Electronic music pioneers Soft Cell release a super deluxe reissue of their classic 1983 album The Art Of Falling Apart via Universal Music. Soft Cell’s – aka singer and frontman Marc Almond and multi-instrumentalist and producer Dave Ball – second album is freshly remastered by Barry Grint from the original tapes and shows off the feted duo’s gothic take on pop music in all its full, darkly textured glory. Following directly on from 1982’s seminal one-of-the-first remix albums ‘Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing’, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ reached No. 5 on the UK charts. As befits an album celebrating difference and choosing art over the glitzy 80s pop dream, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ gloriously twists and turns between anger, frustration and destruction to beauty, reflection and unity.
Category: *editions*
…Featuring the original 1969 mix, the album has also been newly mixed by Charlie Russell from the original 1/4″ production multi-track tapes, while the third disc contains a newly discovered live recording from the Finnish radio archives of the bands stunning performance at the Kulttuuritalo Hall in Helsinki on 3rd December 1969, recorded just months after the bands’ career-altering performance at Woodstock.
Ssssh was Ten Years After’s new release at the time of their incendiary performance at the Woodstock Festival in August, 1969. As a result, it was their first hit album in the U.S., peaking at number 20 in September of that year. This recording is a primer of British blues-rock of the era, showcasing Alvin Lee’s guitar pyrotechnics and…
…features 28 unreleased tracks and takes the listener on a journey from the band’s earliest demos and BBC Radio One Sessions through the singles to the album and beyond. Each disc contains rare and, in most cases, unreleased versions of songs.
Universal Music Recordings are shooting a new box set in the right direction, covering Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s U.K. pop landmark Welcome to the Pleasuredome in exhaustive new detail.
Though it’s already been exhaustively been reissued – once on a 2CD set from Salvo Music, on 2014’s vinyl/cassette/DVD set Inside the Pleasuredome (along with a 2018 Record Store Day box set of 12″ singles and the 2022 RSD comp Altered Reels, which brought a pair of…
Keith Moon’s death three weeks after its release added a tragic coda to The Who’s eighth album. In truth, Pete Townshend had threatened to sack Moon during the protracted sessions for Who Are You, his booze-addled antics by then eclipsing his ability to actually do the job.
Contemporary reviews bemoaned the guitarist’s infatuation with synthesizers, but on a record frequently concerned with slipping into irrelevance – ‘New Song’, the still barnstorming title track – it’s one of the most interesting elements, elevating what might otherwise have been stodgier rockers.
Extras on the new multi-format reissue include Glyn Johns’ rejected mix (not enough Ox); 1979 live tracks with replacement Kenney Jones (not enough Moon); demos and rehearsals,…
This new release features the complete 88-minute score, adding nearly a half hour of music to the program originally released on Hollywood Records. The extras include a demo of a short suite Zimmer and collaborator Steve Mazzaro prepared in 2014 to be performed live in concert.
Hans Zimmer was truly flying high in his career by the mid-’90s. He had successfully made the jump from London to Hollywood and had just won an Academy Award for his score for The Lion King (1994). His sound was going through an evolution during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it was on Backdraft (1991) that Zimmer fully embraced meshing an orchestra with his trademark synthesizers. It was also the start of the “power anthem” for which Zimmer would become known.
Strangely, Red Record’s 2025 remastered reissue of Bobby Watson’s Perpetual Groove omits the “Live in Europe” designation included in the 1984 release’s title. Perhaps it’s because one can tell from the first few notes that the set doesn’t take place in a studio – this is jazz meant to excite an audience with each musician’s spellbinding technique. With three Italian musicians (Attilio Zanchi – bass, Piero Bassini – piano, and Giampiero Prina – drums), saxophonist Watson tears it up on five tracks taken from two 1983 concert recordings. Though it’s certainly impressive to hear Kansas City, Kansas native Watson wail, some tracks fare better than others. More importantly, the quartet seems more focused on proving themselves, rather than creating memorable jazz.
In 2017, Real Gone Music reissued guitarist Jesse Ed Davis’ first two albums — his eponymous debut and Ululu — as Red Dirt Boogie: The Atco Recordings 1970-1972. It drew press notice partly because Davis was so prominently featured in that year’s award-winning documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World by directors Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana. It re-centered attention on his three fine studio albums, including 1973’s Keep Me Comin’ from Epic. Real Gone Music steps in again with this rarities collection. It contains 17 unissued performances including songs, alternates and outtakes recorded during sessions for his first two albums. It loosely coincides with the Liveright publication of Douglas K. Miller’s excellent biography…
Chameleon: The Very Best of Toyah is the first career-spanning collection to encompass Toyah Willcox’s full recording history.
…Spanning 45 years of music, the impressive collection includes the top 40 singles ‘I Want to Be Free’, ‘It’s a Mystery’, ‘Thunder in the Mountains’, ‘Brave New World’, ‘Good Morning Universe’, ‘Rebel Run’ and ‘Don’t Fall in Love’, alongside classic cuts right up to the 2021 Top 20 album Posh Pop. Chameleon lives up to its name and highlights Toyah’s musical longevity as a singer/actress that burst out of the punk/new wave scene in the late 1970s, became a pop icon in the ’80s and who has remained an ever-evolving creative force across five decades. Toyah has made an indelible mark on the entertainment industry with…
The legendary Americana band’s 1983 album re-released with brand new liner notes and band interviews written by Chris Morris with rare photos and memorabilia images. The release recreates the band’s third studio album complete with a replica of the inner sleeve with songwriter Dave Alvin’s lyrics.
