [mainstream] thinks.’ It's not supposed to be so literal.”

 “All of the mixtape fans have something new that they can love as much as they loved the earlier stuff,” she says of her latest project, which was largely produced by frequent collaborator J. White Did It. She says the album should bring back memories of her mixtapes, 2011’s ‘Ignorant Art’ and 2012’s ‘TrapGold’. “A lot of those [fans] really still rode for me and were happy for my mainstream success, but I don't think that they really felt satisfied with [‘The New Classic’]. ‘In My Defense’ is a little more polished, but this sounds like the same girl from those tapes. That's what I wanted, and I'm really happy with it.”

Label Review. 

1971 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Coming From Reality’ is the second album from singer-songwriter Rodriguez. It was released in the United States on the Sussex label in November 1971. Whilst his first album ‘Cold Fact’ had failed to excite the record buying public, in those days labels usually gave budding musicians a second chance and this album was the result. A more mellow and less eclectic affair than his debut, ‘Coming From Reality’ is still a good album with some pointed lyrical observations riding over his early 70s folk rock pop vibe. Although a third album was begun it was never finished and he was dropped by his label and he quit the music business for a few years.

However, his records travelled around the world and he gained a good fanbase in Australia and Rodriguez was able to tour there twice in 1979 and ‘81. It was in South Africa though where his two albums became a huge cult success and in the pre-internet age, the common consensus there was that he died after the second album. In 1997 his eldest daughter came across a website devoted to him. She contacted them and discovered his fame at the foot of Africa. The following year he went to the country, performing to huge crowds. A documentary was made about his belated success and ‘Searching For Sugar Man’ was a popular film in itself.

Although Rodriguez has never followed up his two albums, he continues to tour and now the two records have been reissued by a major label for the first time.

Label Review. 

2002 collaboration

Our Overview. 

The Kronos Quartet are a San Francisco based string quartet and have been in existence for over 40 years. Terry Riley is an American composer from the minimalist school who is best known for his 1969 work ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’ which crossed over into the progressive market and influenced many musicians including the likes of Mike Oldfield.

‘Sun Rings’ began with a call from NASA to Kronos Quartet’s manager. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voyager 1 space probes’ launch was coming, and the agency wondered if Kronos would be able to use the “space sounds” that Voyager 1 and 2, as well as other spacecraft, had sent back to Earth in its performances.

A meeting was quickly arranged between Kronos’ artistic director, founder, and violinist David Harrington and University of Iowa physics professor Don Gurnett, who had developed the plasma wave instruments that had received these sounds. After listening to Gurnett’s collection of favourite “space sounds,” Harrington says, “I instantly knew Terry should be the composer to bring them into our work.” At that point, Riley and Kronos had been working together for more than twenty years, beginning with the composer’s Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. Harrington continues, “Eventually this led to all sorts of sonic adventures in Don’s office.”

After Gurnett gave him cassettes with these sounds on them, Riley says, “I began to listen to see what kind of musical element could be buried deep within the spectrum of their mostly raw, grainy sound. There was a wide variety of sonic textures and frequencies of the different samples, often resembling both natural and synthesized sounds found here on Earth.” Many of the samples were eventually integrated into Riley’s composition.

Commissioned in part by the NASA Art Program, ‘Sun Rings’ premiered at University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium in October 2002. It has become a landmark piece in the canon of both Riley and Kronos. The fully staged multimedia production, which features dramatic visual design by Willie Williams, has since been performed by Kronos nearly 50 times in 11 countries and 18 states. The ‘Sun Rings’ album was produced by Judith Sherman, was recorded at Skywalker Sound with engineer Leslie Ann Jones, and includes the San Francisco-based vocal ensemble Volti, under the direction of founder and artistic director Robert Geary.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Folk blues. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Critically acclaimed Minnesota roots singer/songwriter with a vintage sound that recalls pre-war blues and folk is releasing his eponymous album ‘Charlie Parr’ and it is a stunning folk record that will surely stand the test of time, just like the man himself. The album is a collection of new songs and new studio versions of classics/audience favourites from throughout Charlie’s career.

The album is an honest and raw recording of Charlie reflecting on himself and his career up to this point. It’s a musical reckoning that came after a freak accident less than a year ago that forced him to relearn how to play guitar, causing him to take stock of the songs he’s written over his lifetime. 

Parr writes in the great story telling style which introduces many characters and scenarios and tales of everyday life in America. It’s the sign of a great songwriter that you get swept up in the magic of the trials and tribulations in the story evoking in equal parts, smiles and sadness and then there’s the music itself.

Recorded at the legendary Pachyderm Studio in Canon Falls, MN, CHARLIE PARR features Charlie’s trademark resonator guitar and 12-string with co-producer Liz Draper on bass, longtime collaborator Mikkel Beckmen on percussion, Jeff Mitchell on electric guitar, accordion, organ, backing vocals, and Dave Hundrieser on harmonica. 

“Parr is a folk artist for the new American Dust Bowl, a resonator-ready troubadour armed with a well-worn satchel of troubled tales that cut to the heart of a nation mired in fear and in dire need of a roots-music revival.” Acoustic Guitar

“Charlie Parr has made his career hollering, picking, and stomping his way through the Midwest and beyond, leaving a trail of fine records that feel just a shade away from the great rural folk and blues songs of Harry Smith’s epic Anthology of American Folk Music.” AllMusic

Label Review. 

2019 album. Hip hop, avant-pop, and psych-rock. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Yoni Wolf has spent the last two decades traveling the remote sonic terrain where underground hip hop, avant-pop, and psych-rock meet. On ‘Aokohio’, Yoni Wolf condenses the essential elements of WHY? into a stunningly potent musical vision. Co-produced by Wolf and his brother Josiah, the record presents a rich palette of musical voices that emerge and disappear into a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of sound. And while ‘Aokohio’ features many notable guest contributors, from Lala Lala’s Lillie West, to Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, the listener’s attention remains squarely directed on Yoni’s voice and vision.

‘Aokohio’ finds Yoni rethinking fundamental aspects of his approach to creating and delivering his music. The album is presented as six movements comprised of two to four songs each, with some segments appearing as brief fragments that dissolve within seconds. The concept of sharing ‘Aokohio’ in segments over time has been preserved with the release of an accompanying visual album-with the first three segments directed by Sundance award-winner Miles Joris-Peyrafitte, who is also the mastermind of the overarching video project.

‘Aokohio’ feels like a consequential addition to the WHY? catalog, possibly even an artistic turning point. But its creator remains circumspect when asked to comment on the album’s significance within his discography, instead preferring to characterize the work as the latest iteration of his deep commitment to his artistic practice. “I have no idea if this record is good or not,” Yoni says. “But I never really know. I know that I’ve never written a song that’s indispensable to the American songbook. But in terms of what it is, it’s a piece of art. I put blood, sweat, and tears into this album, and struggled through the creative process as I always do. As far as where this sits with the rest of my albums? I can’t answer that. I just know that my career is a lifelong career, and I’m working it. Every time it feels right, it makes me feel good.”

Label Review.

2019 album.

Our Overview.

After a hiatus of five years international superstar Maxi Priest is back with ‘It All Comes Down To Love’ a 14 track album which features Jamaican reggae artist Shaggy - Priest and Shaggy have known each other since the 1990s when the emerging toaster was his opening act - who produced ‘It All Comes Back to Love’ for his Ranch Entertainment company.

The diverse British artists Maxi Priest has proven he can produce music across many genres - the first British-born singer to graduate from the London reggae sound-system Saxon Studio International, introducing the sound of lovers’ rock to a global audience. Before joining Saxon, Maxi embraced Rastafari and served an apprenticeship with South London soundsystem Negus Negast and the legendary Jah Shaka - Throughout his entire career, the international star has adhered to the principles of his faith by making conscious music of all kinds. So his new album ‘It All Comes Back To Love’ has been long awaited.

Maxi Priest has earned his place among other greats such as Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots & The Maytals and Dennis Brown in spreading the reggae gospel far and wide. This is an extraordinary achievement for a singer steeped in Jamaican music, yet raised in South London. Maxi’s joyous brand of reggae and lovers’ rock, infused with R&B and accompanied by real charisma, would bring him a level of success no other British reggae singer can match. Only a handful of singers succeed in transcending their genre without losing the essence of who they are. Maxi is one of those artists whose own unique vision has led him to tremendous international success, being the first reggae artist to have a No. 1 hit worldwide, including the U.S. Billboard charts.

With excitement towards the single, Maxi shares, “My new single ‘I’m Alright’, featuring my good friend Shaggy, is a thought that comes through experience that I’m sure many of us can relate to – of human emotions of envy and jealousy.” He continued, “‘I’m Alright’ is a beacon of light, a positive upliftment with music as the vehicle of change and transcendence, turning a negative into a positive, a bad into a good… ‘Music makes you feel like dancing with so many emotions we sing…/ Set me free to the music, to the music… My heart it beats, to the music.‘”

Label Review.

1972 album.

Our Overview.

Collector’s Reissue - 180 gram vinyl - Original Artwork - Limited Edition. Reissue of the long unavailable 1972 recording by the influential Caetano Veloso, considered the leading figure in Brazil’s Tropicalia movement. ‘Transa’ marks Veloso’s fourth album and like its predecessor, it was recorded while he was exiled in London.

Caetano himself considers it one of his favourite records and regards “Nine Out of Ten” as his best song in English. ‘Transa’ was listed by Rolling Stone Brazil as one of the 10 best Brazilian albums ever. It remains one of the MPB’s essential albums.

‘Transa’ is generally regarded as a classic and was recorded while the artist was exiled in London, though he returned to Brazil shortly after completing it. The sound of ‘70s electric rock predominates, fused with Brazilian rhythms and percussion, berimbau sounds, and his own violão playing. Perhaps this is why this album has gained in stature over the years. It offers enough Western styles to keep outsiders interested but also sounds undoubtedly Brazilian. It also helps that it features strong numbers as “You Don’t Know Me”, “Nine out of Ten” (his best song in English according to Caetano himself), “Neolithic Man” and “Mora Na Filosofia” (a song that originally caused uproar thanks to its rock treatment of a classic samba). “Nostalgia (That’s What Rock ‘n’ Roll Is All About)” can also be seen as the template for Devendra Banhart’s first albums. Transa was listed by Rolling Stone Brazil as one of the 10 best Brazilian albums ever and Pitchfork elected “You Don’t Know Me” as the 73rd best song from the seventies.

Track Listing:

1. You Don’t Know Me

2. Nine Out Of Ten

3. Triste Bahia

4. It’s A Long Way

5. Mora Na Filosofia

6. Neolithic Man

7. Nostalgia (that’s What Rock’n Roll I All About)

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Undeniably, Australia has been a fertile crescent of quality music for the past few decades. Its relative geographical isolation has allowed for a microcosm of innovation and communal inspiration that seemingly knows no bounds. Like the root vegetable from which their name comes, Melbourne quartet Parsnip flourished and flowered within that scene. Since their formation in 2016, after releasing two 7-inch EPs on local label Anti-Fade (plus one side of a split LP with fellow Melbourne band The Shifters on Future Folklore), they are ready to unveil their debut full-length. ‘When The Tree Bears The Fruit’ is chock full of jangle and spirit; A irresistible mix of garage, surf, girl-group gang vocals and bizarro funk, with a carefree attitude that revels in its idiosyncrasies (crazed wah-wah, warped harmonies, unexpected rhythmic shifts, ambient sounds of the sea) without sacrificing any ounce of melodic fervor.

Bassist Paris Reichen’s explains the album’s title; “I was attending a meditation centre based on the teachings of the guru Sri Chinmoy... When the Tree Bears Fruit stems from his wisdom on the divine quality of humility. When the branches are laden with fruit, they are offered to the world. The tree bows down and shares its gifts with all regardless of social status, wealth, age, gender, race, etc”. Many of the tunes are symbolic of life’s journey & whatever means used to get thru it (see first single “Lift Off”, the addictive “Taking Me For A Ride”, or the jaunty “Seafarer”), as well as celebrating the vast, weird & wonderful beauty of nature & the world. Look no further than “Sprouts” or “My Window” for evidence. Despite their admitted influences (Maurice Sendak, Beach Boys, Daniel Johnston, William Blake, ‘Back From The Grave’ comps, Sesame Street, ‘Duck Soup’), Parsnip sounds like no one else; this is music that could only be made by close friends & family and the underlying positivity, jubilance and wonder within “When The Tree Bears Fruit” evokes a musical celebration, inviting the listener along to delight in its merry making.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Post rock. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

Considered to be one of the titans in the original second wave of emo bands, The Appleseed Cast rose to the spotlight in the late 90’s and early to mid 2000’s, with a string of albums, including ‘Low Level Owl I & II’, and non-stop touring, earning them high critical praise and a loyal following. Their influence can be heard in countless contemporary bands such as Chvrches - whose lead singer is a self-proclaimed super fan, Basement, Mewithoutyou and so many more.

While fanship continues to grow with each new incarnation from the band, time between albums has also grown a bit over the last 10 years. Despite lineup changes or time between, Crisci is still focused, as much as ever, on touring and continuing to produce the innovative landscape of music the band is known for. ‘The Fleeting Light of Impermanence’ is another in a long line of consistently epic emotional rock from one of the greatest names in the scene. And now, the conversation about their best record has a new contender.

Always adept at maintaining the signature Appleseed sound, yet consistently experimenting and evolving over the last 20+ years with the band. Chris Crisci, with the help of Sean Bergman, Ben Kimball, and Nick Fredrickson, have crafted another epic, heart-sad tale of darkness and light that could well become a personal soundtrack, like so many other TAC albums.

Both lyrically and sonically, the album delves into the raw edges of existence, happiness, love and the journey to be free and laid out under the expanse of the universe with the vulnerable defeats and fleeting victories of life. It is about surviving and finding love and meaning against the backdrop of seemingly overwhelming darkness in the world. This idea runs through the entire album and shines in the repeated themes of fire, signifying our life light, the most basic good in people and the love that carries us through. There’s a feeling that this fire is both, at the same time, insignificant, as on a lonely beach at the edge of the world or in a pile of leaves, and also the only thing that really matters.

Label Review.

2019 album. Jazz guitar.

Our Overview.

Norwegian jazz musician and composer Stein Urheim is releasing sublime new album ‘Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-Outs’ A beautifully-structured solo album, ‘Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-Outs’, provides a formally adventurous and sonically immaculate listening experience that at the same time acts as an inspirational masterclass for guitarists everywhere. Its relative simplicity also provides a sharp contrast to much of Urheim’s other work for Hubro, especially his most recent album, ‘Utopian Tales’, which featured a seven-piece ensemble, the Cosmolodic Orchestra, playing a set of tunes commissioned by Vossa Jazz and inspired by various experiments in communal living.

