Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
Category: *editions*
Incredible live concert from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting one of the band’s first ever shows in Europe, at Düsseldorf Philipshalle on 27th September 1976.
When Rainbow finally landed in Europe for their debut live shows there, it was on the back of both the albums ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’ and ‘Rainbow Rising’ having charted, so the band were playing sold out venues, and what a band… with the line up consisting of Ritchie Blackmore, Ronnie James, Cozy Powell, Jimmy Bain and Tony Carey. As one of the cornerstones of British Rock, Rainbow, led by the never-predictable but ever-astonishing guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, became synonymous with some of the most well regarded and popular charting Rock songs of the seventies and eighties.
Take a look at Thames & Hudson’s magnificently illustrated coffee table tome Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco, and among the phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic artwork promoting nights at venues such as the Fillmore, Winterland, Carousel and Avalon ballrooms, three names trailing clouds of lysergic glory occur more than any others – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Yet although the Dead and the Airplane have become the stuff of legend, the other corner of the original San Fran acid-rock trinity has been rather forgotten. This 79-track boxset chronicling Quicksilver’s protean iterations over seven albums in the space of five tumultuous years – along with a generous helping of bonus tracks…
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
Celebrating 25 years, Pneumonia stands as an alt-country centerpiece, capturing Whiskeytown at their most expansive and iconic moment.
Whiskeytown had ceased to be a band in the truest sense by the time they recorded their third (and final) full-length album, Pneumonia; the group began to collapse during the touring following Strangers’ Almanac, with members coming and going at a remarkable pace, and for the Pneumonia sessions, the only musicians on hand who had appeared on Faithless Street three years earlier were lead vocalist and songwriter Ryan Adams and violinist and backing vocalist Caitlin Cary. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Daly and percussionist producer Ethan Johns dominated the sessions’ sprawling cast of players…
Grateful Dead is dipping into its archives for a 60th anniversary concert release going back to the band’s earliest years.
Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (7/3/66) arrives on 2 CDs, digital/streaming, or 3 LPs. The concert, recorded by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, previously appeared as part of the 2015 box set 30 Trips Around the Sun. Featuring Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and Bob Weir, the show has been mastered for this release by Jeffrey Norman with speed correction and restoration by Plangent Processes.
Songs include the earliest known recordings of “Cardboard Cowboy,” “You Don’t Have to Ask,” and “Tastebud,” as well as a cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love.”
In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
…newly remastered by Technology Works from the original source tapes.
Strut Records presents the first definitive expanded reissue of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Sun Ra’s 1977 session recorded at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana. The Arkestra were at the peak of their powers in 1977, releasing revered albums like The Soul Vibration of Man and My Favorite Things with Arkestra regulars Marshall Allen, Danny Ray Thompson, Michael Ray and Luqman Ali among the core musicians. Ra also continued his touring in Europe with historic gigs in Italy. During this period, Arkestra live performances were often loosely structured into thematic blocks that moved from reflections on jazz history to cosmic “space narrative” sections…
…20th-anniversary edition has been remastered from the original tapes and includes an exclusive live LP of the band’s performance at the 2007 Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands.
In the metal community, there are two veteran/legendary bands that, whenever they release a new album, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. We’re talkin’ ’bout AC/DC and Motörhead, of course. While the former band now takes several years between albums, the latter cranks them out on a much more frequent basis, as evidenced by the arrival of 2006’s Kiss of Death (which arrived barely over two years since 2004’s Inferno). The fact that the hard-living group is still at it is an astonishing feat unto itself, but when you realize they’re still keeping pace with…
2026 marks the 40th anniversary of Truthdare Doubledare, the second studio album from UK synth outfit Bronski Beat. Four decades on, London Records revisit the album with its first-ever reissue, presented across a range of formats including digital, limited edition purple LP, picture disc LP, 1CD, and expanded 3CD. Fully remastered, the release also unearths rare and previously unreleased studio sessions and live recordings.