The 11-track set features the four core band members-Phil Alvin, Dave Alvin, John Bazz and Bill Bateman accompanied by Gene Taylor, Lee Allen and Steve Berlin. Includes band classic cuts- “Long White Cadillac” (a hit for Dwight Yoakum in 1989), “Jubilee Train”, “Red Rose” along with deep track covers of “Barefoot Rock” and “Tag Along”, sung by piano player Gene Taylor. The album was critically acclaimed with positive reviews…
As a resourceful sound alchemist and idiosyncratic sound architect with multi-layered and often floating guitar sounds that can pile up into a wall of sound, Swiss guitarist Dave Gisler enlivens contemporary jazz. Since 2017, he has been working continuously with his congenial trio partners Raffaele Bossard and Lionel Friedli.
After collaborations with the Chicago trumpeter jaimie branch, who sadly passed away before her time, and the luminary of modern jazz David Murray, the trio decided to continue without guests and focus on the essence and energy of their distinctive trio sound. This live album is another milestone for this promising trio, which is guided by style-independent factors such as density, contrasts, and energy.
If 1968’s Brigitte Fontaine Est Folle (Brigitte Fontaine is Crazy) is the sound of madness, then sanity is vastly overrated. When French singer/ songwriter Fontaine started working on her second solo album, she was kicking against a lot of things. She wanted to move French pop music beyond the trendy pinup-girl chirp of “yé-yé” singers like Sylvie Vartan and France Gall, to fly in the face of the sexism that was still so prevalent even in French society, and to do it all with dark, poetic visions that poked and provoked, standing out even amid the iconoclasm of the emerging counterculture.
Fontaine’s 1966 debut LP, 13 chansons décadentes et fantasmagoriques was, as its title suggests, already plenty dark and strange. But it operated mainly in a kind of post-Jacques Brel…
If great art, as many believe, is inherently polarizing, then the Stone Temple Pilots’ Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop easily ranks as the California-based band’s finest album.
Simultaneously celebrated and castigated upon release in spring 1996, the group’s third full-length finds vocalist Scott Weiland and company expanding their “grunge” palette with a smart blend of glam rock, psychedelia, jangle pop, and other related styles. Having benefited from long-view reassessments that shed the biases and meanness of initial criticisms, the double-platinum effort is now largely and rightly seen as a creative masterwork. All the more reason why it deserves reference-grade production.
Sourced from the original master tapes,…
…remastered by Kevin Vanbergen.
By developing a flair for tight, melodic hooks on Star, Tanya Donelly unexpectedly achieved the crossover success with Belly that eluded her with the Throwing Muses and the Breeders. Evidently inspired by such success and eager to prove that Belly was a full-fledged band, not just a solo project, Donelly and company made a bid for stardom with their second album, King.
Veteran producer Glyn Johns gives the band an appealingly punchy sheen, and with the assistance of Tom Gorman and new bassist Gail Greenwood, Donelly cuts away her remaining arty preciousness, concentrating solely on big pop songs. While some fans will miss the occasional detour into spacy dream pop, Belly’s makeover is…
It’s always interesting to see where the next Imaginational Anthem compilation will take us, and this fourteenth addition (in time for Tompkins Square’s twentieth anniversary) has hopped us over to one of the traditional music hubs of the world to show us some of the instrumental guitar talent operating in Ireland.
Cian Nugent has his hand on the curating tiller and has chosen nine other tracks to sandwich his own little number, the lovely ‘I am Asleep and do not Wake Me’, a traditional Irish tune that he learned from a harp arrangement. As you would expect from Cian, the playing here on solo acoustic is finely nuanced and unshowy, with a couple of softly audible knocks on the body giving the sound an intimate feel.
In a recent thought piece on The A.V. Club, Josh Modell ruminated on the dilemma of bands touring endlessly around the hits that made them famous, even as they continue to record new material (or not). He rightfully noted everyone from The Pixies to Van Halen for their habits of living in the past on stage, writing, “I wonder if there’s not a bit of shame in strict nostalgia. Sure, Frank Black has made plenty of new music since the Pixies started playing again, but it hasn’t reached anywhere near the same audience. What does a once-and-maybe-current great songwriter do?”
This is the same question that’s dogged Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze for five years. The British duo formed one of the most evocative songwriting partnerships…
Pianist Horace Silver leads his mid-’60s quintet through a combustible, hard swinging evening on the superb 2025 archival recording Silver in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse. Recorded by KING-FM radio host and engineer Jim Wilke, the concert was one of many Wilke captured for later broadcast on his show. Thankfully, he saved the tapes, and they are presented here in a vivid restored quality. Joining Silver on tour was his then-main quintet featuring trumpeter Woody Shaw, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Teddy Smith, and drummer Roger Humphries. Taking into consideration the minor line-up shifts in Silver’s group from 1964 to 1966, including Shaw taking over for Carmell Jones and Smith being replaced by Bob Cranshaw in studio, this is essentially…