‘Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-Outs’ is a no-frills fingerstyle masterclass from Norwegian guitarist that blends hard-won solo skills with superb audiophile sound. It’s so good you don’t even have to play the guitar to enjoy it. If you do, there’s a 40-page musical score and tablature to help learn or adapt the tunes.

“The main idea for the album was that I wanted to do an acoustic guitar recording without any overdubs”, Stein Urheim says. “It’s all played on one particular acoustic guitar, with all of its sonic possibilities and limitations as the centre of attention. It’s a hand-made guitar, built after a model of the Selmer jazz guitars of the 1930s, and it has a certain twangy mid-range that I thought worked well for these tunes. It’s really tempting for me, as you can probably hear on some of my previous work, to add voices and other layers of instruments and electronics and if I start going in that direction the ideas develop really fast. But here, in short, it’s just an acoustic guitar, lots of open space, no abstract concepts or huge arrangements. It can, of course, also be heard at a more technical level, as an introduction to open tunings, especially open G and D, for other guitar players and students. The accompanying musical score has a tablature as well, and it will make me happy if people use it and keep the music alive in their own way, with their individual style on their own instruments. But it’s not classical guitar, or meant to be played in a very strict or composed manner. It’s open to change and interpretation in any possible way. Most of the pieces are quite easy to play, while some have more rhythmical obstacles and challenges for players not so familiar with finger-picking or bottleneck/slide guitar technique.”

On listening, the first thing you notice is the immediacy of the sound, as if you are hearing it from inside the belly of the guitar itself. An opening moment of silence - the movement of air around the microphone - is interrupted by a softly-strummed series of chords whose subtle progressions recall the successive gradations of pigment on an artist's colour wheel. This prelude, ’Slow Reader', (balanced at the end of the album by a symmetrical coda, ’Slow Reader 2’) is followed by a lilting Brazilian theme with a marvellously sprung rhythm whose stately measures seem to dance in the air. And so it goes: a masterly bit of bottleneck slide detours into the transcendental guitar territory of John Fahey; a cyclical blues riff encounters what sounds like contemporary minimalism; the jerky gait of an old-timey rag rubs up against what could be something by Rodrigo or Villa-Lobos. Whatever the style, the effect is complementary: an infinite variety of sounds all keyed to the same overarching aesthetic of clarity of intent and purity of sound. Stein Urheim’s ’Simple Pieces & Paper Cut-Outs, makes the complex appear simple and the simple shimmer with hidden depth, echoing the joyful colours and dancing forms of the Matisse papier colle cut-outs referenced in the title, reproductions of which Urheim would sometimes look at when he was composing the music while in Berlin last year.

The album is also full of surprising moments and, like the Matisse, exquisite formal invention. The sound of a peal of bells precedes the piece ‘Bells’, because, Urheim says: “the sound just seemed really good for starting the ‘Bells’ tune, with the right kind of dissonances before the opening chords. It’s actually a little field-recoreding from me walking by Westminster Abbey last summer.” Similarly, the thirteen tracks (two more are available as mp3s) are often short in duration but jam-packed with incidental details that reflect an experimentalist's regard for the value of sound as sound. "I get easily bored with very virtuosic playing, especially if you get the feeling that someone is showing off, which is very common in the guitar world.” Urheim says. "It can be fascinating for a short time but it doesn’t attract me or make me curious in a musical way. And many guitarists tend to use the same solutions to express themselves, for example by staying in the same tuning all the time. I hope this album's score can serve as an alternative: newly written but mostly based on old and traditional styles of playing that are relatively easy to master on many levels, while the recordings are meant first and foremost as an open listening experience.” Or as Urheim’s liner note for the album ends by saying: "Do with them as you like - and enjoy.” 

Label Review.

2019 album. Blues. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Acclaimed blues guitarist Ronnie Earl is releasing his new album ‘Beyond The Blue Door’ and it is a whopping 15 track sonic journey that serves as a clinic on the versatility of blues guitar. This record covers everything from relaxed shuffles to motown grooves and mellow, sophisticated duets. Powered by ''The Broadcasters''; Ronnie Earl (guitar), Dave Limina (Piano & Hammond B3), Diane Blue (Vocals), Forrest Padgett (Drums) and Paul Kochanski (Bass), we are treated to the caliber of musicianship that truly gives life to these songs and provides a listening experience you would have to feel to believe.

Ronnie Earl is a three-time Blues Music Award winner as “Guitar Player of the Year,” and was the hit of the most-recent Blues Music Awards show in Memphis with his show-stopping live performance of the Junior Wells classic, “In the Wee Hours.”

Earl follows that up with the release of the latest CD from the blues guitar master and his band, the Broadcasters, ‘Behind the Blue Door’. Ronnie Earl believes in the power of music to heal the mind and spirit, and that’s quickly evident in the 15 tracks on his new disc. Special guests on the new album include David Bromberg, acoustic guitar and vocals; Kim Wilson, harmonica and vocals; Greg Piccolo, tenor sax; Anthony Geraci, piano; and Peter Ward, guitar.

‘Behind the Blue Door’ confirms Earl’s status as one of the most soulful blues/ soul/jazz guitarists working today. He’s also a DownBeat magazine winner for “Blues Album of the Year,” an Associate Professor of Guitar at Berklee College of Music and has taught at the National Guitar summer workshop in Connecticut.

Label Review.

Originally aired 2001. This is the classic BBC Radio 4 comedy that launched the careers of writers and leads Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. Demon.

Our Overview.

Described by the Observer as "Some of the most inventive comedy writing of the decade," and eliciting an exclamation of "Wow!" from Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, come with us now on a journey through time and space—to the world of The Mighty Boosh ‘The Complete Radio Series’. On this release Demon Records goes on a journey through time and space to the world of the Mighty Boosh. 

Here are all six episodes of the BBC Radio 4 series, complete and uncut, from the winners of the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. In Episode 1, a mysterious character called The Phantom is stealing animals from the zoo. Howard and Vince go on a mission to find the thief and the sinister figure behind the plot. In Episode 2, tired of Bob Fossil's management, Howard and Vince venture into the zoo's Jungle Room in search of former zoo boss Tommy Nookah, (Howard's idol), who disappeared there long ago. Episode 3 sees Vince forming a rock band, but after annoying the guitarist Dave and driving him to quit, he calls on Howard to overcome the Spirit of Jazz and join them. In Episode 4, when keeper Joey Moose is savagely bitten, Howard and Vince investigate and discover Bob Fossil is breeding mutant animals to sell to wealthy Japanese businessmen. Episode 5 finds Bob Fossil sending Vince to Spain and Howard to the Arctic to collect more animals for the zoo. Our heroes end up back together facing the perils of the tundra. In Episode 6, Howard and Vince take Tony the prawn to the Zoo for Animal Offenders. Along the way they meet a mysterious hitchhiker, and end up in the bizarre world of "The People of the Box." Starring Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, with Rich Fulcher, Lee Mack, and Richard Ayoade.

Now reissued on three black 180g heavy weight vinyl. Housed in a gatefold sleeve with original artwork by Noel Fielding and sleeve notes by Julian Barrett, Noel Fielding, Rich Fulcher & producer, Danny Wallace.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Meshing dance, punk, disco, R&B and much more for more than 20 years, !!! (or Chk chk chk) return with their eighth album ‘Wallop’, and it’s another stellar addition to the wildly impressive catalogue they’ve built up and stands as a testament to their hardworking approach and ceaseless desire to push things further. Recorded over the past year in lead singer Nic Offer’s Brooklyn apartment, the band pick up where 2017’s ‘Shake The Shudder’ left off, further exploring the fringes of dance music with a focused edge and a care-free spirit.

‘Wallop’ sees friends from across the spectrum appearing on a number of tracks, including Liars frontman Angus Andrew, Maria Uzor of British dance aesthetes Sink Ya Teeth and Glasser’s synth-pop wizard Cameron Mesirow, who all join Offer and !!! covocalist Meah Pace on this barn-burning party of a record. With an array of producers lending a hand, including Cole M.G.N. (Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Julia Holter), Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) and longtime collaborator Patrick Ford - ‘Wallop’ was eventually stitched together to reflect the colourful, body-moving tapestry that its end result represents.

Label Review. 

1969 debut album remixed 2019 by engineer Tim Jessup and the band. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

The legendary Chicago formed in 1967 and their debut album ‘Chicago Transit Authority’ is now 50 years old. At the time, the band was called Chicago Transit Authority and this groundbreaking double album led to the actual CTA to force the band to change their name and henceforth they were known as simply Chicago.

Inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014, it has been certified double platinum. It showcased the band’s imaginative writing, proficient musicality and genre-blending mix of rock, jazz, funk and pop. Released in 1969, it stayed on the American charts for a then record of 171 weeks. The album kicks off with the autobiographical “Introduction,” and includes many of the band’s most enduring hits, such as “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?,“ “Beginnings,” and “Questions 67 and 68.” Their blazing cover of the Spencer Davis Group’s “I’m A Man,” “South California Purple,” and “Free Form Guitar” all feature the signature guitar work of the late Terry Kath.

In celebration of the albums 50th Anniversary, Chicago worked with mixing engineer Tim Jessup to remix the entire album.

Label Review.

2019 debut album. Rap / Hip hop.

Our Overview.

‘Firmamentum’ is the debut album from Gawd Status aka King Kashmere and Joker Starr. Pressed to gold vinyl Limited, hand-numbered press of 500 Individually the duo have supported the likes of AZ, M.O.P, Kool Keith, Necro and Phife Dawg King Kashmere has collaborated with MF Doom and has lent his vocal talents to producer Dr Zygote (aka The Maghreban).

Fronted by lead singles “Heavy Metal” - which was premiered on Tom Ravenscroft (BBC 6Music) show - and “The Alchemist ft. Fae Simon”, the LP showcases Gawd Status’ versatility and eclecticism as an unconventional prodder/MC duo, delivering a killer and off-kilter record that lies in between the worlds of hip-hop, psychedelia and soul.

“Heavy Metal” is an experimental hip-hop meets psychedelic trip-hop listen that is boisterous, chaotic and marked by a profound sense of urgency. Exploring disparate but interwoven themes of Roman Catholic priests, Afrika Bambaataa, Braintax, the origins of humanity, Babylon and devilish behaviour - Joker Starr’s intention is to uplift and discomfit the listener; “heavy metal for the devil” he ominousness preaches in sinister and satanic voice. “Heavy Metal” closes with a psychedelic outro, that pays a closer tribute to the experimental pop of early Animal Collective than their UK hip-hop counterparts.

“The Alchemist ft. Fae Simon” pours hypnotic soul and genuine jazz vibes, reminiscent of the hey-day of trip-hop kings Massive Attack. Featuring as a guest vocalist, Fae Simon adds her darkly sensual melodies to track. Introduced initially to King Kashmere through fellow UK rapper Jehst (who Fae Simon collaborated with on “Timeless”), Fae’s smooth, effortless and instantly recognisable voice allures vocal valour. While DJ Jazz T guests showing off him turntablism skills, scratching sparsely with choice vocal clips below hip-hop rhythms. Featuring on the record, fellow UK MCs Micall Parksun and Big Cakes (who has collaborated with the Godfather of grime Wiley) team up on politicallycharged, Thabo Mbeki-inspired “I Am An African”. “Messiah Hybrids” showcases the duo delivering what they do best, a conscious straight-up hip-hop banger.

Label Review. 

1970 debut album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Cold Fact’ is the debut album from Detroit, Michigan, singer-songwriter Rodriguez. It was released in the United States on the Sussex label in March 1970. The album featured a blend of folk, pop, and psych rock, with some social commentary which flopped in his home country of the USA. He released a second album the following year and then after getting dropped by the label walked away from his music career.

However, his records travelled around the world and he gained a good fanbase in Australia and Rodriguez was able to tour there twice in 1979 and ‘81. It was in South Africa though where his two albums became a huge cult success and in the pre-internet age, the common consensus there was that he died after the second album. In 1997 his eldest daughter came across a website devoted to him. She contacted them and discovered his fame at the foot of Africa. The following year he went to the country, performing to huge crowds. A documentary was made about his belated success and ‘Searching For Sugar Man’ was a popular film in itself.

Although Rodriguez has never followed up his two albums, he continues to tour and now the two records have been reissued by a major label for the first time.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Americana. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Strolling home after a gig one night in Chicago, Matthew Schneider (Moon Bros), was punched in the face by one young man, while another filmed the attack, presumably to post the video online. Though Schneider wasn’t knocked out in the attack, the assailants stole his prized electric guitar. Rather than sulking over his loss and victimhood, he took it as a sign to change direction and focus on acoustic guitar. This is the kind of person he is. In fact, he called it “the best day of his life.” His new album ‘The Easy Way Is Hard Enough’ raises a toast with the same glass-halffull outlook that Schneider has carried from his days as a young guitar prodigy in rural Illinois to his current status as a woodworker and carpenter in LA.

It’s difficult to follow the fragmented life and musicianship of Matthew Schneider. His twofold path has always embraced both an abiding love for Chet Atkins and Nashville session virtuosity, and a begrudging though fruitful flirtation with Chicago’s post-rock underground and middle ground. So many finger-style virtuosos fall into one trap or another; bad production, hollow showboating, predictable influences, but Schneider bypasses all the tropes. In doing so, he gives the subgenre back to the weirdos, rendering it more palatable and listenable than it has been since the early ‘70s. 

On album opener “OO Bub” the drum machine abruptly switches on, doing its best impression of a chugging steam-engine, and ‘‘The Easy Way Is Hard Enough’ begins. Over the rhythm, Schneider’s notes roll skilfully and effortlessly into one another aside joyous howls and grinning harmonica. As the song quietly sputters out, “Footsteps” appears on its heels with zero hesitation. Gorgeous, finger-tapped fractals of 12-string guitar tessellate outward and back in, while a pedal-steel acts as a gentle barrier to it all like water lapping against a stoney wall in some quiet corner of a lake. “Temporary Thoughts” pulls the contemplative vibe back out, and Schneider’s lyrics show up here at the very middle of the album, fashionably late, but welcome nonetheless. Any time he sings it’s brief and respectful to his guitar playing, adding to his string-band tapestry rather than hoisting into the foreground and blocking the view. 

