…features the original album alongside rarities, instrumentals, previously unheard songwriting demos, rehearsals, and live sessions.
October 1972: with Roxy Music’s first 45 ‘Virginia Plain’ still airborne, Bryan Ferry, wearing gold-trimmed black silk pyjamas, was convalescing from a tonsillectomy. “I may never sing again,” he said, drily. “But I can’t promise anything.”
Ferry’s voice was musical Marmite, shivering and trembling like a lounge singer from Mars. Expressive to the point of caricature, it stretched the bounds of believability to such an extent that some questioned its sincerity. There were similar misgivings over Roxy’s trailblazing, wildly eclectic music. “Style over substance,” grumbled rock TV host Bob Harris earlier that year.
Category: *editions*
…contains 51 newly-mixed audio tracks, including 27 unreleased, live, extended, and previously unheard tracks.
“Welcome to one of the best origin stories in rock’n’roll: the long march from genesis to liftoff of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” trumpets MOJO writer David Fricke’s essay in the beautifully illustrated and informative ‘zine-style guide that accompanies Origins’ 50-plus tracks and Blu-ray of the band’s BBC Old Grey Whistle Test performance. But the actual story is less a glory-bound forward march than a stop-start of slow-downs, double-backs and dead ends before a serendipitous reset. Save for the first two Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums not just in toto but with several tracks re-edited to run precious…
Roma is the fifth and final improvised recording from Keith Jarrett‘s last solo European tour of 2016. In 2018 he suffered two strokes that left him unable to play. Roma follows ECM’s releases of the other shows in the tour: Munich 2016 in 2019, Budapest Concert in 2020, Bordeaux Concert in 2022, and New Vienna in 2025.
This album contains a ten-part improvised suite, and two standards in the encore. “Part I” opens in full pointillistic motion, as Jarrett rumbles across fragmented chord voicings and interwoven single lines. It’s easy to hear this nearly 11-minute journey as spontaneous composition. There are fugue-like moments à la Bach, but the piano’s movement and intricacy move afield to embrace color, varying dynamics, and canny…
…features the original album newly remastered, a brand-new remix of the album from the original stems by longtime collaborator Cameron Webb, studio rehearsals and outtakes from the 1985 sessions, and the complete BBC Radio 1 Friday Rock Show session from 1986.
Motörhead were always a band whose truest home was the stage, and for much of their career their studio albums felt like snapshots of a live assault rather than carefully sculpted statements.
Orgasmatron is the exception that proves the rule. Released in the summer of 1986, it arrived after three years without a studio album, a bruising legal war with their former label and a line-up upheaval that had torn up the classic power-trio blueprint. Lemmy was by then the last man…
After last year’s 50th anniversary bonanza for the score to JAWS at Intrada, one good bite deserves another! The label will reissue the out-of-print score for JAWS 2, the unlikely 1978 sequel to Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece. (Spielberg, of course, did not return, and French director Jeannot Szwarc assumed directorial responsibilities.) Once again, Amity Island contends with a great white shark problem – only this time, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is mostly on his own against the beast, racing against the clock to rescue a marooned group of teen sailors that includes his children. Intriguingly, JAWS 2 was the first time John Williams scored a sequel, and instead of simply reprising his own work, he brings the iconic shark theme back alongside a set of…
On A La Altura: Visionary Mexican Music 1977-1999, Volume 1, a new compilation of Mexican experimental music from the latter quarter of the 20th century, the misconception that cosmic exploration is reserved for futuristic science fiction is thoroughly righted. Instead, ambient and New Age ruminations sprawl with celestial curiosity, while pre-Hispanic instruments and cinematic field recordings ground the secrets of the universe in our own verdant home-world. The result is a fascinating dialogue between ancient wisdom and Space-Age zeal, with just enough rock grooves for the body to pick up wherever your intellectual journey peters out.
Curated by the Mexican journalist Carlos “Tropicaza” Icaza and Mark “Frosty” McNeill of…
…remastered and restored for its 40th anniversary, including five previously unreleased bonus tracks sourced directly from the original 1986 recording sessions.
Wind was first issued in 1986 on Masin’s private imprint, Bear in the Moon, and marked the start of a much loved catalogue which has more recently flourished with contributions to the Music from Memory label, including a solo 2LP compilation and the Gaussian Curve album, beside his work on that first Lifted LP for PAN alongside Co la and Max D. Coming from a similar place, spiritually speaking, as the pioneering work of K. Leimer and Savant, and finding modern antecedents in the exploratory, bittersweet arrangements of Laura Groves or pretty much anything you’d hear on…
Dave’s Picks Volume 60 contains the two previously unreleased complete concerts recorded on April 13 and 14, 1984 at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia on 4 discs, and was recorded by a reportedly “super-dialed-in” Dan Healy and mastered to HDCD by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering. In his “seaside chat” about the album, David Lemeiux, the namesake and overseer of the series, says he couldn’t believe they were at number 60. He calls the two shows “magnificent”, noting that one of the “Morning Dews” from the two was one of the best he had heard from the band’s 1980s performances. He also says that the second show is “really interesting”, as the set begins with “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on…
…newly remastered and include five bonus tracks: rare single edits, alternate versions, and legendary electronic remixes from the archives.
