After releasing two strong albums for Slash, the Blasters had plenty of critical acclaim and a sizable hometown following, but they hadn’t come especially close to landing a hit record, and on the 1985 album Hard Line, they overhauled their approach in the studio in hopes of creating something that sounded more contemporary.
Producer Jeff Eyrich pumped up the sound of Bill Bateman’s drums (and for a few tracks replaced him with Stan Lynch of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), Dave Alvin’s guitar tone got thicker and harder and the emphasis was put squarely on new songs. “Trouble Bound” and “Help You Dream” showed Dave Alvin’s gift for writing in traditional styles was as strong as ever. Alvin’s songs took on a darker tone on Hard Line, especially the tale…
Category: remastered
When punk rock began exploding in the late 1970s, more than a few fans of the new music declared the only hope for rock & roll was to throw away its past and start over, but thankfully, a few people knew better than that. Dave and Phil Alvin were a pair of brothers from Downey, California who’d been raised on a steady diet of what they called “American Music” – blues, rockabilly, country, jazz, swing, R&B, and early rock & roll.
The Alvin brothers formed a band called the Blasters that approached the classic styles of the past with the energy and insouciance of punk rock, and their music taught a new generation that rock & roll was hard, wild, and manic fun even before it was called rock & roll. The Blasters, the band’s second album, is divided roughly…
A masterpiece! But also a major turning point in 38 Special’s career. It is with this now ‘classic’ that the band will be recognised. Rockin’ Into The Night, which followed ‘Special Delivery’, benefited from the first seeds sown by the latter, and the first plant to appear in all its splendour was the eponymous title of this new album, released in 1979.
A revolver cartridge transformed into a tube of lipstick sets the tone, far removed from Southern bands. Just like the opening track, co-written by three members of Survivor, including Jim Peterik, which producer Ron Nevison thought was too Southern for his colts. Was it this track that influenced the Jacksonville gang’s songwriting? 38 SPECIAL’s music is becoming smoother and more polished, and even if their Southern roots…
Though little-known in America prior to 2000, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant formed in Japan back in 1991 and began playing raucous garage rock & roll inspired by the Stooges, Thee Headcoats, the Who, and MC5. Futoshi Abe’s thrashy guitar riffs propel the fast-paced, hard-hitting tunes over the driving rhythms of Kouji Ueno’s thick bass grooves and Kazuyuki Kuhara’s heavy backbeat. Yusuke Chiba’s mod, raspy vocals, alternately sung and screamed out mostly in Japanese, hold the whole thing together with a rough-as-rock-gets swagger.
Initially, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant’s sound was derived from British punk and blues. The band recorded their first EP, Wonder Style, in 1995. They soon followed up with their debut album, Cult Grass Stars, recorded in London with…
Electric Cowbell Records announces the launch of Richmond Relics, a new archival imprint dedicated to preserving the city’s musical history. Its inaugural release is a newly remastered reissue of FA3574, the sole album from Richmond, Virginia’s legendary supergroup Famous Actors From Out of Town. Originally self-released in 1986 as a limited-edition, cassette-only title, FA3574 was recorded at Floodzone, a repurposed tobacco warehouse studio in Richmond.
The album features ten original instrumental tracks that capture the group’s kinetic chemistry and their off-kilter blend of late-’70s/early-’80s art rock, jazz, noise, and improvisation. Nearly forty years later, the recordings remain strikingly vibrant. Now fully remastered for vinyl, FA3574…
…Remastered by Bob Weston.
Having fully made their case with Venus Luxure, Girls Against Boys kept on course with the equally fine Cruise Yourself. The hints of lounge and Vegas were even more explicit here — the cocktail artwork on the CD, the fact that one particularly bitter number is called “My Martini.” Again, though, these weren’t the gauche clichés of characters like Combustible Edison, but signposts of a vicious, cutting quality in lyrics and music. McCloud’s purring rasp again serves as one of the band’s chief qualities, perfectly suited to the sassy, snarling burn of songs like “Cruise Your New Baby Fly Self” and “The Royal Lowdown.” Though backing vocals aren’t specifically credited, it’s Janney adding the high parts here and there,…
There are times, listening to Richard Bishop do his thing with Sun City Girls, when this reviewer thinks, “Everyone else can stop playing their guitars now.” A few of those moments occur at points during the 92 minutes of music included on Three Lobed’s reissue of tracks from two of the Sun City Girls’ late-1980s Cloaven Cassettes: Famous Asthma (1987) and Tibetan Jazz 666 (1988). For listeners not tuned in to the vagaries of the Sun City Girls’ prolific output, the Cloaven Cassettes were self-released tapes, often composed of performances of the band at its loosest and weirdest, and the Sun City Girls could get very, very weird. Most of what you’ll hear on this reissue is the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher in improvisation, working a blend of mutant jazz,…
30th anniversary remaster. Included is a second disc with 7 bonus tracks from the era, some unreleased, some remixes and reinterpretations.
