Barcelona joins Helsinki 2003 as the second concert from the Rising tour released in the Live Archive series, though the two releases stand apart in meaningful ways. As outlined in the essay that accompanied its release, Helsinki was liberated from a proprietary DSD recording system used across the 2002-03 tour, though curiously (and fortunately) not Barcelona.
The Palau San Jordi show was captured on half-inch digital multitrack tape, like the format used on the Reunion tour. Why the change? Perhaps because the show had been earmarked for a live television broadcast and a future DVD. That would explain why Brendan O’Brien, who produced The Rising, was on hand (this night only, it seems) to record the concert on what we’ll assume…
Category: rock
Collected Classics: Rare & Live is a 13-track compilation album by legendary singer-songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson. Released as an exclusive free CD accompanying the November 2026 issue of Uncut Magazine, the compilation spans rare studio tracks and standout live recordings curated with commentary from Thompson himself.
…”We speak to the guitarist, singer and songwriter at length inside the issue, but he also took the time to talk us through this compilation, a handy refresher before the release of new album Hippies, Thugs and Heroes.
Thompson himself tends to think in terms of songs rather than albums, so he’s relaxed about compilations of his music.
Both solo and with The Monkees – and various permutations thereof – Davy Jones spent decades on the road sharing the music he loved all over the world. While a Monkees setlist would be painstakingly constructed, the solo Jones was far more freewheeling, incorporating new and old songs and crossing genre lines with abandon. Now 7A Records celebrates the late singer’s legacy with a new live compendium.
Let Me Entertain You: On the Road with Davy boasts two dozen concert recordings spanning 1979- 2003 from venues in the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan. Entertainment was in David’s bones: the Manchester native had been entertaining audiences since his youth. As a teenager in Great Britain, he’d appeared on…
… includes three CDs: the original mixes on CD1, the 2026 remix on CD2, and a third disc of completely unreleased studio tracks and outtakes like “Sad Suit” and “Aborted Soliloquy”, alongside live performances from their 2000 tour.
Released in 1999, J-Tull Dot Com was Jethro Tull’s 20th studio album. Anderson and company navigated the 1980s well, but the ’90s proved to have new obstacles, with CDs, the beginning of bands using the internet and a new bass player (Jonathon Noyce). Martin Barre (guitars, backing vocals) and Ian Anderson remained the core of the band with Doane Perry (drums) and Andrew Giddings (keyboards) who had been with the band since 1984 and 1991, respectively, at this point. And yet, make no mistake,…
…remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road. A 2CD deluxe edition offers an interesting selection of bonus tracks (20 in total) including previously unreleased David Kosten mixes of some album tracks, unheard demos and BBC live sessions and recordings.
Starsailor was already a critic’s darling in the band’s native England during mid-2001, and the group’s painfully melodic debut, Love Is Here, poised the band to rise in the shadows of Doves, Coldplay, and Travis. Starsailor, however, isn’t as polished as its counterparts, but that’s not to say Love Is Here isn’t a beautiful piece of work. It’s less lilting than Coldplay’s Parachutes, and frontman James Walsh’s aching vocals shape his angularity as a singer/songwriter. Starsailor is…
Recorded during his summer 2026 run of outdoor UK shows, which brought together a phenomenal band and a setlist spanning the songs that have defined Weller’s musical journey, in performances widely praised by fans and press alike. The album brings together classic tracks and much-loved favourites from across Weller’s remarkable catalogue, spanning The Jam, The Style Council and his solo work, alongside a cover of the Curtis Mayfield classic, Move On Up. Talking about the live album, Paul said: “We hope this live recording gives justice to the experience that we and the audience felt on these tour dates. We all felt they were very special shows – all of ’em! This recording is straight off the sound board. All real, all true, more power, more love.” Reviewing Weller’s…
The line the Beatles drew to mark a turning point in late 1965 was both bold and significant. With the release of Rubber Soul, their sixth album, in December, the mop-tops took their first big step toward becoming artists. Its influence and history-making chain of events (from Pet Sounds to Revolver to almost every aspiring musical work released in the past six decades) have been well documented for decades. Then and now, it deserves all the attention. Things were happening fast for the Beatles in their fifth year together. Since the release of their debut album, Please Please Me, in March 1963, the quartet was on a nonstop rotation of live performances and studio dates. In the 13 months between their second LP and December 1964’s rushed Beatles for Sale…
…features 104 tracks, demos, outtakes, live performances, interviews, and other rare recordings half of which are previously unreleased.
Year Zero, 1976. While his punk contemporaries were at least pretending to hate old music, D.P. Costello had fewer qualms about negotiating with the past. He unpicked the mysteries of Mississippi John Hurt; channelled Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison; was “completely unnerved” rather than contemptuous when he spotted Bert Jansch in the audience at one of his early gigs. Taking The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo as a gateway drug, he studied the heartbreak and nuance of country and dreamed of becoming a Nashville songwriter. He even tried his hand at Vaudeville whimsy. A fleet-footed 1976 demo called…
London-based Swedish singer-songwriter Josefin Öhrn (previously of Grammy nominated Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation) is set to release her debut album Cherry featuring vocals from Bobby Gllespie (Primal Scream) and Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre), with guitar from Andy Bell (Ride).
Josefin’s most intimate and self-defined album yet, Cherry explores themes of fresh starts, desire, love and grief. It taps into a new and very interesting phase of music, seen on recent releases from Robyn (Sexistential) and Lykke Li (The Afterparty), where the experiences of women are put out there without shame in colourful candidness, such records tap into a fascinating period of raw, intense and highly transformative self-actualization.
