As the late ’60s rolled unsteadily into the early ’70s, the U.K. music scene was in understandable flux. The last stages of psychedelia were burning out, and musicians were looking for new sounds to fill the void. Some turned to the freedoms of jazz, others looked to the countryside for laid-back vibes, while some rocked up the blues or started heading in the direction of prog. A few intrepid explorers even tried to meld it all together into something new and magical, though most bands just seemed happy to be free of the influence of the Beatles and Carnaby Street.
Strawberry’s 2025 collection Feelin’ Alright: Mod Rock, Funky Prog & Heavy Jazz 1967-1972 is a fun and educational survey of groups and artists who tried one or more of these paths.
Category: *editions*
After 29 months, 6 distinct legs, and 130 concerts across practically every corner of Europe and North America, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band finally wrapped up their world tour Thursday evening at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza in Milan, Italy.
The setlist was largely standard for this final leg of the tour until the very end when Springsteen strapped his guitar back on after typical show closer “Chimes of Freedom,” and called out, “Key of B, boys. Key of B.” He was instructing them to break into John Fogerty’s 1975 rock anthem “Rockin’ All Over the World,” which is known to most European audiences thanks to Status Quo’s 1977 cover.
“Rockin’ All Over the World” has been in Springsteen’s live repertoire with the E Street Band going all the way back to the 1981 River…
…this expanded edition features five previously unreleased demos and alternate takes, along with the never-before-heard track “Hey Ah Nothin’”.
The other bonus material: alternate versions of “Ain’t Hurting Nobody” and “Quit Hollerin at Me,” acoustic versions of “All the Way with You” and “Humidity Built the Snowman,” and a demo version of “Lake Marie.”
John Prine‘s follow-up to his comeback album, The Missing Years, is more of the same in terms of freeing up Prine’s idiosyncratic muse and marrying the result to Howie Epstein’s top-flight production sound. Fans of the early Prine may find that sound over-produced, but the songs never get lost, and with Prine’s typically humorous, off-center view of the world (song titles include…
…includes the original album, demos, the B-side “Shame,” a previously unreleased song called “The Seventies,” and live recordings of “Long Haired Child” and “Hey Mama Wolf.”
Cripple Crow marks a departure for Devendra Banhart. It’s obvious from the faux Sgt. Pepper-meets-Incredible String Band freak scene cover photo that something is afoot. The disc is Banhart’s first foray from Michael Gira’s Young God label, and it’s more adventurous than anything he’s done before. This is not to imply that the set is a slick, over-produced affair, but it is a significant change. The instrumental, stylistic, and textural range on this 23-song set is considerably wider than it’s been in the past. Working with Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan, a backing band of…
…includes a bonus 12” of the 1994 ‘Machine Cuisine’ EP, and a download of 17 additional songs, including rare singles, compilation tracks, and unreleased material. All the material has been freshly mastered by JJ Golden.
Herky-jerky pandemonium rife with buzzing guitars and spooky, deliberately melodramatic synth and Moog lines, Severe Exposure is filled with tight, paranoid riffs that fulfills the deepest wish of anyone who ever wanted to find out what the unholy progeny of Big Black and Devo would sound like. Although there isn’t much sonic variety — and some of their attempts at humor are downright silly — the Satellites command attention with their unrelenting musical intensity and singer J. Ryan’s frantic, hell’s-bursting-loose…
This September 2015 concert was legendary even before a note was played. There was no better act to reproduce the Joe Cocker/Leon Russell led infamous Mad Dogs & Englishmen ensemble than the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Like the lineup that crisscrossed the county in Spring of 1970 with Russell as the captain that organized and steered this hulking ship, TTB’s sprawling outfit taps into soul, blues, rock and roll and gospel with a mindset comparable to the initial one-off aggregation of musicians, singers, pets, friends, relatives and hangers on.
But distinct that ragtag gathering, TTB are organized, professional and above all structured, words that could not consistently be claimed about the 1970 MD&E concept.
The original album plus rarities and b-sides, all remastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound.
A strange thing happens before the two-minute mark in “Saeglopur.” All the twinkling and cooing erupts, at what might seem like eight minutes earlier than normal, into a cathartic blast of tautly constructed group noise — or, as those who prefer songs and motion over moods and atmospheres might say, “The good part comes.” “Saeglopur” is emblematic of Sigur Rós‘ fourth album, released nearly three years (!) after ( ). Nothing resembles a drone, and no part of it could be described as funereal. Even so, Takk… is still very much a Sigur Rós album, due in large part to the ever-present otherworldly vocals, but also because the only real changes are the activeness of…
…contains 3 CDs: the remastered album, rehearsals/soundcheck from their Aug. 12, 1975, show at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, and performances from their June 21, 1976, concert at Pennsylvania’s historic Tower Theatre.
