Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Fronted by Texan native Danny Lee Backwell, ‘Myth Of A Man’ is Night Beats’ fourth studio album and their second for Heavenly Recordings, following the release of ‘Who Sold My Generation’ in 2016. Night Beats play pure psychedelic R&B music that spikes the punch and drowns your third eye in sonic waves of colour. Theirs is a bastard blues, contorted and distorted into new shapes for 21st century wastoids — once tasted never forgotten. This is music to melt your sorry little minds.

While Blackwell has always fed off the musical legacy of his Texas roots - Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, The Red Krayola, The Black Angels and more paving the way for the napalm-coated psych-rock headtrip of past albums - ‘Myth Of A Man’ has him pulling from the surrogate wellspring of Nashville, Tennessee.

In short, it’s an album that holds its own next to the classics, less of the bloodshot acid trip of ‘Sonic Bloom’ (2013) and ‘Who Sold My Generation’ (2016 here, Blackwell has recalibrated them, slowed them down just enough and allowed them the space to breathe and exist as something new. It’s the same book, just a different chapter.

Written during a particularly destructive period of the band, the album is populated by fallen angels, blood-sucking wanderers and vindictive lovers - sketches of people the band has surely come across during their cosmic roving through the underground - but the character most present is Blackwell himself. “‘Myth Of A Man’ can be summed up as a personal display of vulnerability and guilty conscience,” he explains, “Destroying the mythos of what it means to live and function in society.”

With its bold steps forward, ‘Myth Of A Man’ serves as both a takedown and reintroduction of the band as we know it - the strongest evidence that you’ll never be able to pin Night Beats down.

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Manchester based Lost Under Heaven are releasing their sophomore album ‘Love Hates What You Become’. A startling, thought-provoking record, ‘Love Hates What You Become’ follows the bands 2016 debut, ‘Spiritual Songs For Lovers To Sing’. Shot full of incisive social commentary, ‘Love Hates What You Become’ captures the Manchester-based audio/visual duo - comprised of Dutch artist Ebony Hoorn and British vocalist Ellery James Roberts (former WU LYFer) - at their most musically raw and visceral.

The band wrote the album in Manchester before traveling to Los Angeles to record with producer John Congleton, known for his Grammy-winning work with St. Vincent, Swans, Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós. Congleton also introduced the band to Swans drummer Thor Harris, who plays on the record. “We were without a drummer or a real band,” explains Ellery. “I just concentrated on writing the songs rather than making a sound. We turned up in LA with that as our starting point, this collection of Guitar & Piano demos that I’d sent through.”

Those demos included some of the most accomplished songwriting of his career to date, such as momentous album closer ‘For The Wild’. “I started writing that song years ago almost as a pastiche of trying to write real this rock ’n’ roll saviour,” he reminisces. “The rock ’n’ roll revolutionary feels such a culturally irrelevant cliché now, we’re living in a mechanised world seemingly indifferent to the longings of the human soul.”

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

West Palm Beach, Florida’s Afterlife will be releasing their new album ‘Breaking Point’ their debut via Hopeless Records, - the group were previously signed with Attila frontman Chris Fronzak‘s Stay Sick Recordings label.

Afterlife, made up of vocalist Tyler Levenson, guitarist Andrew McGuire, drummer Luke Walkinshaw and bassist Tristan Edwards-emerged from West Palm Beach, Florida at the tail end of 2016 with a clear vision of what they wanted to bring to the world with their music. "We talked about what we find in music that's nostalgic and memorable and implemented that into what we felt was true to us and just started from there," Levenson says of the band's formation.

Following up their fast and in-your-face Vicious Cycle EP ’Breaking Point’ ambitiously tackles a variety of impactful topics from mental health and domestic assault to political apathy and the weight of guilt over the course of 10 unique tracks that blend influences like Slipknot, Linkin Park and modern hip-hop.

The band dropped the first single from the upcoming album, "Throat." The song is very personal, diving into vocalist Tyler Levenson's journey with mental health. "I felt at times that I was controlled by the anxiety, that it was dictating everything I did," he reflects. "Everything I did, I had some type of doubt in my mind because of it."

On the new single and signing announce, the band shares, "'Throat' is one of our favorite songs from the record and right after it was recorded we knew that we wanted this to be the first song the world got to hear from our upcoming record 'Breaking Point' out on January 11th, 2019. Hopeless is synonymous with some of the best artists in the music world and we couldn't be happier being a part of the Hopeless family!"

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Toronto, shoegaze/dream pop band Tallies are releasing their debut album ‘Tallies’. The band includes Sarah Cogan (vocals, rhythm guitar), Dylan Frankland (lead guitar), Cian O’Neill (drums), and Stephen Pitman (bass). The band’s self-titled debut comes out Jan 11th via Fear of Missing Out Records, January 11th and was co-produced by Frankland and Josh Korody at Toronto’s Candle Recordings, a hot spot where locals like Metz, Dilly Dally Austra, and Weaves. It’s also where Frankland works as an engineer/producer.

Sara Cogan started music lessons at a young age, learning simple piano melodies and guitar chords that she could sing and write lyrics over. Frankland has also been immersed in music for most of his life, growing up with a music-obsessed father who introduced him to greats like The Smiths, The Sundays, Aztec Camera, and Cocteau Twins. He subconsciously carried these influences into Tallies, which is evident in the Johnny Marr stylings of his guitar riffs and the Robin Guthrie-tinged shoegaze textures of his production. “While writing this album, we were listening to The Sundays Reading, Writing and Arithmetic a lot,” says Frankland, adding, “Harriet Wheeler’s soft-spokenly sweet melodies has a major influence on where Sarah sometimes takes her writing to.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

'Kirsty Bertarelli announces that her new studio album ‘Sweet Summer Rain’ will be released on 14th December via Caroline International.

‘Tick Tock’ is the second track taken from her forthcoming album ‘Sweet Summer Rain’. Kirsty’s passion for music evolved far from her childhood poetry and local theatre performances. This desire to create music lasted well into adulthood, resulting in her writing of ‘I Wouldn’t Wanna Be’ which became the hit ‘Black Coffee’ for legendary pop group All-Saints. Since then, she has continued her musical journey collaborating with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and has supported Simple Minds, Robbie Williams and Jools Holland live.

In Kirsty’s own words, she says ‘For me, a most important journey has been my musical one, and the wonderful people I have known through music.’

Label Review. 

1968 album remastered. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Released in late 1968, the second Pearls Before Swine record continued to deliver music with a preternatural sense of what the youth of America wanted to hear. ‘One Nation Underground’ had been a surprise hit when released in 1967 by the hipster free jazz indie label ESP, receiving an incredible organic response, with continuous underground radio play and sales. Coming from obscurity in Florida into a position of speaking to people everywhere, Tom Rapp and his bandmates felt emboldened to embark upon an evolved piece of record making.

The music of ‘Balaklava’ strips away the manic, post-garage band diversity of the first album, instead grounding the production around Tom Rapp’s guitar and singing, with the touches of instrumental colour all the more dramatic and striking. Producer Richard Alderson utilized breathy sweeps of reverb, sound effects, tape manipulation and spoken word recordings along with an array of instrumental overdubs including banjo, marimba, organ, clavinet, flute, English horn and strings (played by the band along with New York jazz session players Bill Salter and Al Schackman, plus The Fugs’ Lee Crabree and legendary saxophonist Joe Farrell, with Selwart Clarke and Warren Smith contributing string arrangements) to reach for the universal space sought in Tom Rapp’s meditative, existential songs.

Tom Rapp passed away while this album was being readied for re-release. While he spent the majority of his life working as a lawyer who practiced humanist, equal rights law - “60s law,” as he put it - for the benefit of many under represented people, his name will best be remembered and will forever be synonymous with the music of Pearls Before Swine. We are grateful to help in pushing this music forward toward the eternity it deserves. It goes without saying that this anniversary restoration of ‘Balaklava’ is dedicated to Tom’s memory. May he rest in peacefulness and live in the positivity that Pearls Before Swine bring to all who hear their music.

Label Review. 

2018 live album. Springsteen on Broadway is a solo acoustic performance written and performed by Bruce Springsteen under the lights of Broadway. It is an intimate night with Bruce, his guitar, a piano, and his stories. Also available on 4LP.  

Our Overview. 

Springsteen himself said of the performances “I wanted to do some shows that were as personal and as intimate as possible. I chose Broadway for this project because it has the beautiful old theaters which seemed like the right setting for what I have in mind. In fact, with one or two exceptions, the 960 seats of the Walter Kerr Theatre is probably the smallest venue I’ve played in the last 40 years. My show is just me, the guitar, the piano and the words and music. Some of the show is spoken, some of it is sung. It loosely follows the arc of my life and my work. All of it together is in pursuit of my constant goal to provide an entertaining evening and to communicate something of value”.

Label Review.

2018 album also available on CD+ and Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘What Is Love?’ is the second studio album from the British electronic and pop trio Clean Bandit and it is the fruit of the past three years’ work and an exciting new chapter for the band and their follow-up to the two million-selling and uk top 3 debut ‘New Eyes’. On announcing the new album the band tweeted "We can’t wait to share new music with you very soon!" And it features a a plethora of prominent artists like Charlie XCX, Ellie Goulding, Sean Paul, Demi Lovato, Luis Fonsi and others. 

The album will come four years after their debut studio album ‘New Eyes’, which featured the breakout hits "Rather Be" and "Real Love" with Jess Glynne. Clean Bandit's more recent succesful singles "Rockabye" featuring Sean Paul and Anne-Marie, "Nowhere" featuring Rita Ora and KYLE, and "Symphony" with Zara Larsson are all set to appear on the second album.

‘What iIs Love?’ is a home to Clean Bandit’s inventive, eclectic multi-genre catalogue – a collection of gigantic upbeat megabops married with emotive lyricism. a band that thrive on being a true collaborative endeavour.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” we are told and in the old tradition, Aidan Moffat and RM Hubbert invite you to gather round the fire for ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’, billed as "an alternative view on the Season to be Jolly".

The album began with an idea for a song - ‘A Ghost Story For Christmas’. Originally intended as a one-off, seasonal release, it proved such fun to write that soon they had enough songs for an EP. “Then, on a nice, sunny, summer morning, I phoned Hubby and suggested we just do a whole album,” says Moffat. "We were really enjoying it – there’s something pleasantly perverse about recording Christmas songs in summer clothes – so we just kept going," says Moffat, who draws inspiration from the likes of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens.

The album also features their cover of Yazoo’s synth classic ‘Only You’, already a popular number in their live set. The cover versions are topped off with a sombre rendition of Mud’s 1974 hit, ‘Lonely This Christmas’.The album features Moffat's long-term collaborator Jenny Reeve on violin and vocals, Emma Pollock on choral duties, clarinet and flute from John Burgess, and the band's live drummer David Jeans.

The album is available on CD, digital download and heavyweight white vinyl LP with the download card doubling up as a personally signed Christmas card from the duo themselves.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Van the Man is back huh his 40th studio album, quite a feat itself. This fourteen track album follows a recent run of hugely acclaimed albums (‘Roll With The Punches’, ‘Versatile’ and ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’), each of which has delved deep into the musical styles that have continued to inspire Van throughout his life – vocal jazz and R&B. Here, Van takes on a series of unarguable classics by the likes of John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke and Solomon Burke (among others) and makes them unmistakably his own. Alongside these reinterpretations, ‘The Prophet Speaks’ features six phenomenal new Van Morrison compositions.

Van Morrison says of ‘The Prophet Speaks’: “It was important for me to get back to recording new music as well as doing some of the blues material that has inspired me from the beginning. Writing songs and making music is what I do, and working with great musicians makes it all the more enjoyable.”

‘The Prophet Speaks’ again finds Van working with the incredible multi-instrumentalist Joey DeFrancesco (the artist co-credited on ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’) and his band (including Dan Wilson on guitar, Michael Ode on drums and Troy Roberts on tenor saxophone).

Label Review. 

1998 album remastered. Also available on expanded 3CD. 

Our Overview. 

The Manics fifth album saw the band under immense pressure after the massive success of ‘Everything Must Go’ their 1996 album which not only saw the band finally crossing over to mainstream popularity, but also was their first record without Richie Edwards who disappeared in 1995. Although the remaining trio considered splitting up, instead they rose like the phoenix and scored four Top 10 hits and then grabbed a couple of Brit Awards for their trouble in ‘97.

Sticking with producer Mike Hedges who midwifed the previous album, they continued to move towards a lush musical backdrop, away from their earlier hard rock sound. After sharing lyric writing duties with Edwards, Nicky Wire had to write all the words for their new album for the first time.The first single from the album: “If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next” gave the band their first No.1 single and the album followed it to No.1 in the albums chart a few weeks later, also their first. Subsequent singles also performed well and the album sold as well as the last one, including increased across Europe and Asia. More Brit Awards and sold out tours followed in 1999, consolidating their position as one of Britain’s biggest bands.

Label Review.

2018 album also availble on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Richard Swift believed in and sought real beauty. Therefore, even at its most caustic and sardonic, his masterpiece swan song ‘The Hex’ is beautiful. Conceived in pieces over the last several years and completed just the month before his passing, ‘The Hex’ is the grand statement Swift acolytes have been awishin’- and-a-hopin’ for all these years. After a career of sticking some of his finest songs on EPs and 45s, here are all his powers coalescing into a single long-playing statement.

Fearless exploration defined the work of Richard Swift as a producer and collaborator. Working mostly at his National Freedom studio in Cottage Grove, Oregon, he guided singer/songwriters toward their most otherworldly music (Damien Jurado, Kevin Morby) and helped more whimsical acts evolve into wilder forms (Foxygen, the Shins). The records he released under his own name, though, were more straightforward and solitary, if not necessarily somber. Playing nearly everything himself and singing through stoned, self-deprecating asides, Swift cracked jokes about his record collection, his frustrations with the industry and how his Quaker upbringing might have doomed him from the start. Swift’s immersive and ornate indie pop suggested he saw himself as a tragic soldier facing a battle larger than himself. Since his death in July at the age of 41, the lyric that’s echoed in my head rings like an epitaph: “My name will go missing/But the songs will be here.”

Richard Swift believed in and sought real beauty. Therefore, even at its most caustic and sardonic, his masterpiece swan song ‘The Hex’ is beautiful. Conceived in pieces over the last several years and completed just the month before his passing, ‘The Hex’ is the grand statement Swift acolytes have been awishin’- and-a-hopin’ for all these years. After a career of sticking some of his finest songs on EPs and 45s, here are all his powers coalescing into a single long-playing statement.

At its core, ‘The Hex’ is an aching call out into the void for Swift’s mother (‘Wendy’) and his sister (‘Sister Song’) whom he lost in back-to-back years. You hear a man at his lowest and spiritually on his heels. The pain fuelling Swift’s cries of “She’s never comin’ back” on the absolutely gutting standout ‘Nancy’ is some sort of dark catharsis for anyone who’s ever lost a loved one to the cold abstraction of death. Over a slow Wall of Sound kick and a warbling synth, Swift’s cries climb higher and higher into what may be his most devastating vocal performance on record. A cry of pain so real and so raw Swift had to treat the performance with just a little studio effect, without which the recorded grieving might be too much to bear.

‘The Hex’ is presented here as ‘The Hex For Family and Friends’. An obsessive fan of Wall of Sound doo-wop, early Funkadelic, Bo Diddley, Beefheart and Link Wray, Swift gives them all a moment with the flashlight around ‘The Hex’ campfire, one moment to make a strange shadow-cast face for us, his family and friends.

Conceived in pieces over the last several years and completed just the month before his passing.

A close collaborator and performer with The Shins and The Black Keys and producer of some of the most loved independent releases of the last 10 years.

Label Review. 

1970 album with previously unreleased instrumental backing tracks. This was his final album for Capitol.

Our Overview. 

‘Earth Rot’ is visionary composer / arranger / producer David Axelrod’s third album, and the last of his Capitol trilogy. Recorded as a concept album about the decrepit state of the environment in 1970 Los Angeles, and scheduled for release on the first Earth Day, it features choral vocals and marks a departure for Axelrod’s signature sound, which would take on a jazzier feel in the 1970s.

This definitive version of ‘Earth Rot’, overseen by Now-Again’s Eothen Alapatt in conjunction with Axelrod’s Estate, fulfills a request Axelrod made while alive – to see the instrumentals of this album, never before released, issued. They see release here as the second half of a deluxe CD reissue. This is an audiophile reissue, with the vocal version transferred directly from Axelrod’s original master tapes at Capitol Records by Ron McMaster. The master was approved by Axelrod’s son Michael, who adapted ancient lyrics for the album in one of three collaborative projects he did with his father.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Nick Saloman is a true hero, a musician's musician. A cult entity, his work as The Bevis Frond - which now totals an almost incalculable number of albums, singles, and EPs - blends artfully British songwriting with fuzzed out elements of the American underground.

Nick Saloman continues to fly the psych freak flag! His 2018 delivery 'We're Your Friends, Man' is a 90-minute blast of buzzsaw guitars and the liberating songcraft of The Beatles, presented with a jagged edge, intense swathes and swerving changes that give the material a transatlantic propulsion. Saloman's lyrics, as always, bristle with incisive wit and poignant observations.

Lauded by Teenage Fanclub, his work has charmed J Mascis, a singular catalogue that, despite being vast, is actually forever welcoming. The new album 'We're Your Friends, Man' arrives on December 7th through Fire Recordings, and it's billed as a stellar return from a true iconoclast.

To the point, on the money ‘We’re Your Friends Man’ is dramatic, plucking at the heart strings, spilling one liners, milking the past and crafting something completely new. Every song that the Frond’s front man Nick Saloman writes has the effect of little orchestras tuning up in your head, sketching the scene and filling in the blanks – a feat explained in the cunningly titled ‘Little Orchestras’, no less. And there’s more personal realisations on offer for sure – ‘Growing’, ‘A Hard Way To Learn’ and ’Young Man’s Game’ make for a strident midfield in this 20-track squad.

But doesn’t every Bevis Frond album do that? Sure… The man writes great songs, he knows his way around a verse and chorus as well as he knows the best route around a guitar, he also has his tongue firmly in his cheek throughout.

Label Review.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) Splendor In The Grass (1961) The Young Savages (1961) The Arrangement (1969) Pull My Daisy (ft Jack Kerouac) (1959) Isnt It Delicious (2016) On The Waterfront (Broadway production 1995) After The Fall (Broadway production) (1964) Echo Of An Era (documentary short subject featuring Cecil Taylor) (1956).

Our Overview.

‘Jazz On Film: Classic American Film Scores 1956 - 2016’ the latest release on Moochin’ About’s ‘Jazz On Film’ series features a rare and unique 5CD collection from the multi-instrumentalist classical composer and author David Amram.

Using the music from his own personal archives, the box set includes highlights from seven of his film scores and two Broadway productions, celebrating a career spanning 60 years. All of these scores have been re-mastered and the included 60 page colour booklet has been written by David Amram.

Beginning in 1956 with a rare short film ‘Echo of An Era’, a story about the history of the Third Avenue El and the ever changing nature of New York, this excerpt gives a glimpse of the creativity of Cecil Taylor on piano - his first ever recording opportunity - and a hint of what Amram has done since.

The box set concludes with a score to Michael Patrick Kelly’s film ‘Isn’t It Delicious’. It features Latin legends Paquito D’Rivera, Candido, a bevy of great contemporary jazz artists like Slide Hampton, Jimmy Owens and Earl McKintyre and classical chamber music instrumentalists Harumi Rhodes and a group for the Copland Center.

Amram, rightfully hailed as a Renaissance man of American Music, plays more than 35 instruments and with Julius Watkins, was a pioneer in introducing the French horn to jazz more than sixty years ago while a member in the bands of many of the 1950s jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus, Kenny Dorham and Oscar Pettiford. He also developed friendships while jamming or recording with Thelonious Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Betty Carter, Stan Getz, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Nina Simone, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Arturo Sandoval, Paquito d'Rivera, Candido, Ray Mantilla, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Thad Jones, Sonny Rollins, Wynton Marsalis, Leonard Bernstein, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Odetta, Jack Kerouac, Richie Havens, Steve Martin, Pete Seeger, Sir James Galway and Johnny Depp.

“David Amram has done a magnificent job. The score is exactly what I wanted for the film. The music is almost sane sometimes… as the story is almost sane sometimes... And at other times, the music is in the trees, just like the movie. It is a great score!” - Frank Sinatra (star & co-executive producer ‘The Manchurian Candidate’)

“David Amram is one of the most versatile and skilled musicians America has ever produced” - Washington Post“A Godsend to those who believe in the power of music to change lives and inspire” - Wynton Marsalis (Artistic Director Of Jazz at the Lincoln Center)

Label Review.

2018 album also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Farai’s debut album - a collaborative project between London based vocalist Farai Bukowski-Bouquet and musician and producer TONE - via Big Dada, documents a process of recovery. ‘Rebirth’ weaves together South East London landmarks, the bare-bones ethos of post-punk and the experience of being part of the African diaspora, continuing the themes of their 2017 debut EP, ‘Kisswell’.

The lyrics of eponymous vocalist Farai are coloured by the different cities she’s lived in, including London. Having met TONE via Shop Floor Sessions, recording and writing followed in Hackney, Lewisham and a shared studio with Mica Levi aka Micachu. TONE laid down synthesisers and guitar to Farai’s poetry and drums were recorded with Marc Pell from Micachu & The Shapes. The result is Farai’s alternative vision of pop; distinctive and many-sided at once, poised between punk directness and flourishes of soulful warmth.

For fans of Young Fathers, Mica Levi, Tirzah, King Krule, Sleaford Mods, Mount Kimbie.

Carbon disc CD with softpack card wallet. LP on yellow vinyl housed in a 3mm spined outer sleeve with printed inner, plus digital download code. Artwork by Haribo Cosmo Jones. Layout by Sofia Lucarelli.

Farai performed live at Uniqlo Tate Lates to coincide with the highly successful ‘Soul Of A Nation’ exhibition celebrating black American artists. She performed with Zezi Ifore, Mark Godfrey and Jade Montserrat.

Label Review.

2018 live album and film. Also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The awesome Bay Area producer DJ Shadow (Josh Davis) releases ‘Live In Manchester: The Mountain Has Fallen Tour’. Recorded at a sold out Albert Hall in Manchester, England, the release (out 13th July on Mass Appeal Records) is now on vinyl, CD, and digitally.

‘Live In Manchester: The Mountain Has Fallen Tour’, documents DJ Shadow’s most ambitious, extensive worldwide tour yet - surrounded by stunning visuals, he blasts through classics and more obscure cuts from his discography.

Josh Davis was catapulted to prominence thanks to his landmark debut album, ‘Endtroducing’, acknowledged by Guinness World Records as the first LP created entirely from samples.  Since then, Shadow has continually moved forward releasing innovative albums and collaborating with the likes of Thom Yorke, Massive Attack, Jason Newsted (Metallica), Mike D (Beastie Boys), Zack de la Rocha and several others.  Live In Manchester: The Mountain Has Fallen Tour continues an exceptional couple of years for the producer: in 2016 he unleashed innovate new album The Mountain Will Fall, which birthed his biggest single yet, Nobody Speak featuring Run The Jewels; a massive worldwide tour followed - The Mountain Has Fallen Tour - plus an EP featuring collaborations with Oscar-winning film composer Steven Price, rap maverick Danny Brown and hip-hop hero Nas. 

Label Review. 

1973 album remastered with 18 bonus tracks. CD2 contains reconstruction of the original double album idea. CD3 with 17 bonus tracks. DVD1: Music Videos / James Paul McCartney TV Special / Live And Let Die [Live in Liverpool] / Newcastle Interview. DVD2 & Blu-ray: The Bruce McMouse Show plus 5.1 mixes. 128pp book containing many previously unpublished images by Linda McCartney, expanded album and single artwork from the archives and story behind the album including new interviews with Paul McCartney, and key album personnel and track-by-track information, written by Amanda Petrusich. 64pp photo book capturing 'Wings In Morocco'. Folio containing Paul McCartney’s original character sketches and dialogue sheets for The Bruce McMouse Show. Also available on 2CD, 2LP, and Special 2LP. 

Our Overview. 

Paul McCartney formed ‘Wings’ in 1971, following his second solo album ‘Ram’. His first band since the break-up of The Beatles, issued it’s first album ‘Wings Wild Life’ in late 1971 before heading out on the short ‘University Tour’ in the New Year. A European tour followed later in that year. Three singles were issued in ‘72, two of which made the UK Top 10: “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and “Hi Hi Hi”. Sessions for the bands second album continued throughout the year and the original plan was to make a double album.

EMI had other ideas, and considering the first album got a lukewarm reception and sales to match, they were non-committal to a double record and McCartney was forced to cut it down to a single album. However, the single released ahead of the album “My Love” was a Top 10 hit and the resultant record restored some of Macca’s commercial standing. It helped that the record was billed as ‘Paul McCartney & Wings’ as would his next album, the sales busting ‘Band On The Run’.