By the time ‘The Easy Way Is Hard Enough’ reaches “Okie” the river rapids have emptied out into a moonlit cove in one of the most passive, yet most brooding moments on the record. Here Schneider pulls off what the best psychedelic-era acoustic records do: the subtle blend of blues with the minor key drones and flutters of Indian classical ragas that led to a new form of contemplative music for the counterculture of the late 1960s and beyond. Schneider doesn’t just dust it off and call it his own, rather he coaxes it from his chakras, paying no mind to those oversimple idioms and their qualifiers. Continuing the quietude, more spirographic fretwork winds down to a gradual close with “Nasty Fresh” concluding the punctual and introspective journey that is The Easy Way is Hard Enough, a suite of adept guitar vignettes that prioritize heart over skill, yet possess a wealth of both.

“…imagine late-period Byrds sharing stimulants with Scott Tuma and you’re in the ballpark.” Magnet 

"…has a quavering emotional tenderness, and it's how I imagine Thom Yorke would sound, if only he was an American carpenter living out in the sticks surrounded by Bill Fay records.” Drowned In Sound 

Label Review.

2019 album. Features George Clinton on 4 tracks. Funk, soul, Rhythm & Blues. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Fronted by the genre defying powerhouse lead vocalist Miss Velvet and featuring a rhythm and brass section comprised of some of America’s leading studio musicians, Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf - a dynamic 8-piece New York-based band that brings a vital and original dimension to the funk/ soul scene, combining catchy horns with soaring vocals and a driving rock undercurrent. - has been garnering rave reviews for their highly accomplished musicianship and on-stage flair. ‘Feed the Wolf’ features eight new songs, which were written and arranged by the band is the follow-up album to the band’s highly acclaimed debut of 2015, ‘Bad Get Some’ and features the legendary Parliament Funkadelic frontman George Clinton guesting on 4 tracks.

Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf, have an ‘in your face, badass’ sound has been described as ‘if the 70’s band Chicago and Led Zeppelin had a baby with Janis Joplin, you would get Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf.’ Miss Velvet may be tall, thin and blond, but her epic voice thrills with the unlikely sound of James Brown, Steven Tyler, and Joe Cocker with the soulfulness of Janice and Etta James, taking the listener on a journey back to the days of psychedelic rock and funk.

In a review of ‘Bad Get Some’ the Huffington Post said, “Miss Velvet and The Blue Wolf are cap-a-pie prodigiously talented. The melodies are phenomenal, the rhythms are combustible and Miss Velvet’s voice contradicts the non-existence of the phlogiston.”

The band has performed over 100 concerts opening for George Clinton Parliament Funkadelic (2018-2019). The iconic worldwide tour has seen them play before SRO audiences across the States, Europe, Asia and Australia. Miss Velvet and the Blue Wolf have headlined at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, Tallinn Music Week, Jogevatreff Festival, Auguustibluus Festival (all in Estonia) and concerts in Riga, Helsinki and Tallinn. The Band is also a favourite and regular throughout the New York concert circuit.

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD and Black Vinyl.

Our Overview. 

The phenomenal American blues, funk and soul group that is Robert Randolph and the Family Band are back with their new album ‘Brighter Days’ - which is the follow-up to the Grammy-nominated 2017’s ‘Got Soul’ album - and may be Robert Randolph and the Family Band’s best, most diverse album yet. Rooted in gospel and blues, and branching into rock and soul, it is the sound of a veteran artist sure of himself and confident enough to spread his wings. 

Led by pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph, a virtuoso on the pedal steel guitar, Robert jumped from spiritual music - he started playing the instrument as a churchgoing teenager in Orange, New Jersey, a small city just outside of Newark - to secular music and found an audience among blues fans, roots rock aficionados, and jam band followers with his fiery, passionate instrumental work and heartfelt music.

The first three songs of ‘Brighter Days’ are a full dive back to Randolph’s gospel roots, starting with lead track “Baptise Me”, a joyous romp of a song that makes a direct connection between religious and musical ecstasy and salvation. “We wrote ‘Baptize Me’ the first day in the studio.” Says Robert “It’s really a love story, about an all-round love: for each other, for our audience, for our church background, for the music we love and for our fans.  All of these songs kind of harken back to how we started, to being known as this musical family band that comes from the church and appeals to rock, blues, gospel and soul music audiences. We wanted that good gospel, blues, R&B feel, because that’s where we started and it’s good to not only remind people of that but to actively remember it ourselves.”

“The Family Band” Is not just a name meant to evoke connections of togetherness. They are an actual family; the group that supports Randolph is anchored by his cousins, bassist Danyel Morgan and drummer Marcus Randolph and his sister, vocalist Lenesha Randolph.Given his goals for the album, it’s fitting that the lone cover song Robert selected for the collection comes from Pops Staples and the Staples Singers, one of gospel’s greatest musical families, who seamlessly crossed over to secular R&B success with inspirational songs like “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” Their “Simple Man” is a deep, contemplative blues, its pensive nature amplified by Randolph’s signature weeping pedal steel guitar lines.

The album was produced by Dave Cobb, known for his acclaimed and award-winning production of albums by Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile, and the "A Star Is Born" soundtrack. “Dave Cobb is just a guy who likes to record good music and good songs,” says Randolph. “He wanted to do something that was fun but it also gives you a gospel feeling. He knows the history of our band, coming from church and giving that fun church feeling to people.

Label Review.

2019 album. Singer/songwriter. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Los Angeles based singer-songwriter Shannon Lay is releasing her new album ‘August’ the title of which refers to the month in 2017 when Lay quit her day job and fully gave herself over to music a mix of transcendent folk-pop. This was her liberation as an artist and the album is devoted to paying that forward to her listeners. Lay may be the most chilled-out artist you’ll ever meet. Despite fronting her tranquil solo act and being a guitarist/singer in the indie-rock band Feels, she never pressures herself to over achieve.  Nonetheless, she regularly does: in a glowing review, Pitchfork anointed her last album, ‘Living Water’, “captivating. ”Think of ‘August’ as a warm hug for your psyche. “I want to create as much music as I can,” Shannon says, “and leave this spot by the river where people can go sit and enjoy.”

There is an entire sub-genre of poetry devoted to rivers and their persistent, meditative flow. Emily Dickinson’s ‘My River Runs to Thee’ compares them to the cycle of life, while Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’ deems them eternal and Kathleen Raine’s ‘The River’ muses on the dream-state they evoke. For transcendent folk pop artist Shannon Lay, the river is all of the above: It’s the metaphor driving her latest album, the exquisitely uplifting ‘August’, which doubles as an aural baptism renewing her purpose for making music. “I always picture music as this river. Everyone’s throwing things into this river, it’s a place you can go to and feed off of that energy,” she says, “and feel nourished by the fact that so many people are feeling what you’re feeling. It’s this beautiful exchange.”

‘August’ was mostly written in three months, during Lay’s first solo tour for ‘Living Water’. “For the most part, all of the songs were just guitar and voice,” she says. In keeping with the humbled, contemplative nature of ‘August’, most tracks clock-in at three minutes or less. She saved indulgence for the production. “Some songs as they were had this room to grow,” says Lay, who recorded the album with her longtime friend, musician Ty Segall at his home studio on the East Side. “I believe whoever you record with tends to affect the mood of music and Ty really brought this jovial sense that I hadn’t really explored yet,” she says. Also in the mix is Mikal Cronin, who played saxophone on the album’s opener, ‘Death Up Close’. “A lot of myfriends who are really tough have admitted that they shed a tear when they hear my songs, and I think that really speaks to the visceral aspect of folk music,” Lay says. “It’s this ancient form of expressing yourself.”

Label Review.

2019 album. Country singer/songwriter.

Our Overview.

Dalton Domino is a gritty blend of energetic Southern Rock, Red Dirt and Texas Country from Lubbock TX and is releasing his masterful new album entitled ’Songs From The Exile’. For Dalton, music was always present. The way artists of all stripes, from punk rockers to traditional country artists, could convey a simple or complex truth with a simple turn of phrase caught his imagination from an early age. Creativity and an appreciation for song has been an evolution for Domino. Raised on punk music, Conor Oberst, and classic country, Domino writes songs that are both fresh and familiar, nodding to the western-shirted troubadours who came before him while still making room for heartland roots-rock, atmospheric Americana, and the autobiographical lyrics of a songwriter who isn't afraid to shine a light upon his own demons. And he is as described by Rolling Stone “A Country artist you need to know”.

He chases the muse into his darkest territory yet with his third record, ‘Songs From The Exile’. Written during a period of closeted addiction and released during the clear-eyed clarity of Domino's sobriety, his new album mixes hope with heartache, melody with melancholy. It's an album about the damage we sometimes inflict upon ourselves, with 13 clutter-free country songs that were recorded during a series of live takes. The lush, layered arrangements that filled Domino's sophomore release, ‘Corners’, are gone, replaced by a lyrically-driven sound laced with light touches of guitar, pedal steel, piano, drums, and bass. The result is the most direct album of Domino's career — an album that focuses not upon the presentation, but upon the frank songwriting and compelling singing that's always been at the core of Dalton Domino's music.

Although written at home during a period he describes as "my own personal rock bottom," ‘Songs From The Exile’ also finds Domino finally conquering the demons that have plagued him throughout a critically-acclaimed career. "I learned that the mistakes and ghosts of the past are okay to befriend," he says of the songwriting process. "They are what make you who you are today. This record is a collection of songs that are about specific moments in my life where I felt wronged — where I did things that were wrong — and I wrote it alone, in exile, during a year I spent learning how to look the things that kept me prisoner in the eye and let them go. I learned gratitude. I learned how to forgive.” 

A staple of Texas' music scene for years, Domino headed out of town to record 'Songs From The Exile', setting up shop at a friend's studio, Dauphin Street Sound, in Mobile, AL. He brought along an all-star studio band, too, including guitarist Doug Pettibone (John Mayer, Lucinda Williams), drummer Brad Rice (Ryan Adams, Jason Boland), and additional musicians who, collectively, had backed Texas luminaries like Pat Green, Aaron Watson, and Wade Bowen. Together, they recorded stripped-down ballads ("Happy Alone"), breakup songs ("The Nerve"), family tributes ("Daddy's Mud"), and shuffling country numbers ("Better Now"). It was a compelling mix, without any unnecessary overdubs diluting the music's emotional punch.

Born in Memphis, Domino was raised on a steady diet of varying musical genres, ranging from George Jones to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. He proudly recalls his grandmother walking around the house singing church hymns. As a teenager he gravitated towards the punk-rock scene, playing in bands, drawn in by the speed “and the rawness of the lyrics.” But not until he moved to Lubbock, however, and started frequenting the Blue Light in the city’s historic Depot District, did Domino find his true voice as a songwriter.

“The singer-songwriter seamlessly blends Lone Star State influences, red dirt country and Southern rock into his own unique and intricately layered sound.” The Boot

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

‘Beyond The Door’ is the new release from the quintessential Los Angeles based band who invite you to explore beyond the door, an album inspired by the band’s “total commitment to having the best f*cking time we can have while we’re all still here” (what they like to call “the Party”). It’s a rock and roll record and a celebration of everything brothers Jeff and Steven McDonald love, from cultures both high and low. Redd Kross -formed of Jeff and Steven McDonald - exist at the sweet spot where punk, metal, and bubblegum meet and since they began in the late '70s and the album musically is guitars, bass, and drums topped with a generous portion of sweet vocal melodies often delivered with an ambiguous edge. 

‘Beyond the Door’ marks Redd Kross’ most collaborative record to date. Steven describes this evolution: “Jeff is still very much the driving force behind the compositions, but with more help from me than ever. Jeff and I haven’t shared this much of the writing and singing since ‘Born Innocent’ in 1981.” Guitarist Jason Shapiro and drummer Dale Crover (Melvins, OFF!) are longtime members of the Redd Kross live band, but this album marks the pair’s recorded debut with the group. 

Mixed in Los Angeles by Steven McDonald, Beyond the Door includes notable guest appearances from Anna Waronker (That Dog), Geré Fennelly, Buzz Osborne (Melvins), and Josh Klinghoffer. Setting the stage is album opener “The Party,” a raucous cover of the Henry Mancini-penned title theme from a 1968 Blake Edwards film. The opening line of the song (“The party is groovy and everyone here loses control, yeah…”) is the perfect declaration Redd Kross want to make—and they don’t just mean some beer-guzzling teen hesher affair, either. The Redd Kross party is groovy, yeah… Just listen!

Of title track “Beyond the Door” Steven recounts, “I started the track as just a fun glitter romp, and during tracking, Jeff decided to take a stab at writing the vocal melody and lyrics. Seems like an obvious way to work, but we’ve never done it before. From that came a tale of childhood obsession with demonic possession nurtured on TV brain junk food and the golden age of rock and roll, 1971–73.” 

On the surface, the album title is a playful reference to an Italian horror film the McDonald brothers watched as children, a loose rip-off of both The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby that stars Juliet Mills of ’70s television program Nanny and the Professor. But like all things Redd Kross, it would be a sad injustice to stop digging there. No one knows what lies Beyond the Door… but we’re all in front of it. Inspirations as varied as K-pop, glitter gangs, embarrassed tweens, long-term relationships, a mysterious character named Fantástico Roberto, and much more all contributed to ‘Beyond the Door’, an album that lures the listener into Redd Kross’ secret club full of riddles and inside jokes, with the ultimate reward of the perfect pop moment!

Label Review.

2019 album. Rock. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Braindrops’ is the highly anticipated second album from Tropical Fuck Storm, the menacing and broody Melbourne based Australian band following only 1.5 years after their critically acclaimed debut LP ‘A Laughing Death in Meatspace’. ‘Braindrops’ is a jarring and exhilarating experience, full of pulsating grooves, black humour, dissonant experimentation, and unsettling dystopian plot-lines. It is an unrelenting work, from an unrelenting musical ensemble. “Tropical Fuck Storm is a full on thing,” Liddiard offers. “Everything we do, we do it to the death.”

Tropical Fuck Storm were formed around 2017 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria along Australia’s south-eastern coast. The band released their debut long-player on Joyful Noise Recordings in 2018. Each of the band’s four members bring considerable experience to the group. Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin were part of the long-running and critically-acclaimed act The Drones, while Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel have performed in a variety of well-received projects. Perhaps it’s that wealth of rock and roll experience that allows Tropical Fuck Storm to so expertly deconstruct and distort the genre’s norms.

“I've invented fake news as a genre of music,” Gareth Liddiard observes with a laugh. He’s talking about “Maria 63”, the closing track on Tropical Fuck Storm’s sophomore LP ‘Braindrops’. The song takes aim at the once-marginalized alt-right conspiracy theories that now seem to be a driving force behind the rise of fascism in global politics. “It’s about a Mossad agent traveling to Buenos Aires to assassinate Maria Orsic, a Nazi witch who telepathically got the blueprints for warp drive engines from aliens,” Liddiard shares.