Blues for Allah came on the heels of the Dead’s self-imposed (and ultimately) brief hiatus which began in October 1974 following a run of five shows at San Francisco’s Winterland. After recharging in November and December, the band began thinking about a new album in January. Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Donna Jean Godchaux, and Keith Godchaux would set up camp at Weir’s home studio in Mill Valley, California. Rather than perfecting songs in the studio which had been…
After a period of nearly four years, David Bowie’s series of “Eras” box sets is returning with a new, final volume. 13-CD or 18-LP box I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2016) picks up where 2021’s Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) left off, capturing the final years of an artist who never stopped innovating.
The set contains new pressings of: Heathen (2002); Reality (2003); A Reality Tour (recorded 2003, released 2010); The Next Day (2013); The Next Day Extra (2013); Blackstar (2016); and the No Plan EP (2017). All but the last two have been newly remastered for this set. The set also premieres Montreux Jazz Festival: July 18, 2022 on 2 CDs and includes a sixth and final volume of Re:Call, featuring 41 tracks on 3 CDs.
A new four-song EP collecting live tracks from Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti is being released to celebrate the classic album’s 50th anniversary this year.
…The new Live EP includes live versions of ‘In My Time of Dying” and “Trampled Under Foot” from the band’s five-concert stand at London’s Earl’s Court, 1975, as well as “Sick Again” and “Kashmir” from Knebworth, 1979.
The Knebworth dates were Zeppelin’s first U.K. concerts since Earl’s Court, and first gigs overall since concluding their 1977 North American tour.
Although these were released on the 2003 Led Zeppelin DVD, this EP marks the first time they’ve been released in an audio-only format.
1. Friendship – Betty Ford
2. Case Oats – Bitter Root Lake
3. Eve Adams – Death Valley Forever
4. Horsebath – Hard to Love
5. Souled American – Sorry State
6. Eli Winter – Black Iris On a Burning Quilt
7. Slow Motion Cowboys – Invisible Stars
8. Anna Tivel – Airplane to Nowhere
9. Wednesday – Pick Up That Knife
10. Shrunken Elvis – An Old Outlet
11. Julianna Riolino – Seed
12. Florry – Big Something
13. Sally Anne Morgan – Eye Is the First
14. Jeffrey Martin – Edge of Lost
15. Joseph Decosimo – Glory in the Meetinghouse
As genres mutate and multiply, the etymologists of electronica delve deeper into the arcana of minute differences and emerge with hair-split explanations of the latest viruses inflecting the worlds of club and home listening.
Different Circles co-founder Mumdance and his cohort of DJ’s, producers and beat scientists have alighted on “Ping.” Not, Mumdance stresses, perhaps with tongue slightly lodged in cheek, a genre, more a feeling based on freedom from the tyranny of the kick drum. Back in the day we may have pointed to the Clicks & Cuts compilations, to Oval, Microstoria, Pole and other adventurers in scrape, float and bleep and declared them new, liberated from structure. Now “Ping” and what to make of it.
Ryan Adams marks 25 years of his breakthrough solo debut with a reimagined take on ‘Heartbreaker’. Featuring eleven newly recorded versions of songs from the original 2000 album. With subtle string arrangements and a renewed emotional depth, these reworkings revisit the ache and vulnerability that made the original so enduring.
As Whiskeytown finally ground to a halt in the wake of an astonishing number of personal changes following Faithless Street (coupled with record company problems that kept their final album, Pneumonia, from reaching stores until two years after it was recorded), Ryan Adams ducked into a Nashville studio for two weeks of sessions with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
While much of The Fall’s formidable ’70s and ’80s back catalog has been reissued in recent years following Mark E. Smith’s death in 2018 at the age of 60 and the earlier reissue campaign by Superior Viaduct of their 1979 to 1983 material, here is an often-overlooked piece of Fall history that has finally gotten the reissue treatment. A half-studio, half-live curio often overshadowed by their more well-known studio albums, it’s aged far better than it has any right to, especially given that Smith often dismissed this period as a commercial and comprised vision, leading him to retreat into slightly more experimental and abrasive territory in much of the ’90s and beyond.
All that said, side A is composed of studio tracks recorded in 1989, the most well-known…
…On the Road to Findout: Greatest Hits marks Cat Stevens’s first career-spanning compilation, containing tracks across the last six decades. It contains material from his 1967 debut, Matthew & Son (including “I Love My Dog”), and extends all the way to 2023’s King of a Land.
It’s the first time an album will feature both the cream of his work as one of the top British folk songwriters in the ’60s and ’70s, as well as music from his return to popular song styles after decades out of the business following a major spiritual journey.
…The man born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London had an impressive career as one of the more thoughtful and contemplative songwriters of his age, earning critical and commercial…
Serious-minded Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær has long stood at the vanguard of eclectic, experimental music, defying preconceptions through immersive, genre-bending soundscapes with a heavy emphasis on groove and ambiance. His new album with his revitalized band Khmer is a modernist reinvention of older works — most drawn from the group’s landmark debut Khmer (ECM, 1997) — performed live in Bergen.
“Song of Sand” floods the speakers with a hip-hop beat and sampling. A trance-like bass groove supports Molvær’s relaxed trumpet lines, modulated with synth effects, before guitarist Eivind Aarset steps forward, weaving moody textures, exploratory lines, and noise-rock ambiances. “Platonic Years” opens with…