One of the highlights of the King Crimson 50th anniversary CD/Blu-ray editions to date has been King Crimson producer David Singleton’s series of Elemental Mixes as he uses the full spectrum of available studio sessions for each album to produce very different takes on the familiar songs and pieces.
Speaking about the Elemental Mix approach, David Singleton said: “Ever since the concept of an Elemental mix was first suggested, I have approached these with equal measures of hate, dread and love. Dread and hate because you are, in effect, staring at a perfect jigsaw (the finished version of the Mona Lisa) wondering how you might roll back the years and get closer to the moment of creation – often by finding…
The MOFO Project/Object is an album by Frank Zappa. The album was announced by the Zappa Family Trust in mid-2006. It commemorates the 40th anniversary of Zappa’s first album, Freak Out!.
It documents the making of Freak Out! featuring previously unreleased material. Critics and hardcore fans widely praise The MOFO Project/Object as an essential archival release.
It brilliantly highlights Zappa’s pioneering studio genius and avant-garde vision well before the era of modern digital editing. While casual listeners might find the deep-dive session tapes and raw component tracks a bit heavy for a single sitting, for prog-rock historians and dedicated Zappa aficionados, it is a masterclass in musical archaeology.
Following a four-year hiatus as a solo artist, Todd Rundgren relocated from the US East Coast to California to record and release the album ‘Nearly Human’ in 1989. The album was the result of live studio sessions involving a host of musicians. To promote the album Todd embarked on an extensive US tour with one of the early highlights being a memorable performance at The Ritz in New York City in August 1989.
The concert was Todd’s first performance in New York for two years and featured a ten-piece backing band. The live set featured classic tracks such as ‘Love In Action’, ‘Real Man’, ‘Can We Still Be Friends’ and ‘Hello It’s Me’ along with contemporary material from ‘Nearly Human’. The concert on the 6th of August…
Originally released in September 1996, ‘Coming Up’ represented the creative and commercial peak for a rejuvenated Suede… some debut indeed for new band members guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboardist Neil Codling. A UK No. 1 album which spent just shy of an entire year in the album chart, the vivid, electrifying ‘Coming Up’ spawned five UK Top 10 singles – ‘Trash’, ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Saturday Night’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Filmstar’. Elsewhere, grimy glam stompers met elegiac ballads and stadium anthems… and 30 years on, ‘Coming Up’ still packs all its original punch.
For the anniversary, Coming Up has been expanded into an all-encompassing 5CD edition, in Deluxe 7”X 7” packaging. On CD1 ‘Coming Up’ has been newly mastered from the original…
Following his acclaimed 2020 album The Red Planet, Rick Wakeman makes a triumphant and inevitable return to Mars with Return to The Red Planet, a sweeping new progressive work that fuses science, imagination and musical virtuosity into one of the most ambitious recordings of his career.
At a time when space exploration has moved back to the forefront of human endeavour – with missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond once again capturing the world’s imagination – Return To The Red Planet feels both timely and visionary, rekindling the cosmic spirit that helped define progressive rock’s golden age.
Where its predecessor opened the story, this album explores the planet’s ancient lakes, vast canyon systems, shifting dust storms…
Continuing the series of archival live albums documenting German experimental rock legends Can at their mid-’70s creative peak, Live in Arles 1975 captures a set recorded in August of that year at an amphitheatre in Southern France. As with other volumes in the series, the tracks are numerically titled, as the group mainly improvised in concert, though they often touched on riffs, ideas, and rhythms heard in the songs contained on their studio albums. Also like some of the other live releases, it sounds like it was sourced from private fan tapes rather than professional recordings, but the energy of the musicians’ performances mostly makes up for the murky sound quality. The group sound strong and energetic as soon as the record button was pressed…
1974-1977 brings together five CDs absolutely bursting with music covering the most overlooked, but arguably most pioneering, period of Marc Bolan’s glittering career. It rounds up the final three T. Rex studio albums – Bolan’s Zip Gun, Futuristic Dragon and Dandy in the Underworld – and a string of 10 peerless late-period singles (and B-sides) that included ‘New York City’, ‘Dreamy Lady’, ‘The Soul of My Suit’, and of course ‘I Love to Boogie’. Throughout the journey Marc’s restless muse and creative spark encompasses soul and R&B (‘Ride My Wheels’, ‘Dreamy Lady’), excursions into proto-glam metal (‘Zip Gun Boogie’, ‘The London Boys’) and nervy, spiky-sharp tracks (‘Think Zinc’, ‘Celebrate Summer’) that nod towards the punk explosion happening…
Gugaruz (curated by Zappi W. Diermaier): Werner ‘Zappi’ Diermaier has spent decades channeling spontaneity into a unique rhythmic language; a direct, instinctive and vital beat born from the creative freedom which has long defined the spirit of Faust. This same intuitive approach is at the heart of his new LP ‘Gugaruz’, created in collaboration with Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) and Elke Drapatz, a record which grew organically from shared experiences, chance encounters and the energy of collective interaction. The project’s unlikely starting point came in a Vietnamese restaurant, when Diermaier pointed to a piece of pickled baby corn and exclaimed “Gugaruz”, an Austrian dialect word for maize. That small moment triggered a chain reaction…
Peter Hammill has never been an artist interested in taking the easy route. Whether through Van der Graaf Generator or his extensive solo catalogue, his music consistently occupies a space where beauty, tension, introspection and unease exist side by side. Tears in Time, his first solo album in five years, continues that tradition while looking back across decades of creative exploration.
Released through Cherry Red’s Esoteric Antenna label, the album brings together eleven compositions drawn from recordings made at Hammill’s Terra Incognita studio between 1991 and the present day. Rather than feeling like an archival collection assembled from unrelated fragments, Tears in Time develops into a surprisingly coherent journey through memory…
