horizonrecords

The members of the legendary original 1990s Joshua Redman Quartet—Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian Blade (drums)—reunited after twenty-six years for 2020’s RoundAgain; they return now with LongGone, featuring six original songs by Redman, due September 9, 2022 on Nonesuch Records.

RoundAgain, the group’s first recording since 1994’s MoodSwing, debuted at No. 1 on the Current Traditional Jazz Albums chart in the US and at No. 1 on the Jazz & Blues chart in the UK. The album received two Grammy nominations. NPR called it “a flawless effort,” stating that the four musicians have “only gotten better in that time” and are each “at the very top of his game now.”

Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? is the highly anticipated new album by Tyler Childers and his longtime band The Food Stamps. This unique collection is separated into 3 parts, each with a different sonic perspective, but all part of one album vision. “Hallelujah” is a pared-back version of the music featuring Tyler and his band only, “Jubilee” is full band including strings, horns, bgvs and a touch of sitar, and an exciting new sound in “Joyful Noise.” From Tyler Childers’ vision, it’s a genuine concept album meant to showcase the incredible musicianship of The Food Stamps. 

The legendary BORIS celebrate a 30 year career as one of experimental music's most forward-thinking, heavy, and innovative bands with the new album Heavy Rocks (2022). Continuing their series of Heavy Rocks records, BORIS once again channels the classic proto-metal sounds of the 70s into something all new. The album, 10 pulse-pounding tracks, highlight the very trajectory of BORIS and their storied career - from the driving, fuzzed out Rock N' Roll opener "She is Burning", to the punk, raucous "My Name is Blank", BORIS are heavier than ever before. "Question 1" is just kickass - D-beats give way to a doomed, spaced out and heavier-than-anything guitar wailing and feedback, before diving back into their Metal, sending the listener into a complete frenzy. This is unmistakably BORIS, and this is the band at the height of their powers.

Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? is the highly anticipated new album by Tyler Childers and his longtime band The Food Stamps. This unique collection is separated into 3 parts, each with a different sonic perspective, but all part of one album vision. “Hallelujah” is a pared-back version of the music featuring Tyler and his band only, “Jubilee” is full band including strings, horns, bgvs and a touch of sitar, and an exciting new sound in “Joyful Noise.” From Tyler Childers’ vision, it’s a genuine concept album meant to showcase the incredible musicianship of The Food Stamps. 

25-year-old GRAMMY-nominated artist Marcus King prepares to release his new album, Young Blood, produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys via Rick Rubin's American Recordings/Republic Records. He has toured with The Marcus King Band for over 10 years, as well as tours with Chris Stapleton, Greta Van Fleet, and Nathanial Rateliff. He’s released 3 LPs with The Marcus King Band before his GRAMMY-nominated 2021 solo debut LP, El Dorado. Indie Exclusive Yellow LP.

160g LP (pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago), in a Heavyweight Reverse-Board LP Jacket, with Insert Sheet, OBI Strip, and Poly-Lined Innersleeve.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, producer and composer Makaya McCraven. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records – and his patience, ambition and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work.  With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work at home. the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft.

"Perhaps because one half of Pavement lives in New York City and the other in a sleepy, rural, central California town called Stockton, the spirit of the band's music is split right down the middle. Simultaneously sophisticated and unpretentious, heartfelt and totally goofy - but always entirely sincere - Pavement exhibits it's genius casually. The group's first full-length album, Slanted and Enchanted, is brimming with beautiful pop songs, soured a bit by the rhythmic clamor of harder guitar rock. You can hear Pavement's effortless charm in the evocative lyrics... and, ultimately, in the sheer, clangy joyfulness of the band's playing." Entertainment Weekly "Pavement makes things happen where nothing happened before" Spin Magazine 'Spin's Top 5 albums of the 1990s ' #3 on Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 1990s

It was like I was moving forward and venturing into places I had never been before. Taking everything I've learned from every other record and kind of setting fire to it all and starting over," Ben Harper says of his new album Bloodline Maintenance. "And I knew the sounds I was hearing in my head were so unorthodox that I had to do most of it myself." The result is a fearless and immensely soulful work largely inspired by the loss of a longtime friend and the lingering influence of a mercurial and charismatic father. Along with guitar and bass, Harper also played the drums including an eclectic assortment of percussions. The deliberately open spaces and accented beats influenced in large part by the exploratory rhythms of the hip-hop he has loved since his teens. The result is less a direct influence than the applying of hip-hop's inventiveness to longstanding paradigms of soul, blues and jazz, spinning it all forward into a reconfiguration of a new black Americana. "If this is my Mule Variations, then hallelujah." Harper says, referencing the groundbreaking Tom Waits record. Bloodline Maintenance is both a political and personally revealing work. It is soul music, but never a stylistic tribute to some bygone era. The sound and words are essential and undeniably timely. Harper acknowledges that much of the exploration on the record was fueled by an awareness of time. "It's this notion of mortality and the people we have lost. The way I hoped it would all turn out and the realization that, as beautiful as it all can be, perhaps none of it matters beyond these moments.

Recorded in a shaky makeshift chicken shack in rural Maryland, Link Wray's eponymous 1971 solo album is a compelling and forward-looking piece of honest, handmade Americana. This album is vastly different from his previous work, foregoing instrumentals entirely. Instead, Wray, left with only one lung following a bout with tuberculosis in 1956, gives us his raw voice, full of spit and vinegar, as he blends elements of country, rock 'n' roll, roots, folk and gospel marked with fuzzy guitar and booming percussion. He kicks off with a track, "La de Da", that may be the greatest song the Stones never wrote. Elsewhere, the single "Fallin' Rain" channels Dylan at his most political, with lyrics about "stabbings and shootings and young men dying all around." Link Wray proved to be the only album that the guitarist issued in his own name to hit the American charts during his nearly 50-year recording career. Although it didn't receive much critical acclaim at the time of it's release, Link Wray has seen a resurgence in recent years and developed a cult following, with artists from Nick Cave to The Neville Brothers recording versions of it's tracks. Link, along with brothers Vernon and Doug began playing together professionally in 1942, their rowdy instrumental single "Rumble" charting at number 16 in 1958. Following a string of hits on Philadelphia-based Swan Records, Vernon began to serve as the family's producer, eventually starting his own studio; first in the basement of his home and then-after his wife Evelyn complained about the noise-in a converted shack on the property. It was there that Link, Vernon and producer Steve Verroca found a sound that marked "a return to simplicity." This carefully remastered reissue will take you right back to that chicken shack, and to sessions so electric you can almost feel the atmosphere.

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Grateful Dead's iconic Europe '72 Tour with the original Europe '72 album, newly remaste red.Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction, with mastering by GRAMMY® Awardwinning engineer Dave Glasser, Produce d for Release by David Lemieux. 180-Gram, Black Vinyl. -In another industrydefying move,the Grateful Dead followed up theirfirst Gold Record, the 1971 liveshowcase SKULL ROSES , with another live album, one that to most fans and critics surpassed even the excellence of the previous offering. From April 7 to May 26, 1972, the Dead performed and recorded 21 live concerts, plus a set in a television studio, with every night being an exceptional display of the magic that was uniquely the live Grateful Dead. These concerts and this tour, 50 years later, are still considered one of the highest of high points in the Grateful Dead's performing career. In an era whena double album was rare enough,the Dead outdid even their own lofty standards by producing a 3 LP masterpiece that to this day is considered one of the finest live albums ever produced. Remastered from the original analog tapes, the album has never sounded better.

LIZZO / SPECIAL - When you love yourself, anything becomes possible. Channeling boundless self-confidence through a downright earth-quaking voice, colorful persona, and undeniable star power, Lizzo struts into the spotlight and steps up with a whole lot of sass, spirit, and soul. Embracing her vocal range like never before and celebrating herself to the fullest, she speaks her mind, censors nothing, and delivers an enviable level of honesty, pure passion, and fresh fire.

Limited silver colored vinyl LP pressing. Can it really just be over a year since Yard Act exploded into the national consciousness with their debut EP Dark Days, released via their own Zen FC imprint? Yard Act have gone on to be one of 2022's defining artists with the release of their debut album The Overload, and their rise has been as entertaining as it has been meteoric. And as well as touring the world and smashing sales records, they've still found time to continue Zen FC, releasing acclaimed 7"s from Baba Ali and Benefits. Being the budding record industry moguls that they are, they couldn't bear to see the Dark Days EP languishing out of print. So they commandeered a Danish pressing plant and rudely shoved their way to the front of the queue, picked a new colour (silver in honour of the Overload finishing second in the album charts) and rushed through a repress in time for the summer. And while they were at it, they sorted out a run on the format of the future, cassette. So there you have it: while you're thinking about putting 'The Overload' at the top of your albums of 2022, you can enjoy the EP of 2021 all over again.

2022 release. Domi & JD Beck release their highly anticipated debut album Not Tight on Anderson.Paak's new label, Apeshit Inc in partnership with Blue Note Records. Featuring special guests Anderson.Paak, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Herbie Hancock, Thundercat, Mac DeMarco, and Kurt Rosenwinkel, the album exemplifies their trailblazing take on jazz. The New York Times hailed them as simultaneously "freakishly complex and virtuosic" and "relentlessly melodic."

GRAMMY and Americana Award-winning singer/songwriter and violinist, Amanda Shires, has pushed the reset button with Take It Like a Man, a record that is so unlike anything she has ever recorded that you would be tempted to think it was her debut album instead of her seventh. Shires, who also plays in The Highwomen, worked with producer Lawrence Rothman to make a fearless confessional, showing the world what turning 40 looks like in 10 emotionally raw tracks. Indie Exclusive White LP with lyric sheet.

Reggae Film Star is Damien Jurado's 18th full length studio album and the second on his own record label Maraqopa Records. 25 years since his debut album Waters Ave S. came out, Jurado is more prolific, driven and creative than ever. The twelve mystical songs on Reggae Film Star are gorgeously cinematic and feature a rich production and diverse sonic textures. Reggae Film Star was produced by Damien Jurado at Sonikwire in Irvine, CA, with invaluable help from the dream team of multi instrumentalist Josh Gordon and recording engineer Alex Bush. The album was mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound.

2022 release. Solon Islandus is the Decca Records debut of 23-year-old Icelandic composer, Gabr¡el Olafs. It is an ambitious concept album that pays homage to the artistic spirit of the people of Iceland. A work of personal discovery, and an exploration of the artistry, culture, and place that has shaped Gabr¡el's identity.

40th Anniversary Edition of Fresh Ruit for Rotting Vegetables. Remixed by Chris Lord-Alge. Includes 8 page booklet with rare archival photos and interviews. Also includes full size collectible poster.

From the first bass note within the driving drum beat you can tell something is different about the new record from Nikki Lane. The backbeat feels like a gutsy strut while the lead guitar feels like a revved up engine shifting gears. Denim & Diamonds comes out firing, spit shining the cowboy boots and tossing on a jean jacket. Produced by Joshua Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Denim & Diamonds has the Highway Queen embracing a more rock-oriented sound while still maintaining the heartfelt outlaw country sound she has developed across her previous three releases. Denim & Diamonds still has the fuck-off flare of which Nikki has come to be known. Her stylized, story-telling lyrics are all there as well as her catchy country hooks. The outlaw country sound is now balanced out with a gritty guitar and a machine gun snare that echoes the sound of 70’s rock. Nikki Lane has made a record that sounds new and old. Familiar and surprising. She embraces where she has come from, (“First High”, “Born Tough”) the lessons learned along the way, (“Good Enough”, “Try Harder”) all while doing things her way, (“Denim & Diamonds”, “Black Widow”).

Limited purple colored vinyl LP pressing. But You Caint Use My Phone was originally released on November 27th, 2015. The mixtape takes influence from hip hop, R&B, jazz, and art rock, with lyrics that focus on the themes of communication, notably through phones, with lyrics that touch upon ideas of "missed connections, call waiting, answering machines."

Super Deluxe contains 8 LPs on 180-gram heavy vinyl showcasing the newly remastered album from the original analog tapes along with 4 complete concerts on the Nevermind Tour from Amsterdam, Melbourne, Tokyo and Del Mar, California. Also included is a first-ever 7-inch for “Endless, Nameless” with B-sides “Even In His Youth” and “Aneurysm,” and a 40-page hardcover book with unreleased photos.

Original album, remastered

Entering Heaven Alive is the fifth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White's Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, and released by Third Man Records.

Kendrick Lamar released his first album in 5 years, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. Available on physical CD on
May 27, 2022.

Limited red, green and gold colored vinyl LP pressing. This 1982 release, Steel Pulse's first for elektra, marks the band's move toward a more buoyant, pop-inflected sound. 'true democracy' does not have the edgy roots feel of albums like 'handsworth revolution'; instead, it demonstrates the group's synthesis of reggae rhythms with high production values and well-crafted melodies. #but while the album's stylistic corners may be sanded for radio-ready accessibility, 'true democracy' contains some of the band's boldest, most explicitly political songwriting. The opener, 'chant a psalm,' invokes the names of biblical figures and puts the listener on notice of the album's conscious, spiritually minded tone. There are classic rasta themes, such as 'worth his weight in gold,' a song based on the teachings of marcus garvey, and songs that overtly address social and political issues. 'a who responsible?' takes on the history of racial injustice, 'leggo beast' is an indictment of prostitution, and 'man no sober' looks at alcoholism. #yet for all it's seriousness, 'true democracy' has a light, danceable vibe, exemplified in the party anthem 'ravers,' one of Steel Pulse's best tunes. Though sometimes overlooked in favor of the early island albums, this is one of the band's most consistent and enjoyable releases.

Transluscent Blue Vinyl with photos and special handmade artwork. On his latest album, The Sun is Shining Down, out January 28th via Forty Below Records, Blues legend John Mayall teams up with a stellar cast to deliver a funky soulful affair punctuated by brass, violins, harmonica and electric ukulele. Special guests include, The Heartbreakers' Mike Campbell, fast rising roots rocker Marcus King, Americana icon Buddy Miller, Scarlet Rivera of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, Chicago blues guitar mainstay Melvin Taylor and Hawaiian ukulele star Jake Shimabukuro. Also on hand are Mayall's longtime dynamic Chicago rhythm section of Greg Rzab on bass guitar and Jay Davenport on drums with Austin's multi-talented and charismatic Carolyn Wonderland on guitar. Recorded at Robby Krieger's (The Doors) Horse Latitudes studio with Grammy nominated Producer Eric Corne, The Sun is Shining Down is Mayall's 5th studio album for Forty Below Records, a fruitful partnership that began with 2014's A Special Life. "I couldn't be happier with the new record," exclaims Mayall. "I can't wait to share it with my fans. Each one of these special guests brings something unique to the album and our team works so well together. I think you can hear that chemistry in the music," raves Mayall. The album explores a range of styles and eclectic instruments. Scarlet Rivera's violin beautifully compliments two Mayall originals, the timely "Got to Find a Better Way" and a spirited reboot of the Mayall classic "Deep Blue Sea". Mike Campbell sounds like a natural born Bluesbreaker on the funky Bernard Allison cut "Chills and Thrills" and Marcus King sizzles throughout the soulful "Can't Take No More," another Mayall original. Buddy Miller's baritone tremolo guitar adds a unique and memorable flair to the Bobby Rush composition "I'm as Good as Gone", while Jake Shimabukuro's electric ukulele is nothing short of astonishing on "One Special Lady". Melvin Taylor proves why he's been wowing Chicago blues audiences for decades on "Hungry and Ready" and "Driving Wheel" and Carolyn Wonderland brilliantly concludes the record with a sensitive moving performance on the title track. As significant as each of these guest turns is, however, they can't overshadow Mayall's own spirited vocals, iconic harmonica and lyrical keyboard work on The Sun is Shining Down. "John shines throughout this album, exuding a joy and gratitude that are infectious. We all want to give that back to him," adds Producer Eric Corne.