The original double album concept is reconstructed as part of this new deluxe edition of the album which has been out of print on CD for nearly ten years.

Label Review.

2005 album.

Our Overview.

King Creosote, aka Kenny Anderson, is the co-founder and figurehead of Fife’s wonderfully eccentric and frequently brilliant Fence Collective, a loose group of purveyors of “skewered folk, folkadelica, nonsensical, bluedoh and swampguff.

Following up from the excellent, if patchy, ‘Kenny And Beth’s Musakal Boat Rides’ now available for the first time on Vinyl (a mix of a decade’s worth of King Creosote CD-Rs), ‘Rocket D.I.Y.’ is a more coherent, more controlled effort. Written and recorded in the space of a few weeks, it also offers a clearer picture of Anderson the man – witty, romantic, mournful and faintly mystical.

‘Rocket D.I.Y.’ is the home-recorded follow up to 2003’s ‘Kenny and Beth’s Musakal Boat Rides’. Instead of a collection of songs spanning several years, ‘Rocket D.I.Y.’ contains 12 new songs, all written and recorded over a period of weeks. Acoustic guitar and piano based songs have been embellished with accordion, banjo, electronics and a smattering of samples. Collective drummers OnTheFly and Captain Geeko deliver an altogether new punch, with Pip Dylan’s pedal steel adding that final twang. ‘Rocket D.I.Y.’ can best be described as a recollection of a hectic year. From the cosmic highs to the lunar lows come world weary themes of age consciousness and humdrum household chores sitting alongside wide eyed travel adventures and far-fetched yarns. With its scratchy sentiments, anthemic yearnings and downright nonsense, ‘Rocket D.I.Y.’, like ‘Kenny and Beth’s Musakal Boat Rides’ before it, takes you on a Neukian journey possibly not as far as the stars but one you’ll want to take again.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The phenomenal Jeff Tweedy releases ‘Warm’. A solo album of all new material on November 30th via dBpm Records. ‘Warm’ was produced and recorded entirely by Jeff at Chicago’s now legendary studio, The Loft (with help from some of his usual collaborators – Spencer Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and Tom Schick). ‘Warm’ follows the acoustic retrospective release, Together at Last (2017), and Wilco’s 2016 album, Schmilco. 

The incredible liner notes for ‘Warm’ were written by George Saunders and are available to read in full at The New Yorker.

“Certain lyrical flowers sprout up with regularity across the ten song-yards that are this record. A son who has lost a father sings to his wife, his sons, that father. There are apologies, and mirror-twins; threats to enemies (‘I’d love to take you down / and leave you there’) and entreaties (‘Let’s go rain again!’) and dreamy challenges (‘I wonder how much freedom we can dream’) and ornery morphings of language that serve a simple function: they make the listener love language again.” – George Saunders, Liner Notes for Jeff Tweedy’s ‘Warm’.

In conjunction with album announcement, dBpm presents lead single, “Some Birds,” and its accompanying video directed by Seth Henrikson. "When I got the call to collaborate with Jeff on the video for ‘Some Birds’ it was a thrill and an honor,” comments Henrikson. “The concept for the video naturally highlights Jeff’s amazing song writing and lyrical genius. However, it also exploits another of Jeff’s gifts -- his uncanny sense of men’s fashion and hairstyles. I’m excited to share it with Tweedy fans!” 

Jeff describes the song as “like a lot of songs on ‘Warm’, being a confrontation between self and shadow self simultaneously feeling I'm to blame and not to blame, present and gone, and utterly confused, but determined to hold someone accountable.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Daniel Romano’s new album, ‘Finally Free’, could stand alone as being pivotal if it were only its profound and breath-taking prose on paper. Writing now like an agnostic Whitman in his prime, Romano explores and uncovers new language and meaning for old sentiments grown tired, stating, “these poems are most certainly my finest and most principled efforts to date.”

‘Finally Free’ marks Daniel Romano’s eighth long playing album in the last eight years. He has had what understatedly would be considered a prolific output of incredibly entrancing, poignant and creative records in this span of time. Recording, producing, designing and landing his records into the minds and hearts of scores of fans the world over. He has been called a shapeshifter, contrived, a chameleon, a charlatan, the best living songwriter, an asshole and a genius. His last record, ‘Modern Pressure’, received outstandingly high acclaim and praise from every notable publication out there and was acknowledged by a plethora of voguish year-end lists. Despite being the bronze placeholder in most of these dogfights, he is most often noted as a person of astounding influence on all of his musically economic successors.

“No matter what he does, everything he puts out is better than anything else being put out by anyone else.” - Unnamed Subjugate

‘Finally Free’ sings like a radical revelation, exploring the concepts of music as a celestial being, flora as a consequential ancestor and singing, no matter its quality or sound, as the endmost important output of our species. This record contains a vivid religious articulation despite its clear condemnation of a god as a singular ruling white male. New words have replaced old words for new meaning and the definitions have been left up to interpretation.

Label Review. 

Remastered. Aerial, Director’s Cut, 50 Words For Snow, Before The Dawn, 12” Mixes, The Other Side 1, The Other Side 2, In Others’ Words.

Our Overview. 

After ten years out of the limelight, Kate’s return in 2005 with the single “King Of The Mountain” was welcomed by her fans, starved of new product. The parent album ‘Aerial’ was a double album too and proved that Bush had not lost her musical touch since ‘The Red Shoes’. Six months later when David Gilmour released his new album ‘On An Island’ no-one noticed the coincidences between the two records. Both albums were on EMI, and both artists previous records (in Gilmour’s case it was Pink Floyd’s ‘The Division Bell’) were issued twelve years after their last! See our review of Box Set One for the other Bush-Gilmour connection!

There was another long wait (six years) before more material arrived from Kate and this time there were two albums! The first was ‘The Director’s Cut’ which saw Kate revisit certain tracks from ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘The Red Shoes’ to make an all new album. ‘50 Words For Snow’ appeared six months later and this was composed of all new material and at the time of writing remains her last studio album. In 2014, Kate surprised her fans again by announcing her first live shows in 35 years. Booking the Hammersmith Apollo for 22 nights and selling out the lot, the audio document of the shows was issued two years later as ‘Before The Dawn’ which focussed largely on ‘The Hounds Of Love’ and ‘Aerial’ along with some other later period songs. Nothing from her first four albums were performed during the residency.

This remastered box set also contains several bonus discs. '12” Mixes' is self-explanatory, the two 'Other Side' discs contain a selection of non-album b-sides whilst ‘In Other’s Words’ features cover versions that Kate has recorded over the years.

Label Review.

2018 album also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The Bryan Ferry Orchestra release ‘Bitter Sweet’. “Make it new” rang the rallying cry of modernists in the early twentieth century. To be modern in the 1920s, or postmodern in the 1960s, demanded destruction—of conventions, traditions, expectations, representation, even beauty itself. A drawing by Paul Klee captured the rebellious spirit of the age just after World War I. A scribbled stick-figure angel, dubbed “Angelus Novus” (New Angel), stares out, wings aloft, flattened crudely against the page. Pierced by the gaze, philosopher Walter Benjamin imagined the figure to be the Angel of History looking at the debris of the past, looking at us while blown backwards into the future.

Ferry too looks out upon the debris of the past, but with a deep affection and real sympathy that escaped the modernists. He follows a different prescription: not “make it new,” but “make it newly beautiful.” And here beauty lies in bittersweet remembrance, rather than youthful rejection. This art recognizes that the past was once our present, even our future, and this moment too shall melt away into the past.

The art of the past that Ferry embraces includes ragtime, blues, and jazz as well as the clean lines of Art Deco, the heady glamour of early cinema, and the modishness of the 1960s. Jazz in the 1920s was the soundtrack of popular culture—itself a modern invention. Think of swing, the Ziegfeld Follies, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin. Remembering them evokes a sense of nostalgia. “It’s still the same old movie that’s haunting me,” Ferry once said. So what are we watching on this album? What are we hearing?

“Reason or Rhyme” calls to the ear the dark reed timbres and baleful trumpets of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy”, with a gesture, perhaps, to the tenor saxophone sound of Coleman Hawkins. (Ellington and Hawkins played together on an essential album from 1962.) “Sign of the Times” includes a swinging trumpet solo and a veiled allusion, in the concluding section, to Eddie Lockjaw Davis. “While My Heart Is Still Beating” throws a bridge between the clarinet and alto sax duo of Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges to the edgier sound, on the sax, of Benny Carter. An even more haunting transposition of the 1920s is Boys & Girls, which again recalls Bechet and Hodges, now processed through a modernist sensibility. The vibrato in the saxophone line is crisper and more classical, less sensual than cerebral, more like the imitations of jazz that became fashionable among modernist composers.               

Thus Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”, from his iconic “Threepenny Opera”, influences the texture of “Alphaville”, which is also the title of a New Wave film by Jean-Luc Goddard. (The past really does pile up.) The title track, “Bitter-Sweet”, makes the Weill homage more explicit, and even includes lines in German. Dance Away begins like a Scott Joplin Rag, but “New Town” is pure Ferry. He doubles his voice in a song with a slow Charleston feel, yet the harmony, disorienting throughout the album, is here otherworldly.

Ferry returns his great songs to their roots, but they are stranger for it. Thus he captures the uncanny essence of nostalgia—of the familiar made strange, the pang of returning to your childhood home or grade-school classroom. This is an album in the truest sense, like a photobook or scrapbook, and so engages our musical memories. Throughout, Ferry’s dusky, poignant voice shades the meaning of the music like chiaroscuro shadowing in a Renaissance painting (just the kind of details the modernists would eliminate, but Ferry now restores). Horns inhale deeply, dreamily; castanets click in reference to the Romani goddess Carmen; and solo instruments sink, despairingly, casually, in a delirious blend of swing and tango and fantasy. The arrangements, created by Ferry with his long-time music director Colin Good, at once suggest the childhood of jazz in the 1920s and capture its more recent echoes, including those from Ferry’s album ‘The Jazz Age’. The reverb is soggy, the piano lines clean, and the forms prove more complicated than those by the bandmasters of yesteryear.

“Bitter-Sweet” accomplishes what the modernists of the past, in their youthful enthusiasm, could not. Ferry’s music embraces the artifice of art as well as the artlessness of emotion so that the “sad affair” described at the start leads you to “break down and cry” by the end. Thus we are transported to the Berlin of the “Tacheles” club and the “Chamäleon”, to the zeitgeist of that jazz-friendly metropolis in the young 20th century - the hedonistic world of “Babylon Berlin”.

Label Review. 

Official release of his legendary headline set at worlds biggest festival. Also available in CD and Vinyl.

Our Overview. 

David Bowie ‘Glastonbury 2000’ documents Bowie’s legendary Sunday night headline performance on 25th June at the most famous festival on earth. The legendary full performance released for the first time including many of David’s greatest hits and never before seen footage.

The package includes the full 21 song greatest hits set and for the first time, a DVD of the entire show (only 30 minutes of which has ever been broadcast on TV) including the Glastonbury performance of ‘Heroes’, a highlight of the record breaking ‘David Bowie Is…’ exhibition and the only track that has been previously released. 

All formats feature David’s diary, originally written for Time Out, which documents him preparing for the show in his own inimitable manner. In addition to newly mastered audio and upgraded video DAVID BOWIE ‘GLASTONBURY 2000’ features new artwork from Jonathan Barnbrook (who worked with Bowie on the sleeves for Heathen, The Next Day & ★) and notes from the renowned author and Bowie fan Caitlin Moran who reviewed the show for The Times. 

The package features photos of Bowie resplendently dressed in a 3/4 length one-of-a-kind Alexander McQueen frock coat, the pattern of which was made to echo the hat (the famous ‘bipperty-bopperty hat’ mentioned in the song Queen Bitch) and worn by David at his Glastonbury Fayre debut in 1971.

Label Review. 

Finally released under its original title (thought as too controversial by the label a half century ago), Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills restores the band’s vision and intent in an essential new collection of 30 rare performances, including 29 studio outtakes (25 previously unreleased) from the mythic 1968 sessions that generated Big Brother & The Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, the breakout album that introduced Janis Joplin to the world. This release debuts a previously unreleased live performance of “Ball And Chain”, recorded live at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12th 1968. Includes liner notes penned especially for this commemorative release by Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and and Big Brother & The Holding Company drummer David Getz. Double CD set includes 30 songs. Also available on double vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills’ includes liner notes penned especially for this commemorative release by Jefferson Airplane front-woman Grace Slick and Big Brother & The Holding Company drummer David Getz. “Then I heard that voice,” writes Slick. “Good Lord–spontaneous explosions of every emotion–no holds barred… Janis had no trouble sliding from the apron clad fifties into the no bra sixties. We all took every advantage of the new freedoms, and it was reflected in the music… This album, because of its worldwide success, made it possible for everybody to hear the phenomenon that was previously limited to the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, a new generation gets the ‘Cheap Thrills’ experience to enjoy”.

Originally released on August 12, 1968, Cheap Thrills was an out-of-the-box smash, a #1 album that–building on the heat she’d generated at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival–established Janis Joplin as rock’s foremost primordial psychedelic soul singer, a musical archetype whose influence has never waned. ‘Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills’ revisits those 1968 sessions and shines a new light on the genius of Janis Joplin and the incredible chemistry she shared with her bandmates in Big Brother & The Holding Company.

Of the 30 tracks showcased on the 2CD edition of Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills, only five have been previously released: “Summertime (Take 2)” (on 1993 Janis compilation); “Roadblock (Take 1)” (on 1999 Cheap Thrills reissue); “It’s A Deal (Take 1)” and “Easy Once You Know How (Take 1)” (both on 1999 “Rare Pearls” disc in Box of Pearls set); and “Magic Of Love (Take 1)” (from the Columbia/Legacy Record Store Day release, Move Over!).

The original Cheap Thrills featured dubbed-in crowd noise to create the sonic illusion of a live album, though only “Ball and Chain” was actually recorded in concert. An alternate live version of the song–recorded at The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on April 12, 1968–is included on Sex, Dope & Cheap Thrills. The album was the culmination of several years of hard work for the psychedelic quintet, consisting of Joplin on lead vocals, Sam Andrew and James Gurley on guitar, Peter Albin on bass and Dave Getz on drums. In 1967, a year after recruiting Joplin, they released their self-titled debut album while continuing to build a devoted fan base in their native San Francisco and the Bay Area.

A performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 earned Big Brother national recognition, with Joplin’s unrestrained full-tilt delivery bringing audiences to their feet. Clive Davis, president of CBS Records, attended the group’s performance and signed Big Brother & The Holding Company to Columbia Records. Produced by John Simon, Cheap Thrills was the pure distillation of the band’s raw talent and bleeding-edge instrumental prowess, with compelling originals (“I Need a Man to Love”, “Combination of the Two”) as well as covers of jazz and blues favorites (George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain”, and, notably, “Piece of My Heart”, a now-classic soul ballad, penned by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns, that became one of Janis’ signature songs and her top charting single during her lifetime).

Label Review.

2018 album also available on Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Doubtless Dauntless’ is the new album from Matt Deighton a multi-talented singer and songwriter of rare repute. Idiosyncratic and blessed with an ear for melody, he stands alongside the likes of John Martyn, Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake for his ability to craft songs of beauty and power. Illumined in the modern musical firmament, 2018 sees him stepping forward once again with a new 10-track solo album.

Recorded in Monnow Valley Studio in Monmouthshire in September 2016, the pastoral setting for ‘Doubtless Dauntless’ proved perfect for an intensely artistic get-together of some of the most feted musicians of the past 40 years, the record’s personnel including piano maestro Steve Nieve (Elvis Costello), Linda Lewis, Gary Carpenter (associate musical director on The Wicker Man, 1973), Ben Trigg and Matt’s ex bandmates in The Family Silver, Steve White (The Style Council, Paul Weller) and Damon Minchella (Ocean Colour Scene, Richard Ashcroft).

First hitting the airwaves with Mother Earth in the early '90s, Matt enjoyed early success with the release of a clutch of albums that included The People Tree (Acid Jazz Records, 1993). After Mother Earth’s disbandment in 1996, Deighton joined Paul Weller’s band on lead guitar and vocals and temporarily replaced Noel Gallagher in Oasis when Gallagher quit in the middle of touring in 2000.

But his back catalogue speaks for itself. As a solo artist, he distilled his art into four soulful folk-tinged albums (‘Villager’, 1995; ‘You Are The Healer’, 2000; ‘The Common Good’, 2002; and ‘Wake Up The Moths’, 2004), followed more recently (2017) by a compelling collaboration with Chris Difford, the resurrected album called ‘Kids Steal Feelings’. Matt has recorded and played with Paul Weller, Oasis, Bill Fay, Brian Auger, Carleen Anderson, Roger Daltrey, Chris Difford of Squeeze and many others and with ‘Doubtless Dauntless’ he proves he’s getting better with age.

‘Doubtless Dauntless’ is a perfect pop synthesis of folk, rock and soul that, in equal measure, is both compelling and impossible to pigeon hole, Matt possessing the rare songwriting ability – or, some might say, the dying art – of being able to winnow existential truths from modern life, writing with an economy of lyrical gesture, his lyrics deft and weighted, figuratively precise.

Label Review. 

All of the existing audio and video from the show, including the original album, both “sit-down” and “stand-up” performances, rehearsals and sessions recorded with the Wrecking Crew in June 1968, including outtakes. The video content is only available on Blu-ray. Original show, unedited music performances from 27th & 29th June, all takes of If I Can Dream show closer and other outtakes plus more.

Our Overview. 

Elvis Presley – ‘68 Comeback Special (50th Anniversary Edition) is the definitive chronicle of one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll performances ever televised: Elvis Presley at the peak of his powers. For the first time ever, all previously-released audio and newly-restored video from the taping of the special will be available in one package – including unused performances and studio outtakes that spotlight the real Elvis. The package contains an entire disc showcasing the legendary sessions for the special recorded with Elvis and the Wrecking Crew.

The ‘68 Comeback Special (at the time titled “Singer Presents…ELVIS”) aired on December 3, 1968 and was a pivotal broadcast event that upped-the-ante on Elvis’ career, the evolution of pop culture and the history of television. By 1968, prior to the broadcast, Elvis was no longer seen by the mainstream as the atomic-powered rock and roll pioneer. Since his discharge from the United States Army in 1960, Elvis’ career path careened through a string of low-budget (though often successful) formulaic films while the rock music scene was exploding with innovation, experimentation, and an urgency to complement the turbulent era. Elvis hadn’t performed in public since 1961 and hadn’t appeared on television since 1960.

The special, recorded over several sessions in June 1968, presented Elvis in a variety of settings, from spectacular production numbers (“Nothingville,” “Saved,” “Guitar Man,” “Little Egypt,” “Big Boss Man,”“Let Yourself Go”) to the intimate “sit-down” performances of classic Elvis hits, reuniting the artist with Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana, the guitarist and drummer who’d played alongside Elvis on his earliest records and shows. The black leather “sit-down” and “stand-up” sequences provided a retrospective of Elvis’ career to that point, highlighted with the new song “Memories,” written by Mac Davis specifically for the show. The special’s transcendent closing number was Presley’s now-classic, emotionally fueled performance of “If I Can Dream,” an anthemic new song penned especially for Elvis and the special byW. Earl Brown.

The special was the most-viewed television program in America the week it aired and firmly re-established Elvis as a major musical and cultural force. “I think the ‘68 Special gave him the confidence to get on the road again, knowing that people accepted him,” said Priscilla Presley. “That show was so successful that he just knew this is what he wanted to do, go back and be with an audience.”

Label Review. 

Official release of live solo acoustic tracks from his November 1976 tour. Also available on double vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Songs For Judy’ is the debut release on Shakey Pictures Records, Young’s own imprint. ‘Songs For Judy’ is thoroughly engaging collection of live acoustic performances culled from Neil’s November 1976 solo tour and features twenty-two songs recorded at various cities along the tour. This song cycle of live recordings is particularly powerful and unique. Young had spent much of the year traveling around the world on tour with Crazy Horse. When touring on his own, he recharged and focused on songs that would not surface in recorded form for several years. Of the albums many treasures, “No One Seems To Know” would not see the light of day until now and it remains unreleased in any other iteration.

The raw versions of the tracks found on Songs For Judy reflect an artist completely unvarnished and unafraid to allow the songs to breath and to find their own shape when performed in a solo setting. Songs written in that era would come into focus and then seemingly disappear only to re-enter Young’s orbit somewhere down the road. “White Line” and “Give Me Strength” are such examples of finding the light in 1990 and 2017 respectively. It’s also fascinating to hear Young revisit early gems such as Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” (‘67), “Here We Are In The Years” (‘68), and “The Losing End” (‘69) from some of his earliest solo recordings which remain as timeless as ever.

Label Review. 

In celebrating 50 years of Neil Diamond as a singer songwriter, Capitol is releasing a 6 disc retrospective spanning his entire career. The collection features 115 tracks and contains beloved hits alongside demos, rarities and 14 previously unreleased tracks. Housed in an attractive book.

Our Overview. 

Neil Diamond’s unique connection with audiences the world over is evident all throughout the breadth of material presented on this box set. Witness the folk-rock reverie of “Solitary Man,” the unbridled exuberance of “Cherry Cherry,” the sweet acoustic twang of “Forever in Blue Jeans,” the pure Americana swing of “Kentucky Woman,” the eternal sing-along sunshine of “Sweet Caroline,” the raw emotionality of “I Am…I Said,” the welcoming arms of “America,” and the deeply expressive heartlight that’s on full display in his chart-topping duet with Barbra Streisand, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” for just the tip of the iceberg of Diamond’s artistic achievements.

A full disc containing 12 unreleased songs, including recently unearthed gems such as “Sunflower,” (written and recently updated by Neil Diamond, originally recorded by Glen Campbell), “Before I Had a Dime” and “C’est La Vie” a song that Neil co-wrote with friend Gilbert Bécaud. Meanwhile, the original demos of two of Diamond’s most indelible tracks, “I Am…I Said” and “America,” give listeners further insight into the creative process behind a pair of his best known songs.

Throughout his illustrious and wide-ranging career, Neil Diamond has sold over 130 million albums worldwide and has dominated the charts for more than five decades with 38 Top 40 singles and 16 Top 10 albums. He has achieved record sales with 40 Gold albums, 21 Platinum albums, and 11 Multi-Platinum albums.

Label Review. 

The fourth volume in the series of his yearly round-up’s, Jon’s selections for this year oscillate between soul, funk, Americana, pop-psych and hard-edged rock. 1965, 1966 and 1967 still available. Ace.

Our Overview. 

A genre-spanning 2CD mix of hit singles, slow burners and lost gems, including the first-ever official release of the preview pressing of ‘Kick Out The Jams’ by the MC5. The 45s that defined 1968 and crystallised author Jon Savage’s memories of the year.

1968 began with business as usual in the pop charts, but the year would see convulsive political and social changes. This turmoil would be replicated in the music industry, where the effects of 1967 were seen in a proliferation of musical styles and social attitudes. The old days of a unified, central Top 40 were gone, and in its place came a new energy that transformed pop into rock, ska into rocksteady and early reggae, and soul into funk.

Jon’s selections for this year oscillate between soul, funk, Americana, pop-psych and hard-edged rock. With the loss of pirate radio after March, he heard of many of these either by scouring the record bins in central London or picking up tips from the music and the underground press. Some are later discoveries but the aim is to construct an ideal playlist that simulates a top radio show, without all the populist choices and extraneous filler – a more radical and faster-moving soundtrack for an inflammatory year.

Label Review. 

Over 100 tracks of home recordings featuring demo versions of many songs which went on to be released and others which didn’t. Some of the tracks were issued on vinyl in 2018 whilst the fifth volume is exclusive to this CD box set. Easy Action. 

Our Overview. 

An amazing insight into the workings of the late and very great Marc Bolan, here are over 100 tracks from Marc’s home of his own personal home recordings. Marc purchased the best tape recorders of the day as early as 1970 to record his ideas on. Included are work in progress versions of many tracks that went onto become global hits such as Get It On, Jeepster, Metal Guru, Telegram Sam, The Groover, Truck On (Tyke), Thunderwing, Sunken Rags and many, many more. Nearly all of the other tracks were never issued during Marc’s lifetime.

Presented in a clam shell box with a booklet featuring full liner notes by Andrew Gardner of the Bolan Society and designed by Bolan fan and top designer Les Clark. Most of these recordings were stolen from Marc & Gloria’s home literally the day after Marc died. It is with great pride that we are returning these recordings to the family and the audio restored and mastered by Anders Peterson at Ghost Sound in Sweden, royalties from sales of this set will help fund the Marc Bolan School of Music through Gloria’s charity The Light of Love Foundation. 4 of the discs have been issued on limited edition vinyl pressings but disc 5 remains exclusive to this box set.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Ed Harcourt is releasing ‘Beyond The End’, his eighth studio album, and his first for Point Of Departure which follows ‘Furnaces’, his 2016 album for Polydor, sees Ed Harcourt add another new string to his multi-faceted musical bow.

