With the release of his first-ever live album, Daniel Donato is experiencing a genuine full-circle moment. What began as a fledgling music career busking around his hometown of Nashville, TN, Donato quickly found his footing as a regular performer among the litany of legendary Music City venues. Most notably, Donato became a fixture at Robert’s Western World, an intimate space that abuts Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, where the prodigious guitarist honed his generational musical talent over the course of nearly 500 performances and spent countless hours after those shows dreamily staring up at the Mother Church of Country Music.
Fast forward to August 22, 2025, exactly ten years to the date of his final show at Robert’s,…
Category: *editions*
Cherry Red previously anthologized shoegaze and dream pop with the expansive multi-disc sets Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 and Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995, neither of which included anything by My Bloody Valentine, presumably due to licensing restrictions.
In both cases, the compilations started near the beginning of when the genres were beginning to crystallize, then firmly stopped in the mid-’90s, after the music press stopped giving shoegaze attention, and most of the genre’s big names either disappeared or changed their sound. With We Are the Beautiful: Two Decades of Shoegaze 1991-2011, the compilers start right when shoegaze’s definitive releases were…
4CD sequel to Heaven Sent: The Rise of New Pop 1979-1983, documenting the influence of jazz and ’50s/’60s black American music (including retro soul) on modern pop in the UK between 1982 and 1987. Featuring Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt, Working Week, Joe Jackson, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Matt Bianco, Carmel, Fine Young Cannibals, The Blow Monkeys, The Style Council and Swing Out Sister.
…In 1982 a new jazz era was dawning and Soho, a hotbed since the ’50s, was where the renaissance began. Blue Rondo A La Turk, who had the first ‘New Jazz’ hit, were led by Chris Sullivan who opened The Wag Club in Wardour Street in April 1982, a vital catalyst for the ‘New Jazz’ scene.
Vic Godard, singer with Subway Sect,…
…The album has been newly mastered for the reissue and the 2CD edition includes a selection of rarities appended to CD 1 including a newly discovered ‘Cricklewood Jam’ instrumental demo. CD 2 includes a newly mixed version of the band’s second set at the Fillmore East on 27 February 1970, which includes an 11-minute version of ‘Going Home’.
Cricklewood Green provides the best example of Ten Years After’s recorded sound. On this album, the band and engineer Andy Johns mix studio tricks and sound effects, blues-based song structures, a driving rhythm section, and Alvin Lee’s signature lightning-fast guitar licks into a unified album that flows nicely from start to finish. Cricklewood Green opens with a pair of bluesy…
Exactly 30 years after Soul Asylum’s legendary 1993 MTV Unplugged session – recorded at the height of the band’s fame – the Minneapolis alt-rockers returned to their hometown to once again strip things down and go acoustic.
The performance captured that night wasn’t a song-for-song recreation of their early-’90s set, but it was very much conceived in the same spirit: an intimate, unvarnished look at a band and a songbook now carrying three more decades of history.
Three years later, the band is giving the album, MPLS Unplugged, captured from that Minneapolis show, a proper release. Frontman and rhythm guitarist Dave Pirner is the sole remaining member from the Grave Dancers Union era of…
On the Boston stop of the 1995 tour promoting their second album Blonder and Blonder, the Muffs stopped off at Fort Apache studio to play a set that was broadcast on WFNX, the area’s alternative station. The band sounds energized and full of punk vim and vigor, even though the daytime session was like putting in an extra shift at work. Guitarist Kim Shattuck, in particular, is on fire, attacking her instrument like it was a six-stringed monster that needed immediate subduing. She crashes and slashes through a set of songs mostly derived from the album they were touring, and her singing is even more fiery. On record she mostly kept her howls and screams in check but on-stage she lets loose, favoring pure emotional release over melody. The band follows her…
…completely remastered and include a replica of Horse Feathers’ original six-song demo CD.
That echo chamber’s a dangerous thing: A number of critics have mistakingly labeled Horse Feathers — the Portland, Ore., duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick — another folksy Americana troupe with an interesting vocalist. Broderick, a talented 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist, certainly adds folk instruments such as banjo, mandolin, and saw to emotive, gothic backdrops; he also accents Ringle’s quavery, near-falsetto with cello, piano, viola, violin, and various sorts of almost-funky percussion. Ignore the chatter– there’s something a bit more avant going on here.
The two approach music rustically, but the Iron & Wine name-checks are off the mark…
…box set includes alternative versions as well as an unreleased live show from Rennes, rough mixes and radio sessions from the era. Plus ‘Twenty-Seven Points’ (that was also released in 1995), an album that consists of live recordings made in various locations between 1991 and 1995, but also contains interludes and two previously unheard studio tracks.
Mark E. Smith once again landed on his feet after departing a label, ditching Matador in favor of Permanent, but Cerebral Caustic is notable for many other reasons. First, of all people, Brix Smith (still going by the name) rejoined the lineup, while future events made this the last studio album featuring Craig Scanlon. Though not an original member, his guitar playing for many…
Formed in 1969 by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown keyboardist Vincent Crane, Atomic Rooster forged a sound that blended proto‑metal heaviness with blistering Hammond‑organ riffs, explosive guitar work, and punishing drum patterns. Their music often brushed against what would later become doom metal, dark, powerful, and intense enough to shake the peace‑and‑love sensibilities of the era. Across seven studio albums released between 1970 and 1983, it becomes clear just how far ahead of their time they were, even as they frequently remained under the radar.