“It may be the most stupid song ever written,” Liddiard jokes. He’s wrong, “Maria 63” is emblematic of Tropical Fuck Storm’s keen ability to mine the extreme edge of pop culture’s periphery for potent musical and conceptual spice. ‘Braindrops’ overflows with compelling sounds and visions that reflect the often dark and fractured reality of life on planet Earth as we hurtle toward environmental and social decay at a frighteningly rapid clip.

“Everything we do, we try to do it in a weird way. The whole album is full of weird beats, and just weird shit everywhere,” Liddiard explains. He cites Doc at the Radar Station-era Captain Beefheart as a key sonic touchstone, and Braindrops certainly shares the Captain’s penchant for pounding abstract grooves. Tropical Fuck Storm have achieved a uniquely off-kilter sound on ‘Braindrops’. Liddiard partly credits this to the group’s use of unconventional equipment, “We use lots of techno gear to make rock and roll because rock and roll gear is boring, and all sounds like Led Zeppelin.”

Liddiard’s own description of Tropical Fuck Storm’s sound is nearly as interesting and evocative as the music itself. He describes the LP’s title track as “Fela Kuti in a car crash,” and talks of creating a sonic atmosphere that “sounds like chloroform smells” for “Maria 62”. Liddiard can be a bit more taciturn when asked to get specific on the group’s lyrical themes. “It's not always a good idea to be too straightforward.” Instead Liddiard favors a “more nebulous and mysterious” approach.

A recurring theme on ‘Braindrops’ concerns the various ways the human brain can be manipulated and controlled for exploitative gain. The bracing “The Planet of Straw Men” is a study of human behavior inside the social media comments section, a place where otherwise reasonable people are seen gleefully engaging in psychotic chest-thumping rhetoric. “It's about everyone having a screaming match,” Liddiard says. “You see two people yelling at each other on Twitter, but they're not really yelling at each other, they're yelling at each other's idea of the other. Meanwhile countries like Russia are taking advantage of this to push their ideologies and get ahead.” Erica Dunn’s “Who’s My Eugene?” contemplates a more personal example of predatory mind control. “It's about Eugene Landy, the doctor that drugged the shit out of Brian Wilson and emptied his bank account,” Liddiard explains.

While Liddiard is careful not to give away too much about the band’s lyrics, he’s confident that audiences will find their own meaning. “If you show a gorilla Hamlet, even if he was capable of reading it, he wouldn't be capable of seeing himself in it. But with humans that's kind of what we do. We have our heads up our own asses.”

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

Formed in Bradford in 1980, New Model Army’s beginnings were inspired by Northern Soul, Punk Rock and the incendiary atmosphere of the times. Since then, they have had a long, creative and eventful journey. They have been massively influential in ‘post-punk’, ‘folk-rock’, ‘political-rock’, ‘goth’, ‘metal’ and all kinds of musical sub-cultures but they have steadfastly refused to belong to any club or style. Members have changed over the years and musical styles have evolved but at the heart of the band Justin has remained, along with a distinct and sincere belief in the power of music to inspire and effect change on both a personal and political scale, locally and globally.

“It is often said that the album is dead. We don’t believe this is true” – Justin, Michael, Dean, Marshall and Ceri. ‘From Here’ was recorded earlier on the tiny Norwegian island of Giske at the beautiful Ocean Sound Recordings studio and reflects the spectacular isolation of that environment yet has profound messages for the world we all live in and the times we are experiencing. “We all have different lives and different tastes in almost everything, including music”, say the band. “One thing we have in common is the love of bleak, open, cold, rugged landscapes – water, snow, rock. So this was the perfect place for us to work on something collectively”.

The album was mostly written in just two months and recorded in only nine days and is the follow up on the two hugely acclaimed albums Between Dog And Wolf (2013) and Winter (2016). New Model Army decided to work again with Lee Smith and Jamie Lockhart, with whom they have developed a productive relationship over a few years and who persuaded them to leave a lot of the details of the music to spontaneity. “This album has a feel that is different to our other albums, but it still contains all the elements that characterise our peculiarly unidentifiable music – perhaps even more than ever. And ‘From Here’ was an obvious title. The record belongs to a very special place and a particular time – what is happening in the world, where we are as a band and where we are as people.”

Label Review. 

2019 album. Psych. Also available on CD.

Our Overview.

‘Guild of The Asbestos Weaver’ is the eighth new studio album by British experimental singer-songwriter Alexander Tucker - member of Grumbling Fur, his duo with Daniel O’Sullivan (This Is Not This Heat) and has been declared “Essential listening for anyone who wants to hear why the psychedelic lineage of the past 50 years is fresh and alive” by The Quietus. ‘Guild of The Asbestos Weaver’ is the follow up to 2018’s ‘Don’t Look Away’ and captures Tucker’s boundless vision as a composer. In focusing on the more arcane aspects of his sound, and giving individual ideas and motifs more space to grow and evolve, Alexander Tucker has made his most immersive and intoxicating music yet.

On his new album Tucker presents an expansion of his sound. Minimalist motifs are sculpted into deep drone constructions, weaving dense layers of maximalist sound to powerful disorienting effect. Through inventive studio manipulation Tucker conjures vivid preternatural landscapes from a synthesis of acoustic instruments and electronic sources. The resulting pieces occupy a unique territory somewhere between paranormal electronics and cosmos-seeking psychedelia, standing as some of Tucker’s heaviest and most hallucinogenic work to date. 

Alexander Tucker employs music as a mode of psychic transportation. His collaged lyrics spin tales of parallel dimensions: dream-like landscapes near the end of perception, with scenes of cursed high-rises, giant speakers transmitting across the city, and unknown horrors at the bottom of the sea. Guild of the Asbestos Weaver leans even further into Alexander Tucker’s fascination with science fiction and cosmic horror, bringing it closer into the orbit of his work as a visual artist. He explains, “With this album I wanted to join together separate key influences that have affected my work, from science fiction and cosmic horror comics, film and literature to minimalist, drone and dream music composition. My aim was to weave these elements into repetitious cycles that guide the listener into worlds both uncanny and familiar.” The album title, taken from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, refers to the underground opposition of the dystopian novel’s totalitarian government ideology. Rather than carrying any explicit political message, Guild of the Asbestos Weaver seeks to simply spark the imagination, envisioning an alternate past and new future as the first step towards realising them. Tucker cites “Dreamweapon”, a term coined by Angus MacLise as a key touchstone; reading it as the idea that dreams and alternate forms of perception can be used as a personal fight against the status quo of society, thought and human order. 

Digital synthesis and studio manipulation have always been a central part of Alexander Tucker’s artistic practice, but on Guild of the Asbestos Weaver he evidences a true mastery of his machines. Sounds sourced from bass, cello and analogue electronics are twisted into surprising new shapes. Sources are shrouded or revealed, with the line between organic instrumentation and digital production often deliberately blurred. ‘Artificial Origin’ and ‘Precog’ both use hammered and bowed cello, transformed into shuddering industrial rhythm tracks, while ‘Montag’ sees Tucker laminate cello and synths to create something between acoustic and synthesised textures. ‘Cryonic’ cycles across re-sampled beats and vocals, bringing the album to an orchestrated, hissing, crumbling halt. 

CD version in a 4 panel mini-LP style gatefold package. LP pressed on virgin vinyl and packaged in a gatefold jacket with printed inner sleeve and free download card. Album cover designed by Alexander Tucker, displaying his hand-cut collage.

“Beautiful songs studded with dissonant eruptions of noise” - Mojo

“Accomplished return from Kentish doom-folk oracle, now wrapped in a warm blanket of mid 70s Eno.” - Uncut

Label Review.

2019 album. Folk. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview.

Rowan Rheingans has already achieved great acclaim with bands Lady Maisery, The Rheingans Sisters and Songs of Separation and is widely regarded as one of the foremost innovators in folk music today, so the release of her solo debut has been highly anticipated and does not fail to seduce the listener. ‘The Lines We Draw Together’ is quite simply a captivating heartfelt, unflinching and genre-melding debut.

Rowan Rheingans is an applauded English fiddle player, banjoist, singer and songwriter and one that never chooses to simply repeat but choosing instead to constantly innovate, ‘The Lines We Draw Together’ is best understood as an artistic piece in its own right rather than as an attempt to capture the inimitable musical essay on the power of small acts of resistance that is ‘Dispatches on the Red Dress’. Rowan explains how “they are different but very connected pieces; the album is a deeply intertwined and yet wholly different artistic journey through some of the same themes as my one-woman show. In the live show, the songs provide the emotional landscape to a very big story. On the album, these songs fully ex-press their own, complex individual stories and I am inviting different meanings and different interpretations to them here.”

Musically, ‘The Lines We Draw Together’ is often quite extraordinary too, conveying both beauty and horror with its spare, often tellingly hushed textures that sometimes expand outwards into a more chaotic and surprisingly richly detailed sonic climate. It reaches out beyond an immediately folk soundscape in drawing on the talents of her collaborators including clarinettist Jack McNeill, bassist Michele Stoddart, experimental percussionist Laurence Hunt and electronica musician Robert Bentall, while Andy Bell’s skilful, careful production ensures maximum concentration.

‘The Lines We Draw Together’ comprises 10 original songs by Rowan, whose song ‘Mackerel’ scooped the esteemed ‘Best Original Track’ award at the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Already widely celebrated as a songwriter by music critics, ‘The Lines We Draw Together’ is Rowan’s most self-assured work yet. This is adventurous and necessary new writing that asks fundamental and troubling questions with Rowan’s characteristically deep emotional charge, razor-sharp sense of purpose, audacious musicality and disarming warmth.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Americana. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Houston-raised performer known to some as a member of the Los Angeles-based indie folk outfit the Show Ponies, Jason Hawk Harris signed to Bloodshot Records in November of 2018, and now is releasing his captivating debut solo LP ‘Love & The Dark’. The country singer, songwriter, guitarist and performer, is a name to look out for. With a touch of punk attitude and darkness, and a proficiency with melody and composition not always found in country, Jason put himself on the radar of some with his 2017 EP “Formaldehyde, Tobacco, and Tulips”, and he’s about to arrive on the radar of many more.

Jason Hawk Harris hit rock bottom during the writing and recording of his debut. In the last few years, the Los Angeles-based musician endured life-altering hardships—illness, death, familial strife, and addiction—yet from these trials, a luxuriant and confident vision of art country emerged.

Bloodshot first caught Jason at Folk Alliance in Kansas City in 2018, when he gave goosebumps to everyone within the dingy walls of a tiny hotel room with his evocative, powerful, and unrestrained live duo set. With an unlikely background, Harris is a songwriter who walks his own line, one that touches on Lyle Lovett’s lyrical frankness, John Moreland’s punk cerebralism and Judee Sill’s mysticism and orchestral sensibility. There’s even the literary and sonic audacity of an early Steve Earle, an outlaw unafraid to embrace harmony.

After writing thousands of measures of classical music, though, Harris found himself drawn back to the country, folk, and rock music that had soundtracked his early childhood. He'd grown up listening to classic crooners like Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Jim Croce, Patsy Cline, and Elvis. Harris's music draws a distinct bridge between his country and classical roots and reaches far beyond rootsy influence. There are complex chords, acrobatic arrangements, and unexpected intervals, results of a stirring and compelling musical culture clash.

Jason’s grandfather exposed him to country music at an early age, and his family celebrated holidays with group sing-alongs. In his teens, Harris began listening to punk, indie rock, and, notably, Queen. In some part inspired by the instrumental flair of Freddie Mercury & Co., he later took the educational plunge into classical composition and was eventually wait-listed for the master’s program at UCLA, when things took a turn.

While touring and performing in the indie folk band The Show Ponies, Jason started writing his own songs, intuitively returning to his country roots but incorporating his classical and rock ‘n’ roll performance skills. He released his first solo offering, the Formaldehyde, Tobacco and Tulips EP in 2017 and hit the road.

Meanwhile, his world fell apart: his mother died from complications of alcoholism; his father went bankrupt after being sued by the King of Morocco; his sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and gave birth to a premature son with cerebral palsy; and—subsequently—Jason got sidetracked by his own vices.

While his music acknowledges mortality, pain, and hardship, it’s also Jason Hawk Harris’s way of working through it.

Label Review.

2019 album. ECM.

Our Overview.

‘Violão Solo (Universo Musical de Egberto Gismonti)’ focuses exclusively on the works of Egberto Gismonti, whose compositions have long been a major part of Daniel Murray’s repertoire. So it is more than fitting that this recording is now being released on Gismonti’s label ‘Carmo’, with the composer also acting as the producer of the record.

Born in 1981, Brazilian guitarist Daniel Murray began his musical studies at an early age. After dedicating himself to the classical guitar, he studied the instrument and composition in Brazil and formed a duo with Paulo Porto Alegre, dedicated to modern and avant-garde repertoire for two guitars.

Since then, he has given concerts as a soloist and chamber musician in venues including Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, the Municipal Theater of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo Museum of Art, the “Festival tonnants Romantiques” in Combourg, France and “Fete de la Musique” in Paris.

Over the last decade, Daniel Murray has been developing a conceptual idea he calls ‘Universos’, of which ‘Violao Solo (Universo Musical de Egberto Gismonti)’ is the newest instalment. Previous releases were ‘...sound universes for guitar and tape...’, which explored avant-garde repertoire for acoustic guitar and tape, and “Universos em expans o...” (Universes in expansion) which aimed to broaden the possibilities of electroacoustic music. A notable previous album was ‘Brazilian Landscapes’, a collaboration with the well-known Danish musicians, recorder player Michala Petri and percussionist Marilyn Mazur.

Personnel: Daniel Murray (guitar)

Label Review.

Four albums and 6 bonus tracks.

Our Overview.

The Philadelphia based R&B soul group, who melded 60’s soul, 70’s funk with lush orchestral arrangements and pop hooks that had the dance floor buzzing to their vibes, the legendary Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes were one of the very first groups to achieve global success for Philadelphia International Records within its first year as a CBS-distributed label. The 1972 release of two consecutive ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ ballads – “I Miss You” and “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” – marked the start of a four-year association that yielded some of the most enduring recordings in contemporary soul music, in the process creating – with label founders Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff and a burgeoning coterie of talented songwriters, arrangers and musicians – a handful of timeless dance music classics including “The Love I Lost”, “Bad Luck” and “Don’t Leave Me This Way”.