Ed is a much acclaimed recording artist who released his Mercury Prize nominated debut, Here Be Monsters on Heavenly Records in 2001, in recent years his has gained acclaim for his songwriting for a variety of artists. ‘Beyond The End’ is something of a left-turn after its busy, big-screen, somewhat under-appreciated predecessor, it sees the supremely versatile singer, writer and all-round instrumentalist bravely eschew vocals and lyrics and create a soft-spoken yet emotionally loquacious group of piano-led instrumentals, as if sound-tracking an as yet invisible film, or responding to today’s ferocious shouting match of a planet with a mesmerizing, meditative calm. “The world that we live in, we’re exhausted by the internet, social media, the sheer barrage of news and vomit being rained down us on a daily basis. You can’t avoid it, and it’s tiring. So this record came from taking a step back – it’s something that’s trying to be beautiful. My hope is that people might choose to swim amongst this music when it all gets too much.”

Talking about the gestation of the album, which was written and recorded at his ‘Wolf Cabin’ studio in Oxfordshire Harcourt said, “I knew I wanted to buy a new piano. Eventually I found this 1910 Hopkinson Baby Grand, which is exactly the same make and era as my grandmother’s piano which I started learning on and wrote my first three records on. I felt at home again. I needed a break from singing and lyrics so I began writing instrumental music. I grew up listening to and playing Debussy, Satie, Mozart, Grieg, as well as modern composers like Max Richter, Philip Glass, Arvo Part. I also loved Warren Ellis (with whom Harcourt worked on the new Marianne Faithfull album) and Nick Cave’s score for The Assassination Of Jesse James… 

Label Review.

Afro-Centric Jazz, Street Funk and the Roots of Rap in the Black Power Era 1969-75. Soul Jazz Records also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Soul Of A Nation: Jazz Is The Teacher, Funk Is The Preacher’ is a powerful new collection of radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap made in the era of Black Power (1969-75).

This is the second ‘Soul Of A Nation’ album released by Soul Jazz Records to coincide with the exhibition ‘Soul Of A Nation - Art In The Age Of Black Power’, critically acclaimed and enormously successful when it opened at the Tate Modern in London last year (as was Soul Jazz Records’ accompanying first album ‘Soul Of A Nation: Afro-Centric Visions In The Age Of Black Power 1968- 79’). The blockbuster international exhibition is now at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, travelling to Los Angeles in 2019.

This new album features a number of important and ground-breaking African-American artists - The Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Don Cherry, Funkadelic, Gil Scott-Heron and more - alongside a host of lesser-known artists all of whom in the early 1970s were exploring new Afrocentric poly rhythmical styles of music - radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap - while at the same time exploring the Black Power and civil-rights inspired notions of self-definition, self-respect and self empowerment in their own lives.

During this era African-American jazz musicians ripped up traditional definitions - rejecting the term ‘entertainer’ to redefine themselves instead as ‘artists’. They worked outside of the mainstream music industry perceiving this artistic relationship to be fundamentally exploitative and politically flawed. Artists instead formed their own pan-arts community-centric collectives, set up their own record labels, ran concerts in alternative performance spaces - art galleries, parks, lofts, community centres - all as a way of taking control of their own creative destinies.

At the start of 1960s jazz musicians had embarked on an intense period of musical experimentation as artists John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry sought to dismantle the traditional definitions of jazz by creating new music that broke free from its establishment shackles. By the end of the 1960s, forward-thinking African-American jazz musicians had absorbed the ideas of this radical and avant-garde path but also began to introduce many new elements - not just civil rights concepts of freedom but also black power ideas of self-respect, righteousness and anger.

Their music developed into a radical and intense Afrocentric mix of jazz, funk, soul and street poetry, all in search of a new musical language that could better represent artistic African American cultural expression.

All of the featured artists here were involved in this search in different ways; A shared sense of Afrocentric collectivism joined the dots between the deep avant-garde experimentalism of The Art Ensemble Of Chicago (here featuring soul singer Fontella Bass singing the powerful ‘Theme de Yoyo’) to the hyper funk psychedelia of George Clinton’s Funkadelic.

The poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and Sarah Webster Fabio performed with a backdrop of street funk and heavyweight percussion laid down the template for the birth of rap. The Har-You Percussion Group, a group of young Harlem teenagers, showed how government-sponsored social initiatives helped create great art and music. Gary Bartz and The Oneness of Juju offer spirituality and cosmology. Collectives like The Pharaohs and Detroit’s Tribe add deep jazz and street funk in equal measures.

Influenced and radicalised by Black Power and civil rights, all these artists were involved in creating - in the words of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago - ‘Great Black Music: Ancient To Future’.

This album is available as a digital download album, as a heavyweight triple vinyl LP (with free digital download), full and extensive text, exclusive photography with house inners and as a deluxe CD with slipcase, 40-page outsize booklet and jewel case.

Label Review.

2018 album also available as CD+.

Our Overview.

Rita Ora will release her long-awaited second album, ‘Phoenix’, November 23rd. ‘Phoenix’ arrives six years after Ora’s 2012 debut, Ora. Over the past few years, Ora has released several singles that will appear on the record, including “your Song”, “Anywhere” and “Girls” which featured Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX.

Speaking to Esquire Middle East, Rita admitted she feels like she's starting again as she readies herself for the release of her first album in six years. 'I feel like a brand new artist,' she said. 'I didn’t really know where I stood as it had been so long since I had released some music, but I’m doing things differently this time. 'I am trying to modernise the way music is going today, and because of online streaming there really aren’t any rules anymore.'

In a statement, Ora said of ‘Phoenix’, “One of the most liberating feelings for me is performing and creating music. This album is a true labour of love, and it was important for me to do it my way. I’m so appreciative of the love and support from those who worked with me on the record and allowed me to create something I’m really proud of. They gave me the space and freedom to create something from my heart. Both challenging and euphoric at times, I am really proud of and grateful for the journey that the making of ‘Phoenix’ has taken me on.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Jacco Gardner is releasing his new album ‘Somium’. Jacco has been known to create swirling psychedelic pop boosted by his rich, resonate and baroque voice but on his third album ‘Somium’, his vocals are gone and in their place is an equally seamless melodic exploration but an instrumental one, with a synthesised occult edge.

‘Somium’ is a nod to the novel of the same name, written in 1608 by Johannes Kepler and is regarded as the first ever science fiction novel. “This book fascinates me because it was basically Kepler travelling in his mind to a non-existent world while describing it, and his journey, with amazing detail. Many of his imagined sensations are actually really what happens when one travels into space, which happened almost four hundred years later. You could call it a vision of the future through his dreams, and I find this aspect very mysterious and powerful.”

This form of mind travel is what Jacco has set out to create in a sonic, almost alchemic, capacity. Hence the reason for his vocals to be left out of this spiritual journey. “I deliberately removed my voice from the experience, as it made it more difficult for me to achieve the intended state of mind. I think it makes the journey more interesting, more deep, and more intimate. I didn’t feel the need to show my face while one drifts away into thought. ‘Somium’ is a visionary experience. The album is more than just a trip, it is about contact with a deeper - hidden - reality.”

If the concepts behind this record sound otherworldly and intricately woven then Jacco has also succeeded in making a record that does the same. Analogue synths hum and glide pristinely, bass lines dance buoyantly, dense atmospheres build and form and thoughtfully crafted melodies come and go, floating around as though in space. There are nods to early pioneers of such dreamlike ambience and cosmic exploration - Bo Hansson, Vangelis, Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Eno and Oldfield (the album was mastered by Simon Heyworth whose production credits include the latter three, including Tubular Bells) - but it also exists as a futuristic pursuit, one that is chasing something ahead as well as exploring the past. This is because to Jacco both are equally valid. “The past has always felt very much alive to me and so full of mystery that I have to conclude that the present and the future are probably no different.”

Now living in Lisbon and immersed in literature, cinema, philosophy and with new winding streets to wander, Gardner's ideal listening scenario is to take the album for a walk yourselves, consume it complete and without interruption. “Somnium could be seen as a tribute to the album, a dying format in today’s fast-paced society. It can often be difficult to enjoy a meaningful uninterrupted moment. This album is where true mystery and wonder is waiting to be discovered.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Hippo Campus are four Minnesotan boys making music that is infectious, joyful, and thematically soaked with the sense of cynicism accompanying the youthful search of self-meaning.

‘Bambi’ is the bands sophomore album and is shaped by the impact of toxic masculinity, the #Metoo movement and mental health issues, ‘Bambi’ sees Hippo Campus open up more than ever before. As audibly quirky and sprightly as ever, the band express their vulnerabilities through their most honest lyrics and moving melodies to date. On ‘Bambi’, Hippo Campus do a superb job of balancing their vivacious sound with much more sensitive and openly fragile lyrical content.

Throughout ‘Bambi’, Hippo Campus match their relentless self-examination with a joyfully adventurous sonic approach, ultimately transforming the emotional experience of the problems they're exploring. One of the band’s greatest hopes for ‘Bambi’ is that the album might help others in dealing with their own pain. “I’ve always considered the responsibility of art to be representing your specific experience,” says Sutton. “We’re saying, ‘This is what I’m doing now, this what I’m living like.’ It’s about sharing what you’re going through, so maybe someone else will feel less lonely.”

LP pressed on coloured vinyl. Also includes digital download code.

Label Review. 

2018 album. Three years since their last album, following the birth of their son, and over a decade since the release of their debut as the song writing partnership behind hotly-tipped southeast London indie-folk pioneers Indigo Moss, the duo have produced yet another beautifully crafted and delicately delivered gem that will delight fans old and new. This is their first album in seven years to be available ‘in the shops’ after they only sold the last two albums through their website and at shows. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

After breaking away from Indigo Moss, the band which gave them their initial breakthrough in 2007, husband and wife team Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou joined Danny & The Champions Of The World on tour and on (their first two) records. This led them to releasing their debut album as a duo on Loose Music (the label Danny and his combo were also on) in 2010. With its low-key production, folky overtones and their idiosyncratic vocal blend the album created enough of an impact for them to step up to Heavenly Recordings for their second album ‘Quality First, Last Forever’ in 2011. Aside from a couple of full ‘rock’ band concessions (no doubt for commercial label requirements) the record saw the duo expand their sound palette and fanbase.

However, the duo elected to decamp to France to self-produce their third album ‘La Ferme De Fontenaille’ and on their return, self-release it too. The record was cut on their trusty four-track cassette recorder and the results saw a stripped back sound which let their vocals and song-writing shine through. It was therefore a surprise that they turned to celebrated producer Ethan Johns for their next records, 2015’s ‘Expatriot’. Their most rounded and accomplished album to date it raised the bar for their next record for which they returned to the 4-track.

Trevor says: “I’ve never really liked studios. The first one we ever stepped foot in was Olympic as teenagers, the same room as Hendrix, Zeppelin, The Stones. I didn’t really enjoy it. It felt like a space ship, like a factory. I want records to come from somewhere. I like to limit the possibilities. 4-tracks are more than enough. It forces you to push what you do to the limit, focusing on the songwriting and the performance.”

Label Review. 

17 track career retrospective with Soundgarden, Temple Of The Dog, Audioslave, and solo tracks. Also available on 4CD. 

Our Overview. 

‘Chris Cornell’ commemorates his life and legacy not only as a singer, but as a poet and one of the most prolific writers and greatest voices of the modern rock era. His wife Vicky worked extensively with Chris’ bandmates and friends to compile a collection of material from the late artist’s expansive career, showcasing his contribution to music history with selections culled from the deep catalogs of his three influential bands - Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Audioslave - as well as songs from his solo career. She turned to producer Brendan O’Brien, who was a trusted partner to Cornell over the years and Jeff Ament who created the packaging for Chris Cornell.

Vicky says: “Since Chris’ sudden passing I have put all my efforts and energy into sharing his music and legacy with his fans from all over the world. I felt we needed to create a special collection to represent all of him – the friend, husband and father, the risk taker and innovator, the poet and artist. His soaring vocals found their way into the hearts and souls of so many. His voice was his vision and his words were his peace. This album is for his fans.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Mumford & Sons are Ben Lovett, Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane, and Winston Marshall and are releasing their fourth album ‘Delta’, along with a huge sixty-one date arena tour starting later this year.

 ‘Delta’ will be released on the 16th November through Island Records/Gentlemen of the Road. It was recorded at The Church Studios in London, and produced by Paul Epworth.    

Since the release of Wilder Mind in May 2015, and the collaborative Johannesburg EP in the Summer of 2016, Mumford & Sons have found a rich, prolific vein of form in the writing for ‘Delta’. Where Wilder Mind harnessed a widescreen electric sound that seemed custom built to be belted back to them from the festival main stages, ‘Delta’ loses none of that sense of scale, but couples it with an intimacy and jubilance that has so successfully combined to make Mumford & Sons one of the biggest bands of recent years. Guiding Light is the perfect example of that – a dizzying folk-rock song that builds, builds, explodes and then explodes again. An emphatic return. 

‘Delta’ is a record of differing shades, colours and textures. A record that finds Mumford & Sons, no longer young lads caught in a whirlwind, exploring that sense of adulthood and responsibility that comes of turning thirty and re-evaluating priorities. It’s a tender listen, introspective and reflective but is married with those ecstatic stadium-sized dynamics. It sounds like a career-defining body of work. 

2019 welcomes the tenth anniversary since debut album Sigh No More’s release. It’s a record that lit the fuse on what has become an incredible decade for the band, littered with highlight upon highlight. Yet for all the awards they’ve since won across the globe, and the multiple numbers one records notched up in a variety of different countries, it’s taking their songs out on the road that continues to define them. The announcement of ‘Delta’ coincides with a huge sixty-one date arena tour, kicking off in November. Full dates are listed below.

 ‘Delta’ is a substantial, exciting record by a British band in the form of their lives.

Label Review. 

Remastered. Kick Inside, Lionheart, Never For Ever, The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love, The Sensual World, The Red Shoes.

Our Overview. 

Considering Kate Bush has only issued three studio albums and one live document since ‘The Red Shoes’ in 1993, she hasn’t felt the need to asset strip her fans by pumping out retrospective product. Her early albums in particular have never been reissued since they first came out on CD in the 1980s. Finally, Kate has remastered her entire catalogue with esteemed engineer James Guthrie, best known for his work with Pink Floyd. Of course, Floyd’s David Gilmour helped Kate get a contract with EMI in the mid-70s so a nice connection there.

Kate’s debut single “Wuthering Heights” cleaned up in early 1978 giving her a No.1 single. It featured on the debut album ‘The Kick Inside’ which sold consistently for about a year, helped along with the second single “The Man With The Child In His Eyes”. A hastily recorded second album ‘Lionheart’ appeared before the end of the year and material from both albums were performed during her first tour in 1979. The second album wasn’t as well received as the first and the two singles also struggled compared to the previous hits. However, the tour went down well and Kate consolidated her early promise with third album ‘Never For Ever’ in 1980 for which she was rewarded with her first No.1 album. This contained the top ten hit “Babooshka”.

Fourth album ‘The Dreaming’ arrived in 1982, which had taken nearly two years to produce. The lack of a discernible hit single (only “Sat In Your Lap” which hit No.11 was issued a year before the album) and the overall experimental nature of the record led to her lowest selling album to date. Kate disappeared after this until she re-surfaced in 1985 with the smash hit “Running Up That Hill”. It was taken from the fifth album ‘Hounds Of Love’ which proved to be Kate’s biggest selling album of her career and was largely recorded at her newly constructed home studio.

There was a four year gap to the next album ‘The Sensual World’ which featured one of her best loved tracks “This Woman’s Work”. Another four year wait was required for Kate’s seventh album ‘The Red Shoes’ which featured more of a band sound. This raised hopes that Kate might tour again as her 1979 jaunt proved at that point to be her only live work. Instead the opposite happened. Once the promotion for the album concluded in 1994 she then slipped out of view for ten years, primarily to focus on starting a family. All seven of rthese albums from 1978-1993 are featured in this box set.

Label Review. 

2018 album. Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Tony Allen & Simon Tong. Also available on Deluxe CD and vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Merrie Land’ is the second album from the band known as The Good, The Bad & The Queen. They began life as the acclaimed 2007 album of the same name, a heartfelt tribute to London described by The Observer in a 5 star review as –“One of the most surprising and magical records for which Damon Albarn has ever been responsible”.

The record traced a journey from the English music hall tradition to West Africa and Afrobeat, zigzagging through the West Indies and its reggae and dub, back to England and London’s punk scene, all the while taking in a strand of British beat music from the ‘50s right through to Britpop. The result was a record specific to a place and mood but with a background that was geographically wide-ranging. Now the four musical storytellers are back.

Produced by Tony Visconti and The Good, The Bad & The Queen the album was completed in London and Wales this year (2018), during the current ongoing period in which the UK is preparing to leave the European Union, ‘Merrie Land ’is a questioning good-bye letter, a series of observations and reflections on Britishness in 2018. Even though it has been over 10 years since the band last released a record, the timing could not be more apt – there could not be a more perfect band to untangle the optimism, disorientation and confusion in the atmosphere today.

With ‘Merrie Land’, the band taps into a creative symbiosis of past and future, drawing inspiration from their shared glittering musical histories and wrapping the hybrid results in a brilliantly postmodern yet thoroughly British package.

The album sees the band’s focus move beyond London with a beautiful and hopeful paean to the Britain of today - an inclusive Britain - and the possibilities of the future. In the band’s own words, Merrie Land is a ten song lament of Anglo-Saxosentialism marking the reluctant end of a relationship, and about picking up the pieces and seeing what can be salvaged. The band set a beautifully muted palette and lustrous finish to bring out a mood that is bruised yet unapologetically defiant and optimistic, and carries the underlying message: we will survive.

In times of metaphysical trauma, the people need to forge ahead and wear armour. Here it is, set to the mood music of a nation about to be broken yet undefeated.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in 2CD and Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Global superstar Michael Bublé is scheduled to release ❤, pronounced ‘Love as his first studio album in two years on November 16th following a two year break from public life to spend time with his family. The Canadian singer-songwriter returned to the studio with a new perspective on life and a renewed commitment to honouring the music he has always loved. 

"I didn’t anticipate returning to recording or performing and I was fine with that. My entire world view has changed completely these last few years. I wanted to spend all my time with my wife and kids. That was my focus. During that time, I also learned how much love and humanity is out in the world from the prayers and good wishes we received. But slowly, along with understanding what my priorities in life are, I began to feel a new commitment to express the emotions and lessons I’ve embraced. Whether I am the narrator, the observer, the main character, the dreamer, the broken hearted guy at a bar or having the night of a lifetime, I have stories to tell on this record. It’s all there in the songs. I have had so many blessings in life and one of them is that I hold the torch to keep these songs alive for generations to come. I take the responsibility very seriously.  My end game for the new record was to create a series of short cinematic stories for each song I chose and have it stand on its own. I’m so proud of what we accomplished,” commented Bublé.

Bublé co-produced his new album and brings new love to several rich classics from the American Songbook. The album opens with the idealistic and dreamy “When I Fall In Love.” It also includes a haunting take on another Rogers & Hart standard, “My Funny Valentine.” Other standouts are an ebullient “When You’re Smiling,” a swinging “Such A Night” as well as Bublé’s hand-picked favorites including “Unforgettable,” “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” and “I Only Have Eyes For You.” Two standout tracks are Charlie Puth’s swinging “Love You Anymore” and an achingly poignant “La Vie En Rose” –a Bublé duet featuring singer Cecile McLorin Salvant. A touching Bublépenned original ‘Forever Now” demonstrates his songwriting skills, which were previously shown in such Bubléwritten hits like “Home,” “Haven’t Met You Yet” and “Everything.” The album closes with a show-stopping version of “Where or When.” 

❤ was produced by David Foster, longtime collaborator Jochem van der Saag and Michael Bublé. The trio brought Bublé’s visions to life with luscious arrangements surrounding his rich vocals. Michael Bublé has sold over 60 million records worldwide, performed hundreds of sold-out shows around the globe, and won four Grammys and multiple Juno Awards during the course of his extraordinary career.

Label Review.

2018 album also available as 2CD and in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The debut studio album from Tyla's Dogs D'Amour. 'In Vino Veritas' is a blistering, guitar-driven rock album containing 12 incendiary, new, 111% proof R&R songs. Classic song-writing at its best. After a few well-documented stumbles, it’s now 35 years since The Dogs D’Amour exploded into existence. “Their second album, 'In the Dynamite Jet Saloon', is one of the greatest rock’n’roll records ever made. Ever.

Simply speaking, they were the coolest band that ever was. They were the swaggering, stumbling, hobo kings of rock’n’roll’s back alley. They could out-drink, out-fight, out-fuck and out-rock any outfit you can think of. They wrote about life, and liquor, and love – the real stuff, the kind that tears a good man asunder, and the graveyard of empty bottles it often leaves in its wake. They were the real deal, in a decade when real was lost and presumed dead forever.” (Classic Rock) - In 2016, a box-set re-release of the early Dogs albums re-ignited interest not only in the band & their songs but in their main man – singer, songwriter, guitarist and front-man Tyla. Despite a lifetime in the fast-lane & mishaps aplenty, he is still alive and kicking. Still incendiary. Still stirring up conflict with his art, music, live performances and writing.

He’s a renowned 21st century poet and modern-day troubadour who has never stopped writing, recording, painting and drawing. A travelling man whose home is where his he(art) is. Despite a world in conflict, 2018 is a good time to be alive. A good time to say what you feel and feel what you say. A good time to say it like you mean it and play it like your life depends on it. A good time for another Dogs D’Amour – Tyla’s Dogs D’Amour. 111% proof R&R… Tyla has put together an incendiary new band and he’s recording a brand-new Dogs D’Amour album – 'In Vino Veritas". New songs, new attitude, new power & new urgency. The time is now! Why wait for tomorrow?

The band have also recorded a10-song covers album 'In Musica Veritas' only available with the limited-edition double CD version of 'In Vino Veritas'. 'In Musica Veritas' is a special collection of songs that mean something to Tyla - an homage to his musical heroes and influences over the years. When you listen to the songs and read his stories behind them, you won’t be surprised that you’ll be surprised – it’s more tales of the unexpected. In Musica Veritas: The limited edition, double-CD version of In Vino Veritas contains an extra CD In Musica Veritas. A special 10-song covers album containing a collection of songs that mean something to Tyla. It’s an homage to his musical heroes and influences over the years. “There are so many songs that have influenced me in so many different ways over the years. For In Musica Veritas I've chosen a few from my childhood (from listening to the radio & to my sisters record collection) & a few from just after I left home at the ripe old age of 17. I was a Rod and the Faces teenager, and a Be Bop Deluxe and Thin Lizzy fan. 'Summertime Blues' I’d hear on the radio and love as a youngster. Usually I’d hear it on Sunday mornings while me Mom was cooking Sunday Roast. It was the same with 'Waterloo Sunset' and 'Remember Walking In The Sand'. If I remember rightly, it was a requests show. The troops abroad would choose songs for their loved ones back home in Blighty or vice versa. After I left home I got into the likes of The Cars. I loved their guitar sound, along with the 'Get it On' T Rex sound, and that's what I base my own guitar sound on now.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Chicago experimentalist Ryley Walker reimagines Dave Matthews Band’s lost 2001 album ‘The Lillywhite Sessions’ in full for a new era. Walker delivers a powerful, heartfelt meditation on the twists and turns of an individual’s musical journey across a life of enthusiastic and curious listening. Through his thoughtful performance and rearrangement, with frequent collaborators Andrew Scott Young and Ryan Jewell, he submits that perhaps DMB is justly due the reassessment it’s slowly been granted in the pop zeitgeist as of late. He transforms DMB’s loping and goofy Lillywhite Sessions lead-off track “Busted Stuff” into a buoyant and breathy jazz-tinged post-rock that recalls Chicago heroes The Sea & Cake.

On ‘The Lillywhite Sessions’, Ryley Walker and the similarly indebted trio of drummer Ryan Jewell and bassist Andrew Scott Young cover Dave Matthews’ infamously abandoned 2001 art-rock masterpiece of the same name, a record where he and his band indulged a new adult pathos and a budding musical wanderlust.

With a delicate rhythmic latticework and vocals that ask you to lean in, ‘Busted Stuff’ recalls Jim O’ Rourke’s golden Drag City days. Emerging from a wall of distortion, ‘Diggin’ a Ditch’ becomes a power trio wallop . la Dinosaur Jr, shaking off existential malaise like twenty-something pals writing rock songs in the garage. Walker’s ‘Grace is Gone’, the most faithful take here, is a testament to his unflagging love for the music that helped make him a musician.

