Much has been written about the Transatlantic fallout of punk rock, with every crevice of the era meticulously scanned in the hope of a lost classic. Whilst Circle X’s fractious run, two albums and two EPs, over a span of seventeen years, might not signify complete unknown status to seasoned crate-diggers, their minimal place in the history books belies their brilliance.
Formed in 1978, in Louisville, Kentucky – by brothers Rik and David Letendre, alongside Tony Pinotti and Bruce Witsiepe – Circle X emerged from the ashes of the city’s very first punk bands No Fun and The I-Holes, surfing the shockwaves created by punk rock. The band swiftly relocated. First to New York, then Dijon, and back to New York again, all the time evolving and mutating…
Category: reissue
…includes a bonus disc of demos and two previously unreleased B-sides from the original sessions, “Comin’ To You” and “Harpsi Chords”.
The third solo album by K Ishibashi under his Kishi Bashi moniker, Sonderlust comes with a tweak to his sound, a footnote on the title, and some emotional baggage. The title is a play on the recently invented word sonder from the Web’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Essentially, it refers to the realization that any random stranger has a life experience as vivid as one’s own. As for the baggage, Ishibashi has admitted to suffering marital woes while working on the album, a fact that affected its tone and especially lyrics, which are often colored by uncertainty. It may also have altered his creative process, given…
Counterfeit Blues, originally released in 2014, was met with critical acclaim and remains a shining example of what Corb Lund’s longtime band, The Hurtin’ Albertans, are capable of. “My old friend Joel Stewart cooked up the idea for this record. Joel was one of the key people responsible for a lot of the successes we had when we first started out and has been a great supporter for many years. He was working at CMT Canada at the time, in his subversive way, and decided he wanted to grab a band and make a live off the floor documentary/recording at Sun Studios in Memphis. Same room Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis used,” said Lund. “He told us that of all the bands he worked with we were the most capable of pulling it off, which is…
Cabin Fever returns to print and reclaims its place as one of Corb Lund’s most defining records. Originally released in 2012, the album still sounds tough, grounded, and alive, capturing the moment when Lund’s songwriting reaches beyond borders and starts connecting with a truly global audience. Now expanded with an acoustic bonus disc, this reissue gives the record new space to breathe while preserving its grit.
The album leans into a raw, organic sound built on dusty rhythms, twangy guitars, and stories that feel pulled straight from the road. Fan favorites like “Gettin’ Down On The Mountain” and “Bible On The Dash” continue to stand out as live staples, songs that thrive on their simplicity and swagger. They move easily between humor and hard…
Losin’ Lately Gambler returns to print as part of a renewed celebration of Corb Lund’s extensive catalog, and it lands with the same grit, humor, and lived-in storytelling that define his best work. Originally released in 2009, the album still feels stubbornly timeless, rooted in dust, whiskey, and the hard edges of working-class myth.
The record moves forward on a galloping stand-up bass and the lonesome cry of steel guitar, giving the songs a restless, road-worn momentum. Lund sings in Jack London-like yarns about down-and-out cowboys, ranching life, and late-night barroom philosophy, painting scenes that feel less like fiction and more like stories overheard at the end of a long shift. The production stays raw and unfussy, letting the groove and the narratives…
To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers’ basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature – The Exploited’s gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set – Rob and John Wright were busy deconstructing the very physics of the power trio.
When guitarist Andy Kerr completed the circuit, internal pressure reached a critical mass.
The guys who make up the country group the Mavericks began their professional music career performing together at rock clubs in Florida. Now you might think that’s a long ride from Nashville, but they found their way easy enough. Once they did, they didn’t leave everything they learned in those rock clubs behind though, and listeners won’t miss the rock & roll flavor that the Mavericks stir into a number of the songs on this 1998 album, It’s Now! It’s Live!
As the title foretells, this is a live album. It was made during a couple of shows the group did in Canada. This is great country-rock music done the way the Mavericks do it best, but the album is a little short with only seven tracks. The songs are fan favorites though, like…
Numero present ’90s shoegaze band Should’s ’98 debut ‘Feed Like Fishes’ + 10 period bonus tracks.
The folks in Phoenix’s Half String talked up this trio when they were Austin, TX’s shiFt (before they moved north to various universities and gave up their name because of another band called Shift). And it’s easy to see why: Should would have fit perfectly into Arizona’s former “beautiful noise,” post-dream pop scene.
Even without the interestingly sedate but grasping cover of the Wedding Present’s “Spangle” (and, on another record, 18th Dye’s “Merger”), their sound makes it apparent that they can match the English in pairing inventive, modern guitars to lulling tunes for nighttime singing. You could see “Sarah Missing” appearing on a Slowdive…
Unique collection containing authentic rhythms of Haitian Voodoo drumming. Recorded in Port-au-Prince, Haiti by Soul Jazz Records, this album features The Drummers of the Societe Absolument Guinen.
Voodoo is the African religion at the heart of Haitian life. The complex rhythms of the drums are used to bring down African spirits in Voodoo ceremonies. These drums are the link between the music of Africa and the Caribbean. With links to Cuban Santeria, Jamaican and Trinidadian Afro-religions, Voodoo rhythms are the heaviest, most intense of all.