Compiled by Cherry Red’s Esoteric Recordings, this 2-CD set collects the band’s BBC sessions recorded between 1970 and 1981, including appearances on Radio 1, the Friday Rock Show,…
…remastered by legendary audio engineer Howie Weinberg and includes 12 previously unreleased tracks. This bonus material compiles B-sides, outtakes, and raw demos from the original recording era.
A smaller, simpler affair than his breakout album, Sha Sha, Ben Kweller’s On My Way strips away the polished alt-rock production and emphasizes the singer/songwriter side of his music. There’s nothing here as immediately infectious as the Sha Sha singles “Wasted and Ready” and “Commerce TX” were, and overall it’s a more subdued album. However, this somewhat more mature approach is contrasted and balanced by Kweller’s voice, which still sounds charmingly, vulnerably adolescent as he ventures further into his twenties.
When Pulp and Jarvis Cocker (the band’s soul and brain) appeared back in the ’90s, quite a few critics, even with all the praise, didn’t expect either to last long on the music scene, tying Pulp and Cocker to the Britpop “fad.”
Well, that “fad” is still around, and so are Pulp and Cocker. Yet they didn’t succeed because they remained strictly connected to Britpop, as both had wider aspirations, which they were able to reach with some, simply put, brilliant music and lyrics, being one of the rare artists that were able to bring their cross of British/European song trends (and Cocker himself is a sort of an encyclopedia in that respect) worldwide.
So it is no wonder that Pulp is getting their own live documentary – Pulp: What Do You Do…
In the summer of 1976, Bob Marley & The Wailers hit the UK shortly before the heatwave, in mid-June. They’d been touring Rastaman Vibration since April – breakthrough shows in the US and Europe – and in Britain, just a few months after the success of Live! and No Woman, No Cry, filled four nights and two matinees at
the Hammersmith Odeon, announcing that reggae was no niche novelty but a potent force. In the audience was future DJ Don Letts who in the linernotes here makes an impassioned case for that residency’s significance. “It made British kids who’d never stepped in a Caribbean household feel the hum of something deeper than rock or pop. Marley showed the world the spirituality, rebellion and beauty inside our culture.” Letts also asserts that reviewers of…
During the first wave of post-punk, the bulk of its practitioners lived in nations with undeniably agit-worthy issues. But they weren’t faced with anything like the existential chaos that’s been a day-to-day reality for generations in Lebanon. In other words, Beirut bands like Scrambled Eggs have a right to roar, and then some.
Scrambled Eggs’ first recordings appeared in the early ‘00s, but the quartet wound up drinking deeply from the late 1970s/early ‘80s post-punk well of bands like Gang of Four, The Pop Group, et al. The explosive energy and sociopolitical unrest at the core of those 20th-century sounds is surely something four young men raised in Lebanon could take to heart in a whole different way from their fellow post-punk revivalists further…
…The deluxe edition introduces 2 previously unreleased studio tracks rescued from the original sessions, newly mixed by Stephen Mougin.
On their second effort for Ricky Skaggs’ Ceili label, Del McCoury and his band, the reigning kings of bluegrass (even if Ralph Stanley is the Pope) turn in a another solid, haunting, and even completely astonishing set that features everything from tunes about haunted train rides, biker outlaws who remain focused on their quest unto death, a Richard Thompson tune (“1952 Vincent Black Lightning”), and a blues tune supposedly gleaned from listening to Frank Sinatra, as well as more traditional bluegrass stompers about being high and lonesome, grief, lost love, and hanging out at the barnyard. Right, that sentence was…
…Four albums from the McAuley Schenker Group from the late ’80s and early ’90s. All with bonus material.
After making his debut at a mere 17 years on Scorpions’ first LP ‘Lonesome Crow’ in 1972, guitar maestro and mad axe-man Michael Schenker spent five years as lead guitarist with the inimitable UFO, before forming The Michael Schenker Group (MSG for short) with singer Gary Barden in 1979. With four studio albums and two live records under his belt between 1980 and 1984, Michael returned in 1987 with the ‘Perfect Timing’ album, fronted by former Grand Prix and Far Corporation singer Robin McAuley, and a change of name to the McAuley Schenker Group – but still conveniently shortened to MSG. The new look MSG…
…5CD box set anthology of B-Sides, rarities and archive material from Toyah’s recording history for the Safari label (1979-1983).
…Revelations provides an alternate history of the Toyah Wilcox-fronted new wavers by way of B-sides, outtakes, instrumentals, alternate versions, home demos and live tracks.
Record label Cherry Red say that “it has been designed to perfectly complement the album catalogue reissue programme”.
Remarkably, given how comprehensive the individual album reissues were, 50 of the 102 tracks on Revelations are previously unreleased. The box has been compiled by by Toyah archivist Craig Astley alongside Joel Bogen, co-founder, composer and guitarist with the band.