It was pretty hard to guess what Primal Scream would do with a follow-up to their bombastic 2000 release, XTRMNTR. That record broke all kinds of ground for a group that had consistently shifted with popular culture since their Madchester/acid house success of Screamadelica. XTRMNTR offered up a maddening scope of aggressive beats and screaming politics that the group had not previously tackled. Jarring and off-putting at times (albeit a stroke of brilliance), the record is a tad difficult to sit all the way through. Evil Heat seems to attempt to bridge together the two worlds of their past club psychedelia and…
Between the release of their first album 1965’s Begin Here and the second, and last, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle, the Zombies issued a staggering number of excellent songs. Unlike many of their compatriots in the U.K. like the Beatles and Kinks, the group’s output was regulated to singles and a few songs recorded for the soundtrack of the film Bunny Lake is Missing. It seems the record company lacked the vision to steer the band’s career in the only direction that made sense – the LP market – and kept trying to replicate the success of early hits like “She’s Not There.’ The band themselves did their part by making songs that were easily the equal of anything topping the charts, but their fortunes kept waning until they finally threw in the towel.
At nearly 40 years old Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) remains one of Coil’s trippiest and most ludic sets, beloved for its febrile fusion of field recordings (a drunken brass band in Mexico; a Muay Thai boxing arena) with a malfunctioning Fairlight synth and the pair’s homoerotic, eccentric energies. In the grand scheme of their catalogue ‘Gold…’ marks a line in the sand between their earliest work and the new decade advance of ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, a groundbreaking LP and huge influence on everyone from Æ to NIN, Surgeon and the electronic music at large. In key with a slew of posthumous Coil releases over the past decade, the remastered versions now better backlight the vastness of their sound, revealing ‘Gold…’ among their sexiest and most seductive.
The Monkees celebrate the 60th anniversary of their self-titled debut album with a new deluxe edition through Rhino. The 1LP/3CD collection expands the 1966 album with its original stereo and mono mixes alongside rare recordings from the sessions and the television series that established Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork as international stars. The collection has been produced by Monkees historian Andrew Sandoval, with new liner notes from Dolenz. The release documents an album that became central to the unusual relationship between television and recorded music in the 1960s. The Monkees was created alongside the NBC television series of the same name, with the music assembled through a combination of the four performers…
Phil Lynott is best known to most as the frontman of Irish rockers Thin Lizzy, but now, 40 years after his death, his solo work is being celebrated with an 8CD box set called The Story Of My Life.
The box set features both of Lynott’s solo albums – 1980’s Solo in Soho and 1982’s The Phil Lynott Album – alongside remixes, rare demos, alternate versions and archive recordings, many available officially for the first time.
The box set is also home to an unreleased album called Fatalistic Attitude. This was effectively an early version of The Phil Lynott Album. It was prepared for release in January 1982 but was considered “too dark” for release and reworked and released eight months later. Using Philip Lynott’s personal acetate copy…
…Remastered from the original master tapes by longtime Sparks engineer Bill Inglot, expanded edition includes the 9 original tracks alongside 17 bonus tracks featuring rare remixes, alternate versions, and previously unreleased demos.
The third and mercifully last of Sparks’ mid-’80s dance pop albums, the frankly disappointing Music That You Can Dance To delivered just two standouts: a remake of Russell Mael’s European “Modesty Blaise” 45 and the epic 1985 single “Change” (replaced on British pressings by “Armies of the Night”). Indeed, “Change” isn’t merely the album’s most provocative number; it ranks among the duo’s finest performances of all time, a shifting soundscape of sonics and moods through which Russell Mael’s ruminations on…
GarciaLive Volume 23: August 14th, 1993 presents the Jerry Garcia Band’s final performance at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA. The two sets that the group performed that night were originally recorded to two-track digital audio tape straight from the soundboard by John Cutler. All told, Garcia played Shoreline 39 times with the Grateful Dead and on three occasions with the Jerry Garcia Band. This show took place seven years after the opening of the venue. The Grateful Dead were slated to perform the initial gig at the facility but it was cancelled due to Garcia’s health complications. Indeed, as the label notes, “Although JGB was conceived as a low-key respite — a chance for Garcia to relax and cut loose in small clubs away from the stadium circus…
…May 1975 found Pete Townshend turning 30 and troubled by thoughts of the future. What would it hold for The Who, the music business, and rock and roll itself? He poured his anxieties and emotions into The Who by Numbers, the October ’75 release of which would become the band’s seventh studio album. On October 30, Polydor and UMe celebrates 51 years of The Who by Numbers with a new 5CD/1Blu-ray Super Deluxe Edition.
Sessions for the album began in April 1975 and continued through early June, with producer Glyn Johns (Who’s Next) at the helm. Though Townshend recalled being detached from the sessions with his bandmates in various states of distraction, the resulting album became one of the band’s most distinctive. Underneath a drawing…
By the early 1980s, the electric organ had started to infiltrate the iconic hotel bands that defined the Addis Ababa music scene of the previous decade. And so keys player, arranger and producer Teodros Makonnen took the leap. Using nothing but a double-manual Yamaha (with a built-in drum sequencer), he made this album of instrumental versions of classic Ethiopian songs.
Originally released on cassettes in the ’80s, it was all recorded in a single take under the shadow of curfews – and, in doing so, mapped out his version of the future of Ethiopian music. It’s a vibe: pop melodies with deep roots in Ethiopian folk music, dreamy runs doused in hazy reverb, and minimalist waltz rhythms shuffling from the tinny drum machine. Some tracks are…
…includes three brand-new songs.
Those who have heard the two albums from Sons of Fathers, Paul Cauthen’s previous under-the-radar outfit, may not be surprised by the power and grit of the singer-songwriter’s voice. But the rest will be immediately transfixed by his vocals when we push play on his solo debut.
As soon as Cauthen starts singing “I’m still drivin’, when’s this break gonna come,” in a baritone that recalls a combination of Waylon Jennings, later day Guy Clark and the Maverick’s Raul Malo, you know you’re in for a dose of the unadulterated “outlaw country” that artists such as those took to the people, if not always the bank. Despite an erratic recording schedule that encompassed multiple musicians and audio engineers…