A Philadelphia-based group (The Charlemagnes) became ‘The Blue Notes’ after Harold Melvin joined them in the mid-‘50s and after a number of personnel changes, ‘Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ achieved their first US Top R&B hit in 1965 with ‘Get Out (And Cry)’. Mainstays of the popular lounge circuit, Melvin had hired Theodore Pendergrass as the new drummer for the group’s touring band in 1970 and by the time the quintet joined the fledgling roster at P.I.R., he had emerged as the lead singer; it was Pendergrass’ gospel-honed passion-filled vocals that were front-and-centre of the four gold-certified albums that formed the legacy of treasured recordings included in this glorious 36-track, 3-CD box set.

Disc 1, comprises the 1972 LP, I MISS YOU (originally released as ‘Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes’ and retitled after the US Top 10 R&B success of their first P.I.R single) and includes the soulful opus ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’; and the 1973 set, BLACK & BLUE particularly memorable for the group’s anthemic ‘The Love I Lost’ and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed (Or Take Your Love Back)’.

Disc 2, features two albums released in 1975: TO BE TRUE which kept the momentum going with ‘Where Are All My Friends’ and ‘Bad Luck’ while also introducing female vocalist Sharon Paige via the US R&B chart-topper, ‘Hope That We Can Be Together Soon’; and WAKE UP EVERYBODY, the title track of which – with its memorably timeless lyrical theme – became the group’s final million-seller with Pendergrass who went on to launch his solo career in 1977.

Disc 3, consists of various bonus tracks: the group’s cover of Nilsson’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ from The Philadelphia All-Stars’ 1977 LP, “Let’s Clean Up The Ghetto” LP; two dance mixes by legendary remix pioneer Tom Moulton, “Bad Luck” and an eleven-minute version of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, originally a track from the group’s final P.I.R. LP – never issued as a U.S. single (but covered by Motown’s Thelma Houston for whom it became a global smash); and three ‘live’ recordings from the group’s performance at a CBS Records’ 1973 convention.With artwork by Roger Williams and mastering by Nick Robbins, the box set also includes informative notes by renowned US writer Kevin Goins (including 2019 quotes from group member Jeremiah Cummings) and personal reflections by reissue producer and SoulMusic.com founder David Nathan.

Track listing:

DISC ONE "I MISS YOU / BLACK & BLUE"

1. I MISS YOU

2. EBONY WOMAN

3. YESTERDAY I HAD THE BLUES

4. IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW

5. BE FOR REAL

6. LET ME INTO YOUR WORLD

7. LET IT BE YOU

8. CABARET

9. THE LOVE I LOST

10. IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOU

11. CONCENTRATE ON ME

12. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED (OR TAKE YOUR LOVE BACK)

13. IS THERE A PLACE FOR ME?

14. I’M WEAK FOR YOU

15. I’M COMING HOME TOMORROW

DISC TWO "TO BE TRUE / WAKE UP EVERYBODY"

1. WHERE ARE ALL MY FRIENDS

2. TO BE TRUE

3. PRETTY FLOWER

4. HOPE THAT WE CAN BE TOGETHER SOON – Sharon Paige And Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes

5. NOBODY COULD TAKE YOUR PLACE

6. SOMEWHERE DOWN THE LINE

7. BAD LUCK

8. IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF A WOMAN

9. WAKE UP EVERYBODY

10. KEEP ON LOVIN’ YOU

11. YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE ME FEEL SO GOOD – Featuring Sharon Paige

12. DON’T LEAVE ME THIS WAY

13. TELL THE WORLD HOW I FEEL ABOUT ‘CHA BABY

14. TO BE FREE TO BE WHO WE ARE

15. I’M SEARCHING FOR A LOVE -Featuring Sharon Paige

DISC THREE VARIOUS BONUS TRACKS

1. EVERYBODY’S TALKIN’

2. BAD LUCK (TOM MOULTON MIX)

3. DON’T LEAVE ME THIS WAY (TOM MOULTON MIX)

4. THE LOVE I LOST (LIVE)

5. IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME BY NOW (LIVE)

6. I MISS YOU (LIVE)

Label Review. 

2019 album. Rock. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Los Angeles based alt-metal band Silver Snakes known for combining hardcore industrial influences to produce a brutally beautiful sound are releasing their fourth studio album ‘Death And The Moon’. The band, comprised of Alex Estrada (vocals / guitar), Mike Trujillo (bass) and Garrett Harney (drums), continues their evolution of sound by incorporating influences of ‘90’s industrial and elements of doom metal into their post-hardcore sound. The result is cathartic and innovative. Heavy, stabbing riffs crescendo into massive walls of guitars that give way to atmospheric and at times ethereal moments of calm that relay underlying messages of sabotage and deception. 

Inside a nondescript industrial building, just outside of Los Angeles’ Chinatown neighbourhood, Silver Snakes’ singer, songwriter and producer, Alex Estrada, sits at the helm of his Pale Moon Audio Studios, putting the finishing touches on the bands new release, ‘Death and the Moon’. The setting certainly influenced the music, as it’s gritty, abrasive, and, at times, terrifying good. The new album, the second for Claudio Sanchez’ EVIL INK RECORDS, follows 2017’s ‘Scathe’ EP which saw the band leaning in a more electronic direction and featuring covers of acts who’d helped shape their current direction, such as Garbage and Ministry.

‘Death and the Moon’ expands upon that path, finding the band as much in the industrial space, as in the dark rock roots of previous full length, ‘Saboteur’. Lyrically, ‘Death and the Moon ‘follows in its predecessor’s footsteps, and one will certainly recognise similar guitar work but from the opening notes of track 1, “Smokedance,” you’ll immediately discover a synth hook and electronic beat. ‘Death and the Moon’ is a harder, more abrasive, album than its predecessor. The industrial motifs are more pronounced. Everything feels bigger, harder hitting, and more epic than anything Silver Snakes have released in the past. There are more electronic elements to making Silver Snakes a band in transition.

Label Review. 

2019 debut album. Indie. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

British indie pop four piece from Liverpool The Night Cafe are releasing their debut ‘0151’ which mixies gorgeous, hazy melodies with intricate guitars and a heavy groove, their sound is uniquely current yet beautifully nostalgic. The Night Cafe have been brewing up a storm over the past couple of years and yet all members are still only18 years old and are set to move up the gears and become one of the UK’s brightest indie hopes.

The group, consisting of vocalist and guitarist Sean Martin, guitarist Josh Higgins, bassist Arran O’Connell and drummer Dan Fell, met in secondary school and bonded over a shared love for the traditional musical heritage of The Beatles and The Coral and formed as an “excuse not to do homework”. The quartet eventually made the short trip upstairs to Whitewood recording studio where producer Robert Whiteley helped to polish their promising demos into the 2015 releases ‘Growing Up’ and Addicted.’

They released their debut single, Addicted, in 2015, which was followed by Together, and Mixed Signals. They released their debut EP, 'Get Away From The Feeling', in 2017 and their second in early 2018.

The band have headlined their own shows and tours across the UK, performed at festivals such as T in the Park and Liverpool Sound City and have supported the likes of Sundara Karma. The Night Cafe embarked on a UK tour in May 2017, as well as making festival appearances at Live At Leeds and 110 Above, as well as supporting Blaenavon.

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

‘Is Not Defeated’, is the American post rock band - The Ascent Of Everest’s first release in nine years and it is an album from a tight-knit community of musicians who assembled, lived together, and wrote music together in non-traditional ways. it’s an album of intricate compositions and sincere passion, culminating in an emotional and cathartic zenith. The Ascent Of Everest is a formed by Devin Lamp (guitar, vocals), Keller McDivitt (guitar), Drew Binkley (bass), Casey Kaufman (cello, strings), Dillon Smith (violin, strings), Chris Click (piano) and Michael Thurmon (drums, percussion). 

The Ascent Of Everest is metaphor for ambitious goals, partly the synthesis of genre and fusion of musical traditions but also to articulate abstract emotional places and states of being. some will be quick to pick out bits that could be called post rock metal doom electronic shoegaze neoclassical post minimalist etc. but shy from saying what the ultimate result is: this is about the journey into the unknown, fiercely new territories.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Returning eight years after their second album ‘Pala’, English Indie Dance trio Friendly Fires are finally back with number three, ‘Inflorescent’. With help from producers and co-producers Mark Ralph, James Ford, and Disclosure, Friendly Fires spent 18 months finishing the LP at a variety of London studios. The band said, “Equally informed by experiencing the here and now, by hanging out and dancing in clubs together as a trio again, it’s a record very much about living in the present; about not being afraid, seizing the moment, casting aside doubts and pursuing the things you love.”

The trio emerged in 2008 signed to XL Recordings who issued their self-titled debut album. The record neatly replicated the energy of their live shows and they made enough of an impression to be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize the following year. Second album ‘Pala’ appeared in 2011 and mixed 80s pop and Ibiza culture into a “blissful collision of euphoria and reflection”. Although the group quickly began work on a follow-up, it seemed inspiration wasn’t forthcoming and the band members worked on other projects until a couple of years ago when they reconvened and new material started to appear in 2018.

If the singles issued so far are anything to go by, starving FF fans have not been disappointed, with the new material picking up where the group left off, retaining their love of 1980s pop, big choruses and current club sounds. A summer smash beckons!

Label Review. 

12 tracks of up front, eclectic, super rare, funk-edge and feel good dancefloor soul.

Our Overview. 

’Time And Place’ is an uplifting, get down on the floor and do “ya thang” album replete with 12 tracks of up-front, eclectic, super rare, funky edged and feel good Dancefloor Soul. In association with Soul Shack DJ’s, Club Soul present the “Time” and the “Place” to Shake the Shack! With album launch party at the Custard Factory in Birmingham featuring DJ’s Neil Rushton, Roger Hayward, Dean “Sunshine” Smith, Jordi Ripolles, Sean T Taylor and Tim Everett.

The Soul Shack manifesto is stark - let your body take the place of your mind, and this new compilation on the Club Soul label is a tough-as-nails route to keeping the groove. The popular Soul Shack sessions in the Midlands being run by Neil Rushton are a homage to mind-blowing and spine-tingling black music gems. They encompass the preciseness of cerebral jazz fusion, the simple rawness of New Orleans funk, Nuyorican Latin Strut frenzy, the rhythm-driven angry polemics of Gil Scott-Heron, the sheen of Philly Soul, Big Apple Soul Disco and the Soul and Funk of Detroit’s many music alchemists. These are all integral parts of a time and place called Soul Shack - and this record is the soundtrack.

This LP edition of ‘Time & Place’ is presented on heavyweight audiophile 180gm vinyl in a single sleeve with Club Soul insert and sleeve notes by Neil Rushton. It joins a growing catalogue of premium music on Club Soul - including the 16-track crossover and modern soul LP ‘Shades of Soul’ and newly compile records that celebrate the clubs of the original Northern Soul Scene - The Scene Club, The Twisted Wheel, Wigan Casino Soul Club, Catacombs and The Golden Torch.

Label Review.

2019 album. Space rock. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Out of the woods of Washington State and the urban zones of Maryland come the combined mystical, shredding folk-infused sounds of Prana Crafter (a.k.a. William Sol) and Tarotplane (PJ Dorsey), a cosmic mind meld from two of the best guitarists working in the realm of modern “Kosmische Musik”. Symbiose is a split LP featuring the talents of both Prana Crafter and Tarotplane exploring the sounds from the edge of the universe…….and beyond. It’s a stunningly beautiful trip among the stars, gently ebbing and flowing through dreamlike states that border on the transcendental. The two tracks that make up Symbiose were composed independently but with the intentional goal of presenting a unified, comprehensive, work of modern kosmiche that offers the listener a unique journey on each side of the record, a bit like passing through different dream realms in one continuous slumber, a changing of moods and textures, all while certain elements remain common between the two canvases, between the two kosmic dreamscapes.

‘Symbiose’ is a split LP featuring two panoramic deep-field oozers that sustain interest, gently wandering the cosmos, through smoke rings and across star clusters, filling the space that stretches between Eastern and Western America and continuing the musical thread that connects modern American underground artists to the European birth of kosmic music.

Like Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel, ‘Symbiose’ sinks its roots into the liminal landscape of the listeners neuro-hemispheres, creeping like black-light illuminated mycelium, passing through subterranean pathways of inner experience, emotion, and vision. Those who love modern acts like MV & EE and Ben Chasny will likely enjoy this album as much as European space rock and Pink Floyd aficionados, because this Symbiose is an interaction between two organisms to the advantage of all.

Although primarily known as a Acid Folk artist, Prana Crafter (aka Will Sol) has a passion for the mellower more psychedelic side of early 70s Krautrock and cites Kosmische pioneers such as Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel and Agitation Free as influences and this is clearly evident in his music. Slowly building a reputation from his early records on Sunrise Ocean Bender and Eiderdown along with touring with Wooden Shjips, Prana Crafter is now starting reach a wider audience with releases on Beyond Beyond Is Beyond and his albums now available in Europe through Cardinal Fuzz, his contribution to Symbiose is no doubt his best work to date. Beamed from space via the Washington woods, ”Jagged Mountain Melts at Dawn” blends a rural acoustic ambience with shards of cosmic fire. Running at just about 20 minutes in length, channeling early records by Manuel Göttsching the track layers guitars and subtle synth washes immersing the listener in a deep pool of sound. It’s the first time that Prana Crafter has really got his Kosmische on, letting the music flow as long as possible, stretching the themes and pushing the boundaries to the limit creating a spellbinding soundscape. It’s “head music” in it’s purest sense.

Flip the disk and their is some excellent music from Tarotplane. The solo project by PJ Dorsey, over the past several years Tarotplane has released albums on boutique European labels Aguirre and Lullabies For Insomniacs and much like Prana Crafter has been greatly influenced by the cosmic sounds of the early 70s. “We Move Slowly Through the Past” is a journey spiralling through the cosmos that takes in early 70s Pink Floyd as much as Krautrock. Possibly more Space Rock than Prana Crafter’s Kosmische musings, Tarotplane’s contribution to Symbiose drifts through time and space with lots of echo and delay. Mixing elements of Dave Gilmour’s more abstract guitar playing with a Krautrock sensibility in rolling waves of sound, “We Move Slowly Through the Past” shimmers with a psychedelic intensity, a sound reminiscent of AR & Machines echodelic masterpieces, a true universal dream-mind sound.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

‘This Is Not A Safe Place’ sees rejuvenated Oxford, UK, four piece Ride reunite with revered DJ, producer and remixer Erol Alkan, who was on production duties for 2017’s ‘Weather Diaries’. Rekindling that creative partnership has once again seen Ride push their sound forward, as hypnotic rhythms and washes of lush guitars come together with leftfield electronic influences. The combination creates a sound rich in their trademark shoegaze atmosphere, whilst simultaneously sounding fresh and creatively ambitious.