This end-to-end interpretation of youthful fascination is a collective reminder that we are all just kids from somewhere, reckoning with our upbringing the best we can. Walker has stepped through the door long ago opened by the Dave Matthews Band to find a world teeming with musical possibilities. On ‘The Lillywhite Sessions’, he has, in turn, created his own.

Label Review. 

Official release. Recorded 25th November 1994 at Joe Robbie Stadium, Miami. Previously released on video but this is now unedited and the songs in the correct order. Plus extras. Also available on DVD, Blu-ray, 2CD+Blu-ray, and Triple vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Voodoo Lounge’ from 1994 was the Stones first new studio album in five years and was the first without Bill Wyman who departed the band the year before. They hit the road in August 1994 for a years worth of shows and the show issued here came out on video in late 1995 to coincide with their ‘Stripped’ live album. The original video received a DVD release a few years later.

‘Voodoo Lounge Uncut’ features guest appearances by Sheryl Crow, Robert Cray and Bo Diddley. The film conveys the audio-visual mastery of the Stones at their best, with stunning, futuristic staging that set a new benchmark for stadium production values. The new version of the film has been recut and remastered rom the original rushes and includes newly remixed and remastered audio. The band’s millions of devotees will also be delighted to know that it reinstates the ten tracks that were cut from the original video release in the 1990s and which appear here in their original running order for the first time.

The performance came some three months into the Voodoo Lounge tour, which the band launched around the release of their 20th UK studio album of the same name. The tour spanned some 56 weeks, four legs, 134 shows and six continents. The show in Miami took place the night after Thanksgiving Day and grossed $2.5 million.

In the film, we see the Stones take the stage to “Not Fade Away” and delight the massive crowd with a set featuring all of their adored hits as well as “You Got Me Rocking”, “Sparks Will Fly” and “I Go Wild”, all of them from the then-new album. The show builds to a mighty finale of “Brown Sugar” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. Five additional songs from the tour’s Giants Stadium show in New Jersey are also included.

Label Review. 

2018 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Josephine raises a stained-glass lamp and shepherds us spelunking the depths of spirit in this four-part double album. Following the fame of her voice are choruses of winged entities (and a space shuttle) that ascend and descend a maze of spirituals: ritual prayers, blues laments, vestal hymns and jubilant benedictions. The edges of the natural world are revolving backdrops from which our narrator perches upon symbolic precipice or saunters desolate snow-blanched forest, exploring eternal themes of mortality and morality, beneath the moon and in occasional dialogue with a mysterious lord of love, an ambiguous mystical figure.

Accompanying herself on guitar, piano, organ, harp & autoharp, this cycle of 18 new songs hearken back to various facets of Foster’s anachronic oeuvre (the esoteric balladry of This Coming Gladness, native rhythms of Blood Rushing, somnambulist waltzes of I’m a Dreamer, the Shaker primitivism of Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead you). Celestial humor and devastating innocence are delivered with contributions from Victor Herrero (lead guitars), Gyða Valtýsdóttir (cello), Chris Scruggs (pedal steel), Jon Estes (bass), as well as cameos by members of The Cherry Blossoms and others. Recorded, engineered and mixed by Andrija Tokic at his Nashville Bomb Shelter Studio, mastered by John Baldwin, and produced by Josephine herself.

Label Review. 

The comprehensive, individually numbered 7-disc collection features: CDs 1 & 2: 2018 stereo album mix. CD3: Esher Demos. CDs 4, 5, 6: Sessions - 50 additional recordings, most previously unreleased, from 'White Album' studio sessions; all newly mixed from the four-track and eight-track session tapes, sequenced in order of their recording start dates. Blu-ray: 2018 album mix in high resolution PCM stereo / 2018 DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 album mix / 2018 Dolby True HD 5.1 album mix / 2018 direct transfer of the album’s original mono mix. Plus book and original inserts. Also available on 3CD, 2LP and 4LP variants. 

Our Overview. 

On 30th May 1968, The Beatles commenced work on the follow-up to the previous years ground-breaking ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ long player which had been released almost exactly a year prior. Much had happened in the interim: The “All You Need Is Love” single and satellite broadcast, the death of Brian Epstein, the recording and filming of the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ project, the “Hello Goodbye” and “Lady Madonna” singles, their trip to India to study Transcendental Meditation and the launch of their label, Apple Records. Phew!

All the band members had new songs stockpiled and many were demoed at George Harrison’s house in May 1968. They block booked Abbey Road and for the next five months recorded these tracks and many more new ones whilst at the same time, the fab four’s interpersonal relationships began to unravel with the individual members recording alone sometimes on their own songs.

Despite the sidelining of their esteemed producer George Martin who found himself unwanted by the band for long periods and even the brief departure of Ringo for a few weeks, the fact that the group managed to pull the disparate strands together into a cohesive albeit wonky double album which stands today as some fans favourite album by the band is a testament to their abilities to overcome their issues to still put out great work. To add to the albums mystique, artist Richard Hamilton in collaboration with Paul McCartney put the two records in a plain white sleeve, an antidote to the elaborate front cover for ‘Pepper’. In the words of Bobbi Flekman from Spinal Tap: “The White Album? What was that? There was nothing on that god damn cover”.

Label Review. 

18 recently unearthed and unreleased tracks from the recordings that Campbell made between 1964 and 1968 for Elvis Presley. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Sings For The King’ features 18 recently unearthed and unreleased tracks from the recordings that Campbell made between 1964 and 1968 for Elvis Presley. The pair’s friendship stretched across three decades, from their first meeting during Elvis’ rise to fame to the days when both were adored worldwide. Initially intended for Elvis’ ears only, these recordings were fully fleshed out studio versions of songs written by the team of Ben Weisman and Sid Wayne; Weisman is noted as the composer with more songs recorded by Presley than any other, with a total of 57.

Glen Campbell was asked to bring his perfect pitch and ability to match Presley’s vocal pitch and style, so that the songs could be presented to ‘The King’ for his recording consideration. Glen also brings his unrivalled guitar virtuosity to the material. Twelve of the 18 tracks on the album were indeed subsequently recorded by Elvis, including the title songs from his movie vehicles such as ‘Spinout,’ ‘Clambake’ and ‘Easy Come, Easy Go’.

Campbell undertook the sessions in between others during his time with the famed studio ensemble the Wrecking Crew, as a touring member of the Beach Boys and on his own recordings. The album opens with a digital duet between Presley and Campbell, the gospel song “We Call On Him”, and features a variety of styles ranging from the country-tinged “Any Old Time” via ballads like “I’ll Never Know” to the rockier “I’ll Be Back”. Campbell begins “I Got Love” in his own style but subtly changes the delivery to Presley’s tone.

Campbell later recalled: “Elvis and I were brought up the same humble way, picking cotton and looking at the north end of a south-bound mule. I saw him in the rough. He was so electrifying.” In 1960, Campbell moved to Los Angeles to find work as a session musician and landed a regular gig at the Crossbow Club, where Presley and his friends would sometimes visit to watch the entertainment from a small private room upstairs.

Long before his own stardom, Campbell was unrivalled as a session guitarist, playing on nearly 600 sessions in 1963 alone. His one appearance on a Presley recording was the memorable guitar on ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ Even after his own breakthrough in 1967, Campbell continued to record songs for Weisman and Wayne in his increasingly limited spare time.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in CD+ and in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Muse are back with a new album ‘Simulation Theory’ which is the bands eighth studio album to date. The eleven-track record was produced by the band, along with several award-winning producers, including Rich Costey, Mike Elizondo, Shellback and Timbaland. Each of the album’s songs will be accompanied by a video.

Recent singles, ‘Something Human’, ‘Thought Contagion’ and ‘Dig Down’, as well as brand new track ‘The Dark Side’, are all available immediately as a download when you pre-order the album. ‘The Dark Side’ is instantly recognisable as a classic Muse track, featuring Matt Bellamy’s unmistakable soaring vocals and blistering guitars and the driving rhythm section of Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard that have become a hallmark of Muse’s stadium-filling sound.

‘Simulation Theory’ follows ‘Drones’, released in 2015. Since then the internationally acclaimed three piece have toured extensively, taking the ground breaking ‘Drones World Tour’ to fans across the globe. This concert was filmed and released in cinemas worldwide for ‘One Night Only’ in July 2018.   

Muse is Matt Bellamy, Dominic Howard and Chris Wolstenholme. Their last studio album, ‘Drones’, was released in June 2015 and debuted at No. 1 in 21 countries around the world including their first No. 1 album in the United States.  The album went on to win the Grammy Award, their second, for Best Rock Album in February 2016.  Since forming in 1994, Muse have released seven studio albums selling in advance of 20 million albums worldwide. 

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

J Mascis best known as the frontman of indie trio Dinosaur Jr. is releasing his new album ‘Elastic Days’ the follow up to his 2014 full-length ‘Tied To A Star’.

Near the end of Reagan’s first term, the Western Massachusetts Hardcore scene coughed up an insanely shaped chunk called Dinosaur. Comprised of WMHC vets, the trio was a miasmic tornado of guitar noise, bad attitude and near-subliminal pop-based-shapeshifting. Through their existence, Dinosaur (amended to Dinosaur Jr. for legal reasons) defined a very specific, very aggressive set of oblique song-based responses to what was going on. Their one constant was the scalp-fryingly loud guitar and deeply buried vocals of J Mascis.

A couple of years before they ended their reign, J cut a solo album called ‘Martin + Me’. Recorded live and acoustic, the record allowed the bones of J’s songs to be totally visible for the first time. Fans were surprised to hear how melodically elegant these compositions were, even if J still seemed interested in swallowing some of the words that most folks would have sung. Since then, through the reformation of the original Dinosaur Jr line up in 2005, J has recorded solo albums now and then. And those album, ‘Sings + Chant for AMMA’ (2005), ‘Several Shades of Why’ (2011) and ‘Tied to a Star’ (2014) had all delivered incredible sets of songs presented with a minimum of bombast and a surfeit of cool.

Like its predecessors, ‘Elastic Days’ was recorded at J’s own Bisquiteen studio. Mascis does almost all his own stunts, although Ken Miauri (who also appeared on ‘Tied to a Star’) plays keyboards and there are a few guest vocal spots. These include old mates Pall Jenkins (Black Heart Procession) and Mark Mulcahy (Miracle Legion, etc.), as well as the newly added voice of Zoë Randell (Luluc) among others but the show is mostly J’s and J’s alone. “The biggest difference with this record might have to do with the drums. I’d just got a new drum set I was really excited about. I don’t have too many drum outlets at the moment, so I played a lot more drums than I’d originally planned. I just kept playing. [laughs] I’d play the acoustic guitar parts then head right to the drums.”

There is plenty of drumming on the dozen songs on ‘Elastic Days’ but for those expecting the hallucinatory overload of Dinosaur Jr’s live attack, the gentleness of the approach here will draw easy comparisons to Neil Young’s binary approach to working solo versus working with Crazy Horse. This is a lazy man’s shorthand but it still rings true. ‘Elastic Days’ brims with great moments. Epic hooks that snare you in surprisingly subtle ways, guitar textures that slide against each other like old lovers, and structures that range from a neo-power-ballad (‘Web So Dense’) to jazzily-canted West Coasty post-psych (‘Give It Off’) to a track that subliminally recalls the keyboard approach of Scott Thurstonera Stooges (‘Drop Me’). The album plays out with a combination of holism and variety that is certain to set many brains ablaze. J says he’ll be taking this album on the road later in the year. He’ll be playing by himself but unlike other solo tours he says he’ll be standing up this time. “I used to just sit down and build a little fort around myself - amps, music stands, drinks stands, all that stuff. But I just realized it sounds better if the amps are higher up because I’m so used to playing with stacks. So I’ll stand this time.” I ask if it’s not pretty weird to stand alone on a big stage. “Yeah,” he says. “But it’s weird sitting down too.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Larkin Poe - the Nashville based sister duo Megan and Rebecca Lovell have announced the release of their fourth album ‘Venom & Faith’, the followup to their critically-acclaimed album ‘Peach’ which was nominated for a Blues Music Award for Best Emerging Artist Album, ‘Venom & Faith’ was produced by both the band and their long-time engineer Roger Alan Nichols.

“It’s a celebration of American roots music as translated by two sisters who are playing the blues in a modern age,” said Rebecca, one half of the duo, whose powerhouse vocals pair perfectly with sister Megan’s slinky lap steel to create an outlaw sound entirely unique to the two.

Still writing on their experience of the American South, the band keeps a strong outlaw mentality and defy expectations of roots rock in their fourth endeavor, this time using electronic elements, hip-hop production techniques and non-traditional percussion methods such as slammed doors and dresser drawers.

The album includes two covers—”Sometimes” by Bessie Jones and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” by Skip James—though it’s otherwise all original material from the Lovell sisters.

Label Review.

2018 album. The record features contributions from friends like Bob Weir, Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Taj Mahal, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and many more.

Our Overview.

The 1960s Bay Area psych-rock band Ace of Cups will release ‘Ace Of Cups’ their debut album via High Moon Records. Although the group shared the stage with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, they never recorded a proper album and called it a day in 1972.

An all-women ensemble that could flip from barbershop-style harmonies to mind-bending psychedelic jams at a moment’s notice, Ace of Cups didn’t find commercial success in their day. This was partially due to their uncategorisable presence in the rock n' roll boys’ club; back then, label suits would routinely ignore the band to schmooze with and sign their male peers. Or, as original guitarist Denise Kaufman puts it to Billboard - “They would just look at us and go, ‘What are you?’”

There were other, simpler reasons for the split, too; most of the band had become new mothers by the end. With no tangible commercial success on the horizon, the Ace of Cups began to make less sense on a practical level. The five musicians - Kaufman, bassist Mary Gannon, organist Marla Hunt, lead guitarist Mary Ellen Simpson and drummer Diane Vitalich - amicably went their separate ways in the early ‘70s, with each working various supplemental jobs. But crucially, no member of the Ace of Cups ever lost touch with the other nor hung up their instruments.

Instead of being lost to rock history, the Ace of Cups have enjoyed a spectacular - and highly improbable - second act 50 years later. A collection of rehearsal demos, TV soundstage audio and other ephemera from their brief run resulted in the great compilation “It’s Bad For You So Buy It!” and renewed interest in the long-defunct band. And when George Wallace, head of the ‘60s and ‘70s rarity label High Moon Records, initially approached the band to release more of those tapes, it turned out to be a no-brainer as to what the Ace of Cups’ next move should be: finally making a record.

And what a debut it is, brimming over not only with great songs, but a formidable guest list from the band’s ‘60s peers Bob Weir, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Taj Mahal and more. It’s the sound of four maximum-eclectic musical lifers, unfettered by old frustrations in the biz and purely ready to jam.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl. 

Our Overview.

Indie rock band The Glands from Athens Georgia, released only two albums of weird, irascible, irresistible indie rock before band leader Ross Shapiro died in 2016: ‘Double Thriller’ 1996 and ‘The Glands’ 2000. The band went their separate ways after that, frontman Ross Shapiro opened a record store in Athens for a time, though they got back together in the early ’10s to play a few reunion shows, and there was a promise of new music on the horizon. Shapiro died in 2016, though, from lung cancer, and the rest of the band went about compiling Shapiro’s demos and recordings from the last two decades into a new, final Glands album. The Glands first two albums established Ross as an unlikely and maybe even unwilling cult artist; you could argue that not enough people bought ‘Double Thriller’ and ‘The Glands’, but everyone who did became avid fans for life.

Eighteen years after its last record, there couldn't be a better time to fall in love with The Glands. Not only are 1996's self-released ‘Double Thriller’ and 2000's self-titled gem of a masterpiece getting stand-alone vinyl reissues (the latter adds five rare songs and a new track sequence), but we're also getting deluxe box set titled ‘I Can See My House From Here', which includes an unreleased third album.

That third album, ‘Double Coda’ was cobbled together from two decades worth of Shapiro's demos and recordings, with final production overseen by founding member and drummer Joe Rowe, bassist Derek Almstead and Glands producer David Barbe. Like Double Thriller, like The Glands, every single one of these 23 tracks is a hit, and a testament to Shapiro's warped-yet-grounded sensibility.

We get two new songs today. There's "So High," featuring Ross Shapiro's falsetto croon over a soulful and slanted, Tom Petty style Southern rocker, warbly organ and distant la la las. That comes paired with a video shot at the 40 Watt in Athens, where The Glands would often perform. But the real gift is in "Electricity," which imagines an alternate world where Shapiro produced head-nodding trip-hop with an ear towards granular beats and quiet turntablism, but looped around an irresistible melody and guitar hook.

“As a fan of the music and as a fan of Ross, it was a labour of love to get this set out, to get as much of the music out as possible and into the ears of the people who loved him,” the band’s Derek Almstead said in a statement. “A lot of the material came from CD’s he’d give us at band practice, like ‘Here’s some stuff I’m working on.’ It might have the vocals buried or it might not be finished. I found the best versions of the songs and put together a three-CD set, something like sixty songs. We whittled that down to what ‘Double Coda’ is.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Leila Moss is releasing her debut solo album ‘My Name Is Safe In Your Mouth’. “The act of making this record has felt truly exotic for me by way of its minimalism,” says Liela Moss, and the album lives up to Moss’s promise of fresh, bold adventure.

As Liela puts it, “I was in my own modest studio, surrounded by deep rural Somerset, and building the album bit by bit over a year with just my producer and partner Toby Butler – with whom I co-wrote all the music. We worked to our own schedule and across all seasons. Staring out of the window singing, I would watch the changing natural phenomena around me and sing to the forms outside. My window-view outside was like an umbilical cord; I was receiving little messages from the nature beyond and the songs were growing inside the studio, transmitting back.”

In 2017, Raymonde said this of Moss: “Outrageously talented as she is, I still think her best is yet to come.” Offering full affirmation on both fronts, My Name Is Safe in Your Mouth is a haunting snapshot of an intuitive artist seeking new ways to work without safety nets, a quest spurred forwards by her move to Somerset in 2014. As Moss puts it, “Whilst the tentacles of city started to loosen their grip, I began amassing vocals that I felt cut a stark silhouette, and I didn’t want to share with big drums and distorted guitars. I work on a few projects at a time, and the contrast of having disparate musical worlds to step into makes me feel more satisfied. But with this record, I’d gone way deeper than anything merely gratifying. I’d gone into that wordless-sparse-Haiku-what-the-fuck-silent-personal-revelation zone!”

Label Review.

Original album and bonus tracks remixed in stereo by Steven Wilson / Live BBC sessions recorded in 1968 / Original mono mix and original 1968 U.K. stereo mix / Original album and bonus tracks remixed by Steven Wilson in 4.1 DTS and AC3 Dolby Digital surround and 96/24 LPCM stereo / Flat transfer of the 1968 stereo remix / Presented in a case-bound DVD book filled with an extensive history of the album, track-by-track annotations by Ian Anderson, plus rare and unseen photographs.

Our Overview.

After several name changes, Jethro Tull played its first show as Jethro Tull in February 1968. Months later, Ian Anderson, Mick Abrahams, Glenn Cornick and Clive Bunker released the band’s debut – This Was. The album debuted at #10 on the U.K. album chart, but more important, it was the first step in a 50-year (and counting) journey that made Jethro Tull one of the world’s most successful progressive rock bands. To celebrate the album’s upcoming 50th anniversary, a special deluxe edition will be released which features:-         

* Original album and bonus tracks remixed in stereo by Steven Wilson        

* Live BBC sessions recorded in 1968          

* Original mono mix and original 1968 U.K. stereo mix          

* Original album and bonus tracks remixed by Steven Wilson in 4.1 DTS and AC3 Dolby Digital surround and 96/24 LPCM stereo          

* Flat transfer of the 1968 stereo remix        

* Presented in a case-bound DVD book filled with an extensive history of the album, track-by-track annotations by Ian Anderson, plus rare and unseen photographs.

Recorded during the summer of 1968, This Was is the only Jethro Tull album to feature guitarist Mick Abrahams, who left the group shortly after the album came out to form Blodwyn Pig. The title of the album refers to the band moving away from its early blues-based sound, which was referenced in the original liner notes: “This was how we were playing then – but things change – don’t they?” The album includes songs that have been in and out of Jethro Tull’s live show for 50 years, like “My Sunday Feeling” and “Beggar’s Farm.”  Also featured are several bonus tracks:  “Love Story,”  “A Christmas Song.”  “Sunshine Day” and “Aeroplane.”    

In 1968, BBC Radio featured the band twice on its award-winning program, “BBC Top Gear Session.” Both of those performances – nine songs in total – are featured on the second disc, including live versions of “Serenade To A Cuckoo,” “Love Story” and “My Sunday Feeling.” Rounding out the disc are b-sides, outtakes, radio advertisements, and an unreleased mono mix of “Someday The Sun Won’t Shine For You” (Faster Version). The final CD features the album’s original U.K. stereo mix and its original mono mix. 

The DVD features the original album and bonus tracks remixed by Steven Wilson in 4.1 DTS and AC3 Dolby Digital surround and 96/24 LPCM stereo. There are also 5.1 surround versions of “Love Story” and “A Christmas Song.” Also included in 96/24 LPCM stereo is the 1969 stereo mix that was released in the U.S.

Label Review.

Collection of his first five Xmas EPs.

Our Overview.

For over a decade and almost every Christmas, Sufjan Stevens recorded a Christmas album that he gifted to friends and family. The recording process took place every December, for one week, usually at home, provoking collaborations with friends, roommates and musical peers. In 2006, Stevens’ label, Asthmatic Kitty Records, released ‘Songs For Christmas’, a CD boxset compiling the first five of these albums, Volumes I-V. And in 2012, the label released ‘Silver & Gold’, a CD and vinyl boxset compiling of Volumes VI-X. However, the first five volumes have never been released to vinyl.

This holiday season, Asthmatic Kitty Records are finally releasing ‘Songs for Christmas’ (Volumes I-V) as a 5xLP vinyl boxset. The boxset includes fan favourites like ‘Sister Winter’, ‘That Was The Worst Christmas Ever’, ‘Only At Christmas Time’ and ‘Put The Lights On The Tree’.

“Hardly a straight-ahead Christmas album, then... Whatever, it’s Sufjan Stevens. He’s a modern wonder, and now he's just made Christmas better as well!” - BBC

“The season’s most thrilling holiday release.” - Entertainment Weekly

“There are moments of quirky holiday splendour - moments akin to some of the best material on ‘Greetings From Michigan And Illinois’ - that make plowing through the entire five-EP set a pleasure.” - Allmusic

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

'No Tourists’ is the new album from The Prodigy and their seventh following ‘The Day Is My Enemy’ released 2015. In a career approaching 30 unpredictable, uncompromising years, The Prodigy have become that rare artist whose influence can be felt across all walks of life. Continually defining (and re-defining) electronic music, the band have clocked up a staggering 6 number 1 albums, played to many millions around the world, and remain as relevant and respected as ever.

Though much has changed in the musical and social landscape, what remains a constant is The Prodigy's resolute focus on following their own path, their own way. This, perhaps, is the true meaning of 'No Tourists', and in 2018 the anger, urgency,and irrepressible spirit of The Prodigy has no doubt never been more needed.

‘No Tourists’ was written, produced and mixed by Liam Howlett at his London’s Kings Cross studio. Though this is very much a band album. Maxim and Keef are very much present and correct, each supplying their legendary vocal skills and whilst there are one or two collaborators, but fundamentally this is the sound of the Prodigy.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Canadian Dan Mangan is releasing his fifth album and has this to say about it: " ’More or Less’ is about witnessing birth, and in some ways rebirth. It’s about feeling disconnected from a popular identity and becoming acclimated to a new one. It’s about raising kids in a turbulent world. It’s about unanswerable questions and kindness and friendship and fear.

"This is my fifth album. I worked with some incredible people who have made many of my favourite albums. It was an important lesson in minimalism, and while their consolidated stamp on the album is vast, it’s a credit to their creative generosity that the result feels more like ‘me’ than ever. More sparse. Less meticulous. More kids. Less time. More direct. Less metaphor. More discovery. Less youth. More warmth. Less chaos.

"In between recording sessions, I’d listen to Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’ and Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’. I’d think about how sometimes, what seems unfinished at genesis can feel more final when given a moment to settle. In my twenties, I boxed my way from the corners of every noisy bar that would let me bring in my guitar. I was stubbornly optimistic.

"When things began to click, it felt like I had the benefit of the doubt from every direction. I signed with my dream label. I even won some JUNO Awards and was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize a couple of times. I performed for Will and Kate. My girlfriend Kirsten kindly tolerated these years of relentless touring and we got married in 2012. I remember having a lengthy and heated long distance call about our wedding guest-list while laying on an airport floor in Croatia.