For the first time on vinyl, this live concert featuring guest saxophonist Pharoah Sanders comes to record stores on numbered color vinyl as part of Record Store Day. 

“The Ring” /”Intro to Africa”/”Sketches of MD”/”Wayne's Thang”/”Happy People”

Sometimes, Forever, the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length, cements Sophie Allison’s status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd’s Dawn FM.

Welcome 2 Club XIII, DBT’s 14th studio album, marks a sharp departure from the trenchant political commentary of their last three records.

A reckoning with the dualities of the things that make you alive and how they sometimes can kill you. A life affirming flashlight for the dark nights of one’s soul.  The title track is a tongue in cheek homage to a local dive that founding members Cooley and Hood played in the early days. As they say in the song “Our glory days did kinda suck”.

Robin Pecknold brings light to the bleakest of winters with Fleet Foxes' 'A Very Lonely Solstice,' a 13-track career spanning collection recorded in December 2020, at Brooklyn, NY's St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church. Now being released for the first time on vinyl, CD and digital formats, 'A Very Lonely Solstice' captures a poignant moment in time. The recording was originally broadcasted as a live-stream event on the winter solstice of 2020, just days after New York declared a state of emergency tightening restrictions again in response to increasing COVID-19 cases. Pecknold describes the set as "me by myself on the longest night of the year... honoring the loneliness of 2020 with a nylon string and some songs new and old." Fans worldwide tuned in while quarantined at home, finding solace and a sense of community in a period of extreme isolation. Much of 'A Very Lonely Solstice' showcases a solo focus on Pecknold who offers up acoustic arrangements of fan-favorite songs spanning Fleet Foxes' catalog. Selections cover all four of the band's studio albums, including their 2008 self-titled debut album ("Tiger Mountain Peasant Song") to 2011's Helplessness Blues ("Blue Spotted Tail") and 2017's Crack-Up ("If You Need To, Keep Time On Me"), all the way to their latest release, Shore. Resistance Revival Chorus joins Pecknold on Shore tracks "Wading In Waist-High Water" and "Can I Believe You." Also featured: a cover of Nina Simone's "In The Morning" and a rearrangement of the traditional "Silver Dagger."

50 years of criminally overlooked recordings by one of the greatest R&B and rock vocalists ever! Darlene Love's work for Phil Spector gets most of the ink, and understandably so, but this 15-track collection captures her rare singles for the Reprise label with the vocal groups The Blossoms and The Wildcats, plus her own solo work. And the bonus tracks are priceless: you get her 1985 Elektra recording of "River Deep, Mountain High," her 2014 duet with Bette Midler on "He's Sure the Boy I Love," and two 1990 recordings for the Sire label! None of this material has ever been on LP, and this release comes with a 4-page insert featuring photos and extensive liner notes. An essential addition to the Darlene Love discography, pressed in teal vinyl limited to 3,500 copies worldwide!

SIDE ONE
1. TV Commercials – Barney Kessel and His Orchestra (featuring Darlene Love)
2. What Are We Gonna Do In ’64? – The Wildcats
3. 3625 Groovy Street – The Wildcats
4. That’s When the Tears Start – The Blossoms
5. Lovin’ – The Blossoms
6. Lover Boy – The Blossoms
7. My Love, Come Home – The Blossoms
8. Let Your Love Shine on Me – The Blossoms
9. Deep Into My Heart – The Blossoms
SIDE TWO
1. If – Darlene Love
2. Too Late to Say You're Sorry – Darlene Love
3. River Deep, Mountain High – Darlene Love
4. Mr. Fix-It – Darlene Love
5. He’s Sure the Boy I Love – Bette Midler & Darlene Love
6. Mr. Fix-It (1930s Version) (Bonus Track) – Darlene Love

Slang is the brainchild of Dave Schools (Widespread Panic) and Layng Martine III (Bill Laswell). Their music stems from decades of friendship and the intertwining of exprimental musical sensibilities. Slang blends a collage of rock, electronic, psychedlelic, and jazz to create a singular sound. Side A features the legendary singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt and Side B features a remix from Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

A1. Escalator (featuring Vic Chesnutt)              B1. Charlie D (featuring Dirty Dozen Brass Band

WE is the new album from Canadian rock band Arcade Fire. This is the sixth Arcade Fire studio album, and is made up of seven songs that speak to this moment with unique directness. Written, recorded, and released during a critical historical juncture, they are divided into two distinct sides, “I” and “WE.” If the “I” side of the record evokes and embodies our holed-up anxiety and lack of physical connection, the “WE” side captures the excitement of new possibilities and the elevating thrill of committing to one another socially and personally. Produced by Nigel Godrich, Win Butler & Régine Chassagne, WE is a 40 minute epic as much about the forces that threaten to pull us away from the people we love, as it is inspired by the urgent need to overcome them.

Harry’s House is the third solo studio album from Grammy award-winning global superstar Harry Styles. The 13-track full-length album was recorded in multiple locations across the UK, Los Angeles and Tokyo from 2020 to 2021. It was written by Harry alongside frequent collaborators Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson, and Mitch Rowland.

A seven LP box set of albums (Pleasant Dreams, Subterranean Jungle, Too Tough To Die, Animal Boy, Halfway To Sanity, Brain Drain) and a neon pink splatter vinyl LP of rarities, all pressed on vinyl for the first time since their original release. Presented in a numbered slipcase with a sticker sheet included.

"Not The Smile as in ha-ha-ha, more The Smile as in the guy who lies to you every day"... so speaks Thom Yorke on the inspiration behind the name of the new trio consisting of himself, his Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood and drummer Tom Skinner of UK jazz outfit Sons of Kemet. The description is borne out by The Smile's acerbic first single "You Will Never Work In Television Again," a 2:48 blast of ragged, raw energy that moved The New York Times to rave: "Over a bruising 5/4 beat and flailing guitars climbing through three chords, Yorke snarl-sings his avenging fury at 'some gangster troll promising the moon' who'd devour 'all those beautiful young hopes and dreams,' and you can almost feel the spittle flying."

Additional singles "The Smoke", "Skrting the Surface" and "Pana-Vision" - which epically closed the series finale of hit show Peaky Blinders - followed with equal critical acclaim; all are collected on The Smile’s first album, A Light For Attracting Attention, produced by Nigel Godrich.

Originally released in May 1982, ‘Combat Rock’ is the final album from The Clash of Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. Featuring two of the band’s most well-known songs, ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ and ‘Rock The Casbah’. Now re-released as a 180g 3LP special edition, with an additional 12-tracks compiled by The Clash.

Having returned to London following their pivotal 17-show residency at New York’s Bond’s Casino in 1981, the band rehearsed and recorded at The People’s Hall in the squatted Republic of Frestonia near Latimer Road in London and from there they embarked on a tour of the East and South East Asia, during which the album sleeve image was captured by Pennie Smith in Thailand.

The tracks on ‘The People’s Hall’ chart the period from what was their last single Radio Clash right up to the release of Combat Rock, including unheard, rare and early versions of tracks.

Also includes rare Pennie Smith images + history of Frestonia  essay by Tom Vague.

Soon after their 1978 debut on the Brian Eno-produced No New York, a compilation that defined the No Wave scene, James Chance's group Contortions had already evolved?getting sharper, tighter and just plain faster. Despite the loss of keyboardist Adele Bertei and bassist Geoge Scott (who refused to sign a new contract demanded by Chance and his then partner, band manager Anya Phillips) Contortions were firing on all cylinders, and their first full-length album, 1979's Buy, is a marvel of hot-wired energy. Led by the brash yelps and free-sax squawks of Chance, Contortions spit out fiercely rhythmic tunes charged by the wiry guitar lines of Jody Harris and the dizzying slide guitar of Pat Place. With drummer Don Christensen slipping in pointillist beats and David Hofstra's infectious basslines, the songs on Buy crackle with both precision and abandon. Opener "Designed to Kill" shoots sparks of sound in all directions, while "Contort Yourself" is a nihilistic dance number wherein Chance instructs listeners to twist into knots, physically and mentally. "It's better than pleasure, it hurts more than pain," he snarls, later imploring, "You better try being stupid instead of smart." Heavily influenced by the showman funk of James Brown (whose "I Can't Stand Myself" the band had covered on No New York) Contortions coined a downtown dance-punk sound that had immediate influence on subsequent No Wave bands?including Place's Bush Tetras and Bronx trio ESG?as well as the burgeoning disco movement. On Buy, Contortions' self-invented template is imprinted so hard into the grooves that it sounds like they're about to break, capturing a combustible band in all it's fiery fury.

This iconic collection is a must-have release by the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band. More Hot Rocks (Big Hits & Fazed Cookies) offers hits, some of their best deep cuts, and a whole LP side’s worth of rarities previously unavailable in the U.S. when it was originally released in 1972. This indispensable 25-track compilation features covers of “It’s All Over Now” and “Not Fade Away,” the psychedelic “Dandelion,” “She's a Rainbow,” “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” “Out of Time,” “Tell Me,” and “We Love You.” Rarities include their 1963 debut single “Come On,” early R&B covers of “Fortune Teller” and “Bye Bye Johnnie,” the soulful 1966 U.K. B-side “Long Long While,” and a cover of Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” featuring great slide guitar recorded in stereo at Chess Studios. Also included is the stereo version of “Child of the Moon,” the psychedelic non-LP B-side that was previously only heard on mono prior to 1972.

50th Anniversary Limited Edition. 180g Glow-in-the-Dark vinyl. Gatefold Jacket. Includes set of Gered Mankowitz photo prints. Remastered by Bob Ludwig.

LP 1
SIDE 1:
1. Tell Me
2. Not Fade Away
3. The Last Time
4. It's All Over Now
5. Good Times Bad Times
6. I'm Free

SIDE 2:
1. Out Of Time
2. Lady Jane
3. Sittin' On A Fence
4. Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?
5. Dandelion
6. We Love You

LP 2
SIDE 3:
1. She's A Rainbow
2. 2000 Light Years From Home
3. Child Of The Moon
4. No Expectations
5. Let It Bleed

SIDE 4:
1. What To Do
2. Money
3. Come On
4. Fortune Teller
5. Poison Ivy
6. Bye Bye Johnny
7. I Can't Be Satisfied
8. Long Long While

On Monday May 9th we kick off our next black midi campaign for the band's sophomore album Hellfire, with the single & Gustaf Holtenäs ("Slow") directed video "Welcome To Hell". Hellfire will be out on July 15th. The album was written in London 2021 and produced by Marta Salogni and black midi, with additional production from Max Goulding. Artwork was created by David Rudnick (who's done the artwork for all previous black midi albums as well), using AI technology into which he fed lyrics from the album to generate imagery which was then printed, cut up and reconfigured into a detailed and complex collage.

No band can quite build their own universe like black midi. Hellfire, their third album and second in two years sees the London three piece at their most direct. "Welcome To Hell" tells the story of a debauched soldier's excess and military discharge, soundtracked by funky guitar sections, driving horns and a progressively snarling vocal. Premiered by Steve Lamacq on 6 Music. 2022 live dates incl Coachella, Glastonbury, Somerset House, more to be announced. 

R.A.P. Music, the fifth studio album by rapper Killer Mike was originally released in 2012 and is finally back in print. Production was handled by rapper and producer Jamie "El-P" Meline; the album was the first collaboration between Killer Mike and El-P, who would later form the critically acclaimed duo Run the Jewels. R.A.P. Music received widespread acclaim from music critics. It landed on the Year End Best Album lists of Entertainment Weekly, Consequence of Sound, Complex, Chicago Tribune, Paste, NPR, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, Spin, Vulture, Village Voice, and many more. Killer Mike's breakthrough LP, R.A.P. Music is being reissued by Adult Swim / WaterTower Music.

Originally released in 1968 as an LA studio concept album, this instrumental album is a remarkable fusion of the psychedelic sounds of sitar and mellotron with angular guitar riffs and hard drum breaks. Featuring a lineup of Ry Cooder, Jim Gordon, Mike Deasy, and The Wrecking Crew (Los Angeles' top studio session musicians). The band recorded only this one album and most of the personnel went on to greater achievements. The quintessence of psychedelic rock in its full-blooming 1968ness. Features original cover artwork by Rick Griffin (Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young). Pressed on clear blue vinyl. Limited edition of 2000 copies

Aton I , Aton II

"Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us.

Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.

“I can’t say that I’m sorry / when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” the record begins, her voice softer and more open than ever, as if she’s singing through a hard won smile. “All the Good Times”, a twangy banger with nods to JJ Cale, starts the album on a triumphant and bright note. The title song, “Big Time”, follows and continues the warm optimism. “Guess I had to be losin’ to get here on time,” she sings, a fearless love song co-written with her partner.

Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time.

“Some experiences just make you feel as though you’re five years old, no matter how wise or adult you think you are,” she writes of that time. After that tearful but relieving conversation, she celebrated with her partner, their friends, oysters, and wine. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me.”

Three days later, her father died; his funeral became the occasion for Olsen to introduce her partner to her family. Though she was fearful their presence as a newly out queer couple would be “an additional symbol of loss,” those days went peacefully, yet only two weeks later Olsen got the call that her mother was in the ER. Hospice came soon after, and a second funeral came quickly on the heels of the first. Another trip back to St. Louis, another grief to face, another deepening and intensification of this still-new love.

The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. “It’s a hard time again,” she sings on “This is How It Works”, pushing against the irrevocability of death, “Tell me a story that will make me forget.” “Go Home”, which begins with an almost numbed calm, slowly builds up to a wailing that comes up straight from the ground: “I want to go home, go back to small things. I don’t belong here. Nobody knows me.”

“You can’t plan grief, you can’t organize it or schedule it or know how you’ll feel when it comes. It just happens, and when it does sometimes it’s not what you thought it would be.” Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was in the studio, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album.

Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Playful bits of Tammy Wynette and Kitty Wells are here, too, but so are the complex orchestrations of her genre-bending 2019 record, All Mirrors. While that record was full of dramatic shifts and twists, here the surprises come in their simplicity—a slow swell of strings, instrumentation that cycles like a storm, or sparkling horns in a light-flooded break-up ballad.

While the spritely nature of her last EP, Aisles, may have signaled Olsen’s turn deeper into the electronic direction of her last All Mirrors, there’s hardly a synth in sight here. Jonathan Wilson, served as co-producer and also mixed the tracks, while Drew Erickson played piano, organ, and scored the string arrangements. Emily Elhaj, Olsen’s longtime bandmate, was a consistent collaborator as well, on the bass throughout.

“And I can’t fit into the past that you’re used to, I refuse to,” she sings as a wraithlike piano scaffolds her hopeful voice on “Ghost On”. “Forget the old dreams,” she rejoices on “Go Home”, “I got a new thing.” Darkness inherently suggests depth, but it takes a much wiser writer to find meaning and complexity in the luminous place that Big Time occupies. “Chasing the Sun” ends the record in a smiling, romantic place, a verdant crescendo rising as she pines: “Write a postcard to you / when you’re in the other room/ I’m just writing to say that I can’t find my clothes / If you’re lookin for something to do.”

The burning of her earliest work is still here, of course, but this time she’s “freed from the longing / for one moment to last” and she’s ready to “walk through the fires / of all earthly desires.”

