For the new remastered edition, 5 bonus tracks have been added: Spampinato’s “Trouble in the Henhouse,” Donn Adams’ “Dry Up and Blow Away,” and Terry’s “Electric Train” are all derived from the ‘Workshop’ sessions. These are augmented by a lively alternate version of “RC Cola and a Moon Pie” plus an updated take of “Get That Gasoline Blues.”
Originally titled Age of Aquariums, Workshop was the last album from one of the pre-classic lineups of NRBQ. This incarnation incorporated the talents of bandleader Terry Adams (keyboard/coronet/trumpet), Joey Spampinato (bass/guitar/sax/vocals), Al Anderson (guitar/vocals), and, in his final studio appearance with the band, Tom Staley (drums). Although they had been performing with an evolving makeshift horn section…
Category: rock
Produced once again by GRAMMY® Award-winner Rich Costey (Vampire Weekend, Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie) at Vermont’s bucolic Guilford Sound – the same studio where The Revivalists and Costey previously collaborated on 2023’s life-affirming fifth album, Pour It Out Into the Night – Get It Honest sees a veteran band enabled by hard-fought experience and boundless solidarity to strike a new path forward. Having embraced multiple musical personalities on previous records, the 12-track collection evinces a blessed cohesion, as if The Revivalists have finally found how they truly want to sound, at least for right now.
With seven of its eight members now fathers, Get It Honest is unquestionably a grown-folks record, built on songs about cutting yourself…
When Emerson, Lake & Palmer conceived the idea of releasing a live album at the end of the ‘70’s it was intended to be, in true prog rock style, a grandiose double LP type affair. However, the band’s dissolution in 1979 meant that Atlantic Records slimmed down the band’s original vision into a single set under the moniker In Concert. When reissued in 1993, that album was restored in all its double disc glory with much of the omitted music included. Titled Works Live, it was more in tune with what the band envisioned, and that vision has finally been realised with this updated version from BMG. Refreshed with upscaled packaging and liner notes, along with a crisper sound, this issue elevates Works Live to its rightful place as a key release in the ELP canon.
On 23rd December 1977 a unique concert took place at Queens Hall, Barnstaple that has justifiably earned a special place in the history of Hawkwind.
Billed on posters as being an appearance by Dave Brock’s Sonic Assassins, the band featured Hawkwind members Dave Brock and Robert Calvert, along with future members Harvey Bainbridge (bass), Martin Griffin (drums) and keyboard player Paul Hayles.
Intended as a Brock and Calvert side project, the concert was recorded and featured early renditions of tracks such as ‘Freefall’ and ‘Death Trap’, along with a classic improvised piece later titled ‘Over The Top’ which showed Robert Calvert at his improvisational lyrical best. The performance would later be seen as sowing…
The 21-track expanded edition includes the remastered original album and 10 “Live and Intimate” recordings from a special session captured at Capitol Studios.
Actually, the title of the Goo Goo Dolls’ 8th album can be taken somewhat literally: Let Love In is a welcoming collection of songs that eschews some of the darker currents roiling under the surface of their previous effort, 2002’s Gutterflower. Not that Gutterflower sounded bleak — it was clean and glossy, so much so that it would be easy to listen to it once and assume that there wasn’t much there. Such assumptions also come to mind after the first listen for 2006’s Let Love In, but unlike its predecessor, there isn’t much to dig into here; what you hear upon that first listen is…
If not for Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz’s infamous anthology series of folk stories that have haunted grade school book fairs for decades — The Garden as we know them might not exist. Ever since twin brothers Fletcher and Wyatt Shears began releasing their brand of sun-bleached, goofball punk rock in the early 2010s, they’ve cited the book’s influence on their work with Biblical reverence and referenced its nightmare-inducing illustrations in the cover art of side projects. The true parallel, however, is structural: Where Schwartz’s writing was succinct and vernacular, so too is the twins’ output across The Garden’s six studio albums and various EPs (and sprawling network of alter egos).
In recent years, the typical Shears song has…
Remember when SST records ruled the independent rock scene in the late ’80s, early ’90s and when those sounds created by the bands like The Meat Puppets, where everything sounded like it was going to fall apart any second, but never did, creating effervescent-sounding jams somewhere between elastic folk and spaced-out jazz?
