Get Ready for the Countdown: Mod, Brit Soul, R&B & Freakbeat Nuggets includes exactly what it says on the box and does it in exciting fashion. Trawling through the dozens of tracks on offer is likely to give even the most hardcore devotees of the sounds of mid- to late British pop enough thrills to make the nominal entrance fee well worth it. Apart from a few tracks by big names of the era like the Small Faces, the Moody Blues and the Pretty Things, and oft-compiled bands like the Action, John’s Children, and the Creation, the bulk of the collection is populated by off-the-main tracks, artists, and songs. Most of the bands are familiar to the members of that group and a handful of trainspotters, though judging by how good most of their tracks sound, they should have…
Category: rock’n’roll
Although they emerged from Melbourne bayside outer suburbs onto the local live scene with their fresh and spirited indie-rock update of the garage-beat sounds of The Easybeats, Kinks and early Beatles only a year or so ago, Gnome actually started out as a bedroom solo project for teenaged singer/songwriter/ guitarist Jay Millar a few years back. Jay, playing everything himself, started recording and releasing a steady succession of material – quite a few albums’ worth – on his own Goblin Records label via Bandcamp. Realizing he needed a band to start playing out, Jay approached some like minded players from Frankston’s rehearsal hub Singing Bird, and with Jay on lead vocals and lead guitar, Ned Capp on guitar, Olly Katsianis on bass, and Ethan Robins…
Damaged Goods is proud to present re-issues of one of thee great collaborations of our times…
Thee Headcoats Sect is the inevitable intersection of two generations of mad-hatted Punk R & B misfits with musical and philosophical lineage that can be traced back over more than 30 years. The Downliners Sect were among the country’s foremost rhythm and blues groups, their most prolific period being the years from 1964 to 1966. As is often the case, they were denied the sort of success they deserved – they were outcasts, too young, too uncouth, and just a tad too eccentric to be accepted by their peers. As the Melody Maker said of their debut album in 1964: ‘forget this one if you want a Happy Christmas, and don’t want to drive all the guests away from your party’.
It takes all of two seconds of Space Junk to realize what Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives are up to. That alternate-picked run is straight out of the surf rock playbook; Dick Dale would be proud. Stuart has played a little bit of everything over the years, and while he’s more known for country, bluegrass, and rockabilly, the turn to surf rock isn’t out of character (and has been part of his repertoire for years).
For Space Junk, Stuart and the band decided to do a throwback instrumental record. They explicitly took the Ventures as an inspiration, and that’s a good starting point for what this album sounds like. Given Stuart’s natural adventurousness, though, it’s also only a jumping off point for describing this sweeping set of 20 instrumentals.
You have to be a pretty big Billy Childish fan to notice the subtle differences between his many musical projects (and there are plenty of them), but they really are there if you’re paying attention. His earlier groups, like the Pop Rivets and Thee Mighty Caesars, tended to be musically gritty but lyrically playful, while he was more willing to explore the darker side of his imagination in his blues-oriented solo recordings and latter-day acts such as the Musicians of the British Empire and CTMF. In 2022, Childish reunited one of his most prolific combos, Thee Headcoats (initially active from 1988 to 2000) to pay homage to one of his musical heroes, Don Craine of the Downliners Sect, and they cut an album, Irregularis (The Great Hiatus), that arrived in 2023.
Jim Jones All Stars once again unleash upon us all their intense, high-octane and evangelical fusion of hard driving rock’n’roll, garage rock, gritty rhythm and blues and gospel through the release of their new live album, Get Down ~ Get With It. And there is no question at all that this electrifying and explosive collection of songs perfectly documents the sound of a band who are pioneering the revival of an age-old rock’n’roll spirit and supercharging it to a whole new and unprecedented level.
It was back in 2022 when the first seeds were being sown for the new rock’n’roll venture by Jim Jones with a batch of new songs being recorded in Memphis, resulting in the release of the first single, It’s Your Voodoo Working, in October of that year. This heralded the birth of Jim Jones All Stars…
…Newly remastered by Grammy winning engineer Michael Graves.
Nearly a quarter century after bursting onto the scene in 1969 with their self-titled debut album, NRBQ delivered another patented mix of carefree musicianship and joyful spontaneity with 1992’s live Honest Dollar.
Honest Dollar gave listeners a special treat (and we’re not talking about the signed one-dollar bills the band inserted randomly into the copies of the original CD). Not only are there NRBQ classics like “Ridin’ in My Car” and “Wacky Tobacky,” but two “State” songs — “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and Carl Perkins’ “Tennessee” (with new lyrics by Terry, added with Perkins’ consent.) And how about two distinct versions of…
Last year’s Elvis Presley box set was Memphis, devoted to the King’s lengthy history with recording studios in the Tennessee city that became his home. Ahead of another annual Elvis Week at his Graceland estate, the next box set will trace his connections to a recording studio on the West Coast.
Sunset Boulevard is a 5CD set featuring Presley’s work at RCA Records’ Studio C in Hollywood – one of the more important studios he’d record in through his final recording years in the 1970s. Like Memphis before it, the set feature new remixes by acclaimed engineer Matt Ross-Spang that offer fresh remixes of familiar studio masters and rare outtakes. The other half of the set finds Elvis and The TCB Band rehearsing for his…
…The 11-track album Something Nice includes rarities, alternate takes and live cuts, including a set of tracks from the new deluxe edition of The Autumn Stone.
This slew of rare Small Faces goodies is largely pooled from Kenney Jones’s recently revived Nice Records. “I started the label in the ’90s to raise money for Ronnie Lane when he had multiple sclerosis,” Jones tells Uncut. “I put it to bed after he died, but have since thought, ‘No, I want to do something with this.’”
The first Nice release was 2021’s Live 1966, an extraordinary document of Small Faces’ two sets at the Twenty Club in Mouscron, Belgium, selections from which comprise the first half of CD. “It was one of the first gigs we’d ever done…
Numero Group’s terrific Eccentric Soul series are studies in early soul, rock and roll, R&B, and pop, much of which is obscure and largely forgotten to time. The most recent installment of the series showcases the Cobra Records label, an establishment founded in San Antonio by Abraham “Abe” Epstein, sometime record producer and real estate mogul.
As is Numero’s wont, The Cobra Label is a finely-packaged double LP with extensive liner notes featuring label and band histories and ephemera. And the music herein is a wonderful overview of Cobra’s oeuvre. Beginning with Sonny Ace & The Twisters’ take on “Wooleh Booleh,” The Cobra Label runs through 28 tracks, from the label’s 1961 debut release, The Royal Jesters with…