—Catherine Lacey
Oaxaca, February 2022"

Released via Columbia Records, Call Me If You Get Lost is Tyler's sixth studio album and includes additional guest appearances from 42 Dugg, Lil Wayne, Domo Genesis, Brent Faiyaz, Lil Uzi Vert, Pharrell Williams, Teezo Touchdown, Fana Hues and Daisy World.

The legendary show was recorded in 1983 at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and originally released as a single disc highlights album in 1984. This Complete Captured Live Record Store Day release features all fifteen songs performed that night, including fiery versions of “Equal Rights/Downpressor Man,” “African,” and “Get Up, Stand Up” on two colored vinyl LPs, the first solid yellow and blue, the second solid yellow, red, and orange. Available for the first time since 2002.

Esperanza Spalding's new album SONGWRIGHTS APOTHECARY LAB explores how songwriters may incorporate knowledge in consultation with practitioners of music therapy, neuroscience, and more to create music that can have a specific effect on the listener. These 12 new songs were created and recorded with different musicians in her traveling lab over the past several months and follow her GRAMMY Award-winning album from 2019, 12 Little Spells. 2 LP includes 1 bonus track "Formwela 12".

In 2019, Arlo McKinley played a show at the High Watt in Nashville. While he had years of such gigs on the DIY singer-songwriter circuit behind him, this night was different. In the audience was one of his musical heroes, John Prine. When they met briefly beforehand, Prine, who never gave praise lightly, told Arlo he was a fan.

McKinley recalls, “Just that moment, if that's where it ended, it would've been one of the coolest things that ever happened to me, something I remembered forever.”

But it didn't end there. Shortly after, he was signed to Oh Boy Records, Prine's indie label. Arlo came into 2020 with the momentum of a new album on deck - his first with a producer and a street team - and an international tour booked. Then things took a strange turn for the world..

As McKinley visualizes the year ahead, he's optimistic that touring will be easier , and that he'll get to play Europe for the first time this summer. When asked what he hopes listeners will get from This Mess We're In, he says, “I hope they can identify with things they're too ashamed to talk about or feel. There's such a stigma that goes along with things like addiction and mental health. I just want them to know that I go through all of that stuff too. I would just like to make them feel a little less alone. At least for the 47 minutes of the album, you can remove yourself from the world and just let everything disappear for a bit.”

Originally released in 1990, Boy Child gathered the very best Scott Walker-penned solo material from his first five solo albums for Philips Records. While the original 20-track CD has gone on to become the definitive introduction to the artist’s early work, Boy Child was only available for a short time as a single vinyl LP with a truncated track list. This expanded 2LP set features the full collection with additional classics such as “Always Coming Back to You” and “30th Century Man,” “Angels of Ashes,” and the rare non-album track, “The Rope and the Colt.” The album artwork also includes the original liner notes by Marc Almond from 1990, Neil Hannon’s notes from 2000, and brand-new notes from Jarvis Cocker (which are exclusive to this edition). Pressed on 180g white vinyl.

Side A:
1. Montague Terrace (In Blue)
2. Such A Small Love
3. The Plague
4. Always Coming Back To You
5. The Amorous Humphrey Plugg
6. The Girls From The Streets

Side B:
1. Plastic Palace People
2. The Bridge
3. It's Raining Today
4. Copenhagen
5. Big Louise
6. 30 Century Man

Side C:
1. We Came Through
2. The Seventh Seal
3. On Your Own Again
4. Angels Of Ashes
5. Boy Child
6. The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated To The Neo-Stalinst Regime)

Side D:
1. Prologue
2. Little Things (That Keep Us Together)
3. Time Operator
4. Thanks For Chicago, Mr. James
5. The Rope And The Colt
6. Epilogue: The War Is Over

Double vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. Recorded in John Keane's Studio, Athens GA during the demo tracking session in the winter of 1990. The original five; John Bell, Michael Houser, Todd Nance, Dave Schools, Domingo Ortiz with John Keane on guitars, Page McConnell on organ, and Randal Bramblett on sax. Includes liner notes from John Keane and John Bell. 'they provide an interesting snapshot of where the band was at the time; more stripped down and guitar oriented prior to the addition of a full time keyboard player.' - John Keane, Producer & Engineer. 'This was Widespread Panic un-filtered - or, at least self-filtered - filling in almost every cranny with sound and movement.' - John Bell, Widespread Panic.

Acclaimed singer, songwriter and musician Molly Tuttle will release her anticipated Nonesuch Records debut, Crooked Tree, April 1 (on CD and digital. LP will be May 13) with her new bluegrass collective Golden Highway.

Recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios, Crooked Tree was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Dan Tyminski and Gillian Welch. The album explores Tuttle’s love of bluegrass, which she discovered through her father, a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, and her grandfather, a banjo player. Across these thirteen tracks, all of which were written/co-written by Tuttle, she honors the bluegrass tradition while also pushing the genre in new directions.  

“I always knew I wanted to make a bluegrass record someday,” Tuttle says. “Once I started writing, everything flowed so easily: sometimes I’ve felt an internal pressure to come up with a sound no one’s heard before, but this time my intention was just to make an album that reflected the music that’s been passed down through generations in my family. I found a way to do that while writing songs that feel true to who I am, and it really helped me to grow as a songwriter.”

In celebration of the new music, Tuttle and Golden Highway—Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass) and Kyle Tuttle (banjo)—will embark on an extensive headline tour beginning tonight with shows at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern (two nights), Portland’s Mississippi Studios (two nights), Los Angeles’ Roxy, Salt Lake City’s State Room, Boulder’s Fox Theatre, Asheville’s The Grey Eagle and Nashville’s Station Inn, among several others. Full details can be found at mollytuttlemusic.com/tour.   

In addition to Tuttle (vocals, guitars), Douglas (dobro), Keith-Hynes (fiddle) and Leslie (mandolin), Crooked Tree also features musicians Darol Anger (fiddle), Ron Block (banjo), Mike Bub (upright bass), Jason Carter (fiddle), Viktor Krauss (upright bass), Todd Phillips (upright bass) and Christian Sedelmyer (fiddle) with additional harmony vocals from Tina Adair, Lindsay Lou and Melody Walker.

Bonnie Raitt is a singer, songwriter and guitarist whose unique style blends blues, R&B, rock, and pop. After 20 years as a cult favorite, she broke through to the top in the early 90s with her GRAMMY-award winning albums, Nick of Time and Luck of the Draw, which featured hits, “Something to Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me” among others. Raitt’s widely acclaimed 2012 independent release Slipstream sold over a quarter-million copies, making it one of the top selling independent albums, and earned Raitt her 10th Grammy Award (Best Americana Album). In February 2016, Raitt released her highly anticipated 20th album, Dig In Deep (Redwing Records). On tour for much of 2017-2019, Raitt and her band performed in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada before touring as support for James Taylor in stadiums and arenas across the U.S., United Kingdom and Europe. As known for her lifelong commitment to social activism as she is for her music, Raitt has long been involved with the environmental movement and continues to work on safe energy issues, environmental protection, social justice, human rights, and blues/music education.

Joshua Hedley is “a singing professor of country & western,” he declares on his raucous and witty new album, Neon Blue. It might sound like a punchline, but it’s not. An ace fiddle player, a sharp guitarist, and a singer with a granite twang, he’s devoted his entire life to the study of this genre. Ask him about it and he’ll explain: “When all my friends went off to college, I went to Nashville. I was 19 years old playing honkytonks and getting an education.” His 2018 debut, Mr. Jukebox, showcased his deep knowledge of country’s history, in particular the beery ballads of the 1950s and ‘60s. His mentors were George Jones, Ray Price, and Glen Campbell, but his most remarkable accomplishment was putting his own spin on their style.

Neon Blue, on the other hand, examines a very different, often forsaken era: the early 1990s. “The last bastion of country music,” says the professor, “was the early 1990s, roughly 1989 and 1996. You could turn on the radio and immediately know you’re hearing a country song. You could still hear steel guitar and fiddle. But there was a hard fork around 1996 or ’97, when country veered off into pop territory. Neon Blue asks, What if that fork had never happened? What if country kept on sounding like country?”

That era may have been dismissed by traditionalists at the time as slick or overproduced, but Hedley finds something exciting in that old hat-act sound, and Neon Blue plays up the excitement of bigger-than-life choruses, the relatable emotions of those sad-eyed ballads, and the inventiveness of the lively production. “The sound is modern,” he says, “but it’s still discernibly country.”

"On Silver color vinyl. Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album, Mahal, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound—encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-post-rock—taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they’re riding in the back of Bear’s Filipino jeepney that adorns the album’s cover. But Mahal is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do.

Mahal is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who’s undoubtedly one of the decade’s most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark Causers of This in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there’s little in Bear’s catalog that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on Mahal, his most eclectic record to date.
The second the album begins we’re immediately transported into the passenger seat, jeep sounds and all, ready for the ride Chaz and company have concocted for us. Seeds of some of Mahal’s 13 songs date back to the more explicitly rock-oriented What For? from 2015. Mahal was mostly completed last year in Bear’s Oakland studio with the involvement of a host of collaborators, Sofie Royer and Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Neilson to Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo and the Mattson 2.

“I wanted to make a record that featured more musicians on it than any other record of mine,” he explains. “To have them live on that record feels grounded, bringing a communal perspective to the table.” As a result, Mahal is lush and surprising at every turn, from the cool-handed “The Loop,” which recalls Sly and the Family Stones, to the elastic psych rock of “Foreplay” and the dizzying Mulatu Astatke- recalling of “Last Year.”
Lyrically, the album zooms in on generational concerns, picking up where the Outer Peace standout “Freelance” effectively left off. Bear seems to be surveying the ways in which we connect with technology, media, each other, and what disappears as a result. Cuts like the squishy “Postman” and the “Magazine” take a deep dive into our relationship with media in a changing digital world. “It’s interesting to see how we adapt to this new age. We’re so connected, but we’re still missing out on things,” Bear ruminates while discussing the album’s themes.

It’s not all introspection. Bear cools things down near the album’s end with the Mattson 2-featuring “Millennium,” a laid-back jam with tricky guitar licks about ringing in new times even when everything else seems upside down. “It’s about enjoying the new year, even when it’s been shitty,” Bear explains. “There’s nothing else to do.” Finding a sense of joy in the face of adversity is embedded in Mahal’s DNA, right down to the jeepney that literally and figuratively brings the music out into the community. “We know that touring is messed up for now, and large gatherings are a fluke,” he explains. “It’s about the notion of us going out to the people and bringing the record to them.” And with the wide-open atmosphere of Mahal, Toro y Moi stands to connect with more listeners than ever before."

2020's A Hero's Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London's iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as 'the damnation of the deer'; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer.

Daniel Rossen knew there was a lot to learn if he was finally going to finish his debut solo album. For nearly two decades, Rossen had been a crucial component of Grizzly Bear, the era-epitomizing act whose shared harmonies and interlaced textures meant he was responsible for only part of a whole.   But Rossen left the close-knit nest of Brooklyn many years ago, first for an isolated patch of land in upstate New York and then for the high desert climes of Santa Fe. The whole, as it were, was now his. So Rossen bought an upright bass (one of his instruments as a kid) and played all the parts himself, along with the cello. Best known as a guitarist, he took up woodwinds, too, buying several cheap student models and learning just enough to understand the rudiments. And then, largely at home in Santa Fe, he slowly built the world that is You Belong There, a riveting 10-song reintroduction to a voice that sounds both entirely familiar and fully reenergized by the act of unfettered expression.

Spiritualized will release "Everything Was Beautiful" via Fat Possum on 2/25/22. It is the ninth studio album from Spiritualized and it comes 30 years after the debut album. This is the follow up to 2018's "And Nothing Hurt". Jason Pierce performs 16 different instruments across the album. It is recorded at 11 different studios and includes more than 30 musicians across the album. There will be an indie exclusive Pink vinyl inserted into a gold foil sleeve, housed in a high gloss UV Jacket that includes a removable pill box with braille inlay.  Some assembly required.  Designed by Farrow Design.

On Paint This Town, Old Crow Medicine Show offer a riveting glimpse into American mythology and the wildly colorful characters who populate it. Co-produced by OCMS and Matt Ross-Spang the album pays homage to everyone from Elvis Presley to Eudora Welty while shedding a bright light on the darker aspects of the country’s legacy. Fueled by Old Crow's freewheeling collision of Americana, old-time music, folk, and rock & roll, Paint This Town turns razor-sharp commentary into rapturous sing-alongs.

Fear of the Dawn is the fourth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White's Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, pressed to vinyl at Third Man Pressing, and released by Third Man Records. Pressed on limited astronomical blue vinyl, only available at independent record stores

MIKE CAMPBELL & THE DIRTY KNOBS - EXTERNAL COMBUSTION - Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs have announced they will release Campbell's second album as a band leader, following their 2020 critically acclaimed debut album, Wreckless Abandon, on March 4. The new album, titled External Combustion showcases Campbell & The Dirty Knobs' evolution, pushing the band to a new level, jumping ahead in vision and drive, proving the first record was no one-shot deal.

Run the Jewels - Hip-hop's preeminent collaboration between veteran rhyme-slayers El-P and Killer Mike -have gone from a whim-driven underground rap project to a worldwide sensation since the release of their 2013 debut Run The Jewels. Mixing the industrial grime of New York City with the vibrant bounce of the dirty South, they forge hip-hop's future while adhering to the core tenets of it's bedrock: gymnastic displays of skills, incendiary political rhetoric, merciless braggadocio, battle-honed assholery, R-rated punchlines and a back-and-forth that brings the interplay of the shell-toe Adidas era screaming into our contemporary nightmare.Tearing up the music industry rulebook, their self-titled 2013 debut was originally released through a series of website-crashing free album downloads. Featuring Outkast's Big Boi on Banana Clipper and Prince Paul on Twin Hype Back, it's a "rough and rabid ride"; a "swaggering victory lap for two artists at the peak of their creativity"; and been dubbed "one of the best hip-hop records of 2013".

Gold and clear vinyl LPs in separate jackets with custom dust sleeves, two posters, book, all enclosed in a hinged box.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions.

Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell.

The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

Great musical events are often born of both positive and negative energies clashing with one another. And so it was at the Newport Festival in 1960, which had already been rocked by violent tumults even before it started. The allures of commerce raised it's ugly head; the Mingus Band wanted their share and named a fee that the organizers were not willing to fulfill. The echo came quickly: Charles Mingus and Max Roach organized their own festival in the near-by Cliff Walk Manor Hotel, and the "Newport Rebels" were born. Tempers escalated during the Saturday night concert and a commotion broke out when masses of drunken teenagers got into a fight with the security personnel. Newport was on the brink of disaster. Gatefold 180g vinyl LP reissue from Friday Music, mastered by Joe Reagoso.

This is a color LP that features alternative packaging from the standard LP. The LP package also includes a download of the full album that includes two exclusive bonus tracks. 

Luther and Cody Dickinson started North Mississippi Allstars in 1996 as a loose collective of like-minded second-generation musicians who shared a local repertoire and regional style. Over the years the lineup shifted by design, and each NMA record offered up a different combination of collaborators. Set Sail finds the brothers working with Jesse Williams on bass and Lamar Williams, Jr. for the first time. 

Set Sail, North Mississippi Allstars’s thirteenth album, follows 2019’s Up and Rolling, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for the Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2021. Set Sail continues the band’s tradition of creating roots music that displays remarkable variety. With their latest record, NMA are able to build upon their self-described sound of Primitive Modernism - a melding of the new and the old, traditional and futuristic, crafted lyrics and improvisational music.