"I’d been touring non-stop for six consecutive years and the phone just kept ringing, but I felt my mind and body start to fail. When we learned that we were going to have a baby, I told my manager that I wanted to take a year away from touring. I felt I’d earned it. That “one year” away from the grind sort of slowly became six. We had another kid. We nested. I swept the floor ten thousand times. I scored a film, and then some television shows.

"As the fog of domestic obligations shifted, I began to regain a sense of myself as an artist. But things were different. I wasn’t a part of the new generation anymore. I knew how to keep racoons from tearing up my lawn, but not so much about youth culture (and the music industry is, uhhhh... all tied up in youth culture). Moreover, politics were different. Dystopic forebodings I’d previously written about seemed to be coming true. Had I manifested them? I was re-entering the world but the rules had changed, and I was a different person.

"So I wrote about warmth. I wrote about the feeling of building something when I was young, and the fear of losing it as an adult. I wrote about feeling overwhelmed. I wrote about being deeply in love with someone with whom I spend a lot of time figuring out who is more deserving of a nap. I wrote about the power of what goes unsaid. More or less, I wrote about myself.

"The recording process was piecemeal over several years and full of eye-opening experiences. Paul McCartney even wandered into the studio as we were listening back to a take of “Lay Low”. We ended up scrapping what he heard, but… well… he heard something I wrote. Let that be an omen.

"Drew Brown was a collaborator and mentor, forever changing my understanding of studio recording. His impact on this work is vital. He brought Joey Waronker, Jason Falkner and Darrell Thorp into the fold, whose collective creativity and instincts helped discover nuances in the songs I could never have dreamed of. Two songs were recorded with Simone Felice who introduced me to Ryan Hewitt and Matt Johnson. Along with my longtime pals Gordon Grdina and John Walsh, this team found a vibrant subtlety that helped me rethink my identity as a singer. I cannot thank them enough. Everyone who touched this album did so with wholehearted dedication and love. I am grateful that they would trust this work and approach it with such care and ownership. I am ready to share these songs. I don’t know where the gig is. I don’t know if it’s cool. But I still get lost in it, and I’ve got more to lose." Dan Mangan, August, 2018

Label Review.

29 tracks from their two sessions for the legendary DJ. Third Man. Also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Third Man released the first-ever official release of ‘The White Stripes Peel Sessions’ on 2 stuffed-to-the-brim discs. Having been widely bootlegged since their initial broadcast in 2001, these recordings are enjoying their first authorised release in celebration of their 15 year anniversary. Capturing Jack and Meg at the precipice of international renown in the hubbub of “White Blood Cells," their two live sessions with famed BBC DJ John Peel are arguably the best document of the White Stripes at that time.

What you hear on ‘The White Stripes: The Complete John Peel Sessions’ is a band on the cusp of being huge. This record has the energy of a band operating as a well-oiled machine and cranking out hit after hit, but it is performed with just a few people in the room.  It is filled with smatterings of applause between each song.  Those lucky few must have been blown away.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Mersey balladeer Bill Ryder-Jones has announced the release of his fifth album ‘Yawn’. It’s a good old fashioned guitar record, with lyrics you can relate to and melodies you can hum that might get stuck in your head — and you won’t even mind if they do!

Ryder-Jones has been writing tunes and playing actual instruments since 2002 when he was a key ingredient in The Coral, and he’s since gone on to make a nice little solo career for himself that has most recently found his dulcet mumble accompanying some long, guitar based tunes that evoke the sincerity and fun of the 1990s.

“But there's a fortune to be had from telling people you're sad” says Bill Ryder-Jones on the opening track of Yawn. But Bill won’t be ordering gold taps for his bathroom on your tear-ducts anytime soon, simply because there’s nothing mawkish or insincere going on in here. Yawn is an album that looks for understanding - down the back of life’s sofa.  These are everyday stories about situations we all fall from and into, out of, and back up against the wall again - and they are sung to us, up close, by a voice still in hock to a few uncomfortable truths.

Label Review. 

Mott The Hoople (1969) with 9 bonus tracks / Mad Shadows (1970) with 8 bonus tracks / Wildlife (1971) with 8 bonus tracks / Brain Capers (1971) with 8 bonus tracks / The Ballads of Mott The Hoople (12 more unreleased tracks) / It’s Live And Live Only (Tracks 1-7: Fairfield Hall, Croydon, 13 September 1970 / Tracks 8-12: Paris Theatre, London, BBC Radio One, In Concert, 30 December 1971). 50pp book.

Our Overview. 

Mott The Hoople were one of the seminal British rock bands of the early 70’s. Undervalued at the time, they have since been cited as major influences by members of Queen, Def Leppard, Oasis, R.E.M, Kiss, Motley Crue and The Clash. This box set brings together all the bands albums from the time with the Island Label, all have been re-mastered from the original tapes (where available) by renowned engineer Andy Pearce. The studio albums are each complimented by bonus tracks selected by sleeve note writer, and Mott the Hoople expert Kris Needs while Disc 5 contains more unheard and, in some cases, unreleased music from the Island archive. The set is rounded off with a disc of live material from Fairfield Hall, Croydon, 13 September 1970 and a BBC in concert recorded at the time. The reissue is housed in a shoe box style box containing a 50-page booklet with detailed sleeve notes by Kris Needs and designed by Phil Smee who has scoured the archives for rare photos and memorabilia from the time to show the evolution of the band.

"Mott would swing relentlessly and unstoppably into their show every night, like a marauding band of outlaws and every night there was something close to a riot – the kids couldn’t get close enough; they simply couldn’t get enough. Ian Hunter – the unwritten boss – would plant himself centre-stage behind his shades and dare anyone to remain seated." Brian May, Queen.

Label Review. 

Blood On The Tracks session tapes. The complete New York City recording sessions + the five existing Minneapolis Sound 80 Recordings in Chronological Order. The deluxe box set is a limited edition. After it sells out, no additional copies will be made. This set includes a hardcover photo book featuring liner notes by rock historian Jeff Slate and a complete reproduction of one of Dylan’s legendary handwritten 57 page notebooks, where you can follow the lyrical development of the songs that would eventually comprise Blood on the Tracks. Also available on CD, and vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

‘Blood on the Tracks’ was originally recorded during four days in New York City in September 1974. Soon thereafter, the album was mastered and review copies began to circulate. A few months later, Dylan felt the album needed a different approach and re-recorded five of the tracks at Minneapolis Sound 80 Studios beginning in late December of that year. While a few of the outtakes from the original New York sessions have been highly prized by bootleggers and collectors, most of these recordings have never been available in any format.

In his liner notes for ‘More Blood, More Tracks’, Jeff Slate observes that, “Dylan cut each of these amazing performances – some of the best he ever committed to tape – one after the other, live in the studio, without headphones, and without the types of overdubs that most performers rely on to make their records sound finished. Instead, on these tracks, we find Dylan – just a singer with a guitar and a harmonica and a batch of great songs – delivering performances that thrill you when they’re supposed to and break your heart when they need to...’ The performances are also in the purest state we’ve ever experienced them. During the production of ‘Blood on the Tracks’, Dylan asked [producer Phil] Ramone to speed up many of the masters by 2-3%, a common practice in the 1960s and ’70s, especially for records sent to AM radio. It was thought that doing so would give the songs a little extra bounce to better engage listeners. Most of the songs from the New York sessions that previously circulated, officially and unofficially, are the sped-up versions that Dylan requested. On ‘More Blood, More Tracks’, for the first time, we’re hearing the songs exactly as Dylan recorded them.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in CD+, Vinyl and Box Set.

Our Overview.

The inimitable Marianne Faithful is back with her 21st album “Negative Capacity’ and it is possibly the most emotionally powerful of her 54-year recording career. Facing down arthritis and bolstered by collaborators including Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, Rob Ellis, Ed Harcourt and Mark Lanegan, ‘Negative Capability’ is charged with brutal honesty and autobiographical reflection as she addresses losing old friends, her loneliness living in her adopted city of Paris, and love.

Driven by her supernatural re-interpretative skills, florid lyricism, battle against the pain she lives with, and realised with her stellar group of musicians, ‘Negative Capability’ is Marianne’s unflinchingly honest and relentlessly beautiful late-life masterpiece. The stark emotional heft, exquisitely framed by ornately sensitive musical backdrops can only be likened to the late-life works by Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen. 

“It’s the most honest album I’ve ever made,” she says. “I’ve always tried not to reveal myself. There’s nothing like real hardship to give you some depth. I’ve had terrible accidents and I’m really damaged. It’s changed my life forever. I’m in a lot of pain and worked really hard to get strong so I can do my work. The great miracle is I was able to make this beautiful record. I really had no idea how it would turn out. I just jumped in and hoped I would be able to do it. This is all what’s happened to me since my life changed but obviously if I do something I must do it really well.” 

The record emphasises her unique place as a force of nature in the beating heart of modern music that started opening up after ‘Sister Morphine’ ignited her muse and was recorded by the Rolling Stones nearly fifty years ago. At that time she had enjoyed her pop career with hits such as ‘Come And Stay With Me’ and ‘This Little Bird’, before becoming the crown princess of the UK counterculture before grasping her artistic reins with the landmark ‘Broken English’ in 1979.

Recorded at La Frette studio on the outskirts of Paris, ‘Negative Capability’ is inexorably overshadowed by grief at losing close friends from the ‘60s such as Anita Pallenberg, Martin Stone and Cream album designer Martin Sharp. It’s produced by both Rob Ellis – the PJ Harvey producer who’s been Marianne’s collaborator for five years -and Warren Ellis from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Warren’s violin blesses songs such as ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Born To Live’ – her intensely moving eulogy to departed lifelong friend Anita - with the stark but lustrous autumnal beauty that makes the album. 

The first single ‘The Gypsy Fairie Queen’ – inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – was co-written with Nick Cave and features his vocals and piano playing. “It’s a little miracle,” says Marianne. “I asked Nick if he would put music to it and he wrote back saying, ‘I’m so busy.’ I said, ‘I understand, sorry to bother you.’ Then he just wrote back, ‘Thank you so much for understanding; here’s the song.’ It’s just gorgeous.”

Label Review. 

Compiled by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, ‘State Of The Union’ follows on from their highly acclaimed 'English Weather' and 'Paris In The Spring' compilations. With clear parallels between today’s fractured country and the USA fifty years ago, this is a fascinating condensation of what Americans were thinking when they turned on the TV, or the radio, or simply walked down Main Street in 1968. 24 tracks. Elvis, Dion, Frank Sinatra, Beach Boys, Everly Brothers, Ray Stevens, Bobby Darin and more. Ace. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

By mid-1968 there was a growing consensus that something had gone horribly wrong with the American dream. The nation’s youth had loudly made their feelings clear, but now the older, pre-Beatles generations began to look at the country – with urban riots, Vietnam, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy – and wonder what the hell was happening.

This album includes rare classics (The Beach Boys’ “Fourth Of July”), lost masterpieces (Roy Orbison’s seven-minute “Southbound Jericho Parkway”), and forgotten gems by some of the biggest names in the business (Elvis Presley’s “Clean Up Your Own Back Yard”).

Reactions to America’s existential crisis ranged in subject matter from divorce (Frank Sinatra’s “The Train”) and the break-up of the nuclear family (The Four Seasons’ “Saturday’s Father”), to eulogies for fallen heroes (Dion’s “Abraham Martin and John”), sympathy for Vietnam vets (Johnny Tillotson’s “Welfare Hero”), the church’s institutional racism (Eartha Kitt’s intense “Paint Me Black Angels”), and even questioning the ethics of the space programme (Bing Crosby’s terrific “What Do We Do With The World”).

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘B.E.D’ is the new collaboration from Baxter Dury, French dance music pioneer Etienne De Cr.cy and Delilah Holiday of London punks Skinny Girl Diet. They release their debut album via Heavenly Recordings. The album is available on CD, LP and digital download album.

The record was recorded between 2017 and the start of 2018 and produced by Etienne De Cr.cy and Baxter Dury in France.

Baxter Dury says “Etienne has created a musical background for my confessional narrative and Delilah has encouraged it to be something more emotional. It’s an unlikely mix that works because its short, simple and honest.”

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Aviary’ is the new album from Julia Holter and it is an epic through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on October 26th via Domino, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements. The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: "I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds." It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void.

 “Amidst all the internal and external babble we experience daily, it's hard to find one's foundation,” says Holter. “I think this album is reflecting that feeling of cacophony and how one responds to it as a person - how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace.  Maybe it’s a matter of listening to and gathering the seeming madness, of forming something out of it and envisioning a future.”

“In a lot of the songs, when I mention love, it’s about a seeking for compassion and humility in a world where it feels like empathy is always being tested,” Holter says. In ‘Aviary’s’ case, that search for sweetness - that bridging of the gulf - becomes a metaphor for the creative process itself, cutting through the hierarchies of history, language, and musical form to offer something more fluid, more inclusive, more idiosyncratic. 

‘Aviary’, executive produced by Cole MGN and produced by Holter and Kenny Gilmore, combines Holter's slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of strings and percussion that reveals itself, and the boundless scope of her vision, over the course of fifteen songs. Holter was joined by Corey Fogel (percussion), Devin Hoff (bass), Dina Maccabee (violin, viola, vocals), Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet), Andrew Tholl (violin), and Tashi Wada (synth, bagpipes).

Label Review. 

1968 album. Original album 2018 stereo and mono remasters plus bonus tracks of singles, B sides, alternate versions, mixes and other original album related tracks. Contains previously unreleased track versions and unreleased new single Time Song. Media book packaging with linen finish, 20 page booklet with extensive notes, band quotes and rare Village Green era imagery. 49 tracks total. Also available on CD, LP and super deluxe box. 

Our Overview. 

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society Preservation Society is now seen as one of the best British albums ever recorded. Created in difficult circumstances by a band who refused to follow fashion, it is an album of timeless, perfectly crafted songs about growing up and growing old, and the decline of national culture and traditional ways. Enduring and unsurpassed, with its wit, sadness, quiet anger, regret and charm, it is generally considered the high point of The Kinks’ outstanding career and Ray Davies’ masterpiece.

A calm, nostalgic album which feels like a sweet, hazy dream but with endless layers of musical and lyrical innovation, The Village Green Preservation Society’s defiantly British sensibilities became the foundation of generations of British guitar pop.

Label Review.

'Memento Mori' charts Adamson's career from 1978's Magazine track, Parade (co-written by Adamson, from their debut album 'Real Life') to his work as founding member, alongside Nick Cave, of the Bad Seeds (From Her To Eternity, co-written by Adamson), through his nine solo albums, from 1988's 'Moss Side Story' to the latest 'Love Sick Dick' EPs, bringing everything up to date with a brand new unreleased track, The Hummingbird. Also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Barry Adamson announces ‘Memento Mori (Anthology 1978 - 2018)’, a 40th anniversary release charting the artist’s writing and recording career.

Says Adamson, “I’m immensely looking forward to bringing my anthology, ‘Memento Mori’, to the stage - complete with strings and brass, flutes and whistles - along with my band, seething with excellence, chomping at the bit, to bring you the full on Barry Adamson experience. A special album release, worthy of everything I can bring to the table. From ‘Moss Side Story’ to ‘Memento Mori’ (before and beyond). Not to be missed.”

‘Memento Mori’ charts Adamson’s career from 1978’s Magazine track, ‘Parade’ (co-written by Adamson, from their debut album ‘Real Life’) to his work as founding member, alongside Nick Cave, of the Bad Seeds (‘From Her To Eternity’, co-written by Adamson), through his nine solo albums, from 1988’s ‘Moss Side Story’ to the latest ‘Love Sick Dick’ EPs, bringing everything up to date with a brand new unreleased track, ‘The Hummingbird’.

‘Memento Mori (Anthology 1978 - 2018’) is out on gold double vinyl, CD and digital download album on Mute.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘I Wasn’t Only Thinking About You...’ thoughtfully explores the melody-rich expanse between indie pop and alt-folk, while dipping into themes of growing older and seeing the world.

After writing the record’s songs Olivia brought them back to Melbourne, where Pepita added strings and collaborated on arrangements. “We record some of that stuff in the studio or on the road. And we do some at our homes individually,” Pepita says. “Liv and I have the same kind of ideas about what we like, a similar amount of tension and release in our choices of melodies as well. Most of the time we agree on whatever the other comes up with.

”A few years back, Olivia happened to find that list of aspirations they wrote when they were just teens. “We’ve definitely evolved, but our values have remained the same,” she says. “In the early days, we weren’t sure how we were going to tour the world. We were just going with the flow in a lot of ways. And we still do.”

Oh Pep! turned to producer Joel Quartermaine (Dan Sultan, Meg Mac) to tie this record all together, alongside mix engineer Marky Wallis (Talking Heads, REM, U2’s ‘Joshua Tree’).

LP format includes digital download code.

Label Review. 

2018 album. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

David Crosby will release ‘Here If You Listen’, his fourth solo album in five years. It’s an unexpected run that proves his musical passion to be as powerful as ever. With ‘Here If You Listen’, the 77-year-old singer/songwriter continues the singular creative streak, delivering one of his most joyfully adventurous albums yet in a career that spans six auspicious decades. On ‘Here If You Listen’, Crosby again joins forces with the three musicians who helped lend his 2016 album ‘Lighthouse’- and the tour in support of the album - its captivating grace: Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Michelle Willis and Becca Stevens (Crosby’s ‘Lighthouse’ band). But in a purposeful departure from ‘Lighthouse’, ’Here If You Listen’ emerges as a highly collaborative effort, with all four artists trading off lead vocals and bringing their distinct songwriting to the mix.“

If leaving a group like Crosby, Stills & Nash was like jumping off a cliff, then finding the Lighthouse Band was like growing wings halfway down,” says Crosby. “These three people are so startlingly talented, I literally couldn’t resist making this album with them.”

Produced by League and co-produced by Stevens, Willis and Crosby, ‘Here If You Listen’ bears a stripped-down, acoustically driven sound centered on the band’s stunning harmonies. But despite its sonic simplicity and minimal percussion, the album unfolds in infinitely shifting textures that find each musician tapping into their own carefully honed palette and idiosyncratic sensibilities. “The songs are taking on all of our collective influences, which is kind of crazy if you think about it—hearing the influence of Björk on a song with David Crosby lyrics, for example,” League notes.

With most of the album written collaboratively in League’s Brooklyn studio Atlantic Sound, ‘Here If You Listen’ matches its intricate arrangements with lyrics both raw in emotion and rich in insight. Attuned to the chaos of the present day but visionary in perspective, the songs question, challenge, and demand self-reflection just as often as they illuminate and soothe.

From song to song, ‘Here If You Listen’ radiates the palpable sense of joy and wonder each musician brought to the album’s creation. “I love that it genuinely sounds like what happened: four people from different backgrounds with mutual respect and commitment to their work, coming together to create something they found meaningful,” says Willis.

Label Review. 

69 tracks. Includes tracks from R&B From The Marquee, At The Cavern, plus studio albums. With rare singles, studio outtakes and non-UK releases. 24pp booklet.

Our Overview. 

Widely acclaimed as the Godfather of British blues, the late Alexis Korner boasts a reputation which is fully deserved. As leader of Blues Incorporated, he was a pioneer of the genre, a Zelig-like presence and generous enabler who inspired a swathe of putative young blueshounds that included Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (as Richards once acknowledged, The Rolling Stones wouldn’t have existed without him), Eric Burdon and Eric Clapton.

But Korner was more than just a seismic influence, as ‘Every Day I Have The Blues: The Sixties Anthology’ makes clear. Recorded in both a live and studio setting, this 3-CD set chronicles Korner’s musical activities throughout that most tumultuous of decades as he went from kick-starting the British blues boom to ending the Sixties in the company of a new generation of blues-rockers, thrilled to be enjoying the patronage of a much-loved elder statesman.

‘Every Day I Have The Blues’ features tracks from such legendary British blues live documents as R&B From The Marquee and At The Cavern as well as a clutch of studio albums, with sensational lead vocal performances from the likes of Cyril Davies, Long John Baldry, Ronnie Jones, Herbie Goins, Duffy Power and Robert Plant, who was in the middle of recording an album with Korner when Led Zeppelin came calling.

With rare singles, studio outtakes and non-UK releases added to the pot, Every Day I Have The Blues is the definitive document of Korner’s work during the Sixties. It comes in a stylish clamshell box with a 24-page booklet of rare photos and a new 5000+ word essay on his career during the period in question.

Label Review. 

The Action was the first band signed by Beatles producer George Martin after he left EMI to set up his own company AIR Productions. In due course, he produced the band’s five singles issued on Parlophone between 1965 and 1967 as well as tracks intended for a never-released album. CD1: Parlophone Masters / CD2: New Stereo Mixes and outtakes. / CD3: Rolled Gold Plus 1967-1968 Recordings CD4: Extras (20 bonus tracks). 36pp book.

Our Overview. 

Sixties Mod band The Action only released six singles in their lifetime - or seven, if you count a pre-Action single by The Boys - but their legend has grown exponentially since their demise in 1968. ‘Shadows And Reflections is far and away the most comprehensive tribute to The Action so far assembled, boasting all their known recordings in the studio and live on radio/TV. Many of the original Parlophone single mixes have never been reissued in their original form on compact disc - until now. The fresh discovery of multi-tracks and rehearsal tapes has led to a whole disc’s worth of previously unheard mixes and performances.

The box set includes numerous photos of The Action in their heyday, with 16,000 words of sleeve-notes by David Wells and a 36-page booklet within a handsome 4CD digibook. Includes all previous material issued from the band’s BBC sessions and post-Parlophone period, suitably remastered by Alec Palao.

Label Review. 

2018 album with the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival Orchestra. Roger has rewritten the text, telling the whole of the harrowing modern fairy tale, playing not just the Soldier, the Devil and the Narrator, but all the other characters as well. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

'The Soldier’s Tale' is a theatrical work “to be read, played, and danced” by three actors (the soldier, the devil, and a narrator) and dancers, accompanied by a septet of instruments. The libretto relates the parable of a soldier who trades his fiddle to the devil in return for unlimited economic gain. The music is scored for a septet of violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet or trumpet), trombone, and percussion. The libretto is adapted by Roger Waters from the translation by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black, based on the original text by Charles-Ferdinand Ramus.

Spoiler alert! As the work opens, Joseph, a Russian soldier, marches toward his hometown on leave, pack in tow. (“Marche du soldat”/”The Soldier’s March”) He rests by a stream and rummages through his pack. First he takes out his lucky St. Joseph medallion, then a mirror, then a photograph of his girlfriend. Finally, he finds what he was searching for: his fiddle. He begins to play. (“Petit airs au bord du ruisseau”/”Airs by a Stream”) The devil appears disguised as an old man carrying a butterfly net, but Joseph does not notice him and continues to play. The devil sneaks up on Joseph from behind and startles him.

Label Review.

1981 album. Coloured vinyl.

Our Overview.

2018 marks the 40th anniversary of Bauhaus. To celebrate, Beggars Arkive are reissuing six records from the band’s catalogue on special edition coloured vinyl.

Formed in 1978, The legendary and hugely influential quartet hailed from Northampton, England and is comprised of Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins. The dark, dramatic music that they made, possessed far more force, variety and playfulness than the ‘founding fathers of goth’ tag that is always attached to them.

Bauhaus’ landmark debut album, ‘In The Flat Field’, came out towards the end of 4AD’s first eventful year. Following the plan at the time, the band then ‘moved upstairs’ to Beggars Banquet, for whom they cut three further albums before dissolving in 1983. They charted with their cover of David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’, they’ve been and name checked by everyone from Nine Inch Nails, Sepultura, Janes Addiction, MGMT, Interpol, Bjork, Nirvana and more. They remain a huge cult concern, periodically reforming to wow their legions of dedicated followers.

The band’s members continue to make new music. Peter Murphy enjoys a successful solo career, Love And Rockets consisted of Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins. Tones On Tail was comprised of Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins. Poptone is a retrospective project, featuring Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins and his daughter Diva Domp., revisiting the music of Bauhaus, Tones On Tail and Love and Rockets.

‘Mask’ is the band’s second album and was released by Beggars Banquet in 1981. This album is mastered from HD audio files transferred from the original tapes.

“Their second album and masterpiece… a record that stretched out their aural madness in every direction possible with pure noise and the space of dub clashing against each other.” - Louder Than War.

Yellow coloured vinyl LP.

Label Review.

1980 album. Coloured Vinyl.

Our Overview.

2018 marks the 40th anniversary of Bauhaus. To celebrate, Beggars Arkive are reissuing six records from the band’s catalogue on special edition coloured vinyl.

Formed in 1978, The legendary and hugely influential quartet hailed from Northampton, England and is comprised of Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins. The dark, dramatic music that they made, possessed far more force, variety and playfulness than the ‘founding fathers of goth’ tag that is always attached to them.