‘Future Love’ is the first song to be unveiled from ‘This Is Not A Safe Place’. An unguarded, gloriously optimistic song, ‘Future Love’ brings together many of Ride’s best loved elements. Layers of guitars chime and drone as the Oxford quartet effortlessly meld shoegazing dynamics and melodic psychedelia with their distinctive Transatlantic harmonies. It’s a song steeped in the heady haze of the start of a relationship, when anything seems possible and one that’s sure to strike a chord as the shimmering start of the summer comes into view.

One of the leading lights of the early 90s shoegaze scene, Ride reformed in 2014, releasing their first album in over 20 years in 2017. ‘Weather Diaries’ was greeted by a raft of critical and commercial acclaim, reaching Number 11 in the UK Album Charts. It also saw Ride reunited with Wichita Records’ Dick Green and Mark Bowen, who worked with the band during their early years on Creation Records.

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD and Vinyl+7.

Our Overview. 

‘The Center Won’t Hold’ is the tenth studio album by the American alt/rock girl trio Sleater-Kinney, who continue to challenge the idea of what three women sound like when they create music together over the course of twenty-five years. Sleater-Kinney set a new bar for punk’s political insight and emotional impact. Now, at the height of their formidable powers, the three feminist icons continue to challenge themselves, break all the rules and push boundaries. This new creative chapter in the acclaimed band’s musical journey is poised to win over both longtime admirers and new fans alike.

‘The Center Won’t Hold’ is Sleater-Kinney’s midnight record on the doomsday clock. The rock’n’roll giants: Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss, rise to meet the moment by digging deeper and sounding bigger than we’ve heard them yet. The album addresses transformation as it relates to the corrosion and decomposition of forms. Fractured and frayed by age or by loss, by internecine politics, by trauma or depression, these eleven songs ask what remains of a body, a human spirit, a relationship, a city, a country. The narrators herein sing from the brink of madness, corruption, loss, or grief. And though they speak to us from the narrow, near desperate strands to which they are consigned by others, or upon which they’ve self-exiled—feeling small, fearing obsolescence—they ask to be heard on the most sprawling of canvasses. By couching these personal stories in a sonic palette that unabashedly takes up space, what remains is a tale of survival: a treatise on female friendship, inner strength, resilience, and community.



If ‘The Center Won’t Hold’ forces a reconsideration of a band people thought they knew, it’s due to the methodologies employed in the writing and making of the album. The tools upon which Sleater-Kinney had relied proved inadequate, both metaphorically and literally, so they sought new ones. They used the geographical distance between them, along with the larger uncertainty and brokenness swirling around them, as a means of inducing and exploring sonic change. Most concretely, they worked with producer Annie Clark (St. Vincent), who treated each song as its own world, letting them find a specific vernacular through careful construction and deliberation. 

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Oh Sees are the brainchild of John Dwyer from San Francisco, California, who has been infecting music fans ears for the last 20 years with his unique brand of garage / psych rock. There has been slight changes to the band name over the years and they really came to prominence as Thee Oh Sees between 2008-16. This new record is their third as just plain Oh Sees.

First single “Poisoned Stones” sees crunchy guitars and jazzy percussion ground the song in its metal roots, while shrill synths alienate Dwyer’s reality with extraterrestrial textures and meandering drones caked in the mix. Fantastic but simple drum fills abound. The closing track “Henchlock” wigs out for some 20 minutes. At first you may think it is a 70s jam band style take off but then the vocals come in and Dwyer and friends zoom off into their own singular trip. It is definitely worth the ride!

John himself suggests that it is: “For fans of fried prog burn out, squished old-school drool, double drums, lead weight bass, wizard keys (now with poison), old-ass guitar and horrible words with daft meanings. If you don’t like it then don’t listen, bub. Back to the comments section with you! Easy. Over and out.”

Label Review. 

2019 album also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

English alt/rock singer songwriter Frank Turner is releasing his eighth studio album ‘No Man’s Land’ a 13 track concept album that tells the stories of important, inspirational women throughout history who don’t receive the recognition they deserve. There are there are tales of musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Egyptian feminist activist Huda Sha’arawi, serial killer Nannie Doss, Byzantine princess Kassiani, and Resusci Anne –a drowned virgin whose face was used as the model for the medical CPR mannequin used throughout the globe. Says Frank “No-one else is writing these songs right now. That’s why I want to share these stories.” The announcement of No Man’s Land also sees the launch of a new podcast from Frank Turner titled Tales From No Man’s Land, which deep dives into each song on the record. The album was produced by Catherine Marks (Foals, Big Moon). 

Frank continues “The record is, first and foremost, a piece of story-telling – a history record, if you will, a pretty traditional folk approach. I didn’t actually set out to write exclusively about women. In the beginning I was just toying with various stories that felt interesting to tell (and I was keen, after my recent records, to write about something other than my own life and feelings for a while). Now, clearly, there is an implicit politics in the fact that, in telling lesser known stories, I’ve ended up singing about women, and I’ll stand behind that, for what it’s worth. But my initial interest was in sharing some stories that I didn’t know before, and that I suspect most people didn’t.

"Nevertheless, as I say, there is a political angle to the record, and it’s one I’d like to handle sensitively. I welcome intelligent, good faith discussion of the point, actually. The main question that is being asked – and it’s a fair one – is what right I have, as a man, to write songs about women. That deserves a thoughtful response from me.

"My answer comes in two parts. Firstly, for the most part, these are stories that have not and are not being told right now, and I think they deserve to be. I feel like I’m not crowding out other voices in releasing these songs. It seems to me that songs about Huda Sha’arawi and Catherine Blake, to name but two, are rather thin on the ground right now, as far as I’m aware. I’ve learned so much in researching and writing this project, and I’d like to share that knowledge. And, given the streaming world we live in, me putting out a collection of songs doesn’t lessen the bandwidth for other writers to make their own statements.

"(A brief aside – there actually are a few songs out there about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, some of which I knew about and some I didn’t. She’s one of the more famous people on the album. The point of the song, for me, is that the history of rock’n’roll is inaccurately portrayed as being dominated by white men. As one of that demographic who plays that kind of music, I felt like it was good for me to acknowledge the people who actually laid the blueprints I’m following, rather than just always banging on about Elvis – as I’ve done myself in the past. Anyways – check out other songs about her by Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Noisettes, and my friend Emily Barker).

"Secondly, I’d flip the question a bit. I’m a songwriter and a singer, writing and releasing (and then promoting) music is what I do. I could write another album about my own life, or I suppose a record about men from history, but I’m not sure I see the point (especially the latter option), and it doesn’t catch my creative interest right now. For better or worse, I have an audience who are interested in the music I make, and who will listen to the next album I put out. Having a platform, why not use it for something more interesting or worthwhile?

"I have not tried to present this record as an aggressively feminist statement. I have no issue with that word – in fact I’m very much in favour of feminism, and equality in general. But putting that first would seem overbearing to me. I’m not trying to lead a parade I have no right to lead. My approach is perhaps best summed up by the name of a group I do a lot of work with on tour – The Ally Coalition (an LGBTQ+ rights group). It seems to me that my best contribution to all of this is to be just that, an ally, to use whatever platform I have to steer the conversation amongst my audience into better territory as best I can.”

Label Review.

2019 album with A5 comic book. Alternative pop.

Our Overview.

There seems to be a hunger for Jadu Heart’s brand of storytelling and this is only the beginning of their tale. Jadu Heart are an enigmatic UK, alternative-pop duo that create music as the supernatural characters, Dina and Faro. Channeling the spirit of these creatures Jadu Heart make imaginative, cosmic pop. 'Melt Away' is their their debut album out via VLF Records. The idiosyncratic young band, who perform adorned in hand-made masks, are a best-kept-secret whose early singles and EP have acquired the sort of hardcore global following (40 million+ streams, immediately-sold-out shows) that render them one of the most intriguing new bands coming out of the UK.

'Melt Away'was Co-produced by Guy Sigsworth (Bjork, Imogen Heap) and the record is a dark and dreamy collection of alternative electronic and guitar-led songs for fans of Jai Paul, Radiohead and Tame Impala alike. Despite the spectrum of sounds, throughout the 14 tracks you know you’re in Jadu’s world. It’s a world they have thought a lot about. Having met whilst studying music, Diva and Alex formed the band in conjunction with an extensive universe surrounding two supernatural cursed characters (Dina & Faro), who have become as much a part of them as their own identities.

It’s this supernatural jump-off that gives Jadu Heart the scope to explore raw topics (loneliness, love, sex, drugs, mental health) without clichés or confessions. With a depth to its narrative, Melt Away harks back to an era of concept albums like Ziggy Stardust and Sgt Pepper but the stories within it very much speak to the world as it is today. Despite having no established record label or significant promotion, the launch singles ‘U Never Call Me’, ‘The Cure’ and ‘I’m A Kid’ have already been streamed over 15 million times and their first 5 headline shows have sold out in days.

2xLP - 12’’ gatefold + matt machine varnish + gold foiling including A5 booklet (comic book).

Label Review.

2019 album. Folk/Bluegrass.

Our Overview.

August will see the release of We Banjo 3’s - one of the best live acts to come out of Ireland in recent years, the multi-award winning quartet, whose virtuosic Irish/Bluegrass/Americana blend continues to reach freshly dizzying heights - sixth album, ‘Roots to Rise LIVE’, which was recorded over two sold out nights at world famous folk music venue, The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Featuring many of the band’s best loved tunes and songs, plus a couple of previously unreleased tracks (and a surprise Stevie Wonder cameo!), Roots to Rise LIVE captures the magic atmosphere of what has become a legendary live show.

We Banjo 3 combine supergroup credentials with a breath-taking command of the emotive power of fiddle, guitar, mandolin and banjo. Any single member of this group could a electrify a venue with a solo performance, but together, in the joyous musical alchemy of We Banjo 3, their passionate lead vocalist like a young Springsteen adopted by the Chieftans, the result is truly unforgettable. Simply put, the gold standard of Irish and American roots music.

The essence of We Banjo 3’s mastery, and ultimately the secret of their staggering artistic power, is their uncanny ability to channel the playful and celebratory dimensions of traditional Irish and American music. They write and perform with emotion, with incalculable brio and inventiveness, with power and subtlety and intelligence. But most of all, these four brothers write and play bravely. It is as if their standing as one of the best bands of their generation – and indeed as if the widely expressed opinion that their emergence represents a bright future for Irish music – was nothing when compared to the spirit of the tunes.

The last few years have seen a huge surge in the band’s popularity propelling them to the headlining slot at all the major Irish festivals in the US and featuring widely on the Bluegrass and Folk music circuits. We Banjo 3 have also garnered some major international awards including RTE Folk Awards Album of the Year, and they are the first Irish band ever to top the Billboard Bluegrass Album Chart in the US. 2019 will see the band touring widely across the USA and Canada, an Irish tour in September including concerts in Dublin, Cork, Derryand of course, Galway, and rounding out the year touring Japan with Talisk and Sharon Shannon. Roots To Rise LIVE will be officially launched in USA on July 19th at GreyFox Bluegrass Music Festival in upstate New York, and subsequently launched every weekend thereafter until at least January! Find out more at www.webanjo3.com

Track listing:

1. This Is Home

2. Puncheon Floor

3. Haven

4. Marry Me Monday

5. Little Liza Jane

6. Tell Me Why

7. Annabelles Cannon

8. Shine On

9. John Browns

10. Hold On To Your Soul

11. Wynnes

12. Prettiest Little Girl

13. Trying To Love

14. Good Time Old Time

Label Review.

2019 album. Rock.

Our Overview.

Detroit-based pop trio Deadbeat Beat are a comprised of longtime friends: Alex Glendening on lead vocals and guitar, Maria Nuccilli on drums and backing vocals and Zak Frieling on bass and now they’re releasing their second full-length album, ‘How Far’. The new album came together in between multiple self-booked tours, including dates with bands like Guided By Voices, Anna Burch, Tacocat, Bodega and Protomartyr.

Deadbeat Beat’s origins date back more than 15 years to a friendship formed in middle school in Grosse Pointe. They’ve been making music together for more than half their lives, initially breaking out on the local music scene with a group called The Decks. Always at shows, hanging out, killing time and absorbing music, Maria Nuccilli and Alex Glendening moved through early projects and various members coming and going before solidifying Deadbeat Beat with the inclusion of bassist Zak Frieling. By that point the band began finding their legs at shows in Detroit and through a series of sporadically self-released demos, EPs and singles as well as an album on both cassette and vinyl.

In a scene of restless loners, everyone’s in at least a couple bands. While Deadbeat Beat actively percolated, Maria’s lockstep drumming kept time for longtime candy-psych heroes Outrageous Cherry and Alex played with trashpunk stalwarts Tyvek and filled in on bass and guitar for Saddle Creek’s Stef Chura and Richard Davies’ recently reformed iteration of The Moles. Even immersed in a wildly creative community Deadbeat Beat stayed on a different path, set apart by complex songwriting that drew from more internal perspectives.

While taking notes on the blacked-out guitar scuzz of their friends and neighbours, there was equal time spent dissecting key records by Kevin Ayers, La Düsseldorf, Joni Mitchell, Julian Cope, The Clean, and a whole litany of rainy pop music. Musically varied and lyrically congruous, ‘How Far’ finds the band at the strongest voicing of this strange nexus, one spawned from rough nights at shitty dive bars as the emotional foundations for soaring pop songs that nervously bump into one another. Largely a reflection on asserting and maintaining a queer identity in an almost completely straight crowd, Glendening’s songs hit at the gut level — either doused in syrup like the harmony-heavy “You Lift Me Up” or stretched into an anxious infinity like “Tree, Grass & Stone,” the album’s extended freak out jam that still feels like a confessional indie pop song. 

Their new album was produced by local audio wizard Jeff Else. The new songs were mastered by the singer/songwriter Fred Thomas, who’s revered amid indie-rock circles on a national scale, from his time leading the chamber-pop ensemble Saturday Looks Good To Me.

Label Review.

2019 album. Rock.

Our Overview.

Following her 2016 solo debut, the tropical bricolage ‘Amparo’, Brooklyn via Ecuador artist Maria Usbeck's second album, ‘Envejeciendo’, is a collection of songs written and recorded across the span of three years in New York City, Japan, and Florida. The former front woman of Selebrities songwriting centres on her own experience of the societal obsession with youth, specifically as a result of growing her first crop of grey hairs, sustaining a dance injury, and feeling an increased sense of alienation from technological advances.