This record, which consists entirely of recordings of voudou drumming made in Port-Au-Prince, is one of a series of Soul Jazz releases exploring…
The Dahlak Band honed their sound as the resident musicians at the Ghion Hotel, a historic building in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa that was first constructed by long-time ruler Emperor Haile Selassie as an intended residence for his son. At the band’s red-hot core was Tilaye Gebre, a heavyweight of Ethio-jazz, whose story intersects with many of the close-knit scene’s key players. As press notes to this new reissue of Tilaye’s Saxophone with the Dahlak Band assert, “Chances are that if you pick up any gem recorded in Addis Ababa during those times, it features Tilaye on saxophone and his arrangements.”
The Selassie era was brought to an end by the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974 and the dawning of a new military regime that imposed…
Was it a matter of timing, or simply living in the shadow of giants, that has kept saxophonist Charles Tyler off most listeners’ radars? Born in Kentucky in 1941 and raised in Indianapolis, Tyler first gained recognition through his association with Albert Ayler. After relocating to Cleveland in the early ’60s, the two became fast friends, and Tyler’s fiery saxophone can be heard on Ayler’s early ESP-Disk recordings Bells (1965) and Spirits (1965). He soon stepped forward as a leader with Charles Tyler Ensemble (1966) and Eastern Man Alone (1967), two albums that have drifted in and out of print, perhaps casualties of a moment when Ayler and Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking work dominated the conversation and left little room for similarly adventurous voices.
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…
…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…
The reappearance of These Were The Earlies for its 21st-anniversary is a surprise. Although The Earlies‘ debut LP received a maximum-marks review from NME on its 2004 release – and widespread praise in general – it is not an album instantly shouting “cult item.” Nonetheless, as the reissue and a tie-in reformation of the band show, there is a residual affection.
Playing These Were The Earlies confirms why. From its opening seconds, it sets itself up as top-notch modern psychedelia, with references – some overt, some subtle – to The Beach Boys, Love and, more contemporaneously, Mercury Rev. A lyric with the words “Mother Mary” cannot have been written without knowing The Beatles would instantly spring to mind.
One of several recordings issued by the Art Ensemble’s own label and the only one to document the group as a whole, Kabalaba is a live, 1974 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival by the same augmented band (with the addition of Muhal Richard Abrams) that recorded the superb Fanfare for the Warriors album for Atlantic. While not as heady as that release, Kabalaba offers a typical example of the Art Ensemble’s live concerts from around that time.
There are several percussion interludes and solo horn features interspersed among stronger thematic pieces such as Theme for Sco, which gets an energetic workout here. Roscoe Mitchell produces an especially acerbic solo alto piece, Improvization A2 [sic], all gnarls and bitter…
Julee Cruise was a remarkable enough talent in her own right that it seems a shame to emphasize her links with David Lynch, but he’s an inescapable presence on this 2-CD set. That’s because Fall_Float_Love comprises her two albums for Warner Brothers, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love on which, apart from one song, all the lyrics were written by Lynch, and all the music was composed and arranged by his collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. With the deaths of both Cruise and Badalamenti in 2022 and Lynch this year, the music takes on an even more spectral and haunting quality (and it started off with plenty of both those qualities), and Fall_Float_Love stands as a fitting memorial to the meeting of three unique but entirely compatible talents.
“This is our last concert, ever. And we’d love to do you for now on our last concert ever…” After the words peter out, a ragged, yet blistering, five-minute version of “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction” explodes from the stage. Show over, The Rolling Stones leave Hawaii’s Honolulu International Center to…what?
It’s not as noteworthy a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry as David Bowie’s 3 July 1973 announcement at the Hammersmith Odeon that “not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” Or even George Harrison’s “that’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore” comment after playing San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966 – what turned out to be The Beatles last-ever (conventional) live show. But it was unequivocal. On 28 July 1966, Mick Jagger told the audience…
Convex was the only LP Conrad Schnitzler released in 1982, though he continued recording an untold amount of cassettes, as he did throughout his lengthy career. On this record, he utilized a sample-and-hold generator, which converted sounds into random sequences of tones. Using sequencers and generators rather than keyboard-based synthesizers, he created slowly unfolding pieces which were left up to chance. While the compositions often have an unhurried pace, they seem far from relaxed or tranquil, and it would be a misnomer to refer to them as ambient. They’re generally hypnotic and often quite busy, and even when they aren’t, they sound like an exploration of an alien planet. “Convex 2” contains high-pitched, semi-melodic pulsations over…
Control originally appeared in 1981 during an especially productive era in Conrad Schnitzler’s career. Inspired by his friend Peter Baumann (like Schnitzler, a former member of Tangerine Dream), he experimented with different sound generators, and attempted to incorporate traditional harmonic elements into his work. When the LP was originally issued, it simply consisted of two sidelong pieces, but subsequent reissues have divided the album into short tracks. Most of the pieces sound different from one another, with some being meandering drones, and others sounding much busier and more exciting. The most memorable ones demonstrate Schnitzler’s curious, playful side, with “Control 4” having sprite-like high-pitched melodic tones, and “Control 6” containing…
Marc Almond has personally curated this celebratory 2CD expanded re-issue of his lesser known 2016 electro-pop album. Lesser known simply because, hitherto, it has only had a limited vinyl release in Germany.
Silver City, now a definitive 20 track techno-pop opus, was written and produced by Marc with celebrated cult German electronic music production duo Starcluster and is Marc Almond’s “most synth laden body of work since Soft Cell” (Electricity Club, 2016). It is indeed, a sheer joy to hear Marc Almond’s deft and distinctive vocals alongside a vast array of vintage analogue synthesisers in this resplendently authentic, retro-futuristic setting; an album that provides an eloquent refracted echo of his formative synth-pop work in revered…