Bauhaus’ landmark debut album, ‘In The Flat Field’, came out towards the end of 4AD’s first eventful year. Following the plan at the time, the band then ‘moved upstairs’ to Beggars Banquet, for whom they cut three further albums before dissolving in 1983. They charted with their cover of David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’, they’ve been and name checked by everyone from Nine Inch Nails, Sepultura, Janes Addiction, MGMT, Interpol, Bjork, Nirvana and more. They remain a huge cult concern, periodically reforming to wow their legions of dedicated followers.

The band’s members continue to make new music. Peter Murphy enjoys a successful solo career, Love And Rockets consisted of Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins. Tones On Tail was comprised of Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins. Poptone is a retrospective project, featuring Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins and his daughter Diva Domp., revisiting the music of Bauhaus, Tones On Tail and Love and Rockets.

‘In The Flat Field’ is the band’s debut studio album, released by 4AD and considered to be one of the very first ‘goth’ albums. This was mastered from HD audio files transferred from the original tapes.

“This record’s influence on the impending goth scene cannot be underestimated or denied” - Drowned in Sound

Bronze coloured vinyl LP.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Richard Ashcroft is set to return with the release of his fifth solo studio album and his first solo album in two years entitled ‘Natural Rebel’. The album will be released on his own RPA label and will be his first released via BMG. ‘Natural Rebel’ represents the latest chapter in a hugely successful solo career for the former Verve frontman and Ivor Novello winner.

Featuring ten new songs, all of which were written by Ashcroft, ‘Natural Rebel’ was produced by the singer-songwriter alongside Jon Kelly (Paul McCartney, Kate Bush) and Emre Ramazanoglu (Bobby Gillespie, Jarvis Cocker).

Former Verve frontman Richard says of his new album: “With experience comes knowledge and for me this is my strongest set of songs to date. All my favourite sounds distilled into something that will hopefully give my fans lasting pleasure . It is for them. Music is power.”

To support the record, Ashcroft will play some intimate shows this winter in venues across the UK including Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Manchester & London.

Label Reviews.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Allways’ is the much awaited new album from CAVE and they have been off on a trip brief, blissed glimpse into the infinite, and they've brought a generous dose back to us. Loaded with space, groove, and rock. Cave are kind of beyond time. You might feel like it’s been a while since you’ve seen or heard them but when you see or hear them again, that moment will feel like ‘Allways’.

During the making of the last album, ‘Threace’, CAVE was in the process of becoming a quintet. They toured the world afterwards, playing on four continents and eighteen countries - as close to everywhere as they could get. Then they took a minute. They recorded it over time, in Chile and then Chicago. You can hear all of this, the energy of liveness, the reps, and consolidating expanded possibilities within their new alignment, the time away, the distance and the freshness of returning to recorded sounds, everywhere on ‘Allways’.

In the past, much has been made of CAVE’s use of particular compelling tropes but their inspiration comes from everywhere - Miles, psych, beats, exotica, library music, rock, punk, the Germans, the New York guys too, minimalists, the Dead, music from India, everywhere. This is a bunch of guys playing rock-based music in a way that pushes them forward from everything they’ve experienced. When you listen to the new CAVE you hear guitars - lots of them - bubbling under, scratching, fanning, locking in and taking off, soaring on acid-washed wings, with keys that pump, burr and whoosh in and out of the rhythms.

Half-speed mastering of ‘Allways’ at Abbey Road has allowed the activity at all frequencies to present with a liquid fullness and ripe detail. ‘Allways’ is a blueprint for your ears to read and a map for CAVE to follow through the world.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Buxton release their new album ‘Stay Out Late’ via New West of which the band say “Is is ultimately, the end result of understanding who we are, and more importantly, who we are not.

This will be our 15th year as a band, and our 5th record overall. In the years preceding the making of this record, we all had to define what it meant for us to be happy making music. There are certain mechanisms and tropes we all fall into as a result. And as hard as we may try to emulate what we consider to be higher art, or rather, classic music; we always end up with a Buxton record.

Sergio couldn't write for almost 2 years after Half A Native. The answers to "why" had run dry. We all saw each other, hung out and everything was like normal. I can't really pinpoint the moment it all made sense again. The question had suddenly changed to "why not" and we were back in the studio making demos. There was a lurking sense that nobody would ever hear these songs, and that lead to a sort of creativity I'm not sure we'd really experienced before. All ideas were on the table, and more importantly they stayed on the table.

There are a handful of truly great masterpieces and the attempt of achieving that is one of the most daunting and exhausting pursuits any artist can take on. In the van we're constantly educating ourselves and finding new and in many cases old points of inspiration. Whether it be Mark Hollis, HC McEntire, Mickey Newbury or rediscovering the genius of Bette Midler, we find ourselves at the mercy of our own limitations of expression. Yet somehow in our most vulnerable project, we're simultaneously the most comfortable in our skin as we've ever been.

The core of this record is about being in it for the long haul, looking back, and being able to accept it all.  We can only hope that the listener can in some way share and make tangible the joy that went into making this record."- Chris Wise, Buxton 

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Dave Matthews Band release their long awaited and ninth studio album ‘Come Tomorrow’and the bands first since 2012’s ‘Away From The World’, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard 200. Working between tours at studios in Seattle, Los Angeles and Charlottesville, Dave Matthews Band chose to record with several different producers, including John Alagia, Mark Batson, Rob Cavallo and Rob Evans.

Since forming in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early ’90s, the Dave Matthews Band have excelled at making cargo-shorts party music, blending acoustic folk, jazz fusion, bluegrass, and funk. In a post-Grateful Deadworld following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, people were eager for exploratory music with distinct pop leanings, and Dave fit the bill.

More than 25 years later DMB still draw substantial crowds and along the way Matthews’ songs have become cultural shorthand for the rejection of irony and cynicism. Of course, darker undercurrents also run through the DMB catalog. His father, John Matthews, died when he was only ten, and his sister Anne was murdered by her husband shortly before the release of the band’s major-label debut ‘Under the Table and Dreaming’ in 1994. In 2008, saxophonist LeRoi Moore died following complications from an ATV accident. These deaths make their way into his songs. For all the sunny melodies, few pop songwriters sing as frequently and with as much clarity about death than Matthews.

The Grammy Award-winning Dave Matthews Band has sold more than 20 million tickets since its inception and a collective 38 million CDs and DVDs combined. It is the first group in history to have six consecutive studio albums debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

The songs of Will Oldham have been written most often for the aliases of Palace or Bonny. Their identities, kept necessarily separate from Will’s, the songs were written to create a singular encounter, to be shared among those who choose to listen. ‘Songs Of Love And Horror’ is a rare entry in this oeuvre: a Will Oldham album, with the writer taking a turn as singer. As befits the nature of this project, the songs are sung and played by Will alone, in a setting enjoyed by fans of his music - that of one voice and one guitar, the better to savour the spare changes and starkly-cut lyrics, operating in quiet tension and ultimate collaboration. Will brings to the songs all that he has learned from his stage-crafting fellows over the years, singing new versions that quiver like fresh young things in the air of today.

Autumn 2018 sees the release of a celebrated lyrics archive that has been growing for over 25 years in the form of a book - the words to the songs sung by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Palace Music, written by Will Oldham. The book, to be released by W.W. titled ‘Songs Of Love And Horror’, the same as this album and can be seen as a companion piece. Both celebrate not one legacy but rather a confluence of them, flowing in the stream towards an unknown and often unknowing future, with the hope that these notes in a bottle ever pass on through.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Cleveland Ohio based four-piece the Cloud Nothings release their new album ‘Last Building Burning’ which is undeniably their loudest to date and hot on the heels of their 2017 album ’Life Without Sound’.

Undeniably one of the finest and most captivating live acts on the face of the planet, this record goes further towards capturing that power and intensity than any of their previous releases. The album was produced by legend of heavy music Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth, Oren Ambarchi, Marissa Nadler, Black Mountain) at Sonic Ranch in El Paso, TX.

Weighing in at just over thirty minutes it’s a singular listen that reflects the band’s live tenacity - one that sees them surge through the tracks at a speed hitherto unseen on previous outings - the perfect antidote to 2017’s ‘Life Without Sound’.

“I wrote this because I felt there weren’t too many rock bands doing what we are right now,” Dylan Baldi says of the album. ”A lot of other bands sound great but it’s missing a heaviness I like.”

Initial copies of the LP pressing will be housed in a mirri-board sleeve. LP format includes a digital download code.

Label Review. 

Rare Studio & Live Recordings Spanning Nearly 25 Years. CD1: Various studio sessions 1991-2008. CD2: 12 track BBC Radio 1 Session, 25 October 1998. CD3: Live at Rock City, Nottingham, 21 November 1984. CD4/5: Milton Keynes, 30 July 1995. CD6/7: Pyramid Stage Glastonbury Festival, 25 June 1999. CD8: St. James? Church, London Radio 2, 15 September 2004. DVD: Accelerating Backwards (60 min BBC retrospective of various performances and interviews) / Later? with Jools Holland Presents R.E.M. 1998 / 3 bonus videos. Also available on 2CD, & 2LP. 

Our Overview. 

R.E.M. grew up with the BBC, and this historic relationship is lovingly celebrated across an incredible collection that beautifully illustrates the career trajectory of one of modern music’s greatest bands. The collection—available as a super-deluxe edition 8-CD/1-DVD box set, as well as 2-CD, 2-LP and digital formats—comprises a treasure trove of rare and unreleased live and studio recordings culled from the BBC and band archives. This is a must-have collection for R.E.M. fans and an authoritative introduction for newcomers.

In-studio performances featured in the 8-CD/1-DVD box set include a John Peel Session (1998), Drivetime and Mark and Lard appearances (2003) and a glorious Radio 1 Live Lounge performance (2008). Live broadcasts include a rough-and-tumble show from Nottingham’s Rock City (1984), the stunning 1995 Milton Keynes Monster Tour (their first after a six-year break), a blistering 1999 Glastonbury headline set and an invitation-only 2004 show at London’s St James’s Church.

The DVD kicks off with a sixty-minute intimate retrospective of the band’s legendary performances at the BBC in the Accelerating Backwards film – previously broadcast only in the UK and available commercially for the first time here. Accelerating Backwards also includes revealing interviews with Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Michael Stipe, further testifying to R.E.M.’s long, special relationship with the BBC. The DVD also offers a complete 1998 Later….With Jools Holland episode uniquely dedicated to the band, plus TV appearances on Top of the Pops and more.

The package liner notes add yet more behind-the-scenes insight to this definitive retrospective collection. Assorted BBC personalities reminiscence about what it was like to work with R.E.M both on stage and off. Respected BBC DJ/Presenter Jo Whiley recalls, “Their Glastonbury performance in 1999 was a dazzling moment: the band storming through an all-killer, no-filler setlist. As a headline performance, it was a triumph and, for me, it’s up there as one of the Glastonbury greats.” Of a 2001 Top of the Pops performance, BBC Producer Mark Hagen muses, “”Michael once told me that he hears in colors and it was one of those nights when you felt that you could reach out and touch the music as it flowed through the air, a glorious rolling cloud of green. Just like a kudzu vine in a dream.” Acclaimed rock journalist Tom Doyle also provides an overview of the entire period.

Label Review. 

1993 debut album remastered with 21 bonus tracks. Album outtakes, b-sides, debut EP and demos. Also available on CD, 4CD, and vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

In 2017, the 4 members of the Cranberries - Dolores O’Riordan, Noel Hogan, Mike Hogan and Fergal Lawler – came together to plan a 25th Anniversary Box Set release of their debut album, and one of the definitive indie albums of all time, ‘Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?’ Following her untimely death in January 2018, the remaining band members have decided to go ahead with the 25th Anniversary Box Set, which is released on 19th October on UMG. Originally released on 12th March 1993, the album hit the No.1 spot in both the UK and Ireland and sold over 6 million copies worldwide. At the time Dolores remarked that the universal appeal of the Cranberries’ songs was based on her: “Own life and experiences as a human being, how human beings treat each other.”

As the band’s wordsmith Dolores was the source of all of the band’s album titles. ‘Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?’ stemmed from her dogged determination to succeed. “Elvis wasn’t always Elvis,” she said. “He wasn’t born Elvis Presley, he was a person who was born in a random place, he didn’t particularly have a lot but he became Elvis. And Michael Jackson was born somewhere and he became Michael Jackson and so on and so forth. And I thought we were just born in a random place so why can’t we be that successful as well? And I believed we could but the majority of people were saying, ‘You’re absolutely nuts, you’re not going to make it, you can’t make any money out of it, you should do cover versions!’.” A simple but clever title, it answers its own question by implying why not? Why shouldn’t a band from a small city in the southwest of Ireland get signed, conquer the world and make a great record?

Label Review. 

1968 album in mono & stereo. Third disc includes 14 bonus tracks. DVD contains contains the Small Faces legendary TV performance of Happiness Stan for the BBC's 'Colour Me Pop' programme in June 1968, together with Peter Whitehead's promotional film for Lazy Sunday. 60pp hardback book. Also available on triple vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

The Small Faces third and final album saw the young four-piece hit their creative peak coming at the end of an astonishing three year run of ear catching singles and two fantastic albums. Having escaped from their first record deal (Decca) and manager (Don Arden), the band hooked up with Andrew Loog Oldham’s label Immediate Records in 1967 and issued three classic singles: “Here Come The Nice”, “Itchycoo Park” and “Tin Soldier”, plus their self-titled second album. Following these, and inspired by The Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’ which raised the bar as to how pop albums should be put together and packaged, The Small Faces embarked on their most ambitious production to date.

What emerged was an album of two halves - one side a strong collection of individual songs whilst side two is a story about a boy called Happiness Stan with spoken word interludes from Stanley Unwin. A single from the album preceded its release and “Lazy Sunday” became one of the groups biggest hits although the group were against its release as a 45. The album was packaged in a circular sleeve made to resemble a tobacco tin. The finished package made No.1 for six weeks in July 1968.

The band couldn’t play it live however and when their summer single “The Universal” only made No.16 in the UK charts, Marriott was deflated. Other songs were recorded later in the year but after the rest of the band refused to go along with Marriott’s idea to add a second guitarist to the line-up he quit on stage on New Years Eve 1968. Marriott went on to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton while the other three re-grouped with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood to form The Faces.

Label Review. 

88 Page hardback book / Let's Dance (remastered) (1LP) / Serious Moonlight (Live '83) (previously unreleased) (2LP) / Tonight (remastered) (1LP) / Never Let Me Down (remastered) (1LP) / Never Let Me Down 2018 (previously unreleased) (2LP)* / Glass Spider (Live Montreal '87) (3LP) / Dance (2LP)* / Re:Call 4 (non-album singles, edits, single versions, b-sides and soundtrack music) (remastered) (3LP)* / * Exclusive to this box. Also available on CD. 

Our Overview. 

In early 1983, David Bowie called a big press conference where he announced his new big record deal with EMI which launched yet another new phase in Bowie’s ever shifting career. That year he went pop with a new blond hairstyle and three big hit singles, all from the album ‘Let’s Dance’, his first album in two and a half years, at that point the longest gap between his new albums. There was a mega tour too, called ‘Serious Moonlight’ which was a huge success too. The album and a 2CD live set from that tour kick off the fourth installment of Bowie’s career box sets which began in 2015 with ‘Five Years’.

Everything has been remastered again and this box trails the period in his career which was just as successful commercially as his previous works but critically and especially over the years, Bowie’s oeuvre in the 80s is seen as the point when his golden touch began to slip. However, there is still plenty of great stuff and lots of rarities to salivate over too.

As well as the other two studio albums ‘Tonight’ (1984) and ‘Never Let Me Down (1987) there is another live album, this one drawn from his big budget and highly theatrical ‘Glass Spider’ tour (also 1987) which was poorly received at the time but today is seen as having laid the ground work for today’s massive tour set designs. The tour was ostensibly to promote ‘Never Let Me Down’, seen as one of his weakest albums and the album has been revisited in its entirety to create a ‘2018’ edition. Bowie himself expressed a desire to “redo” the album and that wish has been realised with input from the albums original musicians and Laurie Anderson.

Back in late 1985, a ‘remix’ album called ‘Dance’ was scheduled for release but was cancelled. It was to contain different versions of his recent singles and the project has now seen the light of day as another of the bonus discs in this box. It has a different tracklisting as to what was planned and includes tracks which cover the full time span of this set. Finally the fourth volume of the ‘Re-Call’ series is a double CD and not only contains single versions and b-sides from the period but also his soundtrack work from ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Absolute Beginners’ and ‘When The Wind Blows’.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Pleasureland’ is the latest work from Canadian-born artist Haley McCallum, known professionally as Haley Bonar for the past 15 years. In 2017, she changed her surname to reflect her maternal family name, now performing under the name HALEY.

Stark, minimalist, and melodically entrancing, ‘Pleasureland’ stands in a class entirely of its own, forging new but not unfamiliar ground for the Minnesota-based artist HALEY. Harkening back to her 2011 release ‘Golder’, which featured two instrumental tracks, McCallum has taken the instrumental concept a few steps further in a bold musical statement which features no vocals.

This time, McCallum’s musicianship and artistry take the lead. Transitioning from the erratic, synth-driven intro of ‘Credit Forever Part 1’ into the deeply enchanting ‘Give Yourself Away’, which blends piano melodies in the style of French Romanticism with the production stylings of Brian Eno to build a sonic landscape which is as lovely as it is uneasy. In the stoner-metal burner ‘Syrup’, McCallum’s lead guitar swaggers lazily over a fuzzed out, intense layer of distortion, featuring longtime collaborator and guitar wunderkind Jeremy Ylvisaker and Low’s Steve Garrington on bass. The intimate and devastating ‘Pig Latin’ showcases McCallum’s extraordinary gift for melody, carried by world class saxophonist Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver), tracked live in Haley's bedroom.

If you’re expecting the dark pop-rock sounds which have defined HALEY’s music thus far, you’ll not necessarily find them here - what you will find, however, is an album that swells with powerful emotion and raw beauty, holding space for those without a voice while simultaneously creating a voice of its own. ‘Pleasureland’ displays another side of a unique artist resisting the familiar aspects of success by redefining it for herself.

White coloured vinyl LP with digital download card.

Label Review.

2018 album. Saxophonist and his band who backed David Bowie on 'Blackstar' Guests Mark Kozelek, Gail Ann Dorsey, Jeff Taylor and Ryan Dahle. Also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Donny McCaslin is releasing his new album ‘Blow’. Days before his January 2016 death, David Bowie released his final album, ‘Blackstar’. While the record represented an endpoint for the legendary artist, it marked a new beginning for jazz lifer Donny McCaslin who, armed with his saxophone and the distinctive sound of his band, played a key role in defining ‘Blackstar’s visionary stylistic fusion.

Now, two and a half years after ‘Blackstar’s release, McCaslin returns with a new album, ‘Blow.’, a new definitive statement that fully realizes Bowie’s influence and McCaslin’s evolved artistic direction. “Before working with him, things like this didn’t seem possible to me,” McCaslin says of ‘Blow.’, the most daring work of his two-decade, Grammy-nominated career. “The affirmation of that project and how wonderfully that turned out artistically - I feel like anything is possible now.”

‘Blow.’s vision is supported by a top-notch cast of musicians that includes vocal collaborations with Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek, fellow Bowie collaborator Gail Ann Dorsey, longtime collaborator Jeff Taylor and singersongwriter Ryan Dahle (Limblifter, Mounties), paired with ‘Blackstar’ bandmates Tim Lefebvre, Jason Lindner and Mark Guiliana. “The idea was to just really go for exploring these collaborations and documenting everything,” explains McCaslin, adding that the project had a “good gestation process” and developed “in a way that didn't feel rushed.”

According to McCaslin, the natural progression that led to ‘Blow.’ began with 2016’s ‘Beyond Now’, which was ‘the seed’ for ‘Blow.’ and featured a combination of originals (written after ‘Blackstar’s recording but before Bowie’s death), as well as covers of Bowie, Mutemath and Deadmau5.

McCaslin emphasizes ‘Blow.’s ‘wide range of moods’, some of which will sound familiar to longtime McCaslin fans. Others not so much, as they span prog and art rock, downtempo quiet storm, instrumentals influenced by Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest and more. Naturally, McCaslin’s horn unites ‘Blow.’s disparate elements, though not in the way one might expect. Thinking back to the ‘Blackstar’ sessions, McCaslin remembers how Bowie urged him to manipulate his instrument’s sound, to create “different loops and textures” while improvising. “That really stuck with me,” says McCaslin. “It’s such a big part of what I’m doing now, how I integrate the electronics and the saxophone.”

Label Review. 

35 tracks. Solo and as producer. Includes 5 demos from 1955/6. Jasmine.

Our Overview. 

The late Lee Hazlewood is one of R&R and Pop’s most iconic cult figures, with a huge reputation as a producer, songwriter and singer. This 35-track compilation presents an eclectic selection of rarities, juxtaposed alongside a handful of his early hits. Hazelwood’s early productions are particularly collectable, notably his own recordings. Included herein are his five earliest known demo’s, from 1955/56, which highlight his distinctive, resonant baritone.

Also included are the sides he recorded billed as Mark Robinson and The Shacklefords, plus his near-legendary ‘Girl On Death Row’. Apart from Hazlewood himself, featured artists include Duane Eddy, Sanford Clark, Al Casey, Ray Sharpe, The Sharps, Barbara Dane and Ramona King. This compilation is a mandatory purchase for all Lee Hazlewood collectors/completists.

Label Review. 

Previously unreleased recordings from the 1970s. The follow up to Hidden Treasures. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Dave Davies is a musician who needs little introduction, as a founder member of legendary rock group The Kinks; his guitar sound, unique style and songwriting has shaped the landscape of rock and pop music across generations. The pioneering rock guitarist single-handedly changed rock-n-roll when he sliced his little green Elpico amp speaker with a razor blade, creating the first heavy metal guitar tone and riff. This revolutionary guitar sound propelled the Kinks into stardom with the global smash hits “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night”, followed by numerous other classics over the next decades.

Davies’ music is as relevant today as it was in the 60s, having released in recent years several critical acclaimed albums on Red River Entertainment. “As lead guitarist and co-founder of the Kinks, Dave Davies is one of the most unpredictable and original forces in rock,” enthuses writer Bill Crowley, “His distinctive guitar style went on to have major impact on several key guitar-rock styles, including heavy metal and punk. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Dave’s massive guitar sounds have inspired bands from Van Halen to Green Day.”

After decisively solving the riddle of the first “great lost Dave Davies solo album”, fully documented at last in the magnificent ‘Hidden Treasures’ CD, we now have what should have been its sequel: ‘Decade.’ Fans often wondered why Dave seemed to have taken break from songwriting for much of the ‘70s, but the assumption was inaccurate. Years prior to the issue of Dave’s first “proper” solo album, 1980’s ‘AFL1-3603’, Dave was working on the fascinating tracks that make up this new compilation. The tapes were unearthed by his sons Simon and Martin from “under beds, in attics, in storage”, and properly mixed and mastered in a way that lets these songs shimmer and shine even brighter than they did at inception. Any album recorded over the span of 10 years runs the risk of ending up wildly erratic in tone and style, and yet, Dave’s ‘Decade’ is surprisingly cohesive, the songs working together beautifully as songs on great albums do.

Label Review. 

This 4-CD set brings together the two albums the band recorded for Fontana: ‘Four Calendar Cafe’ (1993) & ‘Milk And Kisses’ (1996) along with B-Sides, EP’s, Radio One sessions and the odd rarity. The set was mastered at Abbey Road from the original tapes and approved by Robin Guthrie.

Our Overview. 

There was perhaps a sense, after a while, that the world was taking The Cocteau Twins for granted. Late Eighties reviews had routinely described them as The Voice of God, yet 4AD, concerned that we’d get tired of appreciating the rarefied genius which shimmered in front of our noses, would keep reminding us that they were truly special. The irony was that The Cocteaus were themselves evolving, morphing, reconstituting and taking on new shapes. This wasn’t widely registered at the time. It can be now, as The Fontana Years demonstrates a musical marvel which still makes your ears feel like they’re sucking citrus fruits after years of licking ashtrays, while the rings of Saturn crash-land in your front room.

Label Review. 

7A Records are proud to present the new album by Imani Coppola: 'Unsung'. The album is a collection of songs from every part of Imani's wonderful and often overlooked career. Each track has been picked by Iain Lee (I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, talkRADIO, BBC Radio 4) and one half of 7A Records.

Our Overview. 