It’s been observed that while the bleeding edge of what’s cool continues onward, there are always plenty of people still exploring styles long deemed outdated, sometimes finding something new and exciting as a result. Such is the case with Pittsburgh’s Lowsunday, led by open fan of ’80s British post-punk rock Shane Sahene. Drawing inspiration from such pioneers of emotional, thrilling music as the Sound, Bauhaus, the Chameleons, and Echo and the Bunnymen, vocalist/guitarist Sahene originally formed and led the group in the mid-’90s as a quintet called Low Sunday Ghost Machine.
…2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track ‘Sacrificial Code III’.
The first and only time that Kali Malone sat down for a lesson on the pipe organ, she managed about five minutes at the console before begging her teacher to take her inside the belly of the beast. That desire is borne out in her music: Listening to her expansive, slowly moving compositions, which bristle with dazzling arrays of layered waveforms, you feel like you are not just inside the organ — pressed against its pipes, vibrations coursing through your body, air whisking over your skin — but enveloped in the sound itself. The simplest interval might throb like an outboard engine, every new chord triggering wave after rippling wave of beating effects, vibrations as…
It would be difficult to overstate the righteousness of David Zé’s heart. Raised in Angola while the Southern African country was still a colonial outpost of Portugal, regionally he’s considered an icon of resistance who used music as a weapon for liberation and reform. Zè was assassinated in 1977, two years after Portugal’s withdrawal, but in a nation still fractured and unstable. Speculation continues to swirl that governmental fear of his influential voice led to the killing; author and African studies professor Marissa Jean Moorman points out that while there are no definitive accounts of their deaths, the murders of Zé, and fellow musicians Urbano de Castro and Artur Nunes, were part of a “purge.”
Raised by parents who belonged to a Methodist…
Supertramp are to reissue half-speed remastered vinyl editions of their commercial breakthrough album, Crime Of The Century, and its follow-up, Crisis? What Crisis?
After their self-titled debut in 1970 and its successor, Indelibly Stamped Supertramp veered away from their prog roots to mainstream acclaim on 1974’s Crime Of The Century thanks to the ‘Dreamer’ single, with the album reaching No 4 in the UK and No 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. A year later, Crisis? What Crisis? was less successful in the chart, but has since been named Roger Hodgson’s favourite Supertramp album.
Both albums have been remastered at half-speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road, overseen by the band and original co-producer Ken Scott.
The Necessaries came together in 1978 and in the too-brief lifespan of the band counted among their members, Ed Tomney (Rage to Live, Luka Bloom), Jesse Chamberlain (Red Crayola), Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers), Arthur Russell (The Flying Hearts), Randy Gun (Love of Life Orchestra).
First championed by John Cale on the strength of Tomney’s songs, Cale produced their first single for Spy Records (under the I.R.S. umbrella) which was released in 1979. With the forward momentum brought about by the single, the band set about tracking demos intended for Warner Bros., but The Necessaries ultimately would sign to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. These rough demo basic tracks lacked overdubs, mixes and any finishing touches that would have made them…
Recorded November 1957 at Van Gelder Studio, Soul Junction is an album by jazz pianist and composer Red Garland. Also featuring the legendary John Coltrane (tenor sax) and Donald Byrd (trumpet) amongst others, the album features five cuts including the Garland penned title track. This new edition of the album is released as part of the Original Jazz Classics Series on 180-gram vinyl pressed at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio and a Stoughton Tip-On Jacket.
In the early fifties, Lucky Roberts ran an after-hours club in Harlem. Lucky had been the dean of New York ragtime pianists in the early decades of the century, and had influenced James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington, among others.