On his first album in partnership with Verve Records, Kurt Vile pulls his talents as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in unexpected directions — and the result is a vibrant, yet meditative record propelled by laid-back charm and curious spirit.

Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums combines legendary Jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman's albums for Lester Koenig's Contemporary Records. This deluxe box set features Coleman's first albums as a bandleader, Something Else!!! and Tomorrow is the Question!. Both albums were originally recorded by legendary engineer Roy DuNann & have been newly mastered by Bernie Grundman. Includes 32-page booklet with photos & extensive new liner notes by GRAMMYr Award-winning music historian Ashley Kahn.

Calexico occupy their signature sound on the new album, El Mira- dor; riding the continental divide between dream pop, Mexican folk and Americana. If any band understands how to expand their sound without losing the brilliant essence of the band, it’s Calexico. Their songs run the gamut from retro-tinged alt-rock, to sentimental folk to southwestern tracks with an impressive display of vision and expertly honed skills. With vocals that intertwine English and Spanish, El Mirador embraces the musical heritage of the southwest, and features guest artists from all musical genres including: Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) who drops backing vocals on “Harness the Wind”, Jairo Zavala of Depedro is featured vocalist on “Cumbia Peninsula” Gaby Moreno and Mexican Institute Of Sound are featured on “Cumbia Del Polvo”.

Tony Rice was the most influential and emulated Bluegrass guitarist ever. He established the gold standard for both lead and rhythm playing, merging a deep appreciation for tradition with impactful innovation. Rebel Records is pleased to make a gem from his earliest days available again on vinyl. California Autumn was Tony's first serious solo record, produced by the Seldom Scene's John Starling and mixed by the legendary George Massenberg. The material included seven instrumentals that recalled the playing of Tony's mentor, the great Clarence White. The rest featured Tony's plaintive, powerful baritone lead vocals-pitch-perfect and soulful in their own compelling way. This recording is a startling reminder of just how great a vocalist Tony was in his prime, something that may surprise younger listeners who never got to hear him sing live. Remastered from the original analog tapes, this reissue of California Autumn has been updated with new packaging and graphics.

A fever dream in sonic form, The Alien Coast is the first album St. Paul & The Broken Bones recorded in their hometown of Birmingham. Produced by Matt Ross-Spang (Drive-By Truckers, Margo Price) - the bands fourth full-length is a dizzying convergence of rock & roll and R&B, psychedelia and stoner metal, gospel and jazz-funk. At turns explosive, elegant, and thrillingly unhinged - it makes for a majestic backdrop to the groups visceral exploration of the strangest dimensions of the human psyche.

Band of Horses’ sixth album and first record in more than five years.  Sonically, the album is a return to their earlier work and the kind of raw ethos that lies at the heart of Band of Horses. Emotionally intense, both on a personal and elemental level, on Things Are Great we find band founder Ben Bridwell more autobiographical than he’s ever been on record detailing the nebulous frustrations and quiet indignities of relationship changes and what a person will do to make things right.

Vinyl LP pressing. 2021 release from the acclaimed singer/songwriter. Aimee Mann returns with Queens Of The Summer Hotel, which contains songs inspired by the book Girl Interrupted, written by Susannah Kaysen.

2020's A Hero's Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London's iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as 'the damnation of the deer'; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer.

This essential 1962 album showcases the modern jazz saxophone innovator performing alongside the colossus of jazz piano and composition. Only Coltrane could be this "fiercely tender" and there's no better forum for his sensitive side than the music of Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, who contributes the album's true gem, "My Little Brown Book." Verve Acoustic Sounds Series features all-analog, remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging.

Limited colored vinyl LP pressing. Labor Days is the third studio album by Aesop Rock, originally released by EL-P's Definitive Jux label in 2001. The 14-track double album is regarded as Aesop's definitive collection, featuring production work from Blockhead and Omega One and guest appearances from the likes of Illogic and C-Rayz-Walz. Dark dense beats and intricate rhyme flows weave in and out on this conceptual album about work. 20th anniversary colored vinyl 2LP reissue.

Acclaimed singer, songwriter and musician Molly Tuttle will release her anticipated Nonesuch Records debut, Crooked Tree, April 1 (on CD and digital. LP will be May 13) with her new bluegrass collective Golden Highway.

Recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios, Crooked Tree was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Dan Tyminski and Gillian Welch. The album explores Tuttle’s love of bluegrass, which she discovered through her father, a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, and her grandfather, a banjo player. Across these thirteen tracks, all of which were written/co-written by Tuttle, she honors the bluegrass tradition while also pushing the genre in new directions.  

“I always knew I wanted to make a bluegrass record someday,” Tuttle says. “Once I started writing, everything flowed so easily: sometimes I’ve felt an internal pressure to come up with a sound no one’s heard before, but this time my intention was just to make an album that reflected the music that’s been passed down through generations in my family. I found a way to do that while writing songs that feel true to who I am, and it really helped me to grow as a songwriter.”

In celebration of the new music, Tuttle and Golden Highway—Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass) and Kyle Tuttle (banjo)—will embark on an extensive headline tour beginning tonight with shows at Seattle’s Tractor Tavern (two nights), Portland’s Mississippi Studios (two nights), Los Angeles’ Roxy, Salt Lake City’s State Room, Boulder’s Fox Theatre, Asheville’s The Grey Eagle and Nashville’s Station Inn, among several others. Full details can be found at mollytuttlemusic.com/tour.   

In addition to Tuttle (vocals, guitars), Douglas (dobro), Keith-Hynes (fiddle) and Leslie (mandolin), Crooked Tree also features musicians Darol Anger (fiddle), Ron Block (banjo), Mike Bub (upright bass), Jason Carter (fiddle), Viktor Krauss (upright bass), Todd Phillips (upright bass) and Christian Sedelmyer (fiddle) with additional harmony vocals from Tina Adair, Lindsay Lou and Melody Walker.

Eric D. Johnson, the creative force behind Fruit Bats, doesn't spend a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror. But with the 20th anniversary of his first Fruit Bats release (2001's Echolocation) on his mind, it seemed as good a time as any to take stock of his work-and he's doing so in the form of Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001-2021), a two-disc collection that tracks the history of Fruit Bats from it's earliest days to right now. Thoughtfully compiled by Johnson himself, this set is split in two distinct halves. Set in reverse chronological order, the first disc cherry-picks from Fruit Bats' official releases, including fan favorites-"Humbug Mountain Song" from 2016's Absolute Loser and "The Bottom of It" from his 2019 Merge debut Gold Past Life-alongside some of Johnson's more personal choices like "Glass in Your Feet" from Echolocation.

Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread is a studio album by Jamaican reggae legend Lee "Scratch" Perry, released in 1978. Although Perry had been in the Jamaican music business for a long time by 1978, this album, produced by himself at his Black Ark Studio, was the first album he released that only included songs sung by himself. It's considered a rather experimental album, much to the dismay of his record label Island Records, who rejected the album. This significantly worsened the relationship between Perry and his label. Nevertheless, the album went on to become a reggae classic and remains popular among fans of the genre.

One of the most striking and strangely moving moments onJake Xerxes Fussell’s gorgeous Good and Green Again—an album, his fourth and most recent, replete with such dazzling moments—arrives at its very end, with the brief words to the final song “Washing-ton.” “General Washington/Noblest of men/His house, his horse, his cherry tree, and him,” Fussell sings, after a hushed introductory passage in which his trademark percussively fingerpicked Telecaster converses lacily with James Elkington’s parlor piano. That’s the entire lyrical content of the song, which proceeds to float away on orchestral clouds of French horn, trumpet, and strings, until it simply stops, suddenly evaporating, vanishing with no fade or trace, no resolution to its sorrowful minor-key chord progression, just silence and stillness and stark presidential absence. It feels like the end of a film, or the cold departure of a ghost, and is unlike anything else Jake has recorded.

The song provides an apt metaphor for the record as a whole and for Fussell’s artistic process itself. He appropriated the text from an early 20th century hooked rug by an anonymous Virginian artist depicting exactly what its red-stitched all-caps headline text and caption declares: Mount Vernon, a horse, a cherry tree, and the big man himself, cartoonishly grimacing (or is it wryly grinning? there’s not much mouth, just a red-thread wrinkle). George sits cross-legged in foppish leggings and slippers on a blue bestarred chair, with a perfect arch of snow-white wig haloed around his noble head. The rendering of this folk-art artifact ignores perspective and punctuation: every object in the lineup is the same size, and the list of the General’s stuff includes no commas or line breaks, a kind of accidental concrete poem that democratizes the supposedly great democratizer, reducing him to the same prosaic level as his diminutive crib, his prancing pony, and his tart cherries (maybe he is grimacing after all). The image may have been intended as a tribute, maybe even a reverent one—if we forget the fact that it’s a rug, and that we’re meant to walk all over it—but it hits as satire in its contemporary context, like a textile version of one of those all-caps cat caption memes. (I CAN HAZ CHERRIES?) The “noblest of men” looks a bit pathetic here, a little childish with his big-boy toys, a little goofy and alone—a little like how the rest of us often feel.

(Now, Jake is certainly no apologist for George Washington, nor for the myriad atrocities of American history, but he recognizes the deep wells of American song are filled from headwaters both fresh and vile. Within its ambiguities, “Washington” is, for Fussell, a placid protest song that elevates an artist and her rug above a general in his splendor. It’s a fragment of the broken ways we speak about history and power, a satirical shard sent to pierce and deflate our pernicious, endlessly regurgitated national mythologies. As such, it’s adeeply sad song. It’s not the only one here.)

Fussell carefully considers such contradictions in his studious choice of songs. He’s distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia and preciousness, utterly devoid of folkie cosplay. By re-contextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of theAmerican South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. His mesmerizing performances reveal the beauty of calling things by their true names, of coaxing old texts and recordings gently through the telescope of time, thereby transmuting them, through his own ineffable alchemy, into something approachably intimate and immediately relevant, something both his and ours.

In all his work Jake humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-play-ing—here he plays more acoustic than ever before—pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects. What’s different about “Washington” is that it’s one of four original compositions on the album—the others are the three instrumentals—a career first for Fussell, who has heretofore been content to remain a vitreous vessel for existing, often anonymous, songs. On Good and Green Again, Jake not only ventures beyond his established mastery of song catching and song making into songwriting, but likewise navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes, going green with lusher, more atmospheric and ambitious arrangements. The result is the most conceptually focused, breathtakingly rendered, and enigmatically poignant record of his wondrous catalog. It’s also his most deliberately premeditated album, representing his fruitful return to a producer partnership after two self-produced projects, What in theNatural World (2017) and Out of Sight (2019) (William Tyler produced his friend’s self-titled 2015 debut.) This time James Elkington produced and played a panoply of instruments, bringing to Jake’s arcane song choices his own peerless sense of harmony and orchestration, balance and dramatic tension, honed from collaborations with artists such as Michael Chapman, Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley, Richard Thompson, and Jeff Tweedy. Jake knew after a 2018 Midwestern tour together that he wanted to work with Jim, appreciating his open ears, unorthodox influences, and flexibility in following instincts.

The pair enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham,North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular band members Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah, Nathan Bowles) on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun ,Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and veteran collaborator and avowed Fussell fan Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.

Together this crew is uncannily able to pinpoint that magical place on Jake’s musical map where melancholy, quietude, and head-nodding, foot-stomping joy commingle and transcend—places like, on previous albums, “Raggy Levy,” “Jump for Joy,” and “The River St. Johns.” Album opener “Love Farewell” (featuring some beautiful singing by Bonnie “Prince” Billy) rings that bell with an elliptical tale of the folly of war, set to the world’s most heartbreaking goodbye march for a lover left behind. “Carriebelle” and “Breast of Glass” each similarly concerns, in its own way, romantic love and leavings. All three songs highlight Jacobson’s diaphanous, understated brass parts, tying them together in a true lover’s knot. “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down,” with its distant keening strings and capacious sense of space, observes and mourns the loss of work and community in the wake of elemental disaster. Nine-minute tour de force “The Golden Willow Tree,” the sole explicitly narrative song herein, is a hypnotic, minimalist rendering of a tragic maritime ballad about scuttling an enemy ship in exchange for wealth and glory—and a captain’s inevitable betrayal. It’s a rejoinder to “Love Farewell”’s naïve cheer in the face of imminent violence.

If overallGood and Green Again sounds a little sadder and slower than Fussell’s past records, well, maybe we’re all a little sadder and slower these days. A smoldering mood of regret and loss pervades, a distinct vibe of vanitas. But three airy instrumentals, all Fussell originals—“Frolic,” “What Did the Hen Duck Say to the Drake?,” and “In Florida”—punctuate the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes, each in turn somewhat more hopeful and exuberant than the last. Their resemblance to lullabies is, perhaps, not coincidental. Fussell and his partner welcomed their first child into the world during the making of Good and Green Again. These lovely songs bear that promise in letters of bright gold.

LABYRINTHITIS brims with mystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Dan Bejar’s notes woven through by allusions at once eerily familiar and intimately perplexing. The record circuitously draws ever inward, each turn offering giddy surprise, anxious esoterica, and thumping emotionality at equal odds. “Do you remember the mythic beast?” Bejar asks at the outset of “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the album’s first single, casting torchlight over the labyrinth’s corridors. Delivered in a Marlene Dietrich smolder, Bejar’s lyrical menace seeps like smoke through the brazen march’s woozy synths and dizzied guitar. “There’s some character here that feels new to me, a low drawl, an evening gown draped over a piano,” Bejar says of the song. Throughout, LABYRINTHITIS insists that everything’s not all right, but that even isolation and dissolution can be a source of joy—stepping into the sunlight at the other end of the maze in your ear, Bejar strolling alongside like a wildmaned,
leisure-suited minotaur.

More than an arcane puzzle for the listener, LABYRINTHITIS warps and winds through unfamiliar territory for Bejar as well. Written largely in 2020 and recorded the following spring, the album most often finds Bejar and frequent collaborator John Collins seeking the mythic artifacts buried somewhere under the dance floor, from the glitzy spiral of “It Takes a Thief ” to the Books-ian collage bliss of the title track. Initial song ideas ventured forth from disco, Art of Noise, and New Order, Bejar and Collins championing the over-the-top madcappery. “John is in his 50s, and I’m almost there, but we used to go to clubs,” Bejar laughs. “Our version may have been punk clubs, but our touchstones for the album were more true to disco.”

Bejar and Collins conducted their questing in the height of isolation, Collins on the remote Galiano Island and Bejar in nearby Vancouver, sending ideas back and forth when restrictions didn’t allow them to meet. “From the vocal manipulation to the layered electronics, making this record pushed us to a new place, and reaching that place felt stressful,” Bejar recalls. “But I trust that that stress is a good feeling.” That cuddly anxiety excels in tracks like “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread.”

Lyrically, LABYRINTHITIS embraces a widescreen maximalism, blocks of text dotted with subversions and hedges. Building from the koans of Have We Met, Bejar continues to carve his words precisely, toying with expectations and staid symbols, while Collins’ production reconstructs the pieces into a unified whole. “Even though everyone recorded in their own isolated corners, this is the most band record that we’ve done in the last few years,” Bejar says. “Everything’s manipulated, but the band is really present, and our plans wound up betrayed by what the tracks wanted. I’ve written 300, 400 songs in my adult life—I don’t know how to do anything else—but this album feels like a breakthrough into new territory.”

