Bête Noire was the follow up to 1985’s Boys and Girls and was co-produced with Patrick Leonard (who had worked with Madonna on her True Blue album and would later co-produce 1989’s Like A Prayer). Johnny Marr was amongst the contributors to Bête Noire, whose singles were ‘The Right Stuff’, ‘Kiss and Tell’ and ‘Limbo’. Only ‘The Right Stuff’ troubled the UK top 40, peaking at No 37.
For the 2025 reissue Bête Noire is released as a 2CD deluxe edition and on purple vinyl. The second disc of the 2CD set offers remixes and edits from the original singles. This appears to be mostly comprehensive, with the exception of a small number of ‘Limbo’ versions, and extra points go to BMG for putting together a ‘listenable’ running order (not grouping remixes of the same…
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Tony Molina fits grace into the smallest spaces. His songs are abbreviated, mostly in the one to two minute range, but never in a hurry. They make their point with radiant jangles and bittersweet curves of melody, sketch out an indelible chorus, and trail off. If you’re in too much of a hurry for Teenage Fanclub, these songs have the same ineffable bright-and-shadowy wistfulness, without the guitar breaks and middle 16s.
On This Day is typical Molina in that it contains 21 songs, a few of them heart-stopping, and lasts just 23 minutes. It is, perhaps, a bit less amplified than earlier albums like the 2018’s Kill the Lights or 2019’s Songs from San Mateo County, an album whose fuzz-crusted sweetness called Bandwagonesque, but shorter.
Throughout his idiosyncratic career, it has been impossible to figure out where Mike Patton will turn next, but even his most diehard fans would have been hard-pressed to believe the announcement of a new group with folk chart-toppers The Avett Brothers was true, yet that is exactly what happened. The newly christened AVTT/PTTN worked together on a self-titled album that touches on buzzing rock, dusty Americana, and theatrically polished, over-the-top set pieces.
Scott Avett started working on demos and sent them to Patton with no set project idea, but then things clicked as Patton responded with twists and turns on the original folk numbers. Patton has stated that he may have worked too long on past projects, and that this opportunity…
Some time after Crowded House frontman Neil Finn indicated potential work being done with the catalogue of Split Enz – the cult-hero pop band co-founded by his older brother Tim – fans finally have some development on that front, with the first in a planned series of archival sets covering the group’s early, avant-garde years.
Enzyclopedia Volumes One and Two will focus on the group’s early years, coalescing around the material leading up to 1975 debut Mental Notes, which celebrates a half-century this year. The 5CD set feature remasters of Mental Notes and its sort-of follow-up Second Thoughts, a rework of the Mental material with Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera in the producer’s chair. Second Thoughts will also be newly remixed for the set…
…2025 Kevin Vanbergen remaster.
Serving as an introduction to the U.S. market, Gala compiles the band’s first three EPs and adds a couple outtakes. One thing that went overlooked about Lush was their ability to veer from violent and edgy noise breaks to pop effervescence. They were always capable of spewing out Saturday morning glow and Sunday evening doom from song to song. Their early reliance on sheets of distortion, buried vocals, and production issues didn’t help this situation. As a result, their out-the-gate raw talent went rather unnoticed, evidenced on their earliest works. Scar demonstrated their under-appreciated diversity immediately. “Thoughtforms” is an example of their heavenly pop greatness, with the vocals sweeter and…
…contains a new remaster of the original album plus eight original demos, two new mixes, various B-sides and rarities, and a previously unreleased concert recorded at SHIBUYA-AX in Tokyo in March 2001.
Green Day’s sixth album, 2000’s Warning, arrived nearly three years after the band’s multi-platinum Nimrod. It built on the expansive sound of Nimrod by incorporating even more varied textures drawing on pop and folk styles. Now, 25 years later, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool are revisiting Warning in a new Super Deluxe Edition.
With longtime producer Rob Cavallo moving up to the executive producer’s position, Green Day self-produced Warning – their first self-produced major label effort. (R.E.M. producer…
…The box include an expanded version of the album (remastered from 1/4″ production master tapes by Chris Athens and including one B-side and two newly-mixed outtakes) alongside the “lost” album Tallest plus a set of unreleased studio and live sessions.
The Crowes – then consisting of Chris Robinson on vocals/harmonica/guitar, Rich Robinson and Marc Ford on guitar, Johnny Colt on bass, Eddie Harsch on keyboards and Steve Gorman on drums – were flying high from the start of their major-label career on Rick Rubin’s Def American (shortened to American Recordings the year Amorica was released). Shake Your Money Maker yielded pop crossover hits in “She Talks to Angels” and a rousing take on Otis Redding’s…
…features a brand new mix by Steven Wilson, alongside a six track disc of previously unreleased recordings, including the Jagger/Richards composition “I Love Ladies“, plus a take on Shirley & Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame”. Also included are four Stones instrumental jams from the 1975 sessions featuring the guest guitarists. The set also includes a full live concert recording from the band’s celebrated six night residency at London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre in May 1976, where they were joined onstage by Ian Stewart, Billy Preston and Ollie Brown.
…Black and Blue marked the Stones’ rebirth in the wake of Mick Taylor’s departure from the band. As a result, Keith Richards took on the lion’s share of the guitar work while the group…
…features the 15-track album remixed by its original producer David Barbe and remastered by Greg Calbi. The new collection includes the previously unreleased double album Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2002.