New remixes include a striking rework of “Hit That Perfect Beat” from Doncaster-born, London-based DJ I. JORDAN. Injecting the original track with euphoric synth lines, complex arpeggios, and a driving vocal hook, the rework is built for the modern dance floor whilst respecting the original’s important roots.
It’s easy to romanticize New York nightlife — and sometimes you might wonder if it’s cheesy to do so. After all, the late David Mancuso’s foundational Loft parties have been the center of embittered schisms and fights over branding that call into question their founding ethos: “Love Saves the Day.” But what would New York City be without a little conflict, eh? And there are still plenty of true believers in the fiercely independent, dizzyingly multicultural, polysexual spirit that has kept people dancing in the half-century or so since Mancuso first blew up balloons and tuned on his huge hi-fi. Key among them are the Love Injection crew — conceived by Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele at a Loft party, and who are determined to keep the spirit alive through zines, record…
…The live release all hardcore Devo fans have been waiting for, Nitrous Nightmare demonstrates a band harnessing their artistic greatness in the purest of forms. This mythic performance captures Devo perfecting some of their most iconic concepts in the raw. Expertly restored, this live recording makes for a thrilling experience, it also captures Devo as a lightening rod for hostility.
On Halloween 1975, Devo took the stage at the WHK Auditorium in Cleveland, in a supporting capacity for jazz legend Sun Ra, to perform for a raucous crowd dressed in the finest of Halloween cliché. Already riding high on Nitrous Oxide and booze supplied by the sponsoring radio station, this unaware horde was expecting to see a slick cover band churning out renditions of…
The Brazilian religious and musical tradition of candomblé is a rhythmic barrage. Originating in the 19th century among enslaved west Africans, candomblé manifested in music as a ritual practice of drumming circles, where polyrhythms were hammered out to induce possession by spirits. Athens-based archival label Flee presents a treasure trove of this ceremonial music from a community in Salvador in the late 1980s, alongside a series of ingenious remixes made by contemporary artists.
Side one of the album hosts the field recordings. Hazy, unbalanced and full of tape hiss, the 10 ritual compositions pull listeners into the frenetic environment in which they were recorded. It is as if we are sitting next to the tape recorder…
Cherry Red Records compilation album A World of Our Own is a colossal release for one with such a finite scope. Comprising three discs and 86 tracks, it covers, as its subtitle suggests, The UK and Irish Folk Explosion of 1965 with maximalist gusto. This breadth is not the result of curatorial indecision but rather commemorates a singular slice of space and time, marked by an abundance of creativity and celebrating a gamut of interpretations of musical tradition.
Such a kaleidoscopic array exemplifies the core populist values that generally underpinned the folk revival movements of the mid-20th century. So, too, do the individual cuts selected to represent the metaphorical explosion at the album’s center. What emerges from it all is a well-fleshed-out…
Phish release a new digital box set, Phish: Live In Saratoga Springs 2025. The 55-song compilation collects the Vermont quartet’s complete three-night run at Saratoga Springs, NY’s Broadview Stage at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, which takes place at the tail end of the first leg of the band’s 2025 summer tour. Each of the shows, held from July 25–27, 2025, contains some notable moments: Phish’s opening night features a completely seamless second set, the middle night includes teases of N.I.B. by Black Sabbath, Walk This Way by Aerosmith, December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) by The Four Seasons, and other tunes, while the final night becomes an instant classic, opening with Tweezer Reprise and culminating with the first-ever “Tweezer” encore…
Carry On the sophomore solo album by the late rocker Chris Cornell has recently been reissued and expanded. The Steve Lillywhite-produced 2007 album finds Cornell shifting the alt-rock sounds he cultivated as frontman for Soundgarden and supergroup Audioslave into a more introspective, darker direction. Highlights include singles “No Such Thing” and “Arms Around Your Love,” a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (here extended from its original album release) and the film mix of Cornell’s hard-driving “You Know My Name,” the terrific theme song to 2006’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond film to star Daniel Craig as the British spy. This digital edition also includes two studio bonus tracks initially available on U.K. and Japanese pressings.