That unprepared synchronicity and mutual discovery shines on “June,” a six-and-a-halfminute track that features a blend of funk bass, fluttering synth, and charred poetry recitation. While Bejar initially envisioned LABYRINTHITIS as a straight dance record (“just like Donna Summer’s greatest hits”), the end of “June” explodes that simplicity into a million shining pieces, finding joy in mutual discovery instead of isolated certainty. LABYRINTHITIS closes on “The Last Song,” Bejar singing and strumming all alone, a gentle yet no more settled exodus out of the fractured dance party. “I try and sneak in sweet moments where I can,” Bejar laughs. As LABYRINTHITIS closes, the reorienting vertigo lingers, its implacable aura and bewitching lyrics wriggling ever deeper into the mind.

Double vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. 2022 release. Bill & Bonnie shared these songs with a travel-challenged world from fall 2020 through Spring 2021; now their online sensation comes home to roost on the good ol' fashioned format in which all these songs were originally heard in the first place! A record to, from, for and dedicated to almost everyone. Hats off! Pants off too! NOW it's a party.

ALDOUS HARDING / WARM CHRIS Aldous Harding Announces Details Of A New Studio Album, The Follow-Up To 2019'S Acclaimed Designer. For Warm Chris, The New Zealand Musician Reunited With Producer John Parish, Continuing A Professional Partnership That Began In 2017 And Has Forged Pivotal Bodies Of Work (2017'S Party And The Aforementioned Designer). All Ten Tracks Were Recorded At Rockfield Studios And Includes Contributions From H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John And Hopey Parish And Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).

“I’m starting to realize that being an outlier and a weirdo––it doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” says Sarah Shook. Shook pauses, then adds with a grin, “It can be whatever you want it to be.”

Shook is home in North Carolina, talking about Nightroamer, the hotly anticipated new album from their band, Sarah Shook & The Disarmers. Backed by white-knuckle playing from Eric Peterson on guitar, Aaron Oliva on upright bass, drummer Jack Foster, and Adam Kurtz on pedal steel, Shook has pulled from Hank Williams, Elliott Smith, the Sex Pistols, and Shook’s own inquisitive, open, outlying self to create pop-savvy, honky-tonk punk that’s both an escape and a reality check––a re-opened wound and a balm. Relationships and life-changing realizations are dissected with honesty and humor, three tight minutes at a time.

When Sarah Shook & The Disarmers released Sidelong four years ago, the irreverent quintet’s debut turned heads around the world. Then 2018’s follow-up Years hooked everyone from Rolling Stone to Vice. “This ain’t no country for hipsters or posers,” said No Depression. “It’s real, raw, mean-and-evil-bad-and-nasty bidness.” Then, the first two albums turned into a tease: The pandemic shut down the world, just as The Disarmers finished recording Nightroamer in Los Angeles. The band has had to sit on the album––until now.

Nightroamer is worth the wait. This is still a band whose recordings beg to be heard live, either in a punk-rock hole in the wall or honky-tonk roadhouse. Shook’s voice is crystalline––but boozy, too, with a cadence that sounds comfortable resting in the pocket before lagging, jumping, or cozying up to the offbeat. What initially may feel like a slip is actually a stroke––and listeners cannot get enough.

Produced by Pete Anderson, Nightroamer is the confident next step fans hoped The Disarmers could take. “I think this record is different than ones we’ve done in the past. It feels every bit as expansive as I wanted it to feel,” says Shook. “I didn’t want there to be a shocking, jarring difference, but I definitely wanted it to feel like things are opening up. It’s a bigger feeling experience.”

Asked what they hope listeners experience, Shook is clear. “Music is one of the ways we can connect to other people,” they say. “That’s my hope: That people feel seen and they feel connected to something that brings them a sense of peace.”

The innovative hard bop of Jackie McLean evolved as the `60s progressed. Inspired by Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist ventured into the avant-garde but never let go of a soulful sense of swing. Destination Out! was his masterwork of inside-out jazz with Grachan Moncur III on trombone, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Larry Ridley on bass and Roy Hayes on drums. Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal.

Brent Cobb follows in the footsteps of his country music heroes with his new gospel album, And Now, Let’s Turn to Page…. By offering eight familiar hymns alongside an original song written with his wife, the collection feels reverent as well as rowdy—and completely in his comfort zone.

Although the album has been a long-time dream for Cobb, it has only come to fruition now due to a near-death experience in July 2020, when the vehicle that he was driving, with his young son inside, got T-boned at a rural four-way stop. Following the crash, Cobb found himself with a renewed outlook on life, remembering, “You just start piecing together how everything is sort of intentional…I’d always had it in the back of my mind to make a gospel album. That moment of clarity, of almost getting killed, made me think I should just make the gospel album now.”

Produced by Dave Cobb in RCA Studio A in Nashville, And Now, Let’s Turn to Page… continues a tradition established by legends such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Willie Nelson, and Elvis Presley, who could invoke their spiritual side without losing sight of their musical foundation. “I’ve always wanted to make a southern gospel album because it’s what I come from, but also it used to seem like a rite of passage for country singers to make a gospel album,” Brent says. “It all comes from gospel music. That’s where country music came from. I’m just trying to carry that torch.”

Born and raised in Georgia, Brent returned to his home state a few years ago after establishing a career as one of Nashville’s most creative and compelling songwriters. He explains that he considers each of his past albums like a message to his kids: Keep ‘Em on They Toes explores his thoughts, Providence Canyon describes the people who influenced his life, and the Grammy-nominated Shine on Rainy Day reveals who he is. For the gospel album, he adds, “this is what I believe in.”

Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter and musician Brent Cobb will release his debut gospel album, And Now, Let’s Turn To Page…, January 28 via his own label, Ol’ Buddy Records.

Jenny Hval is an Oslo-based musician, composer and writer. Multidisciplinary and transgressive are words often employed to describe her art, but Jenny Hval'spolyphonic artistry is in fact seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. She has released several solo albums and novels, including 2018's Paradise Rotand 2020's Girls Against God, both published via Verso Books.

Cat Power returns with Covers, Chan Marshall’s third album of her celebrated reinterpretations of songs by classic and contemporary artists.

On Covers, Marshall reaches back to songs that have affected her from childhood to the present, connecting each with a deeply personal memory. She recalls her grandmother’s love for Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and finding a box of cassettes as a teenager that led her to discovering Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” She remembers getting chills hearing Iggy Pop’s “Endless Sea” in the 1986 Michael Hutchence film Dogs in Space and being a broke artist in her twenties in New York City spending her last dollar to play the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular” on the jukebox at Mona’s. She recorded the Pogues’ “Pair of Brown Eyes,” which she calls one of her favorite songs of all time, after it reminded her of one friend who passed from cancer and turned to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” to help her heal from the loss of another. 

Alongside covers of rock-and-roll icons from Nico to Nick Cave, Marshall brings her inimitable vocal power and elegant arrangements to songs by contemporary artists, capturing the defiance of Dead Man’s Bones’ “Pa Pa Power” and the dreaminess of Lana Del Rey’s “A White Mustang.” And the album opens with a dazzling cover of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion,” of which she says, “I believe in whatever God is called… But I think that the wretched men that have come in history to implement horror on humanity in the name of these religions is something that should be looked at universally.” 

Finally, Covers finds Marshall, an artist of constant evolution, reworking “Hate,” a song from her 2006 LP The Greatest on which she sang “I hate myself and I want to die.” Marshall says she has always felt “antsy” about the track and reimagined it as “Unhate,” a new version that looks back on the raw devastation of the original track in the rearview. “We all have bad days,” she says. “We all have shit, trauma, something. There are times when you feel like that. But I needed to make it right.” 

Marshall self-produced all of Covers; it was recorded in Los Angeles at Mant Studios with Rob Schnapf, who mixed and engineered. 

Bill Fay has always sung about attempting to understand the most universal questions: those of nature, spirituality, humanity. His songs are “calming hymns for another chaotic time”, he says. His influence can be traced through many artists’ work, and so it only seemed right to celebrate this with a collection of newer voices interpreting his timeless tracks. Originally released in2010 by David Tibet (Current 93), Still Some Light was released as a double CD, made up of70’s album demos (Disc One) and 2009 home recordings (Disc Two). This year, for the first time, this collection of recordings will be pressed to vinyl and released digitally, presented alongside contemporary reimaginings of the tracks by Kevin Morby, Steve Gunn, Julia Jacklin and Mary Lattimore. Bill Fay’s words and melodies remain unaffected by the passing of time and changing trends; and here alongside the original recordings, these reinvented versions still calmly guide us through another moment of chaos.

In the afterglow of her acclaimed 2020 album Silver Ladders (a year-end favorite of NPR, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and others), Los Angeles-based harpist Mary Lattimore returns with a culminating counterpart release, Collected Pieces: 2015-2020. The limited-edition LP features new and previously unreleased material, Bandcamp-only singles, and other obscurities alongside standouts from her 2017 tape Collected Pieces. Beyond the vinyl compendium, an expanded tracklist on the cassette/digital version brings more of Lattimore’s archives together for the first time. Lattimore has described the process of arranging these releases as akin to “opening a box filled with memories,” and here that box continues to populate, accessible for both the artist and fans. Evocative material separated by years, framed as a portrait of an instrumental storyteller who rarely pauses, recording and often sharing music as soon as it strikes her. Seemingly in constant forward motion for the last five years since her Ghostly debut, Lattimore glances back for a breath, inviting new chances to live in these fleeting moments and emotions; all the beauty, sorrow, sunshine, and darkness housed within.
 
Opening the cassette version is “Mary, You Were Wrong,” which mirrors an author’s bout with a broken heart. “It’s about how you have to keep on going even if you make some mistakes,” she says. The bittersweet refrain cycles throughout, a little brighter every time, slowly, like the way time tends to heal.
 
Unreleased track “Sleeping Deer” came together during Lattimore’s artist residency on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. She remembers, “a small deer whose mother I think had been run over by a car would hang out in the yard. I called him Lollipop and would leave vegetable scraps out.” Lollipop returned daily to eat, rest, and wait for more. The music this vision inspired is patient and droning, with light plucks giving way to deeper, vibrating tones, permeating with a sense of anticipation.
 
Next is a newer single, “We Wave From Our Boats,” which she improvised after walking her neighborhood during the early days of lockdown in 2020, and shared on her Bandcamp. “I would just wave at neighbors I didn’t know in a gesture of solidarity and it reminded me of how you’re compelled to wave at people on the other boat when you’re on a boat yourself, or on a bridge or something. The pull to wave feels very innate and natural.” The heart of the track is somber loop, over top which Lattimore’s synth notes ruminate, each a gentle shimmer of optimism in the most anxious and absurd of days.
 
Also recorded in 2020, “What The Living Do” is inspired by Marie Howe’s poem of the same name, which reflects on loss through an appreciation for the mundane messiness of being human. The echoed, slow-marching track has a distant feel to it, as if the listener is outside of it, watching life play out as a film. “Princess Nicotine (1909)” scores actual footage, a dream sequence Lattimore imagined for J. Stuart Blackton’s surreal silent film Princess Nicotine; or, the Smoke Fairy. She adopted the same approach for “Polly of the Circus,” explaining it was the name of one of the old silent films discovered in permafrost in the Yukon [featured in the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time], “the only copy that survived and it kind of warped in the aging process.”
 
A trove of pieces are collected here, most recorded in the moment, just Lattimore and her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand Harp, contact mics, and pedals. There’s the one about the American astronaut’s homecoming (“For Scott Kelly, Returned To Earth”), the Charlie Chaplin-like character who lost their glasses (“Be My Four Eyes”). Like her most affecting work, these songs showcase Lattimore’s gifts as an observer, able to shape her craft around emotional frequencies and scenes. Her power as a musician is rooted in how she sees the world: in vivid detail, profoundly empathic, with deep gratitude for nature and nuance.

Johnny Cash - Bear's Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash, At the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968 (Limited Edition) Bear's Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash, At the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968 - Johnny Cash

Nils Frahm’s double album 'Old Friends New Friends' gathers together 23 solo piano tracks recorded between 2009 and 2021, almost all hitherto unreleased but omitted from previous albums and projects for one reason or another. 

The album was pieced together during the pandemic as Frahm used the time to arrange his archives, conscious of the sheer number of recordings he’d accumulated. Having selected his favourites, he realised how, when he listened to them together, they offered “a different spectrum of freedom for me. I forgot that some tracks are ten years old, some two, and they’re all played on different pianos. Instead I remembered how, as a fan, I love albums like this. With a lot of my records there’s a point where you feel, ‘This is the centrepiece,’ but here I wasn’t really worrying about that. It still feels like my universe, though, and I’m proud that all these things which I never found a way to unite before now work together. It’s like I tossed flowers indiscriminately into a vase and then realised it looked exactly right.”

The 140g vinyl records come housed in a single-pocket cardboard jacket, and protected by premium anti-static inner sleeves.

Digitally remastered 180gm vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. Released in 1964, Crescent is one of John Coltrane's finest albums, featuring the talents of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. On April 27, the Classic Quartet went to the familiar surroundings of Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliff's studio to begin work on the album that came to be called, Crescent.

All Them Witches are known for their loud and lengthy live shows. 2020 found the band releasing their critically acclaimed album, Nothing As The Ideal. An album release from this band would traditionally be followed by a lengthy 18-month tour across the globe. Due to an international pandemic, the band’s touring plans were brought to a halt. This did not stop All Them Witches from assembling in a studio to broadcast a live set for their fans. The set was roundly received as an amazing performance and fans immediately inquired as to whether or not this show would be available outside of the broadcast. New West Records is proud to present All Them Witches - LIVE ON THE INTERNET.

Robert Glasper’s highly anticipated third installment to the Black Radio album series. Black Radio III, much like both of its predecessors, is a cultural moment that celebrates black love and resilience, features an eclectic group of talented collaborators, and is composed by Glasper who the New York Times proclaims is “probably the most prominent jazz musician of his generation”. An innovative and essential addition to Glasper’s seminal Black Radio series. Limited Edition Indie Exclusive Chartreuse 2 LP.

Live from Blackalachia is a live album and movie composed of dynamic band arrangements from Moses Sumney's first 2 albums. It was recorded in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the summer of 2020, on a stage built on a hill nestled within a 72-acre ranch.

In January 2020, Moses Sumney and band gathered in Western North Carolina to design festival-ready versions of songs from Aromanticism and ˆ. After the world shut down and tour was canceled, Moses maintained a desire to share the show, but in a new way. Not just a live stream or recording. A film. A concert film. So in the summer of 2020, the band re-convened in Asheville, and designed the show for Live From Blackalachia. Moses directed the conceptual concert film, and decided to release it in both audio and visual formats. 

There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Sly And The Family Stone’s influential masterpiece of darkly psychedelic funk turns 50 in 2021 and to celebrate, there will be a new limited edition version on red vinyl. The album marked a shift in the band’s tone, striking a more political and militant vibe while showing Sly Stone’s disillusionment with the promise of the 60s. At the same time, it was also a big commercial success, hitting #1 on the album charts while the single “Family Affair” topped the singles charts. Its influence rang throughout the 70s as all of the funk innovators took their cues from this seminal album, and its songs became a favorite for hip hop artist mining sampling gold decades later. It came in at #81 on Rolling Stone’s  Greatest Albums Of All Time and besides “Family Affair,” the album features the tracks “Just Like A Baby” and “Africa Talks To You (“Asphalt Jungle”).”

Cat Power returns with Covers, Chan Marshall’s third album of her celebrated reinterpretations of songs by classic and contemporary artists.