For a musician, the trouble with making your best album is you have to figure out a way to top it next time out, and that isn’t always easy. On their first three albums, the Drive-By Truckers were a better-than-average band from the harder-and-faster end of the alt-country spectrum who blended Replacements-esque snot and slop with a Lynyrd Skynyrd-influenced shot of twangy hard rock. But it was when the Truckers confronted the ghost of Skynyrd as well as the often confusing legacy of both Southern rock and what…
A lot of fun can be had with the original instrument, the human voice. One need not include lyrics, simply a sense of exploration, a willingness to reach past the boundaries of conversation, perhaps a bit of harmony and rhythm. In Solids for Voices, Copenhagen’s Valby Vokalgruppe accomplishes all these things, offering “Platonic solids reimagined as sound objects.”
The album also includes one of the oldest works ever featured on our site, Athénaios Athenaíou’s “Delfiske Hymne,” inscribed in 128 BC. While listening to this ancient hymn, one is connected with the distant past, while gleaning the continuity of humanity, stretching its vocal wings to communicate with the divine.
The majority of the pieces are composed by…
A debut can be tricky; it can also be exhilarating. Gideon Broshy keeps things fresh but also weird with Nest. With a mind toward the future, the pianist and composer blends an eerie convergence of beauty and chaos. The traditional classical style is upended in this release by electronic sounds and effects; these distort and disturb the conventionally pretty soundscape that Broshy also creates. One would think that such a young artist would not have the maturity or technical skills to pull off such a balancing act. Ye, he succeeds in many ways — often wonderfully alarming ones.
A song with a name like “Stutter” gives off a certain air, a certain preconception of what it’ll be about. Broshy, smartly, plays with this idea and delves into an Asian-meets-techno composition.
After a recorded absence of over 20 years, Liverpudlian duo China Crisis release Autumn in the Neighbourhood, their first album since 1994’s ‘Warped By Success’ which was issued on their own Stardumb imprint.
Although Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon have maintained a continued live presence since that time, other than a cover of Michael Halliday’s ‘Starry Eyed’ for the ‘Liverpool Number Ones’ charity album in 2007 which also featured Omd, new material has been notable by its absence.
But ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ sees the return of the melodically inventive pair who have seen elements of their sound re-emerge in acts such as Mirrors and Sin Cos Tan. From the synth friendly leanings of ‘Christian’, ‘Wishful Thinking’…
Most jazz records are recorded in studios with perfect acoustics. Ours was recorded in a French château surrounded by vineyards. And the acoustics were perfect too.
The atmosphere was as rich and complex as the best wines of the region – an incomparable setting for a jazz session. Morten Lund, Kaisa Mäensivu and I – each an artist in our own right – had never been on stage together before that day. And yet it clicked at that moment. Under the high ceilings of the castle, surrounded by old wine barrels, we reached into the Great American Songbook and pulled out something fresh, vibrant and new.
We love these melodies. They’re like perfect little stories wrapped up in 32 bars. The jazz standards are our roots.
The Warm Up Tour was the name given to Peter Gabriel’s run of live dates in June, July and August 2007. In advance of the tour, Peter said:
“When I decided to get a band together it was for the 25th anniversary of our WOMAD festival on the last weekend of July. I then decided to do some other dates around it but don’t have a new album to play yet. So, I thought I would ask the fans through the full moon club on my website to put in requests for songs that I had not been playing recently. It is that list that you sent in that has determined what you are now about to hear. Some of these have not been played for many years and we are intending to brush off the rust.” – pg
The penultimate show of the run was at the aforementioned WOMAD Festival…
The world may be ending, but singer-songwriter Jim Keller is pretty OK with the whole thing; that’s if the title track from his 7th album, End of the World, is anything to go by anyway. “No more fighting, no more pain,” he sings in a tone that can only be described as joyous, against a backdrop that features everything from pedal steel to marimba. “No more calling everybody names / Nothing but red skies day after day / Nobody talking when they got nothin’ to say.” Which, like the album, sounds pretty good indeed.
Optimism in the face of hardship is something of a theme throughout the record, and that’s demonstrated no where better than on the infectiously uplifting ‘Love One Another’ as Keller insists that, no matter the trials…
…include previously unreleased recordings, B- sides, and exclusive live sessions. The new Stargazer Editions add 3 new songs (“Cancerian,” “Anything at All,” “Eye to the Telescope”) which were first attempted during the original sessions and have been completed for this release.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that K.T. Tunstall’s Eye to the Telescope will draw initial comparisons to Dido, since they’re both female adult alternative singer/songwriters who bear a certain similarity in their vocal timbres. But as Tunstall’s debut starts to unfold, those superficial connections fall away, as she reveals herself to be a soulful vocalist, a restless musician, and a serious songwriter. At times, she may be on the verge of being a little too serious, as her songs are…
There are a handful of bands who’re on the cusp of hitting it big that you know they would nail it when the time comes. Swim School is one of those bands. They’ve always been known as an act with an undeniable sound, and a presence that has grown over the years.
Comprising guitarist-vocalist Alice Johnson, guitarist Lewis Bunting, bassist Lee Brown and drummer Billy McMahon, the Edinburgh band’s sound is a potent blend of shoegaze noise and heady melody — we caught up with them to chatting about everything from the brutality of the music industry to blending genres and touring in a cold van.
… Frontwoman Alice Johnson has spoken candidly about her experiences of sexism…
…include two songs that were not initially released on digital streaming platforms.
Hayley Williams has always been bold — from her brightly-hued hair dye to her kickass attitude as the lead singer of Paramore. When it comes to music, the singer is equally unafraid. She belts her heart out and spits brutally honest lyrics across the band’s discography and her own solo albums, 2020’s Petals for Armor and 2021’s Flowers for Vases/Descansos. But never has Williams sounded as brave as she does on her third album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. “I’ll be the biggest star at this fucking karaoke bar,” she declares on the moody title track. The song’s chorus repeats one line over and over again (“Can only go up from here”) as Williams gives up on shooting…