When Pharoah Sanders initially recorded with Theresa in 1979, he was still under contract to Arista. Arista refused to let Sanders be pictured on the cover or mentioned in the title, resulting in the album being issued as Ed Kelly & Friend, although anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sanders’ style immediately recognized his playing. The reissue corrects the title situation and adds five 1992 bonus selections by pianist Kelly to fill out the disc. The first six tunes comprise the original session, and they established a pattern that Sanders faithfully followed throughout his Theresa tenure. They included curious remakes of Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” and “Pippin” from the Broadway show of the same name, the anguished, wailing “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”…
Category: reissue
The deluxe edition features 15 additional tracks: rare remixes, live versions and instrumentals.
On their sixth album, the increasingly prolific neo-psych outfit Portugal. The Man look to the past for inspiration on In the Mountain in the Cloud. The album represents a breakthrough for the band on a couple of levels, the most obvious of which is their signing to major-label Atlantic, which comes as a big step up after years of quietly working their way through the indie circuit. The other is the less tangible artistic breakthrough. With such a rigorous release schedule, Portugal. The Man has been a band that listeners have been able to watch hone their craft step by step, slowly tinkering and adjusting things and growing into a band that’s not only hit their stride, but is in full…
When Conal was released in 1981 on the Norwegian independent label Uniton Records with an initial run of 4,000 LPs, Conrad Schnitzler had already long been known beyond the borders of the Federal Republic of Germany and was now appreciated worldwide as a media artist and musician. In addition to the many cassette and LP editions he released himself, international labels were now increasingly releasing his music. In the same year as Conal, for example, the album Control was released on the American label DYS, followed in 1986 by Concert in the USA and Consequenz 2 in Spain. Schnitzler worked tirelessly and his total work of art, including his music, was becoming increasingly multifaceted. Conal is a good example of this development.
Since 1980 at the very latest, guitarist Kim Simmonds and whatever group of ringers he chooses to call Savoy Brown have been playing bad, late-’70s boogie rock disguised as the blues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an “original” or a cover, Simmonds and Savoy Brown sound tired on virtually every cut of this set, which covers the years 1992-2007. And his playing, while capable, is simply a reflection of the guitar god imagery of the ’70s. Check out his Robin Trower-ized version of Lowell Fulsom’s classic “Monday Morning Blues,” both the author and Trower (a true electric bluesman) should be insulted. In Simmonds’ hands, the tune becomes a generic, wah-wah-pedaled, psychedelicized blues number with a hint of faux soul thrown in, as does his reading of Willie Dixon’s…
By 1963 Miles Davis was on the cusp of being left behind. Creatively exhausted, touring with a repeatedly imploding sextet, he was also trading in a form of modal jazz that was rapidly becoming old hat compared to the frenetic, discursive innovations of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. However, there were signs of promise. For three tracks on the inconsistent studio LP, Seven Steps to Heaven Davis recruited 17-year-old Chicago drummer Tony Williams, 23-year-old pianist Herbie Hancock and Michigan-born bassist Ron Carter (an ancient 26). Allied to the relentless skitter of Williams’ drums, Carter’s regal, mellifluous bass, and Hancock’s background melodic conversations, Davis was able to expand and contract his sound, allowing for more…
…featuring newly unearthed bonus tracks and unheard demos.
The overused shorthand, “retro,” can mean that a group short on their own ideas has repackaged the past. Although Israel Nash Gripka’s country-rock/Americana infused music raises immediate comparisons to a host of classic folk-rock acts, Israel Nash’s Rain Plans is hardly a slavish (or lazy) re-creation of history. Instead, he’s applied a master craftsman’s aesthetic to expanding what might have started as simple singer-songwriter tunes. The resulting album features richly layered instrumentation that draws on acoustic and electric sounds, soft-diffusion reverb to cosset the mix and, above all, a worshipful appreciation for warm analog tone. Casual listeners may…
Like Tony Allen’s drumming in Fela Kuti’s band, or Clyde Stubblefield’s beats for James Brown, there’s something essentially timeless about krautrock rhythms. Can’s Jaki Leibezeit and Neu!’s Klaus Dinger created a rhythmic language that is “motorik” in every sense – a way of delineating forward-momentum, a propulsive groove that links rock music’s physicality with the repetition of electronica. Perhaps this is why a genre of music that emerged in a West German counterculture of the early ’70s continues to represent futurism and progress, even for bands who have absolutely no contact with Germany – from Tokyo’s Minami Deutsch to Chicago’s Lifeguard; from Sao Paulo’s Bike to Bristol’s Beak; from London’s Snapped Ankles to Venice’s Squadra Omega.