On Covers, Marshall reaches back to songs that have affected her from childhood to the present, connecting each with a deeply personal memory. She recalls her grandmother’s love for Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” and finding a box of cassettes as a teenager that led her to discovering Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” She remembers getting chills hearing Iggy Pop’s “Endless Sea” in the 1986 Michael Hutchence film Dogs in Space and being a broke artist in her twenties in New York City spending her last dollar to play the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular” on the jukebox at Mona’s. She recorded the Pogues’ “Pair of Brown Eyes,” which she calls one of her favorite songs of all time, after it reminded her of one friend who passed from cancer and turned to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” to help her heal from the loss of another. 

Alongside covers of rock-and-roll icons from Nico to Nick Cave, Marshall brings her inimitable vocal power and elegant arrangements to songs by contemporary artists, capturing the defiance of Dead Man’s Bones’ “Pa Pa Power” and the dreaminess of Lana Del Rey’s “A White Mustang.” And the album opens with a dazzling cover of Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion,” of which she says, “I believe in whatever God is called… But I think that the wretched men that have come in history to implement horror on humanity in the name of these religions is something that should be looked at universally.” 

Finally, Covers finds Marshall, an artist of constant evolution, reworking “Hate,” a song from her 2006 LP The Greatest on which she sang “I hate myself and I want to die.” Marshall says she has always felt “antsy” about the track and reimagined it as “Unhate,” a new version that looks back on the raw devastation of the original track in the rearview. “We all have bad days,” she says. “We all have shit, trauma, something. There are times when you feel like that. But I needed to make it right.” 

Marshall self-produced all of Covers; it was recorded in Los Angeles at Mant Studios with Rob Schnapf, who mixed and engineered. 

Time Skiffs’ nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder. Harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective's past two decades, still in search of what’s next.

50th Anniversary Edition features direct-to-analog mastering from the original tapes by Kevin Gray. Included are 4 rare cuts making their vinyl debut, highlighted by the “stripped” version of the title song, plus six mono single mixes and B-sides. Pressed on 180-gram 2 LP in a tip-on heavy stock gatefold jacket with printed sleeves featuring lyrics, track details, a brief essay honoring arranger David Van De Pitte, and main essay by poet Hanif Abdurraqib.

On October 8th, Matador Records will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the quintet's long out-of-print second album and label debut, Amanita, with a newly remastered 2xLP reissue.

Formed in 1991, Philadelphia's Bardo Pond have spent some thirty years mapping guitar music's outer limits ­' dialing into extremes of noise, chaos, and harmony in free-form compositions that now unfurl across 12 full-length records and a near-limitless body of EPs, cassettes, and CD-Rs Recorded by the lineup of John Gibbons (guitar), Michael Gibbons (guitar), Isobel Sollenberger (voice, flute), Clint Takeda (bass), and Joe Culver (drums), Amanita is the place where the band's spontaneous collective creativity blazed into maturity.

'Amanita was a manifesto of everything we were trying to do,' says Michael Gibbons. It was really a template for everything we did later. We were a real unit ' just so creative, just making up riffs. There were songs, but they were still rooted in our free-improv base. We had a beauty, but we also had a really strong impulse to be dissonant.'

Double vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. Mere weeks before the world went into lockdown, ground- breaking songwriter and vocalist King Krule performed a handful of concerts following the release of his critically acclaimed third album 'Man Alive!' Recorded during those final shows, the new live album, You Heat Me Up, You Cool Me Down offers fans a glimpse into a tour that never came to be and features a setlist of 17 songs that span the acclaimed artist's entire discography including fan favorites 'Easy, Easy', 'Baby Blue' and more.

Simply calling Curtis Harding a soul man feels reductive. Harding's voice conveys pain, pleasure, longing, tenderness, sadness and strength-a full gamut of emotions. Today his voice takes on an optimistic lilt with his his new album, If Words Were Flowers. If Words Were Flowers is Harding's first new music since 2018, a follow up to his critically acclaimed 'Face Your Fears" album. It features songs like " Hopeful", where Harding croons with devotion over a classic soul groove, textured with infectious horn playing, background singers and modern psychedelic flourishes. Harding fuels his psychedelic sound with the essence of Soul but isn't bound by it. Instead, his songs convey an eclectic blend of genres leaping from the many musical lives he has lived from following his evangelical Gospel-singing mother on tour around the country as a child to rapping in Atlanta, forming a garage band with The Black Lips' Cole Alexander to singing back-up for Cee Lo Green. Through these experiences he fully embraces life's darkest intricacies and conjures dynamic, addictive melodies

The B.B. King - Friday Music 180 Gram Audiophile Vinyl Series Begins Celebrate 5 Decades Of His Masterpiece. Impeccably Mastered From The ABC Bluesway /Universal Music Tapes By Joe Reagoso (Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Ray Charles). Striking Original Gatefold Cover Art Not Seen In Decades. Features B.B. King Classics: "Chains & Things" "Hummingbird" "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother" "You're Still My Woman" & "Ask Me No Questions". Featured Musicians: B.B King, Leon Russell, Carole King, Joe Walsh, Russ Kunkel, Bryan Garofalo, Gerald Jemmott, Hugh McCrackin, Merry Clayton, Clydie King, Shirlie Matthews & Vannetta Fields

El Michels Affair follows up the massive success of their full length Yeti Season with The Abominable EP. A collection of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and instrumentals from the Yeti Season recording sessions.EMA's blending their signature cinematic soul sound with influences from Turkish Funk and the grittiest of Bollywood soundtracks yielded an instant classic The Fader calls "a carnival of dusty funk and soul".The EP starts off with the unreleased gem "Messy Grass" whose synth intro, peppered with distant yeti cries, gives way to a tremendous backing track that Tamer Pinarbasi's Qanun dances over. On "Cham Cham" EMA invites Piya Malik to the microphone again to share her styled storytelling vocals over the instrumental track from Yeti Season's "Perfect Harmony". Where some of the tunes on the EP have vocals added, some of them have them removed letting the band take center stage; "Poison Song", "Uncut Gem", "Smoked", and "Progress" are all instrumen- tal here giving them a wholly different energy than the vocal versions.The EP is being released with two different covers, each one has two paintings from different Ghanaian mobile cinema artists commissioned through Chicago's Deadly Prey Gallery and are interpretations of the original album artwork. One version is paintings by Stoger and Heavy J, who also contributed cover paintings to the Return To The 37th Chamber album. The other version of the cover is two paintings by Teshie and Farkira.

Endless Boogie emerge from fugue state with a new double LP. Admonitions was conceived a recorded via timewarp between NYC, TX & the Stockholm archipelago. Major growls, Eklow riffs, Sweeney flavors. Mystery players appear as specters in the mirror. 100% guaranteed to drown out paranoid inner dialogue. Onward and inward. This one goes down swinging.

While attending a show at the Village Vanguard in 2006, it occurred to Christian McBride that he hadn't played there in nearly 9 years, as he'd been touring the world over. In June of 2007, Christian returned to the Village Vanguard with a group consisting of Steve Wilson, Eric Reed, Carl Allen and a young vibraphonist whom he'd recently met, Warren Wolf. Due to prior commitments, Reed could no longer be in the group, but pianist Peter Martin joined the group immediately upon the release of Christian McBride & Inside Straight's first Mack Avenue recording, Kind of Brown, and Peter's been in the piano chair ever since. The Village Vanguard has been McBride and Inside Straight's home for one to two weeks every December. Although many iterations of his groups have played there, Inside Straight was birthed at the Village Vanguard. This particular set was recorded in December of 2014, titled Live at the Village Vanguard.

Drummer, producer & beat scientist Makaya McCraven digs through the Blue Note vaults with this new remix project that puts a modern bounce on jazz classics by Art Blakey, Horace Silver, & more. McCraven's mastery of the loop is akin to hip-hop's most celebrated beatmakers like J Dilla & Madlib, both of whom have also remixed Blue Note tracks, but McCraven's unique approach also incorporates new recorded elements including his own drums, Joel Ross' vibraphone, Jeff Parker's guitar, & more.

Hell on Church Street, Punch Brothers’ newest album, due January 14, 2022 on Nonesuch Records, is the band’s reimagining of, and homage to, the late bluegrass great Tony Rice’s landmark solo album Church Street Blues. The record features a collection of songs by Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Bill Monroe, and others. Recorded at Nashville’s Blackbird Studio in November 2020, during a time of great uncertainty, Hell on Church Street was intended as both its own work of art and a gift to Rice, who died that Christmas. Punch Brothers said of Tony Rice and Church Street Blues: “No record (or musician) has had a greater impact on us, and we felt compelled to cover it in its entirety, with the objective of interacting with it in the same spirit of respect-fueled adventure that Tony brought to each of its pre-existing songs.”

Bear's Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash, At the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968 - Bear's Sonic Journals: Johnny Cash, At the Carousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968 - Johnny Cash

The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were recorded at the September 1979 MUSE (Musicians United for Safe Energy) benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. This 2 LP set features 13 songs performed over two nights, that are newly remixed and remastered.  This gatefold package includes a 24-page book with rare photos and memorabilia, an essay and a 33” x 19” poster.

* THE OHIO PLAYERS/ FRIDAY MUSIC 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL SERIES BEGINS!!! * CELEBRATE YOUR HOLIDAYS WITH THE RETURN OF THEIR MULTI-PLATINUM FUNK MASTERPIECE "FIRE" * FIRST TIME EVER 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL * FIRST TIME EVER SUPER LIMITED TRANSLUCENT RED VINYL * STRIKING ORIGINAL GATEFOLD COVER ART OUT OF PRINT FOR YEARS * PRODUCED BY THE OHIO PLAYERS * MASTERED IMPECCABLY BY JOE REAGOSO (OHIO PLAYERS/EARTH WIND AND FIRE) FROM THE ORIGINAL MERCURY RECORDS TAPES * FEATURES SMASH HITS: "FIRE" "I WANT TO BE FREE" "SMOKE" "RUNNIN' FROM THE DEVIL" & "TOGETHER"

THE OHIO PLAYERS: Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, Clarence "Satch" Satchell, James "Diamond" Williams, Billy Beck, Marvin "Merv" Pierce, Marshall "Rock" Jones and Ralph "Pee Wee" Middlebrooks 1974 was a magical year for The Ohio Players, after years of hard work, a plethora of fine recordings and tours, their sixth album "Fire" would become all the things you would want for a hit album- multi-platinum hit songs, multi #1 chart sales in both pop and r&b, and multiple radio formats all over the dial. "Fire" was just the song everyone was looking for in 1974. It had the full fledged funk sound of their many years of stewardship to the soul crowd, as it also brought in first time rockers, pop listeners and a major push from radio and massive television exposure with shows like "In Concert" "Midnight Special" and "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," The chart topping album was filled with more great fare like "I Wanna Be Free" "Smoke" as well as the soul balladry of "Together" which would all become instant classics which have stood the test of time now for over four decades. Featuring the guitar and vocals of the late great front man Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, his guitar and vocal wizardry along with the keyboard and vocals of the great Billy Beck, along with the musical geniuses of Clarence Satchell, James "Diamond" Williams, Marvin Pierce, Marshall Jones and Ralph Middlebrooks, the Ohio Players were surely on top of their game and for a very long time afterwards thanks to the songs and musicianship displayed on this red hot album. Friday Music is very pleased to announce the first in a series of super limited 180 Gram Audiophile Vinyl releases from the great Ohio Players with their chart topping masterpiece "Fire." The first time ever 180 Gram Vinyl release will also be manufactured for a super limited run on smokin' hot red vinyl and it will also be featured in the striking gatefold album cover artwork not seen in years. Produced by The Ohio Players and mastered impeccably by Joe Reagoso (Ohio Players/Earth Wind and Fire) from the original Mercury Records tapes, this fine album will become one of the more important funk album revisits in many years. So, please join us in welcoming the legendary Ohio Players to the Friday Music label where we are celebrating their classic masterwork "Fire" album ....right in time for your holiday season listening and gift giving.

Vinyl LP pressing. If you own a copy of this 1977 release on legendary Nashville deejay John Richbourg's Seventy-Seven Records label, then you are on your way to amassing generational wealth! But it's not just the scarcity of the original pressing that has driven prices to sky-high levels, the opening track proclaims 'We're the baddest group of people you've ever seen,' and it's not wrong. Funkadelic, Isley Bros., O'Jays, Kool & the Gang, pick your favorite '70s R&B act and this rural North Carolina (!) band measures up with booty-shaking bass and drums, deft wah-wah guitar, beautifully arranged horn charts, and angelic group harmonies employed with equal aplomb to steamy funk workouts ('Time Is Moving') and sublime soul balladry ('Loving and Caring'), all written by the band itself. To honor the roots of The Brief Encounter, this first-ever U.S. reissue is being pressed in North Carolina on smoky (mountain) vinyl, don't miss this chance to grab one of most elusive soul classics of the '70s!

Special edition of the album includes 6 photographs from the Barn sessions.

BARN, the new Neil Young/Crazy Horse album was recorded in a remote, restored, 19th century log barn. This musical family has played together for a half century, yet they continue creating new music. Neil and the Horse fans have long shouted for “more barn” and here it is… 10 new songs that capture the wild, rock and roll spirit, the idiosyncratic raw sound and the lyrical beauty that epitomizes a classic NYCH collaboration. The last song appeared on the last morning and was recorded just an hour later during a pounding hailstorm and during the full moon.

The album was recorded this summer over a handful of days. The ten new songs encompass all that Neil Young with Crazy Horse are known for, beautiful romantic acoustic ballads, powerhouse electric rockers and insightful rollicking tunes that stick with you. 

Niko Bolas was parked adjacent to the barn, in an exquisite analog mobile recording truck, Le Mobile ready to capture and mix the album on the spot. Produced by The Volume Dealers – Neil Young and Niko Bolas, the album will be released on vinyl, CD, cassette and digitally. There will also be a deluxe edition that will include the LP, CD. and Blu-ray film.Special edition of the album includes 6 photographs from the Barn sessions.

The latest chapter in Columbia/Legacy's highly acclaimed Bob Dylan Bootleg Series shines fresh light on the provocative new musical directions Dylan was taking as a songwriter and a recording artist from 1980 through 1985. In the early 1980s, while the music industry was grappling with the arrival of new trends and technology, from MTV to compact discs to digital recording, Bob Dylan was writing and recording new songs for a new decade, creating an essential new chapters in his studio catalog. Bob Dylan - Springtime In New York (1980-1985) celebrates the rich creative period surrounding Dylan's classic albums Shot Of Love, Infidels, and Empire Burlesque with previously unreleased outtakes, alternate takes, rehearsal recordings, live performances and more.

In his liner notes for Bob Dylan - Springtime In New York, Damien Love writes, "And that's the real story of this gloriously untrammeled collection. The songs. The songs stripped free of trappings, tampering, passing tastes, and judgements. The songs broken down to the sound of people really doing this, right now, acting on instinct. The songs rough and rowdy, bruised and tender, joking and crying, nagging and striving and yearning. The songs were always there, and here they are still, keeping pace with us."

In James McMurtry’s new effort, The Horses and the Hounds, the acclaimed songwriter backs personal narratives with effortless elegance (“Canola Fields”) and endless energy (“If It Don’t Bleed”). This first collection in seven years spotlights a seasoned tunesmith in peak form as he turns toward reflection (“Vaquero”) and revelation (closer “Blackberry Winter”). Familiar foundations guide the journey. “There’s a definite Los Angeles vibe to this record,” McMurtry says. “The ghost of Warren Zevon seems to be stomping around among the guitar tracks. Don’t know how he got in there. He never signed on for work for hire.”