Titled for the Spanish word for ageing, ‘Envejeciendo’ explores Marias’ first-hand experience with getting older, but filtered through her personal kaleidoscope of world textures and dreamlike narratives. The resulting record is an eccentric collection of Spanglish synth-pop, sun-dappled and mirror-polished, out of place and time. Navigating sticky subject matter with equal parts humour and tenderness, ‘Envejeciendo’ manages to be much more than a pure nostalgia vehicle, and comes with the added benefit of a slew of beach-worthy rose-tinted toe-tappers.

After forcing herself out of a depressive slump, she was determined to have fun with the subject matter, deciding to make an upbeat record that she would be excited to listen to as an 80 year old. The result is a confluence of English and Usbeck's native Spanish, peppered with personal anecdotes and nods to her research into the ageing process, including samples of particularly moving interview recordings of Usbeck's late Ecuadorian grandmother speaking animatedly about her girlhood suitors and imagining what her life could have been had she married someone else.

It's this tone of nostalgic joy coexisting with curiosity for futures both impossible and unrealised that runs throughout ‘Envejeciendo’. For Usbeck, even cloudier subject matter like ageing and death is still rife with humour, evidenced in her buoyant breed of sunshine-dappled synth pop. Flanked by drum machines and mirror-polished production, Maria imagines a futuristic version of retirement homes that are more like “really fun hotels,” robot caretakers, and Brave New World-esque rejuvenation drugs. Sonically, there are still ties to the Latin American textures of her childhood, but they're less overt than her tropical bricolage debut ‘Amparo’, instead taking back seat to the 80's synth pop and early 90's tech-house fixations of Usbeck's teenage years.

Label Review.

2019 album. Aussie psych rock.Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The ever prolific sound industrialists Melbourne based seven-piece King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have produced their fifteenth studio album, ‘Infest The Rats’ Nest’, released on Flightless Records, and it is by far The Gizz’s hardest and heaviest album to date, this time armed only with blast beats, an arsenal of well-oiled guitars that are locked and loaded and a desire to melt faces clean off.

Released just six months after the uplifting blues rock boogie and deep electro explorations of ‘Fishing For Fishes’ and drawing on the mid/late 1980s golden period of thrash metal - Metallica and Slayer certainly but also lesser-cited bands such as Exodus, Kreator and Overkill - ‘Infest The Rats’ Nest’ sees a wholly unexpected creative detour into new sonic terrain. King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard aren’t mere dabbling dilettantes either. Their love of this ferocious music runs deep, and was previously explored on 2017’s apocalyptic concept album 'Murder Of The Universe', hinted at during 2016’s award-winning 'Nonagon Infinity’s more bludgeoning moments and elsewhere in numerous hardcore psychedelic freak-outs in their back catalogue.

“In year 4 there was an older kid who was into Rammstein,” explains Stu of his early discover discovery of metal’s extremities. “I made friends with him and we put together a performance at our school assembly where we headbanged to ‘Du Hast’. I got whiplash, which I thought was pretty cool. That was my introduction to heavy metal, and soon Rammstein led to Metallica, Metallica led to Slayer, Slayer led to Kreator and Sodom. The German bands really kicked my ass and scared the hell out of me too. Later on, when I picked up a guitar I realised that shit was too hard to play, so I got into rock ‘n’ roll and garage. That was liberating.”

'Infest The Rats’ Nest' is the sound of King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard scratching the thrash metal itch, fully and unequivocally. This is an album dripping with disdain and disgust for a planet consuming itself in a mass act of cannibalism which meets the fears and anxieties of a planet head on; here is a place where uncompromising music meets the concerns of contemporary cli-fi, that emerging movement of writing centred around ecological disaster and its repercussions.

After a punishing release and touring schedule of 2017-18, 'Infest The Rats’ Nest' was recorded by a pared-down King Gizzard line-up. The band have always enjoyed a fluid approach to writing and recording and with guitarist Cook Craig and keyboardist/harmonic player Ambrose Kenny-Smith touring with their other band The Murlocs, bassist Lucas Skinner enjoying first-time fatherhood and drummer Eric Moore running the band’s own label Flightless (other bands they have released include Thee Oh Sees, Amyl And The Sniffers and Tropical Fuck Storm), they were down to a three-piece.

'Infest The Rats’ Nest' sees Stu and guitarist Joey Walker share all the guitar and bass parts, with (other drummer) Michael Cavanagh recording all the drums. This small set-up ensures tight arrangements and maximum velocity - and another curveball from this most unpredictable (yet consistent) of bands.

Label Review. 

2019 debut mini album. Ambient vocal. 

Our Overview. 

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area to Southeast Asian parents, Ana Roxanne grew up on a diet on R&B divas from the 80s/90s and the communal choruses of the choirs from the catholic church. The upbringing inspired a deep desire to sing, be it at mass, family gatherings or with the jazz ensemble from her high school. Eventually, she went on to study jazz and classical music formally, and travelled to India to live and learn with a teacher of classical Hindustani singing.

Swirling within the smoky ambience and subtle drones of opening track, “Immortality”, the first words on the release make this clear. “I was only dreaming,” Roxanne says in a plain, spoken-word delivery. “A past encounter resurfacing / from deep violet water.” In keeping with the meditative aims, the track never rises beyond its subdued sound, and indeed neither does follow-up “Slowness” - the background drones never making good on their threat to push through the digital babble.

“It’s a Rainy Day On The Cosmic Shore” presents tidal field recordings pocked not by natural drizzle but rather a static buzz, a natural world melded to the digital, while “Nocture” explores the stasis of late-night worrying, the body’s solitude matched by the soaring breadth of the mind’s wandering. The track is a good example of the sensitivity of the record, Ana Roxanne dropping guard and caution in order to more fully delve into the unseen. “Be it romance, love, or worship of a deity,” explains the album description, “in order to access such depths of emotional expression, one must be willing to be intensely vulnerable, lay one’s heart in the open air, expose what is kept hidden.”

The hauntological tone of “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” evokes a version of reality that never came to pass, before closer “In a Small Valley” draws things back the the present, finding beauty and meaning in the quotidian. The song highlights the true purpose of the album, Roxanne’s art not some linear quest toward a higher level of existence, but rather a considered attempt to understand and explore that which is around her.

Label Review.

2019 album. Americana Singer/Songwriter. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

At long last, a new album of originals from Eilen Jewell - the honey-voiced songstress, who blends influences of surf-noir, early blues, classic country, folk and 1960’s era rock ’n’ roll into her mix - arriving in the form of ‘Gypsy’. Eilen is calling this her favourite album yet, both personal and much more political. New sounds. Old sounds. Electric guitar driven rockers. Classic country. Tender ballads. A Pinto Bennett cover. A protest song.

From Boise, Idaho — Eilen Jewell who is described as “one of Americana’s most intriguing and creative voices” (American Songwriter) - laughs when told her label’s president called her a musicologist. But she confirms she and her husband and bandmate, drummer Jason Beek, have a passion for studying American music. “We really love to uncover the past. It’s almost like digging for buried treasure,” she says. “For me, that’s where music is at. I like all kinds of music as long as there’s the word ‘early’ in front of it.” Then, like expert stonecutters, they chiseled them into exciting new shapes and forms, honoring history while breathing new life into each discovery.

And ‘Gypsy’ continues to solidify Jewell’s reputation as one of the most distinctive and potent voices in the Americana world today.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Americana. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Newgrass/Americana string band from Belleville, Illinois Old Salt Union are releasing their new album ‘Where The Dogs Don’t Bite’ to delight their global fanbase. Old Salt Union is a string band founded by a horticulturist, cultivated by classically trained musicians, and fuelled by a vocalist/bass player who is also a hip-hop producer with a fondness for the Four Freshmen. It is this collision of styles and musical vocabularies that informs their fresh approach to bluegrass and gives them an electric live performance vibe that seems to pull more from Vaudeville than the front porch.

Old Salt Union once again enlisted Grammy-winning banjoist and Compass co-founder Alison Brown to produce the follow-up to their self-titled Compass Records debut. The resulting album, ‘Where The Dogs Don’t Bite’, builds on this non-traditional stringband’s varied musical backgrounds for a wildly entertaining, eclectic batch of songs.

The quintet Ryan Murphy (banjo), Justin Wallace (mandolin), John Brighton (violin), Jesse Farrar (primary vocalist and bassist) and newest member Graham Curry (guitar) have continued to hone and develop their sound through relentless touring, cultivating a steadfast fanbase drawn to their highenergy shows. Coming from varied musical backgrounds, Old Salt Union’s collective melting pot of styles and musical vocabularies informs their fresh approach to modern string band music and has helped to carve a unique niche for this Belleville, Illinois roots outfit.

Farrar, nephew of Son Volt’s Jay Farrar , kicks off the album with “God You Don’t Need,” a hook laden ode to a relationship gone bad set against a tapestry of strings and an eerily compelling banjo melody. Label mate Bobby Osborne guests on “Tells Me So,” a nod to the bluegrass side of the band’s musical sensibilities featuring a lead vocal by mandolinist Justin Wallace. Violinist Brighton delivers the gypsy-tinged instrumental “Johann’s Breakdown,” which pulls from jazz and classical progressions, and Wallace delivers the haunting title track, “Where The Dogs Don’t Bite.” The dark, but heartfelt song features triple-layered guitar harmonies, stacked vocals and a group sing-along that recalls last call at a corner pub in the rust belt, a fitting closing.

“Old Salt Union has the groove and the chops of a great string band, balanced with infectious rock and roll energy. Their music occupies that sweet space between Old Crow folk and Yonder Mountain jam not a bad place to be for a band about to break.” No Depression

Label Review.

2019 album. Punk/metal.

Our Overview.

Freedumb, the punk/metal project from acclaimed singer/guitar player Zach Slaughter, offers its second album ‘Calculate My Love’ as a follow-up to the debut fan-favourite record “Skate N Die”. Known for his work as the frontman of Skull Fist, Zach digs even deeper into experimental territory now yielding an eccentric punk/rock band, with commercially viable songs, clean vocals and harmonies, over an energetic punk/ metal mixture, and pop rock elements.

Freedumb continues its cheeky sense of humour through it all. ‘Calculate My Love’ features 9 tracks of punk/experimental rock in the vein of Weezer, David Bowie, The National, trademarked with Zach’s unique vocal style along with metal elements and virtuoso style guitar solos, plus the lyrical humour of NOFX and Frank Zappa. The top production and lyrical hooks will have you bobbing your head throughout the record.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

When P.P. Arnold arrived in London on 23rd September 1966 to support The Rolling Stones as one of Ike & Tina Turner’s backing singers, The Ikettes, little did she know that her world was about to be turned upside down. The shy but vivacious 19-year-old caught the eye of Mick Jagger, who would persuade her to stay in London and record as a solo artist – ultimately leading to a five-decade career working with everyone from Jagger, the Small Faces, Rod Stewart, Barry Gibb and Eric Clapton, to Nick Drake, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, the KLF, Paul Weller, Ocean Colour Scene and Primal Scream, to name a few.

Five decades after she became a ‘60s icon with the timeless pop hits ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’ and ‘Angel Of The Morning’ on Rolling Stones manager Andrew Oldham’s ultra-hip Immediate label, soul singer P.P. Arnold is set to release a double-album of stunning new material featuring contributions from, among others, Paul Weller, Ocean Colour Scene’s Steve Cradock, The Specials and P.P’s songwriter son, Kodzo.

‘The New Adventures Of P.P. Arnold’ was recorded and produced by life-long P.P. enthusiast, Ocean Colour Scene star and Paul Weller band guitarist Steve Cradock at his Kundalini Studio in Devon – after a 51-year gap in P.P. Arnold’s recording career. The beginnings of the album - spanning classic orchestral soul, sunshine pop, house music, a spinechilling gospel elegy inspired by her daughter’s death, two Paul Weller originals and an epic, edgy 10-minute reading of Bob Dylan’s poem ‘The Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie’.

“It’s great that I’m coming back with this record,” says P.P. “Even now, I’m still finding my way, because the industry changes every decade, and you’re sometimes out of the loop. For me it’s all about faith, meditating, love, praying… try to be ready and don’t give up the fight. That’s the message.”

Label Review. 

2019 album.  Also available on CD, CD+(Deluxe Edition) and Picture Disc.

Our Overview. 

The Welsh Brit pop indie rockers Feeder are back with their tenth studio album ‘Tallulah’ and busy touring too boot to delight fans. Following on from consecutive Top 10 albums with 2016’s ‘All Bright Electric’ and the 2017 ‘Best Of’, the band has experienced somewhat of a resurgence and now replete with renewed power on their latest release. And Tallulah’ is perhaps the band’s most creative yet also concise record, an album that takes real chances while remaining committed to their punk-edged melodies and crisp song construction.

Frontman Grant Nicholas says he ponders on how different it is being in a band in the ''social media age''. He also revealed that the tracks are written from the perspective of a ''female rock star'', although the lyrical content is based on his own experiences. Speaking about the concept for the album, Grant - who formed Feeder in 1994, with long-time bandmate Taka Hirose - said: ''Everybody in music who has some success has a fear of the bubble bursting. A lot of things that come with success aren't always positive. It also touches on being a band in the social media age. It's not just about being reviewed by a certain magazine anymore, it's about being reviewed by virtually anyone who wants to do so. It's a whole different world out there for everyone, of any age.''

Feeder have released the lead single 'Fear of Flying', which, like the rest of the 12-track LP, is ''classic Feeder'' but ''stripped-back''. Grant said: ''It's a classic Feeder record. I just write the songs which feel natural to me, and I have a vision of each of them in my mind like a short film. I wanted to make a lot of the songs really adaptable. I didn't want them to have be massively produced, I wanted them to also work in a stripped-back way.''

Available as a standard CD and a beautiful Casebound gloss laminated book pack with extended booklet content. The standard LP version comes on Heavyweight 180grm White Vinyl, in deluxesleeve and printed inner bag and the Deluxe LP version is a stunning Heavyweight 180grm. Picture Disc in a PVC bag.

Label Review.

2019 album. Americana.

Our Overview.

‘Morning Sun’ is a terrific debut from The HawtThorns, an Americana band whose sun-kissed songwriting, fiery electric guitar, and lush vocal harmonies evoke the California coastline as much as the Bible Belt countryside, the HawtThorns are rooted in the collaborative chemistry of husband-and-wife duo KP and Johnny Hawthorn. ‘Morning Sun’ is a collection of warm, West Coast-influenced songs that balance the most engaging parts of the bandmates’ different backgrounds. It’s an amped-up Americana album with sun-kissed songwriting, fiery electric guitar, and lush vocal harmonies that evoke the California coastline as much as the Bible Belt countryside. From the heartland rock & roll of “All I Know” to the soulful empowerment anthem “Rebel Road” to the chiming, high-spirited lead single “Shaking, Morning Sun shows the full range of the HawtThorns’ interests and abilities.