As Iain Lee says: "Imani Coppola is a Genius. I've known this for years, ever since her first album 'Chupacabra' was released and I managed to steal a copy from the radio station I was working at. The hit singles 'Legend of a Cowgirl' and 'I Am a Tree' were unlike anything else in the charts back in 1997. Cool, sexy, poppy, hip hoppy all mixed in with a bit of Donovan 60's vibe and late 20th century psychedelia. I knew she was a genius when she decided to walk away from her record label, as being a pop star didn't seem to sit comfortably with her. Releasing a series of innovative, daring, stylish albums all by herself, each one completely different in tone from what she’d done before to me screamed 'GENIUS'. When she formed the group Little Jackie and decided to make smooth, danceable, hilarious and damned catchy tunes - yeah, you got it, genius."

1. Black And White Jingle #1
2. Raindrops From The Sun
3. Saturday
4. Legend Of A Cowgirl
5. The Same Pain
6. This Is My Chicken
7. In A Room
8. Oprah Winfrey
9. Facetime Continuum
10. Over It
11. Cheating On You With Me
12. Afrodite
13. I Am A Tree
14. These Days
15. Arati Ni Naru
16. The Future
17. All Across The World
18. Haters Club
19. Gravity
20. Just Feels Good
21. Move To The Beat
22. 13 Perfect Days

Label Review. 

In 1993 Primal Scream went to Memphis to make an album with Tom Dowd and the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, that album never saw the light of day, until now. Following the recent discovery of these tracks in a box lurking in Andrew Innes’ basement, Primal Scream will release the original studio recordings from Memphis of the tracks that eventually became their 1994 album ‘Give Out But Don't Give Up’. Disc 1: 9 track album of finished tracks. Disc 2: 15 outtakes. Also available on vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

Primal Scream’s third album, ‘Screamadelica’ (1991) broke the band big after several years of flop records and treading the boards. The now legendary and ground breaking album left the band with a problem. How the hell are we gonna follow this?

A couple of tracks from ‘Screamadelica’ hinted at the band’s direction for the next record. “Movin’ On Up” and “Damaged” saw the group inject gospel, soul, and Americana into their sonic brew and a full album of this recipe was what they had in mind when the teamed up with legendary producer Tom Dowd and the Muscle Shoals rhythm section of David Hood (bass) and Roger Hawkins (drums) at Ardent Studios in Memphis in 1993. The resulting recordings from those classic sessions showcased the country soul and rock’n’roll side to the band again after the electronic sidestep they took with their breakthrough album. Indeed the recordings were a more logical follow-up to their self-titled second album from 1989.

Bringing the tapes back to the UK and with input from their label boss Alan McGee the band worked further on the raw tapes in a bid to add a bit of the ‘Screamadelica’ spice to the album. A recent interview with the band saw them admitting they “bottled” it over not issuing the album as it was when they left the States. The resulting album ‘Give Out But Don’t Give Up’ (1994) confused large sections of their audience with their attempt to be the British Black Crowes with help from George Clinton and a cast of thousands.

How the original tapes would have been received back then is open to question but at last we have a chance to hear them and the band playing, as a band.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘C’est La Vie’ is the first new Phosphorent AKA Matthe Houck album in five years. And it is Matthew’s most grand and varied album to date. This record will delight old Phosphorescent fans but find a brand new audience for his unique take on wild Americana. ‘C’est La Vie’ chronicles a life-altering period which saw him fall in love, start a family, leave New York for Nashville, and build a studio from the ground up. With a focus on translating these profound experiences to music as intuitively as he could, Houck pushes the boundaries of what a Phosphorescent record can sound like, balancing the earthy and the incandescent, the troubled and the serene, creating his own musical cosmos in the process.

For years, Phosphorescent’s rise was a steady one: tours got a little better, rooms got a little bigger and with it the music became more intricate, more ambitious in its recording and arrangement. Then came ‘Muchacho’ 2013, a juggernaut that to date has sold over 100,000 worldwide. Now, five years later, Phosphorescent returns with his seventh studio album, ‘C’est La Vie’.

Recorded in Nashville at Matthew Houck’s own Spirit Sounds Studio, ‘C’est La Vie’ reveals a crystallisation of what made ‘Muchacho’ such a breakout - a little sweetness and a little menace, sometimes boot-stomping and sometimes meditative.

A lot of life was lived between these records: Houck became a father (twice), built his studio, escaped New York. And ‘C’est La Vie’ does have a hefty, career-spanning feel. There’s a newfound wisdom too, however, a deeper well for all that livin’.The magic of Matthew Houck’s music has always been the way he weaves shimmering, almost golden-sounding threads through elemental, salt-of-theearth sounds. It’s not experimental exactly but it’s singular and it’s definitely not traditional. That knack, the through-line across the Phosphorescent catalogue, is front and centre here.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘This Night Falls Forever’ is the first new album from DeVotchaKa since the band released ‘100 Lovers’ in 2011. Frontman Nick Urata says he has a pseudo-photographic memory for songs that are under construction. He doesn’t have a filing system for song ideas, but he has a thousand demo recordings and a thousand pages of lyrics that he’s constantly working toward getting finished. While he might start a song, sometimes it will lay dormant for a few years, and sometimes he just has to just experience more life before finishing the writing process.

“It would come to a place on the page, and I look back now, and I just had to do a little more living before I could finish that verse,” Urata says. Many of the songs on This Night Falls Forever, which drops today on Concord Records, were written that way. And the band, which also includes Jeanie Schroder (acoustic bass, sousaphone), Shawn King (drums, percussion, trumpet) and Tom Hagerman (violin, viola, accordion, piano), hasn’t had a whole lot of time to work on albums.

The delay of the new album is due to the work load for Urata as he has been busy scoring films like Paddington and Focus, and more recently the Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events and Davy Rothbart’s forthcoming documentary, which has been described as Boyhood meets Boyz in the Hood. Hagerman has arranged music for local and national artists to perform with the Colorado Symphony while King has worked with Ozomatli’s Raul Pacheco as Los Dreamers.

“We got into this sweet spot where we were getting all kinds of collaborative offers that a band like us couldn’t resist, what we always dreamed about when we were starting off in living rooms and garages," Urata says. "And before we knew it, we were like, ‘We’ve got to finish these songs and get an album out.’”

While many of DeVotchKa’s albums have had a sprawling cinematic quality, ‘This Night Falls Forever’ might be the quartet’s most cinematic to date — not just musically, but in how it was mixed by Jason LaRocca, a film-score mixer Urata has worked with on many projects.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in CD+ and Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘It’s About Time’ is the new album from Nile Rogers and his collective and their first in over two decades so it is aptly named. Highly infectious and steeped in classic Chic, ‘Till The World Falls’ was recorded between Abbey Road's Front Room and Gatehouse studios. The grooving song cements Rodgers' legacy, continuing to expand the realms of possibility with popular music.

The multiple Grammy-winning composer. producer, arranger and guitarist Nile Rodgers is always collaborating, working with musical superstars and breaking artists alike. He amplifies his legacy by constantly traversing new musical terrain and successfully expanding the boundaries of popular music. The new record sees the UK’s Nao, Mura Masa, Stefflon Don, Cosha and Craig David share in the journey alongside the likes of California’s Anderson .Paak and Chicagoan Vic Mensa, with many more exciting collaborations to be announced.

The album’s cover revisits a strong sense of conceptual aesthetics that have run through the bands career since the very start. The artwork of their debut self-titled album (inspired partly by Roxy Music album covers such as Stranded and Country Life) featured Valentine Monnier and Alva Chinn, and personified the band’s unique style and intent. The ‘It’s About Time’ cover features models Duckie Thot and Jazzelle Zanaughtti. Shot by Britt Lloyd and directed by Greg Foley, co-founder of V Magazine, Duckie and Jazzelle are not only modern fashion icons, but also activists making huge strides for women of colour in fashion.

“When I first came up with the concept for the first Chic album cover more than 40 years ago it was a deliberate statement that we could all be abundant, we could all be with the beautiful people, we could all be included, we could all have good times. Looking at the world today for the release of “It’s About Time” I felt that it was important to make those statements again for a new generation” Nile explains.

Nile Rodgers has said that the album is the first of two parts that make up the "new Chic experience". The second album will be released within a year of the first.

In 2016, Rodgers was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘D’angelo’ is the new album from acclaimed Berlin based German electronica DJ and producer. His third album is the sound of a young artist getting in touch with his roots, exploring new landscapes and freeing inhibitions; deconstructing pop atmospheres while in search of his past, and reforming them into something deeply moving.

Drawing inspiration from the life and works of the baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the album fuses laidback pop sensibility with moody cinematographic soundscapes, a departure from previous sounds.

In fact, ‘D’angelo’ sees the drawing together of the personal and musical influences that led to the creation of both his classical and dance releases over the last few years. What you get is a track that marries a sense of raw grandeur with an intimate and personal touch, reassuring as August exposes some of his innermost thoughts and feelings.

August has this to say about the piece, and the album: “Two years ago, I had this urgent desire to have a true dialogue with myself,” David explains. “All these influences came during the process of finding an identity, the own story and not being a slave of whatsoever. I had to go back in time, confront my Italian roots and embody this rich culture as much as possible into my work. Something I never did before and sad enough I needed 26 years to do so.”

‘D’angelo’ features elements of Balearic pop, noir jazz, post-rock, and the raw genre scramblings of fellow traveller Forest Swords, wound up into something excruciatingly personal.

Label Review.

2018 album.

Our Overview.

Fifth album from Twenty One Pilots entitled ‘Trench’. The American musical duo’s long awaited follow up to ‘Blurry Face’ is finally here after a period of teasing, emails, social media and billboards posted in major cities around the world.

In the album, Twenty One Pilots revisits the subject of mental illness in the form of an allegory. The album was first formally announced on July 11, 2018 with the release of the singles “Jumpsuit” and “Nico And The Niners” The album was teased weeks in advance through updates to a cryptic website called “dmaorg.” On August 7, 2018 the song “Levitate” was seemingly accidentally released early on Tidal, along with the complete tracklist for the album. The single and tracklist were then officially released the next morning.

In an interview withBBC Radio 1 Josh Dun revealed that this album would further the story of their last album, ‘Blurry Face’. He added: “It kind of zooms out a little bit and there is a full narrative. Musically, I’m very excited about it, It continues to be diverse.”

Label Review. 

1971 album. 2018 remaster. CD1: The Album + The Singles & Extras / CD2: Elements Mixes, Album out-takes & Singles out-takes / CD3: Raw Studio Mixes / CD4: The Evolution Documentary - The story of each song on a journey from demo to master via instructions, rehearsals, recordings, multitrack exploration and studio chat. / Blu-ray 1: The Album + The Singles & Extras + 16 out-takes in hi-res stereo and 5.1 mixes + Original 1971 Quadraphonic Album Remastered. / Blu-ray 2: In The Studio and Deeper Listening - Experience, in immersive Surround Sound, the moment John and The Plastic Ono Band record each song live, from a sonic soundstage at the center of Ascot Sound Studios at John & Yoko's home in Tittenhurst. + Elements mixes + Evolution documentary + Elliot Mintz Interviews. Also available on CD, 2CD, and vinyl. 

Our Overview. 

In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono conceived and recorded the critically acclaimed ‘Imagine’ at their Georgian country home, Tittenhurst Park, in Berkshire, England, and in the state-of-the-art studio they built in the grounds, as well as at the Record Plant in New York. The title track’s universally appealing lyrics were inspired by Ono Lennon’s “event scores” in her 1964 book Grapefruit, and she was officially co-credited as a writer on the track in June 2017. Upon release, the album went to #1 in six countries – Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, U.K. and U.S.

The best-selling single of Lennon’s solo career, the titular song was famously written as a plea for world peace. It remains one of the most legendary songs of all time and has earned numerous accolades. BMI designated it one of the top 100 most-performed songs of the 20th century, the Recording Academy Inducted into the GRAMMY® Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted it into their 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Additionally, the Guinness World Records British Hit Singles book named it the second best single of all time and Rolling Stone ranked it number three in their list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” The song has been covered by everyone from Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Ray Charles, Madonna, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Diana Ross, Herbie Hancock and Joan Baez.

Label Review.

2018 release. A one sided, one track, twenty three minute instrumental written and performed entirely by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl. The entire song was recorded live each time on a different instrument (seven instruments) all the way through for twenty three minutes. 12 black vinyl limited to 2000 copies.

Our Overview.

‘Play’ is Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl’s solo project on which he plays seven different instruments on the album. ‘Play’ is a one sided, one track, twenty three minute instrumental written and performed entirely by Dave Grohl.  The 12” black vinyl limited to 2000 copies so get it while you can.

The rocker says that he created the immersive ‘Play’ project to showcase “the rewards and challenges of dedicating ones life to playing and mastering a musical instrument.”

“Watching my kids start to play music and learn to sing or play drums, it brings me back to the time when I was their age listening to albums, learning from listening… and when I take my kids to the place where they take their lessons, I see these rooms full of children that are really pushing themselves to figure this out,” Grohl said in a statement.

"And even now, as a 49-year-old man, I’m still trying to figure it out… it’s not something that you ever truly master. You’re always chasing the next challenge, and you’re always trying to find a way to improve on what you’ve learned.”

Grohl blueprinted ‘Play’ alongside ‘Sonic Highways’ collaborator Mark Monroe, with Grohl performing the entire 23-minute instrumental on one instrument at a time and then merging the videos of each take to create a seven-piece one-man band.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Amber Arcades, the moniker of the Dutch-born musician Annelotte De Graaf, announces details of her second album ‘European Heartbreak‘. A vast step forward from Amber Arcades’ critically acclaimed debut album ‘Fading Lines’, this selection of songs flit around Europe, from Berlin to Spain to the south of France. It’s European not just in lyrical theme but also in the sly sophistication of its music: songs that carry with them the air of opentopped cars on clifftop roads, of cocktails on the terrace at sunset. And then the lyrics undercut that sunny mood, artfully and skilfully.

Annelotte said the following about the album: “If it were called American Heartbreak, you wouldn’t bat an eye. Somehow calling it European Heartbreak feels far less comfortable, almost like a statement in itself. I’m Dutch, hence European. The focus of the record is Europe. As for Heartbreak, for me heartbreak symbolises any kind of falling apart of one of these concepts or stories we invent for ourselves, like romantic love, a sense of identity, nationality, an economic system. It’s kind of a universal thing in my mind.” 

‘European Heartbreak’ was recorded and coproduced in LA with Chris Cohen from Deerhoof and in Richmond, Virginia with Trey Pollard (Natalie Prass, The Waterboys, Bedouine), who oversaw horn and string overdubs from Spacebomb.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

All The Witches are releasing their fifth album ‘ATW’ on which they are taking a harder route. In 2017, the Nashville four-piece offered what might’ve otherwise become their own template in their fourth album, ‘Sleeping Through The War’. Their second for New West Records following 2015’s mellow-vibing ‘Dying Surfer Meets His Maker’, ‘Sleeping Through The War’ brought larger production values to dug-in heavy psych blues jamming with oversight from producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson). After exploring new ground on 2013’s ‘Lightning At The Door’ and 2012’s ‘Our Mother Electricity’ as well as ‘Dying Surfer Meets His Maker’, with ‘Sleeping Through The War’ the band had arrived at something new, something sprawling, and grander-feeling than anything before it.

So naturally, in a year’s time they’ve thrown that all to the Appalachian wind, turned the process completely on its head and reversed paths - recording in a cabin in Kingston Springs, about 20 miles outside of Nashville on I-40, with guitarist Ben McLeod at the helm. The result, mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile), is the most intimate, human-sounding album All Them Witches have ever recorded and another redefinition of the band. Introducing keyboardist / percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist / vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer / graphic artist Robby Staebler, the new eponymous record isn’t self-titled by mistake. It’s the band confirming and continuing to develop their approach, in the shuffle of ‘Fishbelly 86 Onions’, the organ-laced groove of ‘Half-Tongue’, the tense build of ‘HJTC’ and the fluid jam in closer ‘Rob’s Dream’.

From the sustained consonants in Parks’ vocals to McLeod’s commanding slide in ‘Workhorse’ and drifting melancholy at the outset of ‘Harvest Feast’, All Them Witches are laying claim to the essential facets of their identity.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Marissa Nadler announces her eighth album, ‘For My Crimes’ via Bella Union in the UK/Europe and Sacred Bones in the US.

With the sound of turmoil giving way to truth, the songs stare down the dark realisation that love may not be enough to keep two people together through distance and differing needs. By asking these difficult questions about her relationships, Nadler has found a stronger sense of self and a sharper voice as both a songwriter and a vocalist, culminating in her most evocative entry in an already impressive discography.

Nadler co-produced ‘For My Crimes’ with Lawrence Rothman and Justin Raisen at Rothman’s Laurel Canyon studio, House of Lux.

Bolstering the intimacy of these songs is the strong feminine energy that defined their recording.

Label Review. 

59 track compilation of his collaborative highlights 1969-2011. From Flaming Youth, Brian Eno, Brand X, John Cale, and Robert Fripp to John Martyn, David Crosby, Tears For Fears, Four Tops, Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, George Harrison and many more!

Our Overview. 

He has been a member one of one of Britain’s most significant rock bands and one of the world’s biggest male solo stars, but Phil Collins was always eager to collaborate with an eclectic range of artists. Spanning drums, vocals, production, songwriting and more, Phil Collins’ many talents have been employed by some of his biggest musical heroes. Now Phil Collins has compiled a 59-track collection of his collaborative highlights in the shape of ‘Plays Well With Others’.

It’s a box set about the byways of a career that stretches from the ersatz psychedelia of Flaming Youth, through the legendary 70s recordings with Brand X, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and John Cale and into the superstar era of the 80s, when Collins became the go-to man for legends in need of a fresh lease of life. It extends into the years when he had the status to do whatever he wanted. Form a big band with Quincy Jones conducting and Tony Bennett singing? Why the hell not!

‘Plays Well With Others’ is a set that captures the dizzying variety of one of the most successful stories in music history. That’s what has earned him the respect of so many musicians of so many different genres – the ‘Urban Renewal’ tribute album, represented here by Lil Kim, being a classic example.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Dublin based Kodaline release their new album ‘Politics Of Living’. Guitarist Steve Garrigan says of the new album “The song quality on the album is really strong. We’ve treated every song individually, which has made for quite a mixed bag. There’s a lot more to come from us this year. I’m nervous but excited to see how it goes down.”

The Ireland-based modern rock quartet Kodaline specialise in soaring, radio-ready guitar rock that's drawn comparisons to Coldplay, Keane, U2, and Oasis. Formed in the working-class town of Swords around the talents of Steve Garrigan, Vinnie May, Jr., Jason Boland, and Mark Prendergast, the band released an eponymous EP in 2012, with plans to unleash a full-length outing the following year. At the end of 2012, the band was shortlisted for the BBC's Sound of 2013, but was beat to the top spot by Haim.

Kodaline released their debut album, ‘In a Perfect World’, in June 2013, which was preceded by the singles “High Hopes” and “Love Like This”. The album was a major success in Ireland, going platinum twice, and it also did well in Britain (it peaked at three and went gold) as well as portions of Europe. Kodaline's second album, ‘Coming Up for Air’, followed in early 2015. The album peaked at number four on the U.K. charts and spawned the singles "The One" and "Honest." In the summer of 2017, the band returned with the single "Brother" and the I Wouldn't Be EP. The next year, they issued the single "Follow Your Fire."

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Eddi Reader announces her brand new studio album ‘Cavalier’ released worldwide on September 28 by Reveal Records. Featuring sixteen songs, including recently performed live favourites “Wonderful”, “My Favourite Dress”, “Starlight”, “Meg O’ The Glen” and “Maiden’s Lament” the new album was recorded and produced in Glasgow, Scotland by Eddi Reader and John Douglas.

‘Cavalier’ is a new creative peak in an already prestigious career, just under an hour of new music, incorporating both contemporary and traditional songs. There are also a couple of new songs by her regular collaborator, Boo Hewerdine. Eddi is celebrating her 40th year as a live performer, a career which started in 1978 singing on Scottish country rock tours, then appearing on worldwide festival and concert hall stages with Gang of Four and Fairground Attraction through the eighties and her own successful solo live career which continues to this day.

Available on CD, Digital and as a Deluxe Double 180g Blue Vinyl Gatefold with CD Album insert, limited edition of 500 copies. The album features the cream of the Scottish music scene including John McCusker, Phil Cunningham, Alyn Cosker, Euan Burton amongst many others. Eddi plays a series of concerts in October with the announcement of Scottish and Irish shows to follow soon.

Label Review. 

Career spanning 26 track set which unveils previously unreleased recordings, alternate versions of classic songs, rarities, historic live performances and deep tracks. Also available on 4CD. 

Our Overview. 

On September 28, Reprise Records will release An American Treasure—a career-spanning Tom Petty box set. The 60-track set unveils dozens of previously unreleased recordings, alternate versions of classic songs, rarities, historic live performances and deep tracks that spotlight Tom’s remarkable depth and evolution as a revered and tremendously influential songwriter, recording artist and performer. An American Treasure marks the first release of Tom Petty music since the artist’s tragic passing in October 2017.

Tom’s daughter, Adria Petty, and his wife, Dana Petty, were the primary catalysts for the commission, creation and release of ‘An American Treasure’ - a tribute and love letter pointing to the music in between the hits, and a strong musical portrait of the person they know in their hearts. Adria and Dana both serve as the project’s Executive Producers, and, together with Tom’s bandmates of 45 years, Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and his studio collaborator, Ryan Ulyate, curated the box set’s track list from Petty’s rich song catalog. Campbell, Tench and Ulyate also produced An American Treasure.

The creation of ‘An American Treasure’ was a true labor of love, as Adria Petty and Dana Petty explain, “Everyone involved in this project chose each track with tremendous care and deep respect for the body of work Tom Petty created over the course of 40 years. He also accumulated a wealth of unreleased music in his vaults, and we have collectively uncovered one gem after another that will keep us all listening and discovering new facets of Tom’s talent for many years to come. We can’t wait to share with Tom’s fans this musical portrait of an artist who deeply affected our culture and indelibly touched the lives of fans the world over.”

Label Review. 

The album was mostly recorded in May 2005 at the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

Our Overview. 

Linda Thompson celebrates the music of the English music hall with special guests Teddy Thompson, Colin Firth, Martha Wainwright, Jools Holland, Justin Vivian Bond, John Foreman, Cara Dillon, and more. Linda Thompson’s career begins in the much beloved late ’60s, early ’70s British folk-rock scene. At first, she was mostly a session singer and a part of a short-lived duo with Paul McNeill with whom she released two singles in 1968 and 1969. McNeill happened to be friends with Sandy Denny, and soon so was Linda. She became one of the “supergroup” of musician friends related to Fairport Convention for the 1972 The Bunch album, a side project of sorts, featuring rock hits of the ’50s. The album’s single featured Linda and Sandy Denny covering The Everly Brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved.” Also in 1972 Linda married Richard Thompson and Linda (with Sandy Denny) can be found in the credits for Richard’s 1972 solo debut, Henry The Human Fly.

Beginning in 1974, albums started appearing by Richard & Linda Thompson winding up with the classic Shoot Out The Lights in 1982 which also signaled the end of their marriage. Enter the English theatre! In 1984, Linda was singing with The Home Service at the National Theatre’s production of medieval mystery plays, before releasing her first solo album ‘One Clear Moment’ in 1985. Unfortunately, due to dysphonia (a condition affecting her voice and ability to sing), ‘One Clear Moment’ remained her only solo effort until 2002’s ‘Fashionably Late’ by which time she had found a will and a way to continue singing despite the dysphonia. In 1987, the song “Telling Me Lies” from ‘One Clear Moment’ was covered by Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt for their Trio album and was nominated for the 1987 Best Country Song Grammy.

In the 21st century, Linda has released or been a part of five albums to date bringing us to ‘My Mother Doesn’t Know I’m On The Stage’. For long-time Linda Thompson fans, an album of comedy, theatrical and popular songs that made up the music hall music of the 18th and 19th centuries, may seem a bit of a surprise, when actually, Linda has deep ties to the music: “I suppose the genesis of this record is that music hall and variety (vaudeville, for my American friends), was always a big part of my life. I’m only a hop skip and a jump removed from it. My grandparents were born in the late 1800s. My parents were born near the beginning of the 20th Century. My paternal grandmother had seen Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley, and the like. My dad grew up on Max Miller, and The Crazy Gang. He took me to theatres, both in London and Glasgow, to see Shows. I missed Max Miller, but I knew every word of his act, and all of the songs. I did see The Crazy Gang, who were sensational. I actually worked with one of them in 1967. Monsewer Eddie Grey. Lovely guy. Tommy Trinder was top of the bill, something made me steer clear of him tho.”

With family and special guests on board, the album was mostly recorded in May of 2005 at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. While Linda sets the proceedings in motion, special guests appear quickly. “Beautiful Dreamer,” the Stephen Foster classic, is performed by Martha Wainwright. Also along for the ride is actor Colin Firth, who happens to be a fan of Linda’s son, recording artist, Teddy Thompson. Teddy brought Firth into the project and he handles the title track with all the wit and charm the title conjures. Teddy appears as well, handling lead vocal duties on several songs. They and the other guests evoke the bygone era of the saloons and public houses where people could go to dance, sing, drink, smoke and joke, and let the cares of the world fall away for a while. Linda sums it up perfectly, “Drunk? Us? How very dare you?” Come join the fun!