If you do, rejoice, as Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders are back again with their latest (umpteenth) offering Liquid Donnon. If you are yet to get to such a sound, listening to this one, you will not only go for that sound, but will revive your Grateful Dead collection (if you have one, if not, make one) as well as the vast set of offerings Alexander and his crew have on offer. Here, Alexander and his Lidders go…
Abnormal Conditions’ is the fifth album by upstate New York roots rockers Frank Migliorelli and the Dirt Nappers, and it is an absolute corker.
It blends rock, soul, folk and even sixties pop in a wonderfully ‘live’ feeling record. With two members of Springsteen’s backing band in Soozie Tyrell and Lisa Lowell helping out, the pedigree of the band is unquestionable.
In his mid-sixties, Migliorelli has had a long and varied artistic career. He has been a computer and video game developer, written children’s music and worked in educational media and been a creative director at a design firm. He has also found time to produce blues and soul music before returning to writing and performing, which he has been doing for the past ten years.
If there were a collective appreciation of dramatic album intros of the year, then Babylon, the latest offering from The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, would definitely be a big part of the conversation. Like a film where the opening shot is a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, smoke from a recently grounded fighter jet still billows, fragments of civilisation lie broken and motionless, nature fights back amid scattered rubble, and, above, a clear blue sky appears impossibly tranquil and unattainable. Then heaving into view comes a solitary human frame, still very much alive but lost, lonely and desperate among the overwhelming destruction that surrounds. That very place, or at least a personalised assimilation of it, is where this album drops us with…
Features the bonus track “Bad Luck Hideaway”.
When you’ve come back as successfully as the Stones did with Hackney Diamonds, what exactly do you do for an encore? Its renewed urgency, communal goodwill and, more importantly, the strongest Stones music in years made it a hard act to follow. The temptation to deliver a straight- forward sequel must have been strong. Indeed, there are superficial links with Foreign Tongues: returning producer Andrew Watt and a clutch of songs begun during those 2023 sessions. But while Hackney Diamonds was about return and resurgence, its successor offers something more nuanced. Above all, the Stones’ 25th studio album carries an unforced pleasure in playing together – striking in a band that might easily…
Sidemen in rock regularly boast a side to them that comes bursting out later in life. Pink Floyd guitarist Snowy White made his presence known on the radio with the wistful “Bird of Paradise,” just as Genesis touring bassist Daryl Stuermer found a new lease of life as Phil Collins’ co-writer on No Jacket Required. Thin Lizzy bandmate Brian Robertson showcased a new layer in his trajectory with the fiery Diamonds and Dirt, now re-packaged as a two-CD deal. While the first disc showcases the 2011 album as it should be, the latter is an entirely new record named The Brian Robertson Album, which is entirely instrumental.
As it happens, the boxset is credited as Diamonds and Dirt, so it might make sense to rate it as one flowing whole. The collection…
The current popularity of primarily instrumental bands combining funk, blues, R&B and soul can’t be entirely traced to the UK’s New Mastersounds. But there is no question that the recently disbanded quartet’s output, which began in 2000, brought new life and a fresh attitude to a genre that experienced a brief commercial surge in the mid-’60s.
So, it’s no surprise that Pittsburgh’s Norside, who opened dates for the Mastersounds, would look to that quartet to craft their similarly-styled sound. Their second album, Coal &Soul, embodies that, albeit in a trio format. It’s no coincidence they landed on the label that New Mastersounds’ guitarist Eddie Roberts founded.
Credit for this keyboards, guitar and drums…
Swampy surf rock, psychedelic Peruvian chicha and ambient blues – within Brian J. Gitkin’s global genre-hopping, guitar-twanging discography, these are the elements that keep coming back around. And they’re here again on his fifth album, together with touches of New Orleans music and gospel. Although he plays most of the instruments here himself, Gitkin’s real speciality is in his composition, where he pulls on the threads of these different styles and reweaves them together so confidently that the blend feels entirely natural. What really binds it all is the atmosphere. There is a nostalgic but slightly unreal quality across the album’s six instrumentals and four songs, the guitar ripples and organ reverbs evoking romantic and somewhat dreamlike images…
Everyone remembers when bands like The All American Rejects began to surface in the rock scene early 2000s. A contagious earworm for the audio senses is an understatement for what they would achieve and create with their music alone. The All American Rejects would become a favorite for many, hooking fans with ultra-magnetic classics such as “Swing Swing,” with their lyrical charm and infectious power-pop instrumental fervor.
