Category: *editions*


Soul Jazz Records’ new Soul Jamaica brings together a wicked selection of reggae funk and soul tracks from the legendary Studio One stable, featuring a stellar line-up of artists including Jackie Mittoo, The Heptones, The Gladiators, Sim Smith, Peter Tosh and The Wailers, Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks and many more. For a short period of time at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, nestled between the end of rocksteady and the arrival of roots reggae, Studio One released a small stream of superb soul and funk reggae tunes – covering everyone from Sly and The Family Stone, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Nina Simone, Gene Chandler, Tyrone Davis and more.
Most of the tracks featured on Soul Jamaica were only ever released on Studio One’s…

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Cryo Chamber’s seventh entry in its ongoing Tomb series opens strongly with a pairing of Apocryphos & Pœna Sensus. Their track, ‘The Sigh of Archaic Tragedy’, is weighty and oppressive, built from deep drones, bass-heavy descending chords, and unstructured percussion that evokes places of burial and stillness.
The rest of the album explores similar themes in different ways. The variety on this compilation is remarkable considering that each piece adheres to a common aesthetic framework.
Dødsmaskin’s Messiaskomplekset’ is borderline post-industrial with rattling textures accompanied by haunting melodies and tones. Fractalyst’s ‘Those Who Slither’ is cinematic and varied, with abrupt changes in volume and palette.

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Like many a listener, Resonance founder George Klabin was bewitched when he heard Milton Nascimento’s singing voice for the first time. Introduced to him by Airto and Flora Purim when they were playing at a small NYC club, Klabin learned that the young man was in town to record at Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary New Jersey studio. Issued in 1969 on CTI Records, the resultant album was Courage, a classic-in-the-making (Klabin’s all-time favourite, in fact) featuring Herbie Hancock and orchestral arrangements by Eumir Deodato. Now, fifty-six years after its release, renowned clarinetist Eddie Daniels offers a fresh re-take of Courage, his third tribute album to a Brazilian music icon after earlier ones focusing on Egberto Gismonti and Ivan Lins.

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Just when you think you’ve discovered all the greats from the heyday of Turkish psych, along comes a rare nugget like this. Çetin Bükey was a saxophonist/flautist known for composing film scores, who also played on Barış Manço’s 1974 single ‘Bir Bahar Akşamı’.
Two years before that, and going by the name Chettini, he cut this ebullient slab of psychedelic soul-jazz with a heavy Turkish flavour.
Though only clocking in at a slim 26 minutes, its eight tracks ping with enough energy to get any party started. Bükey plays an exquisitely expressive clarinet, with a weeping intonation closer to a ney, across a selection of originals and traditional tunes. Bükey’s arrangements of the latter transform folk dances into jumping soul-jazz…

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Andromeda was a psychedelic/progressive rock trio formed by singer-guitarist John Cann (also known as John Du Cann), formerly of the psychedelic garage band the Attack, Mick Hawksworth (bass, vocals), and Ian McClane (drums, vocals). The group performed in various London venues including Middle Earth and the Marquee Club. Cann’s guitar was the dominant instrument, leading listeners through classically based psychedelic and progressive directions and creative dissonances, contributing to the trio’s impressive live sets. Andromeda combined their own original writing with elements appropriated out of familiar classical material. They were signed to RCA in 1969 but before that they’d appeared live on the BBC’s Top Gear program in 1968, and in…

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Joni Mitchell‘s Hejira is the last in an astonishingly long run of top-notch studio albums dating back to her debut. Some vestiges of her old style remain here; “Song for Sharon” utilizes the static, pithy vocal harmonies from Ladies of the Canyon‘s “Woodstock,” “Refuge of the Roads” features woodwind touches reminiscent of those in “Barangrill” from For the Roses, and “Coyote” is a fast guitar-strummed number that has precedents as far back as Clouds‘ “Chelsea Morning.” But by and large, this release is the most overtly jazz-oriented of her career up to this point — hip and cool, but never smug or icy.
“Blue Motel Room” in particular is a prototypic slow jazz-club combo number, appropriately smooth, smoky, and languorous.

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The Smashing Pumpkins are revisiting the material that initially marked their final bow with a sprawling, unusual box set.
…a new box set, Machina (Aranea Alba Editio), offer a remixed and resequenced, 48-track quintuple-album drawing from Machina, its sequel Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and assorted B-sides, plus a further three LPs of 32 rarities and outtakes, with more than 30 tracks entirely unreleased.
It’s an unusual release plan for an unusual series of albums, which brought the Smashing Pumpkins back to their roots and then closed the book on them entirely a quarter-century ago. Machina/The Machines of God was a back-to-basics, grunge-adjacent guitar album that…

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Seefeel‘s take on electronic music is not quite like any other outfit’s, and the particularities of their sound were apparent from their earliest output. While their 1993 debut full-length, Quique, is a master stroke of their brand of dubby, dreamy underwater shoegaze shot through with deep bass, the material that made it to several of their EPs that same year is just as powerful. Enter Pure, Impure, an EP that captured three stray tracks of Seefeel’s unique rhythmic and hypnotic dreamscaping, as well as some remixes. “Plainsong” is an upbeat and sprightly tune with the vocals buried deep in the mix, hitting the same stride as some of the more drum machine-reliant tracks on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, and the nearly 11-minute-long “Minky Starshine” evolves…