Label Review.

2018 remix album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

11 new reinterpretations of songs from the award winning ‘Relaxer’ featuring Danny Brown, GoldLink, Little Simz, Pusha T, Twin Shadow, Rejjie Snow and more.

“It’s no secret that we love and are influenced by hip hop, and it’s always been a dream of ours to work with hip-hop artists in reimagining our music. With ‘Reduxer’ that dream has come true. We couldn’t be happier with the results. This album is truly global, featuring rappers and producers from all over the world. After a very long time in the making, we are stoked to share it with you all.”

Putting their own indelible vocals on the songs are, amongst others, Grammy nominated US hip hop high flyer GoldLink, platinum-certified Parisian rapper Lomepal, Berlin powerhouse Kontra K, Dublin-born breakthrough rapper Rejjie Snow, Australian auteur Tuka, Puerto Rican rapper PJ Sin Suela and London’s acclaimed Little Simz.

The project was first hinted at last month when Virginia Beach hip hop superstar PushaT and LA synth pop polymath Twin Shadow both joined alt-J for a surprise performance of ‘In Cold Blood’ on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

alt-J - one of the most successful British bands of the millennium - are Joe Newman, Gus Unger-Hamilton and Thom Green. Released last year, ‘Relaxer’ flew straight into the Top 10 of the UK Album Chart ahead of a summer of major international shows, including a headline show at London’s O2 Arena; and headline performances at numerous festivals. ‘Relaxer’ is the follow up to their Number One, Grammy and Brit Award-nominated album ‘This Is All Yours’ and their 2012 Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello Award-winning debut ‘An Awesome Wave’. Between them, the records have sold in excess of two million copies and their songs have been streamed more than one billion times.

Label Review.

2018 album.

Our Overview.

Yokohama-based producer Foodman will release his new album, ‘Aru Otoko No Densetsu’, on Los Angeles artist Sun Araw’s Sun Ark Records. With a series of relentlessly experimental and future-minded releases, Foodman has proven again and again that his work rewards the adventurous music lover’s attention in excess.

Starting with a single monochromatic click that wanders long corridors into larger and larger space, the album quickly blossoms into lush and overwhelmingly colourful sonic landscapes with vast wireframe horizon vistas. The generosity of Foodman’s compositions comes prominently to the foreground, as well as their humour and poignancy.

With ‘Aru Otoko No Densetsu’ Foodman continues to unroll effortless, fractalising sonic devices in his own tradition, building further worlds, and inviting the listener to wander their domes.

Sun Ark Records are extremely proud to present the full-length album ‘Aru Otoko No Densetsu’ on vinyl, accompanied by a full-colour art booklet of drawings by Foodman.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Charismatic power pop performer Daniel Wakeford has been writing and recording music since 2009 and now ‘The Undateables’ star reveals details of a new album to coincide with his huge UK tour this autumn. The release of ‘That’s How I See It’ is timed perfectly for Daniel to be propelled into the next stage of his career; he has the songs, the talent, the fans and certainly the ambition to go all the way.

Daniel, who describes himself as a singer songwriter with autism, is forging a new path through the music scene in the UK and, through his inspirational gigs, portrays a much-needed positive image of learning disabled people in the media. An autumn tour will bring Daniel’s music and personality to an audience eager to hear his songs.

Daniel’s popularity in mainstream culture is partly due to his show-stealing appearances on Channel 4’s hit TV show ‘The Undateables’. Following his fourth appearance, which featured Daniel going on tour and performing his track ‘Playboy Girls’ from first album ‘The Songs Of Gigs’ (released June 2016), there was an immediate and overwhelming response to his music. Another TV appearance in December 2017 built Daniel’s fanbase further with musician Frank Turner amongst them: “A lot of people know of Daniel from a TV show. I just heard his music… and instantly fell in love with it. The show I caught in London recently was an absolute delight, sheer joy and showmanship with wonderful songs.” - Frank Turner

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Mudhoney release their new album ‘Digital Garbage. Since the late 80s, Mudhoney - the Seattle-based foursome whose muck-crusted version of rock, shot through with caustic wit and battened down by a ferocious low end - has been a high-pH tonic against the ludicrous and the insipid. Thirty years later, the world is experiencing a particularly high-water moment for both those ideals. Just in time, vocalist Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, bassist Guy Maddison and drummer Dan Peters are back with ‘Digital Garbage’, a barbed-wire-trimmed collection of sonic brickbats.

Arm’s raw yawp and his bandmates’ long-honed chemistry make ‘Digital Garbage’ an ideal release valve for the 2018 pressure cooker. “My sense of humor is dark, and these are dark times,” says Arm. “I suppose it’s only getting darker.”

“I would’ve really just loved to write songs about just hanging out on the beach, and going on a nice vacation,” says Arm. “But, you know, that probably doesn’t make for great rock.” Mudhoney, however, know what does make great rock - and the riffs and fury of ‘Digital Garbage’ will stand the test of time, even if the particulars fade away. “I’ve tried to keep things somewhat universal, so that this album doesn’t just seem like of this time - hopefully some of this stuff will go away,” Arm laughs. “You don’t want to say in the future, ‘Hey, those lyrics are still relevant. Great!’”

Mudhoney will be touring Europe in 2018.

CD in die-cut gatefold digipak with custom dust sleeve. LP in die-cut gatefold jacket with custom dust sleeve and digital download coupon. Cassette in four-panel J-card in clear case. Digital download album.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Always restless and inventive while remaining true to the power and glory of songwriting and melody, Conor O’Brien has made another great leap forward with Villagers’ fourth studio album, ‘The Art Of Pretending To Swim’, released by Domino.

Following the exquisitely sparse, intimate aura of 2015’s ‘Darling Arithmetic’, O’Brien’s new record reconnects with the multi-faceted approach of Villagers’ 2010 album debut ‘Becoming A Jackal’ and 2013’s ‘{Awayland}’ while adding a new-found soulfulness, rhythmic nous and dazzling panoply of sonic detail, both analogue and digital, creating feverish moods while writing effortlessly accessible tunes. Balanced with subtle aspects and lyrical themes that embrace existential fears and hopes in this desperate, technologically-centred dystopian age, ‘The Art Of Pretending To Swim’ is the most brilliantly realised Villagers album to date.

The album was written, produced, mixed and primarily performed by Conor O’Brien in his Dublin studio.

Conor won a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for his last studio album, ‘Darling Arithmatic’. His music was also recently featured in critically acclaimed HBO series ‘Big Little Lies’. He has also worked on the upcoming Paul Weller album.

Label Review. 

2018 album. Also available on vinyl and deluxe box set. 

Our Overview. 

‘The Blue Hour’ is an expansive, ambitious work which, like their last album ‘Night Thoughts’, was written as a continuous piece, although there are fourteen distinct, thematically linked songs on the record. The album sees Suede continue to explore new ground sonically and features a choir and spoken word, as well as string arrangements from the band’s Neil Codling and one from Craig Armstrong on “The Invisibles”. Craig worked with the band on their 1996 LP ‘Coming Up’ and on films such as Romeo + Juliet and The Bone Collector. The stirring presence of the iconic City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, who were integral to the recording of the fourteen track LP, is one of the album’s most significant touches.

‘The Blue Hour’ is the final part of the triptych of albums recorded by the band since they reformed and released 2013’s ‘Bloodsports’. The record is also complemented by some of the subject matter of Brett Anderson’s recent memoir ‘Coal Black Mornings’. Talking about the context of the record the band explain: “The Blue Hour is the time of day when the light is fading and night is closing in. The songs hint at a narrative but never quite reveal it and never quite explain. But as with any Suede album, it’s always about the songwriting. The band, the passion and the noise: The Blue Hour”.

All the hallmarks of a classic Suede album are present on ‘The Blue Hour’ but everything seems to have opened up into a genuinely progressive, expansive and definitive body of work. Brett Anderson’s immediately recognizable vocal delivery and distinctive lyrics are more assured than ever, whilst the music sees the band play at the peak of their powers, with a visceral, brooding sense of dynamic and drama that is theirs alone.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Formed in January 2009 by Bristol musicians Billy Fuller, Matt Williams, and Geoff Barrow: Beak>, the band instituted very strict guidelines governing the recording and writing process of their work: The music was to be recorded live in one room with no overdubs or repair, only using edits to create arrangements. That process – along with their lineup, which now includes Will Young, replacing Williams – has evolved over the years, but the spirit and sound of Beak> is stronger than ever.

‘>>>’ is released on on Invada Records. Written over the last year and, for the most part, written and recorded live in the Invada studios, the band continue to forge their own path through their own genre of oddness.

To celebrate the album announcement, Beak> released a new single entitled ‘Brean Down’. Showcasing the lyrical side of Beak>, ‘Brean Down’ sounds as though Nirvana are gatecrashing a Bronx B-Boy convention.

“‘>>>’ definitely sounds like a step forward. The production and feel of the first two albums was like listening through frosted glass; a band playing behind a curtain. Now we are hearing Beak> in sharp focus, but without forfeiting what the band see as its ‘wrongness’. This could be the result of having played bigger stages and festivals - something that was never part of the plan - or perhaps it is just a reaction to the infinite cut & paste fuzz pedal kraut bands on the planet.” - Redg Weeks, Invada Label Manager.

Label Review. 

Includes selections from The Return of the Durutti Column, LC, Another Setting, Short Stories for Pauline, Without Mercy, Circuses and Bread, The Guitar and Other Machines, Vini Reilly, Obey the Time, Treatise on the Steppenwolf and A Paean to Wilson. Bonus tracks include three numbers recorded live in Leeds on 7 October 1980. Also available on vinyl.

Our Overview. 

'M24J (Anthology)' is a collection of valuable passages recorded by The Durutti Column between 1979 and 2011 for various iterations of Factory Records, including poignant tributes to manager/mentor Anthony H. Wilson.“The Durutti Column was Tony’s baby,” says Durutti mainman Vini Reilly. “We were the first act signed up to his Factory club night, and the first band signed to Factory Records. Tony became my mentor, somebody to look up to. He was a very tough character, yet he was very gentle. He had many sides. The biggest arguments with Tony were that he wanted to stop me singing with my schoolboy lyrics and my dreadful voice.”

Reilly’s music remains resolutely unclassifiable, and sounds better and better with each passing year. “Don’t listen to the form,” he insists, “listen to the content. Don’t listen to the style, the tradition, the technique, just the content of the music. Then judge. People say The Durutti Column is this or that. I don’t care so long as we make good music. There’s so much good music around. Don’t bother with form. Just enjoy.”

Bonus tracks on the CD version include three tracks recorded live in Leeds on 7 October 1980, these being the earliest preserved professional in concert recordings by Vini Reilly. The cover portrait of Vini Reilly is by Mark Warner. The bonus 7” included with the vinyl package features two previously unreleased live recordings. One is a cover of “Albatross” by Peter Green, recorded in 2004; the other is “Spooky Tune”, recorded with Poppy Morgan at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester in 2011, Vini’s last major concert to date.

Label Review.

2018 album also available in CD+ Vinyl and Coloured Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Blues Rock Guitarist Joe Bonamassa releases his new album ‘Redemption’ with 12 stunning new tracks via his own Record Label J&R Adventures. ‘Redemption’, Bonamassa’s 13th solo studio album and third in a row of all original material, sees him at his most ambitious yet as he continues to redefine and push the barriers of blues-rock. It features a staggering collection of 12 songs that weave effortlessly through an assortment of genres and reflect the artistic re-birth that he is currently experiencing. “I’m going through some other stuff in my life I didn’t expect to be going through. It’s a rising, it’s contrition, it’s acceptance, it’s everything. It’s painful, but knowing that there’s a rising coming,” he explains.

The album reunites Bonamassa with some of Nashville’s finest music minds such as Tom Hambridge, James House, Gary Nicholson as well as Richard Page and American rock and roll legend Dion DiMucci (The Wanderer, Run-around Sue) whom adds his song writing expertise to the Title Track. Joe also continues his long creative relationship with Kevin Shirley and together create an album bigger than ever before. “From a Producer’s perspective, this is far and away the most challenging and diverse album that Joe has ever made, “ says Shirley.

There is a resounding theme of redemption and salvation on the album, but also very much a sense of strength and empowerment. “We all need to be redeemed at some point in our lives. It’s this yearning to redeem yourself after just this tremendous loss and this tremendous feeling of pain,” explains Bonamassa.

Bonamassa is at his ultimate creative peak with ‘Redemption’, which follows the recent release of his last live masterpiece, British Blues Explosion Live, that debuted at No.1 on the Billboard Blues Chart and marked his 20th No.1 album. Bonamassa’s fire is unstoppable both in the studio and live on the road.

Label Review.

2019 live album also available in CD+ and Vinyl.

Our Overview.

’25 Live @ 25’ is the new release from the iconic Skunk Anansie to celebrate 25 years of unparalleled influence showcasing their incomparable live presence over a career-spanning collection, to be released on 25th January 2019 via Republic Of Music. Featuring recordings of the band’s incendiary live sets over the years, and sequenced as one unique concert set by Jeremy Wheatley, a long-time collaborator with the band, ’25 Live @ 25’ is both a celebration of Skunk’s unmatchable career and their importance as a musical and cultural force. Their exhilarating live shows are a hurricane of energy, noise and personality, an exhortation to become part of something much bigger that’s impossible to resist.

Formed in 1994, the band exuded a strong sense of individuality from the start, shunning the Britpop mould of white 20-something men with guitars for a glorious mix of race, gender, sexuality, culture and music influences. Untethered by any scene allegiances, they powered ahead, forming their own wild sound and image: agile, gritty, politically-charged “clit rock”; a throw-away term coined by lead vocalist Skin.

“As a black female singer, it was hard to get accepted in many ways,” says Skin. “And then I was onstage, doing exactly what I envisioned in my dreams. And I felt for the first time that I was accepted.”

“London in the 1990s was a mish-mash of people,” adds guitarist Ace, “But bands weren’t – it was always four blokes with identical haircuts. We were a band of people who were real. That’s why we were radical.”

Their notorious live presence earned them a record deal on just their second gig, and later on saw them become the first international multi-racial band to tour South Africa, where they played three sold-out arena shows. Their first Glastonbury slot came just over a year since formation, and only four years later the band were invited back to headline the festival.

Establishing themselves as one of the most unique rock bands of the past three decades, their career has seen them score numerous Top 40 singles and Top 10 albums, sell millions of albums around the world, share stages with David Bowie and U2, and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Nelson Mandela with Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone and Michael Jackson.

While scenes rise and fall, and sounds come and go, outsiders like Skunk Anansie have continued to enjoy a special kind of longevity, standing the test of time as a thrillingly singular act, enjoying a spectacular international career as trailblazing, multi-platinum-selling, award-winning Brit rockers. Twenty-five years after they exploded from the backrooms of London, Skunk Anansie are more potent and more essential than they’ve ever been.

“Everything that is good that has come out of Skunk Anansie has come out of being a live band,” says drummer Mark Richardson. “We’ve always thought that nobody could defeat us. ‘Come on, try and beat us. You won’t.’”  

“We come alive onstage,” agrees bassist Cass. “That’s where we bare our teeth.”

And ’25 Live @ 25’ is a living, breathing, in-your-face document, proving that there is and always will be only one Skunk Anansie.

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

California rockers Rival Sons are releasing their sixth album ‘Feral Roots’. The follow-up to June 2016’s ‘Hollow Bones’ was recorded at Nashville's famed RCA Studio A and the equally legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Having officially formed in 2009, Rival Sons evoke the bluesy rock of bands like Led Zeppelin and the Black Crowes and now are closing in on 10 years as a band, with their bluesy brand of hard rock powered in large part by singer Jay Buchanan’s powerful pipes and guitarist Scott Holiday’s hefty riffs. Rival Sons caught international attention as the sole support act on Black Sabbath’s lengthy farewell tour.

Just like ‘Hollow Bones’ the artwork, the eye-catching ‘Feral Roots’ cover is the work of esteemed artist Martin Wittfooth. Speaking about being signed to Atlantic Records, singer Scott Holiday told Planet Rock Magazine: “It’s kind of romantic to be at this big, legendary record label.

“And f*** all the rock n’ roll bands – if you want to get really romantic look at all the soul acts they signed, like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. We’re talking about the bedrock, soul and blues, some of the most important recordings in the history of the world.

“But I’m a pragmatic person. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’ve made five records and we’ve had some success, but hopefully signing to Atlantic we’re going to have a little more.”

Known far and wide as a powerhouse live act, Rival Sons will celebrate ‘Feral Roots’ with a worldwide tour schedule, including a headline European run set for early 2019. North American dates will be announced in the weeks to come.

Label Review.

2019 album also availble in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Exploding Head Syndrome’ is the 11th studio album from The Telescopes, their third for Tapete. Consisting of eight new songs and incantations that form a series of sonic convulsions stretching the parameters of intuitive composition to the point of auditory illusion.

Conceived in 1987, The Telescopes emerged as innovators in the field of melodic noise, becoming a crucial inspiration to a multitude of artists and listeners alike. The group has consisted of a revolving line up centred around lead protagonist and founding instigator Stephen Lawrie.

With the exception of Until The End* ‘Exploding Head Syndrome’ was created entirely by Lawrie himself while immersed in solitude deep in West Yorkshire. As the title suggests, this is the sound of a triggered mind reaching into the depths of his own inner turmoil on a personal quest for basic clarity. Whereas previous albums for Tapete have set a parallel course between song based structures and freeform impressionism, ‘Exploding Head Syndrome’ employs almost traditional song writing techniques to achieve a melodic swirl of simplistic refrains capable of lulling the listener into vast sonic dimensions.

‘Exploding Head Syndrome’ is a snapping into consciousness, a synaptic charge of analogue dissonance saturated through a complex undercurrent of pulsing minimalism, profound in its simplicity. A static haze of electronic distortion drifts in and out of lucidity to a sure propulsion of stone age repetition and heady bass vibrations, the momentum held on a thread of acoustic tension. As warm organs drone around the oscillating bones of enchanted melodies, an electric hive of enclosing guitars encircle Lawrie’s trance induced visions, which hang suspended, fractured at the core, until completely enveloped by the gathering swarm.

Exploding Head Syndrome (EHS) is the name given by John. M. S. Pearce in 1989 to a phenomena described by Robert Armstrong-Jones in 1920 as ‘snapping of the brain’. It is a condition in which a person experiences unreal noises.

The front sleeve holds an image of a blank sheet blowing in a breeze. A natural light phenomena occurring at the time the photograph was taken gives the illusion of a face.

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

British alternative rock legends Swervedriver are to release their brand new album ‘Future Ruins’. In 1990s the band were originally associated with "shoegazing", however their heavier rock & roll style also related them to the grunge genre coming from the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Some music writers considered them to be Britain's answer to this sound. Regardless of labels, the band's mix of storming and swirling guitar experimentation often crossed into psychedelia, coupled with mystical lyrics that often praised the nihilism of sports cars, racing and the open road.

“Space travel rock’n’roll” – that’s how the band initially self-identified their sound. This was back in the 1990s, before the aspirational dreams of the computer age collided with reality. Across the four-album arc of their first era – ‘Raise’ (1991); ‘Mezcal Head’ (1993); ‘Ejector Seat Reservation’ (1995); ‘99th Dream’ (1997) – Swervedriver made music that was all about the journey: songs called “For Seeking Heat”, “Planes Over The Skyline”, “Juggernaut Rides”, “93 Million Miles From The Sun And Counting”. Swervedriver simulated the thrill of propulsion, the euphoric arrival, the anticipation of going back again (or not)… of moving on. 

And move on they did. During 10 years in absentia, the band’s legend grew. Sages spoke mistily of these four desert rock horsemen of the apocalypse who came from Oxford and were shunned as exiles in their own land. In 2005, a two-disc anthology was compiled with the band’s involvement, and foretold a resurrection. Sure enough, the trip resumed in 2008, with Swervedriver encountering the acclaim they ought to have enjoyed a decade earlier. A fifth album, ‘I Wasn’t Born To Lose You’, emerged in 2015, a mere 17 years after its predecessor, and trumpeted some eternal Swervedriver virtues: the intricate, fissile guitar patterns of Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge, baked hard then dispatched in giant monolithic waves by the tactile rhythm section. As the opening song “Autodidact” had it: “Holy fuel forever spilled”. 

So much for the resurrection, now for the reckoning. The new Swervedriver album ‘Future Ruins’, a two-word précis of its dread thrills. “There’s a lot of foreboding with regard to the future on this album,” agrees Adam Franklin. “Space is in there a lot too. In the first song, the character is a spaceman who’s trying to remember what life is really like. Also, it could be about somewhere in the world where winter isn’t like the winter here. A sunny place, but it’s December or January and you’re trying to remember winter. Something’s going on.”

That something began in October 2017, with a two-week stint of tracking at MAKE Records Studio in Los Angeles. There quickly followed a further 10 days’ vocals and overdubs at Seaside Studios in Brighton. Stoking the creative energies was engineer TJ Doherty. A Grammy winner for his work on Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, his diverse credit list also includes Lou Reed and Steely Dan, Stephen Malkmus and Joanna Newsom, Sonic Youth and Selfish Cunt. The final 10 tracks were then mixed in spring 2018, as the band toured Europe – again, infusing the recordings with road-slick fumes. Future Ruins exhibits Swervedriver’s fabled widescreen escapism, but with a tension that echoes a sleeve image of Coney Island in skeletal monochrome, like a post mortem photograph of a failed utopia. ‘Future Ruins’ presents a band moving with real time/real life vitality. It showcases new tricks and classic hallmarks.

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Red Vinyl and Yellow Vinyl.

Our Overview.

‘Tomb’, the third full length album from Thousand Oak, CA’s Angelo de Augustine, and the record is a significant shift from his earlier home recordings, such as previous album ‘Swim Inside The Moon’. It was recorded at NYC’s Reservoir Studios with his friend and renowned musician Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), whose credits include work on albums for Sufjan Stevens, Glen Hansard and Rhye.

‘Tomb’ is a beginning for Angelo, both emotionally and in his career. It’s a motion towards positivity, addressing lost love, the worthwhile cost of honesty, and the ramifications of regret. ‘Tomb’ isn’t about burying or hiding something away, it’s about opening the seal and letting something new emerge. The album’s title reveals these sentiments: “Throughout our lives we bury many dead things in our hearts and minds,” says Angelo about the record. “There they go to rest and hopefully are reborn as something beautiful for the world to behold.”

‘Tomb’ is a musical breakthrough for De Augustine, with Bartlett’s artful production spotlighting his increasingly impressive songwriting.The simple strength of songs like ‘Time’, ‘You Needed Love, I Needed You” and “Kaitlin’”will remind listeners that De Augustine is among the best of the rising crop of young, emotionally compelling singer songwriters.

Label Review.

2019 album also available in Vinyl.

Our Overview.

Atlanta indie rockers Deerhunter are releasing their new album ‘Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?’ on 4AD. This is Deerhunter’s first full-length release since 2015’s excellent ‘Fading Frontier’.

Deerhunter’s eighth album is a science fiction album about the present. How do you describe an album out of time, concerned with the disappearance of culture, of humanity, of nature, of logic and emotion? Why make this album in an era when attention spans have been reduced to next to nothing, and the tactile grains of making music have been further reduced to algorithms and projected playlist placement. Why wake up in the morning? Why hasn’t everything already disappeared? 

‘Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? forgets the questions and makes up unrelated answers. It gets up, walks around, it records itself in several strategic geographic points across North America. It comes home, restructures itself and goes back to bed to avoid the bad news.

From the opening harpsichord and piano figures of ‘Death in Midsummer’, it is impossible to tell where the record came from. Is ‘No One’s Sleeping’ an outtake of an aborted Kinks recording session in 1977 Berlin with Eno producing? No. That is nostalgia. If there is one thing Deerhunter are making clear it is that they have exhausted themselves with that toxic concept. 

What they spend their time doing instead is reinventing their approach to microphones, the drum kit, the harpsichord, the electromechanical and synthetic sounds of keyboards. Whatever guitars are left are pure chrome, plugged straight into the mixing desk with no amplifier or vintage warmth.

The result is as thrilling, haunting, and unpredictable as anything in their roughly 15-year career. 

Deerhunter have made a science fiction album about the present. Is it needed right now? Is it relevant? Perhaps only to a small audience. DADA was a reaction to the horrors of war. Punk was a reaction to the slow and vacant 70’s. Hip Hop was a liberated musical culture that challenged the notions presented wholesale about the African-American experience. What is popular music today a reaction to?