In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
Carry On the sophomore solo album by the late rocker Chris Cornell has recently been reissued and expanded. The Steve Lillywhite-produced 2007 album finds Cornell shifting the alt-rock sounds he cultivated as frontman for Soundgarden and supergroup Audioslave into a more introspective, darker direction. Highlights include singles “No Such Thing” and “Arms Around Your Love,” a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (here extended from its original album release) and the film mix of Cornell’s hard-driving “You Know My Name,” the terrific theme song to 2006’s Casino Royale, the first James Bond film to star Daniel Craig as the British spy. This digital edition also includes two studio bonus tracks initially available on U.K. and Japanese pressings.
“My Ice Queen” immediately makes its case. A mid-to-low tempo chugging rhythm underpins choppy guitar, a contemplative, distant vocal and a general air of disassociation. Brief sections of the song feature – albeit muted – guitar mangling and feedback. The lyrics tell of a “heartbreak machine, coolest girl you’ve ever seen.” Icy? Absolutely. Then take the similarly restrained “Life Goes on,” so hazy a rumination it seems to have materialised from the mists enveloping Venus.
It isn’t all so crepuscular. “Song for John” – seemingly an elegy for John Lennon – has a gentle bossa nova sway. It’s small-combo, guitar-centred pop at its most lean, most understated. Elsewhere, the airy “Even if” is yet another arresting example of the sometimes buoyant but mostly…
Darren Hayman is reissuing ‘The Violence’, the sprawling double album he regards as the most ambitious work of his 30-year career. Originally released through Fortuna POP! in 2012 and recorded with his 16-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it returns with previously unreleased songs and demos folded into the running order.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, if she floats or drowns” wrote Darren Hayman on Hefner’s ‘The Sad Witch’, a decade later he’s returning to the subject for The Violence, a concept album based around seventeenth century Essex witch trials and the English Civil war.
As concepts go it’s not as odd a choice as you might think. Leaving aside allegorical links to the present day, intended or otherwise…
…featuring 8 bonus tracks including rare studio recordings + iconic live performances.
Kaleo (a Hawaiian word for “the sound”), are a group of talented young rock/blues musicians from (where else would you expect?) Mosfellsbaer, outside Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, and only recently relocated to Austin, Texas, in 2015.
Having riled up a significant following in their home country as well amassing a horde of streams on Spotify, the band signed with Atlantic Records, and now we have their first complete gift to American listeners.
A/B sounds like a greatest hits album. In a way it kind of is, as it draws from Kaleo’s Icelandic self-titled debut and the handful of singles that have been released in America.
…includes two bonus tracks: Mitski’s covers of One Direction’s “Fireproof” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” previously only available on compilations.
Based in Brooklyn but with an unsettled background that called over a dozen countries on multiple continents home before she reached her twenties, Mitski Miyawaki makes her Dead Oceans debut with her fourth album, Puberty 2.
Her background is not irrelevant here, as the album reflects her own, very personal — and intentional or not, her generation’s — crisis of belonging as she recounts stories of navigating young adulthood in the City. A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes…
In the glory days of Italy’s library music session scene, Giancarlo Barigozzi and his cohorts were like Milan’s answer to L.A.’s legendary Wrecking Crew — if the latter were cutting one-size-fits-all soundtrack music for film and TV licensing. One main difference is that The Wrecking Crew never got to put their names on the records.
Sax/flute wizard Barigozzi and his peers worked on tons of sessions — and not just library music. They would get the call to come play when American jazz heavyweights blew through Italy, be it Joe Venuti or Gerry Mulligan. But in the wide-ranging world of library sessions, Barigozzi could wail in a genre-agnostic way, whether he was diving into electroacoustic experimentalism, chamber-jazz impressionism, early-adopter…
…featuring a previously unreleased demo, alternate versions of much-loved album favorites and a cover from the sessions for their seminal debut album.
Light Upon the Lake is the moseying debut album of Whitney, a septet built around the core songwriting team of Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek, both formerly of Smith Westerns. Often surprisingly intimate for a seven-piece, the group makes subtle use of instrumentation like brass and strings to flesh out without symphonizing their country-tinged indie pop.
The melancholy opener, “No Woman,” begins with cushiony keyboards and a short brass fanfare before Ehrlich — who doubles as the band’s lead singer and drummer — introduces his misty, double-tracked falsetto. He appears…
Expanded reissue of the cult 1991 Skooshny compilation, now collecting all twenty-one of the LA power-pop trio’s recordings from 1971 to 1981 including four tracks new to this edition.
Skooshny is an L.A.-based psych-folk-pop trio who originally came together in 1971, a time that singer/guitarist Mark Breyer later said was “too late for the Byrds, too early for R.E.M.” Breyer and drummer David Winogrond had been in a Chicago-area trio, Brevity, before moving to L.A. in the early ’70s to try their luck on the West Coast. They met guitarist/keyboardist Bruce Wagner after placing an ad in a music publication and he continued to be an on-again/off-again member. Rehearsals proved to be tough to organize, however, as none of the three had a car and relied on public…