The Horses and the Hounds is a reunion of sorts. McMurtry recorded the new album with legendary producer Ross Hogarth (Ozzy Osbourne, John Fogerty, Van Halen, Keb’ Mo’) at Jackson Browne’s Groovemaster’s in Santa Monica, California. Hogarth recorded McMurtry’s first two albums, Too Long in the Wasteland and Candyland and later mixed McMurtry’s first self-produced album, Saint Mary of the Woods. Another veteran of those three releases, guitarist David Grissom (Joe Ely, John Mellencamp, Dixie Chicks), returns with some of his finest work.

Third Man Records is ecstatic to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The White Stripes breakthrough album White Blood Cells with the release of this very special "Peppermint Pinwheel" pressing.

Available exclusively at independent record stores worldwide, this eye-popping pressing is here for a limited time only and will never be pressed again.

The Spaceman Reissue Program edition of Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space promises to give those recordings the fullest spectrum audio and physical treatment they’ve deserved since the original release. It will be the third in this series of 180g double albums with the lacquer cut from original sources by Alchemy Mastering, presented in a gatefold jacket adorned by reworked art by Mark Farrow, and available in both a standard black vinyl pressing and limited edition Neptune Blue vinyl, as well as CD.

Long-considered Charles Mingus' masterpiece, The Black Saint And The Sinner Ladyrepresents high-water marks in both jazz composition and orchestration. An essential work in the history of jazz, this extended work has been performed as a ballet and features original liner notes by Mingus' psychotherapist. Verve's Acoustic Sounds Series features transfers from analog tapes and remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging.

Original remastered album, previously unreleased full live concert and BBC Session Recorded in 2012, 2011 Electro-Vox Session, limited-edition poster and lithograph, “new car scent: air freshener, 100-page photo book.

The Black Keys release a special tenth anniversary edition of their landmark seventh studio album El Camino via Nonesuch Records on November 5, 2021. El Camino (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) will be available in several formats including a Super Deluxe edition of five vinyl LPs or four CDs, featuring a remastered version of the original album, a previously unreleased Live in Portland, ME concert recording, a BBC radio Zane Lowe session from 2012, a 2011 Electro-Vox session, a limited-edition photo book, poster, and lithograph, and a “new car scent” air freshener. A three-LP Deluxe edition, which includes the remastered album and the live recording, also will be available.

The Black Keys won three awards at the 55^th annual GRAMMY Awards for El Camino— Best Rock Performance, Best Rock Song, and Best Rock Album—among other worldwide accolades. In the UK, the band was nominated for a BRIT Award (Best International Group) and an NME Award (Best International Band).

El Camino was produced by Danger Mouse and The Black Keys and was recorded in the band’s then-new hometown of Nashville during the spring of 2011. In the UK, the record gave the band their first top 10 hit, and in the US it debuted at # 2 on the Billboard Top 200. The band was also the # 1 most played artist at Alternative and AAA radio formats for 2012 in the US.  The album’s first single, “Lonely Boy,” reached # 1 on the Alternative and AAA charts; it also entered the top 10 at Rock radio.  The second single, “Gold on the Ceiling,” also reached # 1 on Alternative radio and the third single, “Little Black Submarines,” reached the top 3 at Alternative radio.   El Camino has been certified Double Platinum in the US, Australia, and New Zealand; Platinum in the UK, France, Ireland, and Belgium; Quadruple Platinum in Canada; and Gold in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. Of the album’s singles, "Lonely Boy" was certified nine-times platinum in Canada, triple-platinum in Australia, platinum in New Zealand, and gold in Denmark. "Gold on the Ceiling" was certified platinum in Australia and Canada.

Rolling Stone hailed El Camino for bringing “raw, riffed-out power back to pop’s lexicon,” and called it “the Keys’ grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.” The Guardian said, “They sound like a band who think they've made the year's best rock'n'roll album, probably because that's exactly what they've done.”

Art Blakey's 1960 hard bop classic, The Big Beat, introduced one of the greatest line-ups of the Jazz Messengers with the legendary drummer joined by Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt. 3 of the 6 tunes were composed by Shorter, but the album is best-known for an unforgettable version of Timmons' enduring hit "Dat Dere." Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal.

"Woke up singing a dead man's song..." is the opening line from the Warren Haynes original "Heavy Load," a line of imagery that feels like the beginning of dirt. Blues. On this album, the iconic American band puts their unique musical stamp on an incredible collection of Blues covers and originals. Haynes, the leader of Gov't Mule, hails from a Southern rock tradition of scruffy virtuosity. Gov't Mule is Warren's show, and the Blues is the informing foundation, personal and universal.

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. On his first Blue Note date since relinquishing the Jazz Messengers moniker to Art Blakey, Horace Silver struck gold with the 1956 album, 6 Pieces of Silver, a sterling set of hard bop that introduced his indelible composition "Seor Blues." The pianist was joined by an ace quintet featuring Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley, Doug Watkins, and Louis Hayes. Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal.

Over the last four decades, Bela Fleck has made a point of boldly going where no banjo player has gone before, a musical journey that has earned him 15 Grammys in nine different fields, including Country, Pop, Jazz, Instrumental, Classical and World Music. But his roots are in bluegrass, and that's where he returns with his first bluegrass tour in 24 years, My Bluegrass Heart. My Bluegrass Heart is the third chapter of a trilogy which began with the 1988 album, Drive, and continued in 1991 with The Bluegrass Sessions. The project features a who's who of some of the greatest instrumentalists in bluegrass music's history alongside some of the best of the new generation of players mandolinists Sam Bush, Sierra Hull, and Chris Thile; fiddlers Michael Cleveland and Stuart Duncan; celebrated multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, bassists Edgar Meyer and Mark Schatz, and the amazing Bryan Sutton and Molly Tuttle on guitar.

Donald Byrd's 1975 album, Places and Spaces, featuring the hits "Wind Parade" and "Dominoes," was the culmination of his fusion period. It was his 5th consecutive album produced by the visionary Larry Mizell, and the second to last session Byrd would cut for Blue Note, the label he had been with since 1958. Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series is all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal.

Things Take Time, Take Time is an assured leap forward for Barnett; a breakthrough really. This is Barnett at her most relaxed, creative and joyful. An exquisite look at the intimate, private world created by Barnett and drummer/producer Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint, Cate le Bon, Kurt Vile). It's consequently her most beautiful and intimate record to date.

On their new full-length - the first new music since The Waterfall (2015) - My Morning Jacket reaffirm the rarefied magic that has made them so beloved, embedding each song with moments of discovery, revelation and ecstatic catharsis. It comes after a near permanent hiatus for the band until performing four shows in summer '19 left them with a new energy. Jim James engineered/produced at 64 Sound in LA where the band spent weeks in intentional seclusion emerging with their self-titled 9th album.

Parquet Courts' thought-provoking rock is dancing to a new tune. Sympathy For Life finds the Brooklyn band at both their most instinctive and electronic, spinning their bewitching, psychedelic storytelling into fresh territory, yet maintaining their unique identity. Built largely from improvised jams, inspired by New York clubs, Primal Scream and Pink Floyd and produced in league with Ro- daidh McDonald (The xx, Hot Chip, David Byrne), Sympathy For Life was always destined to be dancey. Unlike its globally adored predecessor, 2018"s Wide Awake! the focus fell on grooves rather than rhythm. 'Wide Awake! was a record you could put on at a party,' says co-frontman Austin Brown. 'Sympathy For Life is influenced by the party itself. Historically, some amazing rock records have been made from mingling in dance music culture ' from Talking Heads to Screamadelica. Our goal was to bring that into our own music.'

This newly discovered live-recording of a performance of the Love Supreme suite is a revelation. Recorded at The Penthouse in Seattle on October 2, 1965, this recording transports the listener to a prime seat for piece of musical history. While not studio-quality audio, the power of the performance shines through. This version is also of the full suite and features an expanded band that includes the same Classic Quartet and Pharoah Sanders in his first official gig as part of Coltrane’s group.

Mastodon will release their anxiously awaited ninth full-length album, HUSHED AND GRIM, on October 29, 2021 via Reprise Records. Over the past year, the group recorded the album in their hometown, collaborating with producer David Bottrill [Tool, Rush, Muse, Peter Gabriel] behind the board. As their most ambitious body of work to date, it consists of 15 tracks, surveying sonic landscapes of rock, psychedelia, punk, metal, alternative, and prog threaded together by the innately expressive musical interplay of these four musicians. At the same time, an atmosphere of loss, loneliness, and longing permeates through the trio of cathartic vocals as they musically say goodbye to old friend, confidant, and longtime manager the late Nick John by architecting a magnum opus that bears the influence of his eternal memory.

30 is the first new music from Adele since the release of her third studio album 25 in November 2015.  The album is produced with former collaborators Greg Kurstin, Max Martin and Shellback and Tobias Jesso Jr., as well as new collaborators Inflo and Ludwig Goransson.

One of the top emerging artists across all genres of music, Billy Strings has made his most ambitious album to date with Renewal, a 16-song collection that effortlessly positions him as a singular talent—one who reveres the history of the acoustic music that inspired him, while pushing it forward into new spaces and audiences through his incredible live shows.

Serving as a reflection of Strings’ diverse musical influences, Renewal reaches well beyond bluegrass with elements of heavy metal, jam bands, psychedelic music and classic rock—even though it’s still primarily an acoustic record. The album follows his Grammy Award-winning project, Home, as well as industry recognition ranging from Pollstar’s Breakthrough Artist of the Pandemic to the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year and New Artist of the Year.

“I’ve learned, you’ve just got to let the song do its thing,” shares Strings. “So that’s what I try to do—write songs and let them come out however they do.”

Let It Come Down is the fourth album by the rock band Spiritualized, released in 2001. It was recorded and produced at Abbey Road and AIR Studios. It took Jason Pierce, Spiritualized's lead singer, guitarist and sole constant member four years to write, perform, produce and release. The album utilizes 115 session musicians, including orchestra and London Community Gospel Choir.

Internationally beloved soul-blues rocker tells a timeless tale of young man bitten by the blues bug. He masters the craft and sets out for fame and fortune, only to realize that what he left behind is what he's been looking for all along. An infectious collection of songs that stand on their own tell the story in vivid lyrics backed by Castro's patented roadhouse rock, soulful ballads and deep, greasy grooves.

Daptone celebrates 20 years of soulful music with the release of The Daptone Super Soul Revue "LIVE at the Apollo". Performed and recorded over three nights in front of a sold-out crowd at The World Famous Theater in Harlem, NY (December 4th - 6th, 2014), this album brings the electrifying performances that helped put Daptone on the map directly to your living room! Featuring live sets from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley and his Extraordinaires, Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens, Antibalas, The Budos Band, Menahan Street Band, Saun & Starr, The Sugarman 3, as well as our em-cee, Binky Griptite. This album is lovingly dedicated to the memory of our dear friends Sharon, Charles, Naomi, and Cliff.

Originally released in 1978, Elvis Costello & The Attractions' album, This Year's Model, has been newly remastered. Available on CD with the addition of "Big Tears" and "Radio Radio."

Also Available:


Spanish Model featuring a stunning international cast of some of the biggest Latin rock and pop artists from around the globe interpreting Elvis Costello and The Attractions' album, This Year's Model, entirely in Spanish.

A collection of new arrangements of Biblical psalms composed and performed by acclaimed guitarist Nathan Salsburg. Following Third (2018) and Landwerk (2020), Psalms was born of a desire for some kind of rigorous and creative Jewish engagement. Though it's origins were solitary, the album was recorded with many collaborators (James Elkington, Joan Shelley, Will Oldham, Spencer Tweedy) leading to a sweeping and lush conversation with the past.

Translucent Orange Vinyl, comes with an autographed 11x17 poster

Time In The Sun is the 4th full length album from Charleston, SC band Susto. The album was written and recorded in the midst of a lot of life changing events for lead writer/singer Justin Osborne. Like everyone around the world, Osborne was navigating the global issues felt from the pandemic while normal life continued with its own blessings and challenges.. "We were navigating the global and national issues that everyone else was dealing with, but also I became a father and also lost my father. There was a lot of contemplation going on in my brain, a lot of personal evolution going on in my life, and songwriting was my way of working through it all. The title Time in the Sun is meant to be a monument to my own human existence and also a tribute to the human experience in general. I wouldn’t claim to understand what it means to be a human, from the countless different perspectives of the world, but I do have my own experience to reflect on and I want to be able to express and explain that in some way. I guess this album is an attempt at that. At the core though, it’s just a collection of songs about my life and my feelings." Time In The Sun is set for release on October 29, 2021 via New West Records. 

Blues music is revered for its timelessness. The best blues–no matter how old sounds as fresh and visceral today as it did when first recorded. The high-energy electric blues trio GA-20 –guitarist Matt Stubbs, guitarist/vocalist Pat Faherty, and drummer Tim Carman –know this well. The band’s dynamic self-penned songs sound and feel as fresh and real as the old blues they love and perform, including songs by Otis Rush, J.B. Lenoir, Howlin ’Wolf, Junior Wells and especially their favorite, Hound Dog Taylor.

Legendary six-fingered Chicago bluesman Theodore Roosevelt “Hound Dog” Taylor always knew how he wanted to be remembered, declaring, “When I die they’ll say, ‘he couldn’t play shit, but he sure made it sound good!’” His first full length recording in 1971 was also the first album on now world-famous Alligator Records, Hound Dog Taylor & The House Rockers. In fact, label president Bruce Iglauer founded Alligator for the sole purpose of recording and releasing that album. Now, Colemine Records–working in partnership with Alligator Records–will release GA-20’s new full-length album, Try It...You Might Like It! GA-20 Does Hound Dog Taylor, featuring 10 songs written or performed by the Chicago blues legend. From the fiery first single and album opener “She’s Gone” to the blistering “Sadie” to the all-time Hound Dog classic “Give Me Back My Wig”, GA-20 deliver one electrifying track after another. As a follow-up to their Billboard-chart-topping Lonely Soul LP, a full worldwide tour will accompany this release, surely to galvanize the blues scene around GA-20!

The War On Drugs announce I Don’t Live Here Anymore, their first studio album in four years, out October 29th on Atlantic Records. Over the last 15 years, The War on Drugs have steadily emerged as one of this century’s great rock and roll synthesists, removing the gaps between the underground and the mainstream, making records that wrestle a fractured past into a unified and engrossing present.

Just a month after A Deeper Understanding received the 2018 Grammy for Best Rock Album, the band retreated to upstate New York to jam and cut new demos. It was the start of a dozen-plus session odyssey that spanned three years and seven studios, including some of rock’s greatest sonic workshops like Electric Lady in New York and Los Angeles’ Sound City.

The War On Drugs’ 2022 tour takes the band to some of the largest venues they’ve ever played, including their first headlining show at MadisonSquare Garden, as well as Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium, the Bill Graham Civic Center in San Francisco, the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, two nights at the Chicago Theatre, Philadelphia’s Metropolitan, the House of Blues in Boston, and beyond.

Vinyl LP pressing. Brian Jackson JID008 is the first full album released by the great man in 20 years and it's a testament to his multifaceted talents that while there are moments throughout that hint at his game-changing history and track record, for the most part it reveals a musician whose considerable lessons learned from the past only serve to keep his eyes firmly fixed on the future. It's a masterclass in unbridled and open-minded creativity, no different from what Brian did half a century ago. The ease and comfort with which his ideas integrate with those of musicians a generation younger than him bears this out. To listen to this album is to hear a hot up-and-coming musician who also happens to be a major jazz-funk legend.