British duo Insides made their debut with 1993’s Euphoria, a sensual set of ambient pop songs filled with airy guitars, intricately crafted beats, and provocative lyrics about intimate relationships and emotional tension. The distinctive album was praised by critics and remains a favorite of dream pop aficionados, and the duo have sporadically released new recordings, including the 2021 full-length Soft Bonds.
Insides’ elusive and icy electronic pop explores the darkest, seamiest corners of love and sex – their songs capture the emptiness and hostility that surface when the afterglow fades, ugly scenes punctuated by eruptions of violence, waves of self-loathing and caresses that are cold to the touch. Singer/bassist Kirsty Yates’ vocals…
Part of Rhino’s annual “Start Your Ear Off Right” promotion is a very welcome surprise: a remastered and expanded edition of one of the most underrated albums by British pop/rock band Squeeze.
The release of Play found Squeeze at a crossroads. After a moderately successful reunion in the mid-’80s stalled with the under-promoted Frank in 1989, the band departed longtime label A&M Records, signing with Reprise for a new decade. The ever-changing line-up was once again different, though by subtraction instead of addition: singer/songwriter/guitarists and founders Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were joined only by bassist Keith Wilkinson and drummer Gilson Lavis. (Keyboardist Jools Holland, whose big band…
By the end of 1980, after 10 years waiting for the world to catch up with them, things were looking bleak for Suicide. The pioneering New York electronic project of keyboardist Martin Rev and vocalist Alan Vega had released a sinister self-titled debut in 1977; the album was met by hostility from crowds and mocked as “puerile” by Rolling Stone. Playing on tour with Elvis Costello, the Clash, and the Cars, they’d been pelted with shoes, coins, and even knives. ZE Records had backed May 1980’s glitzier follow-up, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, putting the duo in the expensive Power Station studios with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek on production. But the label had hoped for a dance-pop record, telling Ocasek to think of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” for reference, and Vega felt it…
In their infancy, Vancouver trio cub embraced the term cuddlecore — coined by friend and Destroyer guitarist Nicolas Bragg — as a cheeky tagline for their ramshackle fusion of ‘60s bubblegum pop and three-chord punk rock. It was an apt descriptor; their 1993 debut record Betti-Cola had garnered a cult following on North American college campuses in part because of its Archie Comics-inspired cover art, riddled with sentient teddy bears, rainbow Popsicles, and lucky pennies.
Where cub’s visuals exuded cuteness, their songwriting possessed a campy bite. Like their twee-punk contemporaries in Heavenly and Tiger Trap, cub’s best songs capture the emotional confusion and lost innocence of adolescence, stories of teenage runaways and…
Formed in California in 1967, Children of the Mushroom were the quintessential garage-psych band. As the times evolved, the band hardened their sound, shortening their name to Mushroom. Jerry McMillen remembers the start: “The initial issue: every member was quite novice on their instrument.” He continues, “Al began playing bass, Dennis took up drumming, and Mark McKean and I both handled guitars. We were already developing original compositions beyond the cover songs we performed—that might have been the catalyst.”
By 1970, Mushroom became Lady, incorporating prog-rock influences and instruments like flute to their hard-pych organ/guitar dominated sound, drawing inspiration from bands like Jethro Tull, Steamhammer, Gypsy or Bloodrock.
…newly remastered by East of Lincoln Productions and Blind Owl Records.
Pigus, Drunkus, Maximus was recorded in 1981 but not released until 1987, soon went out of print and has been unavailable for years. A popular attraction on the Los Angeles club scene in the 1980s, Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs counted Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and Tom Waits among their fans, as well as their peers on the L.A. club scene, such as X, the Blasters, Maria McKee of Lone Justice and the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn.
It was Wynn who originally released the album on his own Down There label, but it’s been out of print for nearly 40 years.
…From the R&B-infused opening track, “Dance with Your Baby”, to the electrifying and…
…The remixed and remastered expanded edition of ‘Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong’ includes ten previously unreleased bonus tracks presented as a ‘mini’ album.
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong is the debut album by the London-based duo Woo. Originally issued on the Sunshine Series imprint in May 1982, it was subsequently picked up for a 1987 US release by the LA-based Independent Project Records label. After this, Woo’s second album, It’s Cosy Inside, came out in 1989 on Independent Project Records. There was no UK version of the follow-up album back then; a US reissue on Drag City followed in 2012.
When Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong appeared in the UK in 1982,…