‘The Power Station DLX’ includes the remastered album alongside three discs of bonus material, including unreleased “raw instrumental” versions, single mixes and live material, including the band’s performances from the charity concert Live Aid and an unissued full set from nearly a month later at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
…The Power Station (a supergroup of sorts) came about during Duran Duran’s hiatus (which also saw Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor form Arcadia) and featured Robert Palmer, Tony Thompson (from Chic) and Duran members John Taylor and Andy Taylor. Bernard Edwards produced the album (with “informal assistance” from Nile Rodgers) which features the hit singles “Some Like It Hot” and a cover of T. Rex’s…
Category: *editions*
Supertramp are to reissue half-speed remastered vinyl editions of their commercial breakthrough album, Crime Of The Century, and its follow-up, Crisis? What Crisis?
After their self-titled debut in 1970 and its successor, Indelibly Stamped Supertramp veered away from their prog roots to mainstream acclaim on 1974’s Crime Of The Century thanks to the ‘Dreamer’ single, with the album reaching No 4 in the UK and No 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. A year later, Crisis? What Crisis? was less successful in the chart, but has since been named Roger Hodgson’s favourite Supertramp album.
Both albums have been remastered at half-speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road, overseen by the band and original co-producer Ken Scott.
The Necessaries came together in 1978 and in the too-brief lifespan of the band counted among their members, Ed Tomney (Rage to Live, Luka Bloom), Jesse Chamberlain (Red Crayola), Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers), Arthur Russell (The Flying Hearts), Randy Gun (Love of Life Orchestra).
First championed by John Cale on the strength of Tomney’s songs, Cale produced their first single for Spy Records (under the I.R.S. umbrella) which was released in 1979. With the forward momentum brought about by the single, the band set about tracking demos intended for Warner Bros., but The Necessaries ultimately would sign to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. These rough demo basic tracks lacked overdubs, mixes and any finishing touches that would have made them…
Recorded November 1957 at Van Gelder Studio, Soul Junction is an album by jazz pianist and composer Red Garland. Also featuring the legendary John Coltrane (tenor sax) and Donald Byrd (trumpet) amongst others, the album features five cuts including the Garland penned title track. This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series on 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio and a Stoughton Tip-On Jacket.
In the early fifties, Lucky Roberts ran an after-hours club in Harlem. Lucky had been the dean of New York ragtime pianists in the early decades of the century, and had influenced James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington, among others.
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
Part of Rhino’s annual “Start Your Ear Off Right” promotion is a very welcome surprise: a remastered and expanded edition of one of the most underrated albums by British pop/rock band Squeeze.
The release of Play found Squeeze at a crossroads. After a moderately successful reunion in the mid-’80s stalled with the under-promoted Frank in 1989, the band departed longtime label A&M Records, signing with Reprise for a new decade. The ever-changing line-up was once again different, though by subtraction instead of addition: singer/songwriter/guitarists and founders Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were joined only by bassist Keith Wilkinson and drummer Gilson Lavis. (Keyboardist Jools Holland, whose big band…
There’s a profound irony in Warren Zevon’s work: a songwriter fixated on mortality who left behind songs that continue to outlive him. More than twenty years after his death, Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album, suggests why that may be.
For an artist who never had much commercial success, Zevon is having a moment. Over the past year, he has been welcomed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, celebrated at a high-profile tribute concert in Los Angeles, and now honored on Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album drawing from across his catalog. The attention-especially his recognition by the Hall-feels overdue, a reminder that Zevon’s reputation has always rested less on sales or radio play than…
Naive Melodies is a bold and visionary tribute to the music of Talking Heads, reinterpreted through the lens of Black musical innovation. Curated by Drew McFadden – the creative mind behind BBE’s acclaimed Modern Love (David Bowie tribute album) – this new collection dives deep into the Afro-diasporic rhythms and experimental soul roots that helped shape Talking Heads’ unmistakable New Wave sound. Inspired by artists like Fela Kuti, Parliament, and Al Green – whose influences loomed large in the band’s rhythmic DNA – Naive Melodies shines a light on the Black music traditions that underpinned their artistry.
Far from a conventional tribute, Naive Melodies reframes the band’s catalog through the voices and visions of a new generation…
…includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of “City of Refuge” and a 2025 mix of “Memphis Shakedown.”
The problem with flirting with old music styles in the digital speedway of the 21st century is the curse of revivalism, a tendency to reduce contemporary stresses and pressures to a perceived better time in the safe and distant past when things were simpler, clearer, and, well, more pure. But of course it’s always now — it’s never then or when — and musical revivalism can suffer from a kind of strictly enforced and ultimately empty artifice. A facsimile is still a facsimile — it can never, by definition, be the thing itself.