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‘Trouble in Paradise’ (Expanded Edition) features a newly remastered version of the original, a rare live recording making its U.S. debut, and 13 previously unreleased demos for tracks like “Christmas In Cape Town” and “My Life Is Good.”
…Like Little Criminals (which introduced “Short People” and “Baltimore”) Trouble in Paradise was heavily influenced by the Los Angeles scene and, as a result, often resembles a sequel to that 1977 effort. (1979’s Born Again, a darker and more prickly set, came in between.)  Co-producers Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker enlisted Rickie Lee Jones, Linda Ronstadt, Jennifer Warnes, Lindsey Buckingham, Christine McVie, Don Henley, and Bob Seger to provide vocal support for some of Newman’s strongest compositions…

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…The new edition was remastered at Abbey Road Studios.
John Darnielle is a compulsive writer forever clutching his stomach as songs pour out uncontrollably into whatever recording device is in front of him. What sets him apart from other prolific artists in the indie rock world (Conor Oberst, Ryan Adams, Stephin Merritt) whose records and side projects can’t keep up with the flow of their pens is his almost alarming gift for pairing quantity with quality. After dropping the devastating Tallahassee — a record that followed in gory detail the imagined demise of a Florida couple’s marriage — in 2002, he turned his focus inward, taking an almost autobiographical stance on the follow-up, We Shall All Be Healed,…

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…20th Anniversary Edition of the album includes multiple B-sides from the same time as ‘Feels’, such as crowd favorites from the time like the abstract “People” and the lively, romping “Tikwid.” It also includes a handful of never-before-heard demos for songs that were fully realized on ‘Feels’, and more.
While critics found it easy to lump Animal Collective in with the freak folk scene after the strumming madness of Sung Tongs, Feels may cause them to revise their opinions — slightly. First, this is more of a rock record, especially early on; the frequent cymbal crashes and pounding drums leave little doubt. Second, Feels has less of the aimless meandering of many artists in the freak folk scene. AC can, and do, explode at any…

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…include the newly mixed and mastered tracks, two B-sides and three previously unreleased demo recordings.
Daniel “Soupy” Campbell, the lead singer and lyricist of The Wonder Years, has never been a guy hesitant to wear his heart on his sleeve, which, of course, is part of the point of being in what is generally thought of as an emo band. But while Campbell has always had plenty to say about the stories of fellow kids from Philly trying to make sense of an often unforgiving world, he’s chosen to take on bigger themes on the Wonder Years’ fifth album. Released in 2015, No Closer to Heaven is a song cycle Campbell has written from the perspective of a man struggling to come to terms with the death of a loved one,…

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…Soul Jazz Records delve into the vast vaults of Discos Fuentes, one of the oldest and largest record companies in Latin America, known as ‘the Motown of Colombia’. Discos Fuentes played a major role in spreading Afro-Latin sounds both to Colombia and around the world and this album explores that legacy.
Latin Fire! features legendary Colombian artists such as Fruko, The Latin Brothers, Michi Sarmiento, Afrosound, Pedro Laza, Wganda Kenya and more and showcases the wide-ranging variety of styles that Discos Fuentes made unique to their sound. The album features music from the golden era of Fuentes; from late 50s and 1960s Cumbia through to the emergence of heavyweight and hardcore salsa and Afro-funk in the 1970s…

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The cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of colonialism should be widely recognized by now. The almost schizoid cultural distortions and developments it led to are impressively illustrated by Zulu Guitar Blues.
This is a truly extraordinary album, a captivating chronicle of the glorious, rousing and defiant music that was created during the horrors of South Africa’s apartheid era – and has remained largely forgotten until now.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens and Juluka’s guitarist Sipho Mchunu may have brought Zulu styles to a global audience, but there was no such fame for the remarkable artists featuring on this 18-track album, lovingly compiled and restored…

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Songwriter Cindy Walker’s name is well-known to country music fans. Her songs have charted more than 400 times, recorded by icons such as Ray Charles, Bob Wills, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley. Willie Nelson released an entire album devoted to Walker’s work: (You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker) back in 2006. She has been celebrated for her ability to capture emotional moments in everyday situations that define our lives, such as meeting an old lover, aging gracefully, and dreaming of a better future.
Grey DeLisle, a longtime admirer of Cindy Walker, is best known for her voice acting work, but she’s also a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. With her own deep roots in music, DeLisle recognizes the significance of Walker’s legacy as…

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What happens after the spotlight is directed towards another target? In the case of Liverpool and the Merseybeat boom – which, in terms of chart success, peaked in 1963 – the question is addressed by Liverpool Sunset: The City After Merseybeat 1964–1969. The city’s musicians carried on, despite record labels looking elsewhere for the next big thing, and despite the Liverpool tag no longer ensuring an automatic interest.
The final (identifiably) Merseybeat bands to debut on the charts were The Escorts, with “The One to Cry” in July 1964, The Undertakers, with “Just a Little Bit” in April 1964, and The Mojos, with “Everything’s Alright” in March 1964. None of these were debut singles, but that was it for burgeoning Merseybeat contenders and…

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