Before forming their band in Los Angeles, the Hawthorns both enjoyed acclaimed careers of their own, leaving their marks upon the intersecting worlds of rock, country, and pop music. California native KP (formerly Kirsten Proffit) launched her solo career with 2006's Lucky Girl, a singer/songwriter record whose tracks found their way onto TV shows like Friday Night Lights and Dawson's Creek. By 2012, she was also touring the country with Jaime Wyatt and Manda Mosher as a member of CALICO, a trio of songwriters whose warm, nostalgic sound nodded to Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, and other icons of California's country-rock golden days. The group hit the ground running, playing 200 shows during their first year together. CALICO was a true collaboration, too — a group whose members shared songwriting and singing duties — but after two albums together (both of which were co-produced by Kirsten), the band called it quits. Life and the grind of the road had taken its toll. Besides, KP had become excited about collaborating with another musician: guitar slinger Johnny Hawthorn. 

As a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, lead guitarist, and record producer, Johnny had already performed with bands like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Everclear by the time he crossed paths with KP at the Cinema Bar in Culver City, CA. He'd also released three albums as a solo artist, with Guitar Player Magazine likening his phrasing to Jimi Hendrix and his vocal melodies to the Eagles. The connection between KP and Johnny was immediate, and the two spent their first date playing songs together. Before long, they were writing songs of their own — melodic music that made room for KP's voice, Johnny's guitar, and plenty of collaboratively-written hooks. The two became newlyweds, too, their sound mirroring the mutual respect and reverence found in their marriage.

In a genre that often trends toward moody sounds, Morning Sun is every bit as bright as its name indicates — an Americana album inspired by the sun-streaked California landscape in which it was written and recorded. It's a record about intersecting lives and finding that balance, with songs that rely equally on Johnny's guitar lines (which he approaches with the nuance of a songwriter) and KP's melodic sensibilities. KP and Johnny aren't newcomers — they've both weathered the ups and downs of the music industry for years, struggling to overcome musical (and personal) breakups along the way — but they've tapped into a new beginning with Morning Sun. Here's to fresh starts. 

"Already a leading light in L.A.’s independent country scene, the HawtThorns swing for the heartland country-rock fences with “Shaking,” whose brightly-strummed guitars and sunny harmonies channel the warmth of the band’s west coast home." Rolling Stone Country

"The album’s West-coast Americana sound evokes the California coastline, with emotive song writing, lush harmonies and great guitar, strings and organ, all in the mix." Iain Anderson Show BBC Scottland

"The HawtThorns bring a truly diverse slate of musical experiences to the table.” The Boot

“The HawtThorns, Morning Sun. Everything comes together on this terrific debut from husband-and-wife duo KP and Johnny Hawthorn, which boasts ringing guitars, fresh-sounding lyrics, consistently strong melodies with powerful hooks, and great harmonies.” Jeff Burger, Americana Highways

Label Review. 

1977 debut album. Features Peter Cook, and Sarah Vaughan. CD 1-3: The original triple album. CD4: Musical Excerpts from Consequences which features the eight musical selections. CD5: Edited Highlights - originally issued as a promotional device at the time.

Our Overview. 

Godley and Creme are/were half of 1970s hit makers 10cc who blended clever experimentalism with cunning tunes. By 1976 the pair had grown frustrated with being in 10cc with their partners Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart and matters came to a head during the making of their fourth album ‘How Dare You!’. The pair decided to split to concentrate on a new project that was already underway while they were still in the group but knew wouldn’t fit with 10cc.

The pair had invented an electric guitar effect in 1969 which they christened the ‘Gizmotron’ and had been used on 10cc’s records up to that point. It allowed a guitar to sound like other instruments which saved money on hiring musicians for orchestral overdubs. Their new album was intended to be a demonstration for their device and took some 18 months to make and featured narration by Peter Cook and singing from Sarah Vaughan.

The concept album revolved around a story peppered with actual songs. The plot as boiled down on wikipedia says: “the play takes place in the office of the increasingly drunken solicitor Mr. Haig; he is negotiating the divorce between Walter Stapleton and his French wife Lulu, represented by Mr. Pepperman. They are continually interrupted by Mr. Blint, an eccentric composer, who lives below; when the building was redeveloped he was the only tenant who refused to sell and a hole remains in Mr. Haig’s floor which is, technically, Blint’s attic; it is through this hole that Blint addresses them. The litigants are unaware that larger forces are at work; the world is being threatened by a meteorological disaster. Weather is possibly being used as a weapon in a global war, and eventually it dawns on them that only Mr. Blint can save them, with his arcane knowledge of pyramids, music and the number 17.”

Mercury Records, the duos label were hoping for another hit following the recent 10cc album from Gouldman and Stewart. However, mouths dropped at the playback of the album were label staff were left wondering how they were going to sell such an extravagant album. The record ultimately performed poorly in the marketplace and a shorter song based edition was released later. Although Godley and Creme went on to release more albums and score some hits, ‘Consequences’ has been neglected and was only issued on CD in limited numbers in the 90s and again in the 00s. This new edition is expanded to include the other edited editions of the album.

Label Review. 

2019 album. Comes with an exclusive 8-page comic-book by official Star Wars illustrator JAKe. Hip hop. Also available on CD.

Our Overview. 

Two seminal artists and hip-hop’s favourite superheroes have unleashed the highly anticipated album ‘Adventures Of A Reluctant Superhero’ from Chali 2NA & Krafty Kuts. American rapper and hip hop artist Charles Stewart , better known as Chali 2na has done it all. From his days growing up on the hardscrabble streets of Chicago’s south side, to his subsequent explosion onto Los Angeles’ burgeoning hip-hop scene, to his tenure as MC for seminal hip-hop group Jurassic 5, Chali epitomises the portrait of a 21st century artist. English producer and DJ Krafty Kuts, real name Martin Reeves, is the multi-award winning DJ/producer and the undisputed King of breaks. Acclaimed in the UK, adored in Australia, admired in North America, Krafty is a living legend of electronic music. His multi-genre sets, dexterity on the decks and dedication to dance floor hedonism have earned him hierarchy status in every genre of electronic music. Together they injected the golden-era hip hop into the atmosphere of the Ghetto Funk Nightclub during their 2018 Adventures of a Reluctant Superhero European Tour.

The industry’s most recognisable voice, Chali 2na, and turntable wizard Krafty Kuts have been not-so-secretly preparing this project since 2017 through over 150 live shows and countless studio sessions. The time has finally come to grab your capes, don a pair of tights and load up the turntable ready for the show to begin. This is ‘Adventures Of A Reluctant Super Hero’ - prepare for the Purple Assassin and the Scratchman as they come and save your city, the scene and hip-hop as we know it.

Featuring a who’s-who of collaborations and guest appearances from hip-hop royalty, this 14-track record takes you to just about every corner of the genre, leaving no stone unturned. With Lyrics Born and Gift Of Gab joining on ‘Guard The Fort’ to deliver a serious statement of intent to open the LP, the rest of the record is an adventure through funk, breaks, rolling basslines, buckets of groove and everything in-between.

Throw in a generous portion of expertly delivered bars and vocals from genre sidekicks like Harry Shotta, Skye (Morcheeba), Omar, Dynamite MC and more, and you’re left with a hip-hop record that not even the comic books could have conceived.

Krafty explains the records vibe they were going for being “We kind of went back to the origins of hip hop and also bringing back the funk and also... a bit more of a fun side of it, too. We've always done that me and Chali -- we've always tried to bring a good fun element to hip hop. We just bring that golden-era sound back in a new style in our own way and we use fusions of funk, jazz, hip hop... there's some really crazy stuff in there. There are sounds we didn't believe existed. We just found these sounds digging for samples and by working with artists we're big fans of like Omar from the UK soul scene. We're literally buzzing about it and are very proud of it.”LP version comes with an exclusive 8-page comic-book by official Star Wars illustrator JAKe + full album download

Label Review.

2019 release. Drum & Bass remixes of classic reggae artists such as Barrington Levy, Alton Ellis, John Holt, Beenie Man, Horace Andy and more.

Our Overview. 

The world of classic reggae, dancehall and bashment collides with drum & bass for a set of stellar remixes on the ‘Jet Star Meets Hospital’ compilation. The album features sixteen first-class reworks from London Electricity, S.P.Y. Danny Byrd, Nu:Tone, Urbandawn and more; all taking a 170BPM step-out on iconic reggae artists such as Barrington Levy, Alton Ellis, John Holt, Beenie Man, Horace Andy and more.

From dancehall classic to dancefloor banger, Hospital mainstay and esteemed soul-selector Nu:Tone applies his production savviness to Barrington Levy’s seminal reggae anthem, ‘Here I Come’. Stimulated from the ground up with a warm, rolling bassline and kitted out with skittering amens to boot.

Fresh from his huge cover of the Beatles classic ‘Come Together’, Urbandawn steps into the fold with an utterly outrageous, monster remix of Chaka Demus’ ‘Forward & Pull Up’. This one speaks for itself, in Urbandawn’s trademark punchy, crunchy style.

The album is also the original home for Benny L’s infamous John Holt ‘Police In Helicopter’ remix, which shot to Beatport’s #1 spot across all genres, making both drum & bass and Beatport history.

The ‘Jet Star Meets Hospital’ project is the collaborative workings of the legendary reggae label Jet Star and leading drum & bass imprint Hospital Records. Also featured are hot and heavy remixes from Inja, Whiney, Saxxon, Particle, T>I, Quadrant, Kid Hops & Iris, Pete Cannon, Double O & Mantra, and Think Tonk.

Label Review.

2019 debut album. Jazz.

Our Overview.

The precocious 17 year old American Jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker is releasing ‘Now Hear This’. Musicians three times his age dream of playing on the same stage as Stevie Wonder, but Matthew Whitaker was only ten years old when he opened for the legend of jazz, pop and gospel at the Apollo Theatre in New York. Whitaker himself has often been compared to Wonder because of his talent, and also because he was born blind.

Whitaker has created a truly remarkable album combining original compositions and covers of songs that have influence him throughout his life - supplementing his virtuoso piano skills with soulful Hammond organ and coloristic synthesisers.

‘Now Hear This’ teams Whitaker with a stellar all-star band featuring guitarist Dave Stryker, bassist Yunior Terry, drummer Ulysses Owens Jr., and percussionist Sammy Figueroa. Keyboard great Marc Cary and flutist Gabrielle Garo also make special guest appearances. The album was overseen by GRAMMY Award-winning producer Brian Bacchus, who has worked closelywith the likes of Gregory Porter, Norah Jones, Randy Weston and Sullivan Fortner, among others.‘Now Hear This’ is a perfect summation of Whitaker’s evolution to date.

Having already appeared on the Today Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show as well as receiving praise from Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, Whitaker is quite literally the inspiration that resilience can have on a person’s life.

Endorsed by both Yamaha and Hammond, he’s enjoyed a remarkable career already, receiving the Harlem Stage Emerging Artist Award and the Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award among other honors. His promise has only begun to be fulfilled, as he prepares to enter Juilliard as a freshman this fall as the first blind undergraduate student to join Juilliard’s Jazz Study program.

Label Review.

1962 with 4 bonus tracks. Waxtime.

Our Overview.

Stunning limited edition of 500 copies, high-definition premium 180 gram vinyl audiophile pressing for super fidelity. The way this music was meant to be heard! Alexis Korner is widely regarded as the founding father of British blues. He became well known in the ‘60s, as his early performances and teachings were a magnet for young blues enthusiasts. Korner put together amplified blues outfits that spawned the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, Cream and Led Zeppelin, among others. He also became a familiar exponent of the idiom on the BBC.

This essential LP release includes R&B from the Marquee - one of Korner’s most iconic albums from his early days with Blues Incorporated. The long play was not a live album, nor was it cut at the Marquee as its title suggests. It was actually taped at Decca Records’ London studio in June 1962, produced by Jack Good and released that same year by Decca’s subsidiary label Ace of Clubs. In addition to the original long play, this limited collector’s edition includes 4 bonus tracks from the same period. The bonus material includes the guitar instrumental “3/4 A.D.” (a collaborative recording with the legendary British folk guitarist Davy Graham), Willie Dixon’s “I’m Built for Comfort,” and two hard-to-find sides: Lead Belly’s “National Defence Blues,” and the acoustic gem “Sail On.”

“Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies were the start of rhythm and blues in UK. I learned the blues through them.” - Charlie Watts

ALEXIS KORNER’S BLUES INCORPORATED: Alexis Korner (acoustic guitar), Cyril Davies (harmonica, also vocals on Side 1 tracks 3, 5, 6 & 7 / Side 2, tracks 1 & 3), John Baldry (vocals on Side 1, track 2 / Side 2, tracks 5 & 6), Spike Heatley (upright bass), Keith Scott (piano), Graham Burbidge (drums), Dick Heckstall- Smith (tenor saxophone), among others. Further personnel information is detailed inside. Recorded by Jack Clegg at Decca Studios, West Hampstead, London, June 8, 1962. Original recordings produced by Jack Good.

Track listing:

1. Gotta Move

2. Rain Is Such A Lonesome Sound

3. Got My Brand On You

4. Spooky But Nice

5. Keep Your Hands Off

6. (I Wanna Put) A Tiger In Your Tank

7. I’m Built For Comfort

8. 3/4 A.D.

9. I Got My Mojo Working / Finkle’s Caf

10. Hoochie Coochie

11. Down Town

12. How Long, How Long, Blues

13. I Thought I Heard That Whistle Blow

14. National Defence Blues

15. Sail On

Label Review. 

1957 album with 5 bonus tracks. American Jazz Classics.

Our Overview. 

John Coltrane, the now legendary and groundbreaking saxophonist had only just recorded his first album as band leader in 1957 for Prestige Records when his only album for the classic Blue Note label came up. The record was recorded on 15th September 1957 in the midst of Coltrane’s residency at the Five Spot as a member of the Thelonious Monk quartet. The personnel include Coltrane’s Miles Davis bandmates, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums, both of whom had worked before with pianist Kenny Drew. Both trumpeter Lee Morgan and trombonist Curtis Fuller were up-and-coming jazz musicians, and both were members of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in due course.

All of the compositions were written by Coltrane, with the exception of the standard “I’m Old Fashioned”. During a 1960 interview, Coltrane described Blue Train as his favourite album of his own up to that point.