This is the dilemma for the Carolina Chocolate…
Panic! At the Disco is celebrating two decades of their career by giving fans A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (20th Anniversary Deluxe). The 20th Anniversary Deluxe will feature remastered versions of iconic tracks like “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and “Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off,” along with unreleased demos and live recordings.
Discovered by Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz when the band members were still in their teens, Panic! At The Disco exploded onto the musical landscape with the release of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out in the fall of 2005, which reached the upper echelons of the Billboard 200 and garnered multi-platinum success. The release’s breakout single, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” would become…
By the end of 1980, after 10 years waiting for the world to catch up with them, things were looking bleak for Suicide. The pioneering New York electronic project of keyboardist Martin Rev and vocalist Alan Vega had released a sinister self-titled debut in 1977; the album was met by hostility from crowds and mocked as “puerile” by Rolling Stone. Playing on tour with Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Cars, they’d been pelted with shoes, coins, and even knives. ZE Records had backed May 1980’s glitzier follow-up, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, putting the duo in the expensive Power Station studios with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production. But the label had hoped for a dance-pop record, telling Ocasek to think of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for reference, and Vega felt it…
In their infancy, Vancouver trio cub embraced the term cuddlecore — coined by friend and Destroyer guitarist Nicolas Bragg — as a cheeky tagline for their ramshackle fusion of ‘60s bubblegum pop and three-chord punk rock. It was an apt descriptor; their 1993 debut record Betti-Cola had garnered a cult following on North American college campuses in part because of its Archie Comics-inspired cover art, riddled with sentient teddy bears, rainbow Popsicles, and lucky pennies.
Where cub’s visuals exuded cuteness, their songwriting possessed a campy bite. Like their twee-punk contemporaries in Heavenly and Tiger Trap, cub’s best songs capture the emotional confusion and lost innocence of adolescence, stories of teenage runaways and…
Every field recording is a virtual reality. Joshua Bonnetta understands that precept: The Canadian artist eschews “authentic” reproductions of any space, openly embracing subjectivity. “I abstract the sounds,” Bonnetta has said of his 2016 album Lago, “so that they would align more with my experience and the feeling of what I got from that place.” A personal perspective comes to the fore in his experimental documentaries, too. El Mar La Mar, his 2017 collaboration with director J.P. Sniadecki, placed oral histories alongside audio of the Sonoran desert, painting the U.S.-Mexico border as a landscape of trauma and bureaucratic racism. In 2020’s The Two Sights, he portrayed the epistemological reality of clairvoyant townspeople in the Outer Hebrides by eschewing…
Streetlife Serenade may be one of the more unusual – and perhaps overlooked – albums in Joel’s celebrated catalogue. His third album (and second for longtime home base Columbia Records), it followed the modest breakthrough of 1973’s Piano Man with a similar formula to its predecessor. Working again with producer Michael Stewart and a team of Los Angeles session musicians, Joel later admitted the difficulty of recording a follow-up album with an admittedly thinner notebook of songs, so occupied had he been touring in support of Piano Man – at one point opening for The Beach Boys. Consequently, the album boasts not one but two instrumentals: the dexterous “Root Beer Rag” and the offbeat closer “The Mexican Connection.” The remaining songs furthered Joel’s…
One of the best West Coast folk-rock/psychedelic bands, Love may have also been the first widely acclaimed cult/underground group. During their brief heyday they drew from Byrds-ish folk-rock, Stones-ish hard rock, blues, jazz, flamenco, and even light orchestral pop to create a heady stew of their own.
Love’s The Complete Elektra Albums includes the definitive selection of Arthur Lee and company’s inimitable work. In addition to newly remastered versions of 1966’s Love and Da Capo and the landmark Forever Changes (1967), this box also includes the CD debut of Lee’s original mix for 1969’s Four Sail plus a disc of single sides and rarities that appeared on a series of early ’00s CD reissues of these albums.
Formed in California in 1967, Children of the Mushroom were the quintessential garage-psych band. As the times evolved, the band hardened their sound, shortening their name to Mushroom. Jerry McMillen remembers the start: “The initial issue: every member was quite novice on their instrument.” He continues, “Al began playing bass, Dennis took up drumming, and Mark McKean and I both handled guitars. We were already developing original compositions beyond the cover songs we performed—that might have been the catalyst.”
By 1970, Mushroom became Lady, incorporating prog-rock influences and instruments like flute to their hard-pych organ/guitar dominated sound, drawing inspiration from bands like Jethro Tull, Steamhammer, Gypsy or Bloodrock.
