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…
Category: remastered
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…
Setting the tenor for his career as a world music pioneer, Yusef Lateef mingles Islamic sounds with jazz aesthetic on this, his first album. After touring with Dizzy Gillespie, he went on to release this hard-bop masterpiece in 1957, backed by bassist Ernest Farrow (Alice Coltrane’s sibling) and trombonist Curtis Fuller. Here, Lateef plays everything from tenor saxophone to the lute-like rabat (on the mercurial meditation, “Morning”) and the flute-like argol (on the bright, punctuated sonic excursion, “Metaphor”). Ultimately, his mingling of East and West feels as intriguing as it is effortless. Upon its release, DownBeat praised that “Almost without exception the tracks give a feeling of warmth, a mood of relaxation, and good feeling, an uncomplicated emotional propulsion.”
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Clannad’s 1985 album, Macalla (meaning “Echo” in Irish) and newly remastered by Phil Kinrade at Air Studios. This ninth studio album became their first international success and marked a significant point in the band’s career, showcasing a blend of their traditional Irish folk roots with a more mainstream, pop-influenced sound.
Building on the momentum from previous successes like “Theme from Harry’s Game” (1982), which gained international attention and was even used by U2 as concert outro music, and their award-winning soundtrack for the TV series “Robin of Sherwood” (released as the album Legend in 1984), Clannad was poised for a breakthrough in markets like America.
…remastered from the original tapes.
Tom Jenkinson’s first release appeared in a limited edition of 1,000 vinyl copies in 1994, issued by Spymania sublabel Nothings Clear (which didn’t put out anything else). Preceding his earliest releases as Squarepusher or under his own name, the initially self-titled Stereotype remained one of the artist’s rarest recordings until Warp finally gave it a proper reissue as a Squarepusher album more than 30 years later.
The album has none of the jazzy bass guitar or blitzkrieg drill’n’bass that Squarepusher is best known for, instead exploring acid hardcore. The first two of the album’s six tracks each pass the ten-minute mark, with “Whooshki” looping a cerebral synth sequence for 16 minutes,…
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…
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.
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…
‘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…
…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,…
…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,…
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…
Any list of the greatest jazz artists of all time includes the legendary Charles Mingus. Bassist, composer, outspoken jazz pioneer, Mingus was an innovator whose legacy continues to inspire us. Over a 100 years after his birth year, we still celebrate his genius.
This tour de force live performance from the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival captures Mingus at the top of his form and the height of his powers. Out of print for more than 40 years, this landmark recording was originally released on Mingus’ own Jazz Workshop in 1966.
This explosive set features career-defining performances of “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” “Meditations on Integration,” and a searing Duke Ellington tribute medley.
Formed in January 1969, Humble Pie soon became one of the best-loved, hardest-rocking live acts of the 1970s. In Steve Marriott, the one-time Small Faces frontman, “The Pie” had the best showman & biggest voice in the business. Peter Frampton, the “Face of ’68” with The Herd had a new role – guitar hero extraordinaire. And with hard-hitting powerhouse drummer Jerry Shirley & ex-Spooky Tooth bassist supreme Greg Ridley, Humble Pie quickly developed into a sophisticated studio unit where tough riffs, rustic rock & bursts of blissed-out psychedelia earned the band instant chart success & critical acclaim.
As Safe As Yesterday Is was their debut album for Immediate Records on 1 August 1969, reaching no. 32 in the UK charts.
One of the strangest phenomena of early ’80s pop is that U.K. pop duo Naked Eyes – who stormed the Top 10 in America in the summer of 1983 with a thunderous synth version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” – completely missed the chart at home. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that a forthcoming expanded edition of their debut, featuring three unreleased demos and a fistful of non-album tracks, takes its cues from the American version of the album.
…the newly deluxe edition of Naked Eyes, mastered by Phil Kinrade at AIR Mastering, offers the album as it was released by EMI America in 1983, not long after a slightly…
…In 1977, John Williams composed three film scores – and you’d be forgiven for not remembering the third, compared to the other two. While Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind made him one of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters (earning an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and five Grammys between both scores), his first offering that year was the suspenseful music to Black Sunday, a taut political thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and based on the novel of the same name by The Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris. In it, Robert Shaw plays an agent of Mossad in a race to stop a crazed blimp pilot (Bruce Dern) and a Black September operative (Marthe Keller) from detonating a bomb in the air above the Super Bowl. Featuring stunning footage of…
Alhaji K Frimpong’s 1977 Highlife masterpiece, melding traditional Ghanaian musical forms with experimental instrumentation and innovative arrangements.
Opening with the urgent, call-and-response drive of “Hwehwe Mu Na Yi Wo Mpena” and closing with the 15-minute odyssey of “Adam Nana,” the record stretches highlife’s rhythmic and structural possibilities. Its sinuous guitar lines, clavinet vamps, layered vocal phrases and hypnotic percussion evolve with a looseness and freedom that echo the experimental spirit found in 1970s jazz and funk — a Ghanaian counterpart to many of the African-influenced sounds being shaped across the Atlantic.
…The Black Album expands the electronic…
…This edition of ‘Ramshackled’ has been newly remastered from the original master tapes and features the single versions of ‘Ooh Baby (Goin’ to Pieces)’ and ‘One Way Rag’ as two bonus tracks (issued on CD for the first time).
It’s worth remembering that between the release of 1971’s Fragile and 1974’s Relayer, Yes had steadily risen from plucky progressive rock hopefuls to become bona fide superstars, selling millions of albums around the globe and effortlessly filling arenas around North America and Europe.
With relationships souring due to clashing egos and the financial imperative to keep the cash-cow rolling, the idea of enabling every band member to record a solo album could be viewed either as a cunning managerial sleight of hand,…