Standing out from the crowd of other bands at the time, All American Rejects was not quite pop, not quite punk, but sat pretty within the genre regions of pop-rock where they could test the waters of their craft.
Tyson Ritter and the band are no strangers to writing material that digs deep.
Slow Accordion is acclaimed guitarist Oliver Wood, of The Wood Brothers, Matt Glassmeyer, of New York and Nashville’s improvised music scenes, on his own strange Wurlitzer and percussion (Billy Martin, Lambchop, Aqua Teen Hunger Force), far-out, hard-grooving bass player Ted Pecchio (Col. Bruce Hampton, Doyle Bramhall II, Tedeschi Trucks Band), and magically versatile drummer Mark Raudabaugh (Sierra Hull, Donna the Buffalo, Jim Lauderdale). Four boundlessly inspired, Nashville-based musicians (and longtime friends) with no preconceived ideas or concepts beyond coming together to conjure music out of thin air, purely in the present moment. Their debut album, on Royal Potato Family/RPF Records, is a completely improvised and analog work…
Parker Barrow returns with Hold The Mash, their second full-length album and the follow-up to 2023’s Jukebox Gypsies. Continuing to draw from Southern rock, blues rock, and classic hard rock, the Nashville outfit shows a clearer sense of direction this time around, refining rather than reinventing the formula introduced on its debut.
Fronted by vocalist Megan Kane and drummer Dylan Turner, Parker Barrow takes its name from the notorious criminal duo Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, although the reference serves more as an inspiration for the band’s identity than as a recurring theme. The current lineup is completed by guitarists Alex Bender and Will Tipton, bassist Kyle Priber, and keyboardist Eric Safka, whose contributions help give the group a fuller sound.
Heavy Metal (Live! Nairobi International Casino!) is a landmark Zamrock album by Paul Ngozi and the Ngozi Family Band, originally captured live-in-the-studio style in 1977.
Blending psychedelic rock, heavy fuzz guitar effects, and African rhythms, it stands as a cornerstone of the ’70s Zambian rock movement. The album relies heavily on Ngozi’s signature “Gee Flanger” guitar effects pedal, creating a swirling, psychedelic fuzz texture that drives tracks like “Heavy Metal” and “Dangerous Woman”
…Zamrock was a bona-fide rock scene, with albums released through independent labels based in Zambia. This music scene was complete, encompassing the genres of rock, acid folk, fusion, Afro-beat, South African jazz and…
Bruce Springsteen began Saturday night with a speech. Ever since President Donald Trump was elected for the second time, Springsteen has taken the extraordinary step of not letting his music speak for itself at the start of his shows.
Instead, when he stepped on stage at 7:30 p.m. sharp at the Xfinity Mobile Arena in South Philadelphia for the final date of his “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour,” the Boss came out swinging.
Labeling the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous,” he asked his audience to join him in embracing a communal, inclusive version of America that he believes runs counter to the president’s. (The president has frequently hit back…
…This remastered edition restores the album’s original running order and features new artwork by Greg Cartwright.
Time Bomb High School is much more than another garage tribute to soulful ’60s Brit-rock. But the sophomore effort from the Reigning Sound is something less than the band’s minimal, country-folk debut. During knockouts like the Rolling Stones-flavored “Straight Shooter” and “I’d Much Rather Be with the Boys,” Greg Cartwright and his Memphis combo’s sound is as pure, and as well-grounded, as anything since Exile on Main Street. With 14 tracks, however, the material and arrangements are spread just a little too thin, and too many average tunes are allowed in the mix. A bit of a stylistic return for…
Hiding your identity is a bold move in 2026. In this year of stalker glasses and flock cameras and algorithmic analysis of every internet move you make, it might seem futile to try to keep your name out of things. But Ferries, based who knows where and comprised of who knows how many or what sort of people, is doing its level best.
Aside from a modest (and cagey) Bandcamp page, the band has left very little internet trail. Assuming this secrecy is an intentional decision, it’s certainly working; their sound is the only objective info we’ve got.
About that sound: it’s slow and dubby, its cavernous sonic space encompassing body-shaking low-end and dreamy, trebly vocals. You might point to the Mekons’ most…