Pop iconoclast A. G. Cook has been the spearhead of a shift in mainstream music throughout the past decade. His (now defunct) label, the seminal PC Music, disrupted the DNA of pop music, the first domino to fall in the emergence of dozens of internet micro-genres. The Moment (The Score) marks Cook’s first solo effort since 2024’s Britpop, a post-PC Music triple disc of shiny digitised, almost indie, tracks. That record came with a multiverse of characters, timelines, even online games and bonus downloads. Like with his time at the helm of PC, Cook is surgical and intrinsic, managing to construct and curate worlds even with the most dizzying or abrasive of material.
Scoring a film is the natural step forward for someone like Cook. It’s also a surgical and…
Category: *editions*
One Moment in Time: Live in the USA is the logical extension of the process of refinement that Robin Trower has undertaken with his studio albums of recent years. Running roughly 77 minutes in duration on compact disc and a double LP vinyl set, fourteen tracks taken from two shows on a 2025 American tour allow the British guitar hero to do justice to a solo career begun in 1971 upon his departure from Procol Harum.
It is utterly pragmatic that Trower collaborates with some of the same individuals with whom he’s fashioned such finely-honed expressions of contemporary blues like last year’s Come and Find Me and No More Worlds to Conquer from three years prior. The recordings were mixed for maximum detail by Sam Winfield…
Cherry Red, longtime home for Howard Jones’ catalogue, release an unheard set from the beginning of his career.
Live at the Marquee, finds the inimitable singer-songwriter-keyboardist wowing a crowd at the late London venue just before his commercial breakthrough in 1983.
The wholly unreleased show, was unearthed from master tapes when the label began compiling bonus material for reissues of his former Warner catalogue in 2018, and remixed by Jones himself for this release. (It appears from the metadata that three of these Marquee tracks were originally released as B-sides to early singles.) The packaging includes rare and unreleased photos of Jones from the period.
When the then-28-year-old Jones took the stage…
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.
For last year’s Record Store Day Black Friday lineup, Rhino puts The Doors front and center with Live in Copenhagen, a previously unreleased 1968 performance finally pulled from the vault. Live in Copenhagen captures the band’s full early show from September 17th at the Falkoner Centret during their European tour. It’s a substantial RSD Exclusive — one that highlights The Doors at a pivotal moment, delivering a raw, unpolished document that adds real value to the band’s live catalog rather than reworking material fans already know by heart.
The set begins with “When the Music’s Over,” and the performance immediately shows a band working with precision rather than chaos. Morrison keeps his delivery steady…
…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…
Halloween: The Complete Expanded Collection collates Carpenter’s soundtracks for the most recent Halloween trilogy: 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and 2022’s Halloween End, which marked the director and composer’s return to film scoring after nearly two decades.
For the first time ever, the complete Halloween trilogy is being released in fully expanded editions, featuring previously unreleased music cues that reveal new layers of the iconic scores. The expanded version of Halloween Kills features 25 unreleased music cues, while Halloween Ends adds 10 new tracks.
…In listening to the recent Halloween scores, the collaborative spirit among the composing trio is one of the first things that jumps out.
House, techno, and garage were respectively invented in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but the U.K. embraced them and took underground club sounds into the pop charts during the 1980s and ’90s. Burn It Up: The Rise of British Dance Music 1986-1991 explores some of the many developments that took place during the era, from the U.K.’s first attempts at acid house to early rave anthems. Like other Cherry Red anthologies, this one casts a wide net and tries to tell a comprehensive history of its subject, making room for established classics as well as rarities, curiosities, and inclusions that might be kind of a stretch, but hear them out anyway.
The collection starts with Coldcut’s “Beats + Pieces (Mo Bass Remix),” representing…
It would be difficult to overstate the righteousness of David Zé’s heart. Raised in Angola while the Southern African country was still a colonial outpost of Portugal, regionally he’s considered an icon of resistance who used music as a weapon for liberation and reform. Zè was assassinated in 1977, two years after Portugal’s withdrawal, but in a nation still fractured and unstable. Speculation continues to swirl that governmental fear of his influential voice led to the killing; author and African studies professor Marissa Jean Moorman points out that while there are no definitive accounts of their deaths, the murders of Zé, and fellow musicians Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes, were part of a “purge.”
Raised by parents who belonged to a Methodist…
Belgian-Caribbean composer and musician Nala Sinephro‘s first film score is for The Smashing Machine, a Benny Safdie-directed biopic about MMA fighter Mark Kerr, starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the title role.
On paper, Sinephro seems like an odd choice for the job, as it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a connection between ambient spiritual jazz and extreme fighting. Regardless, Sinephro and her regular collaborators (including saxophonist/flautist Nubya Garcia and former black midi drummer Morgan Simpson) weave an intriguing instrumental backdrop for the film, issued by Warp as a 25-minute soundtrack. Most of the eight tracks are brief pieces which establish a warm glow, swirl lightly, and make their exit.
Sony Music Japan has continued its popular series of 7-inch SACD reissues with a 50th anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen’s seminal Born to Run. The 3CD set features a new DSD remaster of the original album on stereo hybrid SACD (playable on all CD players) along with The Boss’ Greenvale, New York concert of December 12, 1975 on 2 Blu-spec CDs. The CW Post College Post Dome concert featured most of the songs from Born to Run including “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “She’s the One,” “Jungleland,” and, of course, the title track. (The concert also yielded Springsteen’s now-classic take on “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” which was released as a single nearly a decade later, in 1985.) The concert was issued in 2021 on…
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…
For Mona Fastvold’s film about the Shaker founder, Daniel Blumberg reworked hymns, composed songs, and led a sizable chorus to mimic speaking in tongues. It’s ambitious but ultimately overbearing.
Formed in England in the mid-1600s, the Religious Society of Friends became known for the tremors and convulsions that would overtake its members during prayer. These “quakes” were not, they believed, handed down from on high, but emerged from the inside out — a blasphemy that saw members of the fledgling sect thrown into prison or run out of town.
…In The Testament of Ann Lee, Shakers shake. Mona Fastvold’s film stars Amanda Seyfried as the founder of the religious movement…
…The expanded digital album includes 11 bonus tracks in total: the three songs from the 2007 ‘End Like This’ EP, four previously unreleased outtakes, and four demos.
Makers is Rocky Votolato’s fourth album, appearing fittingly in line after 2003’s Suicide Medicine, but with a worn resilience all its own. It finds Votolato sounding older and weathered, more content than jaded, and there’s a modest quality to his steady voice that projects words as both sincere and comforting.
Some songs are country-tinged — with touches of harmonica, pedal steel, violin, and piano supporting the focal acoustic guitar — but it’s more that they simply evoke images of rural dirt roads, long walks and quiet autumn nights at home…
The Live at City Gardens EP features a blistering six-song soundboard recording captured live on February 11, 1984, at the legendary punk club City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey.
The EP showcases the band’s raw, electrifying energy as they were on the cusp of releasing their landmark album, Let It Be. The latter tune was a birthday request from Jesperson, who was The Replacement’s manager and the co-founder of the band’s label, Twin-Tone Records, in addition to being Let It Be’s co-producer.
A collector’s item, this 10″ EP was released exclusively as a pre-order bonus alongside The Replacements – Let It Be (Deluxe Edition). It features clear, high-quality audio and includes a rare live performance of the ballad “You’re Getting Married.”