Los Angeles based band, Los Lobos, have always been inspired by their surroundings and the place they call home. Their music is influenced by rock and roll, Tex-Mex, country, zydeco, folk, R&B, blues, brown-eyed soul, and traditional music such as cumbia, boleros and norteños. With Native Sons the band set out to showcase all of these influences with their own take on the songs of Los Angeles from some of the cities greatest songwriters. Native Sons features 13-songs from well known LA artists such as Buffalo Springfield, WAR, Jackson Browne and the Beach Boys as well as deep cuts from the Jaguars, The Basters and The Premiers. The album title track is the sole original composition written by the band. 

"The dancer wants to get in a groove and stay there until he has exhausted his invention or his body. The timescale and momentum of any physical activity is vastly different from the attention span of listening."Albert Goldman "A good remix is when the remixer's sonic fingerprint is present, without sounding forced. It should feel like it's own story, with at least some of the same characters as the original." Khruangbin The art of the remix has been around for several decades, from the fervid imaginations of JA pioneers like Coxsone Dodd, Duke Reid or King Tubby to the disco enthusiasts of New York, such as Tom Moulton, who bequeathed us the modern iteration of the remix and provided a template from which most remixers still work. Moulton's first commercial remix, a reworking of BT Express' appropriately-named 'Do It 'Till You're Satisfied', which stretched it from three minutes to a luxurious five, assisted the band in securing it's first Billboard R&B Number One, as well as providing a pathway for remixers like Walter Gibbons, Larry Levan, Richie Rivera and Tee Scott, to completely reinvent the concept of a remix (and in some instances, deconstructing the idea of what comprised a song). It has subsequently been used as a marketing tool, a dancefloor-devastator, a gimmick (both cheap and expensive) or even as a way of reaching a different audience (think Tori Amos' 'Professional Widow'). Khruangbin are no slouches when it comes to the remix themselves. They've been reworked before, in 2016, with the highly collectible EP on Boogiefuturo. But this time, they're taking it a step further with an album dedicated to the art. Entering the tight-knit world of a Khruangbin song can be a little daunting. They have created this entire universe in which the trio seem to function telepathically in the way the music is composed, arranged and played. To mess with their delicate eco-system can invoke feelings similar to that of an unwanted guest crashing a good-time party. "We write our music to be interpreted; this is another wonderful interpretation of the music," reassure Khruangbin. "There is something very vulnerable about letting others work on your music. But through the correspondence with the different artists, we gained a bigger connection to the songs themselves." The choice of remixers for this album is neither arbitrary nor accidental. They're not names picked randomly out of a hat or chosen via a throw of the dice. All have some connection to the band, sometimes personal friendships, musical connections, or simply mutual musical appreciation. Harvey Sutherland and Ginger Roots have both toured with the band, Kadhja Bonet and Ron Trent had their own mutual fan club going on, Knxwledge sampled 'White Gloves' on a recent mixtape, Natasha Diggs and Soul Clap's Eli's are recent buddy-ups, Quantic is a mutual friend of Bonobo (crucial in the KB origin story), while I've known Laura for number of years; plus she is also godmother to one of Felix Dickinson's kids. Doesn't get much more intimate than that, right? Some of these remixes were specifically made so you can dance your ass off while getting down to the Khruangbin sound, while some might better be appreciated horizontally with headphones on, wearing fashionably loose clothes. The choice is yours. But all were made with love and respect for Khruangbin. "A good remix deconstructs, recontextualizes, or simply extends a good time," say the band. Amen and out. Bill Brewster

Deluxe edition of the groundbreaking, genre-defying second album by Alabama Shakes. Certified gold and the winner of four Grammys, Rolling Stone called "Sound & Color” a "weirder, woozier, fiercer and sexier record than their debut in nearly every way.” This repackaged set features revised artwork, new photos, and seven bonus tracks pulled from unreleased studio material, b-sides and live songs cut at the world renowned Capitol Records Studio A.

A definitive new peak in the recorded continuum of prolific producer/percussionist Carlos Niño, elegantly presented in his unique “Spiritual, Improvisational, Space Collage” style. Featuring contributions from more than a dozen exciting voices from the creative music constellation of Los Angeles.

The horse still bucks, the band still funks, and well... The fire still burns. That's right-Country Funk is back. In the summer of 2012, a new sound blew in from the dusty desert. It was a sound difficult to pin down, to codify; a sound that, like some wild horse, resisted one's grasp. But this was no trend, no flash-in-the-pan movement, no shotgun marriage of styles, no ma'am. This sound went back decades, back to the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s when adventurous artists started to blend country hoedown harmony with the elation of gospel, the sexual thrust of the blues and a touch of inner-city grit. This was a new sound with a simple name: Country Funk. Country Funk 1969-1975, first released in 2012 and co-produced by Zach Cowie, Patrick McCarthy and Matt Sullivan, brought together a disparate group of artists that were neither bound by geography nor a shared ideology, but connected through the simple feel of their songs. Country Funk is alternatively playful and melancholic, slow jammin' and booty-shakin'. It's a sound both studio slick and barroom raw, as evident in the artists featured on Volume I: Johnny Adams, Mac Davis, Dale Hawkins, Tony Joe White, Bobbie Gentry, Larry Jon Wilson, and many others. Just two years later, we chased Volume I with a new collection of songs for Country Funk 1967-1974 (LITA 116, 2014). Volume II didn't let up, dealing out all the loose-talking and lap-steel twangin' one could handle. Heavy hitters like Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and J.J. Cale shared barstools with the lesser-known voices of Bill Wilson, Donnie Fritts and Thomas Jefferson Kaye. With Country Funk Volume III 1975-1982 (LITA 194) we're here to say there's more funk left in the trunk yet. This time around, the jeans are tighter, the hair is bigger and the disco ball spins along to a country-synth beat. Produced and compiled by Jason Morgan (Bay Area DJ/collector) and Patrick McCarthy (co-producer/compiler of Volume I & II), the tracklist features regulars Dolly Parton, J.J. Cale, Larry Jon Wilson and Tony Joe White (whose track is released here for the first time) alongside new faces like Steven Soles, Gary & Sandy, Conway Twitty, Travis Wammack, Billy Swan, Rob Galbraith, Brian Hyland, and so many more. As the 1970s began to wane and the 1980s approached, the Country Funk pallet expanded to include disco beats, heavy Moog synth bass lines and more clavinet than you could shake a stick at. Volume III shows artists continuing to buck traditional country tropes and production while embracing modern soul, disco, and coked-up 80s synth-pop. This is the true soundtrack of the Urban Cowboy. Saddle up, partners.

Newly mixed by Giles Martin and Sam Okell in stereo as guided by the original "reproduced for disc" version by Phil Spector.

The Super Deluxe Edition includes 27 unreleased session recordings, a 4-track Let It Be EP, the 1969 unreleased 14-track "Get Back" stereo LP mix by Glyn Johns, and a 100-page hardback book with an intro by Paul McCartney, track-by-track recording information, and many unseen photos, notes, and more.

A slipcase box set houses the 4 LPs, 12" EP, and hardbound book.

Tattoo You celebrates 40 years with the release of a brand new Super Deluxe 5 LP Boxset which includes the newly remastered version of Tattoo You, Lost & Found: Rarities, and Still Life: Wembley Stadium 1982. Also included is a 124-page book featuring over 200 rare photos from recording sessions and their world tour, plus interviews with producer Chris Kimsey and photographer Hubert Kretzscmar. The package includes a special lenticular sleeve.

Nearly five decades since his debut LP, the songs on Jackson Browne’s new album Downhill From Everywhere sustain the soulful intimacy of his first release, combined with a power and wisdom gained from a life pursuing positive change.

The scenery of Thorn’s rural South is changing. The trailer parks, gravel roads around Tupelo and high school beauty queens flicker in the rear-view mirror. Two years ago, Thorn returned to his early gospel roots with the release of “Don’t Let the Devil Ride.”

In contrast with earlier work that riffed on short-term love affairs, as well as “kissing the right one good-bye,” the writing on Thorn’s upcoming release, “Never Too Late To Call” features music from a man who is with the “right one” and is happy to be there.

This offering, seven years in the making, features all original material, some songs written by Thorn, others co-written with his friend and longtime manager Billy Maddox. The album was recorded at Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis and produced and engineered by Grammy winning wunderkind Matt Ross-Spang.

In the case of what is arguably the album’s most tender composition, “Sapphire Dream,” Thorn teamed up with his daughter Kitty Jones, who co-wrote the song and accompanies her dad on vocals:

Jeweled birds fly under crushed velvet skies
And the blue rain don’t fall on me
The sun is on our face; it’s a perfect place
And the one I love is here with me, in my sapphire dream

Particularly poignant is “Breaking Up For Good Again.” On this track, Thorn is accompanied by his wife Heather. Their harmonizing is not only lovely, but resonates with a ring of truth known to two who have driven together that rutted, bumpy road every married couple must travel.

“There’s a theme running throughout the record about people needing each other and reaching out to each other,” Thorn said.

As is the case with all of Thorn’s songs, the album’s title track, “It’s Never Too Late to Call,” comes with a story.

He wrote the song for his sister Deborah who died in 2018. When Thorn was on the road, he’d long to talk to someone after his shows, hours after the members of his immediate family were asleep. But his sister, a night owl, would often stay up all night.

“I could call her and she’d always be awake,” Thorn said. “I wrote that song about her.”

The song is one more example of a distinguishing characteristic of Thorn’s work — a quality his fans love — the intensely personal nature of his lyrics. Thorn’s music has always been a reflection of where he’s been or where he is in his life. On “Never Too Late to Call,” we find mellower Paul Thorn. The razor wit and the gently humorous commentary on life’s existential questions are in evidence, but here there is a peace about his life’s journey. Or, to put it in his words, “I’ve been such a lucky boy. I’m crying two tears of joy.”

Asleep At The Wheel is celebrating their 50th Anniversary with the release of Half A Hundred Years. The nineteen tracks feature original band members, current band members and guest artists. The special guest artists are Lyle Lovett, George Strait, Lee Ann Womack, Willie Nelson, and Emmylou Harris. Tracks 1 - 11 are new songs featuring the original band members. Tracks 12 -16 are old songs featuring the current band members and Asleep At The Wheel alumni. Tracks 17 - 19 are songs from the vaults that have never been released and track 14 features the current and the two previous female band members.

The seven studio albums from 1979-2017, including Bad Love which will be on vinyl for the first time, all pressed on  black vinyl and together as part of RSD Drops. 

On December 4th 1970, Neil Young played two legendary solo acoustic shows at New York’s Carnegie Hall. The 23 songs in this set (2 LP & 2 CD) have been mixed from the original ¼ inch tapes by Young and Niko Bolas. This is the early show which has never been bootlegged or circulated, and is the first release in Neil’s new “Official Bootleg Series”.

Franz Ferdinand is the self-titled debut album from the band originally released in 2004.

The Metallica Blacklist celebrates the 30th anniversary and enduring influence of the iconic Black Album, with one of the most ambitious projects ever conceived by the Metallica team: An unprecedented 50+ artists spanning an unbelievably vast range of genres, generations, cultures, continents and more, each contributing a unique interpretation of their favorite Black Album song. All profits from The Metallica Blacklist will be split evenly between the All Within My Hands Foundation and 50+ charities chosen by the artists who play on the album. All music overseen by executive producer Giles Martin.

 

The seven LPs will be housed in die-cut jackets with a booklet in a library-style slipcase. Comes with an MP3 download card.

While spending time trying to conquer the audio of live-stream athome performances, I got better acquainted with my friend Adam McDaniel, an engineer and producer in Asheville, NC. Adam and I had known each other for years. When the band was a bit smaller I'd often rent his studio, Drop of Sun, for pre-recording / pre tour rehearsals. Summer 2020 was tough for many reasons. But Adam and his wife Emily opened their home to me and made it a safe space to create and let go. I had an idea to record some covers and bring some of the band into the mix, or add other players. I wanted to record 80's songs that I'd overheard walking the aisles at the grocery store, and I needed to laugh and have fun and be a little less serious about the recording process in general. I thought about completely changing some of the songs and turning them inside out. I'd heard "Gloria" by Laura Branigan for the first time at a family Christmas gathering and I was amazed at all the aunts who got up to dance. I imagined them all dancing and laughing in slow motion, and that's when I got the idea to slow the entire song down and try it out in this way. I felt that "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats could be reinterpreted to be about this time of quarantine and the fear of being around anyone or having too much fun. It made me wonder, is it safe to laugh or dance or be free of it all for just a moment? I know it's not really in my history to do something unintentional or just for the hell of it but my connection to these songs is pretty straightforward, I just wanted to have a little fun and be a little more spontaneous, and I think I needed to remember that I could!

Back by popular demand, the critically acclaimed release by tenor saxophone icon Charles Lloyd, is available once again as a deluxe, limited edition180g, 2LP 2nd pressing - newly remastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, cut at 33 1/3 RPM and pressed by RTI.

This album features guitarist Gábor Szábo, Ron Carter and drummer Pete La Roca captured live in 1965 at Judson Hall and Slugs in New York City. The extensive booklet includes essays and rare photos.

Disc One (Judson Hall):
Side A
1. Sweet Georgia Bright (17:49)
2. How Can I Tell You (11:57)

Side B 1. Lady Gabor (12:50)

Disc Two (Slugs’):
Side C
1. Slugs’ Blues (12:57)
2. Lady Gabor (13:53)

Side D 1. Dream Weaver (15:25)

In December 1975, Grammy award-winning songwriter John Prine played three nights at The Other End (previously and now known as The Bitter End) in Greenwich Village, NYC. The acoustic performances featured some of his best-known songs such as “Angel From Montgomery” and “Hello In There”, from his first four studio albums: John Prine (1971), Diamonds In The Rough (1972), Sweet Revenge (1973) and Common Sense (1975). These rare and previously unreleased solo performances—comprising two full sets—will now be made available, pressed on 180g black vinyl, exclusively RSD Drops 2021. Strictly limited to 12000 copies worldwide.

To say In Heaven is about conquering grief would be oversimplifying everything Tim Showalter has achieved on the eighth studio album from Strand of Oaks. A stunning, hopeful reflection on love, loss, and enlightenment, In Heaven is a triumph in music making, and a preeminent addition to the Strand of Oaks discography.

In late 2018, Showalter’s wife, Sue, lost her mother in a car accident. Soon after, Stan, the cat they both adored, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Showalter quit drinking so he could take better care of his wife and help rebuild the life they shared. And within months, they decided to pack up and move across the country from Philadelphia to Austin, Texas. It was an irrational decision made at the height of a terrible time, but it’s one that shaped so much of what In Heaven is about.

In Heaven was recorded in October 2020 with Kevin Ratterman at Invisible Creature in Los Angeles. Carl Broemel (My Morning Jacket) is featured on guitar throughout the record, while James Iha (The Smashing Pumpkins) contributed vocals and guitar for “Easter.” Bo Koster (MMJ, Roger Waters) provided keyboards, Cedric LeMoyne (Alanis Morrissette, Remy Zero) bass, Scott Moore violin, and Ratterman monstrous drums. Showalter also played a lot of synth on this record, which he hasn’t done since 2014’s HEAL. With clean sounds, Jeff Lynne-esque acoustics, and sophisticated songwriting, he approached In Heaven in a more poised and pop-leaning way than his past releases.

“I wanted to strive for something greater than what I thought I was capable of.”

The result is something extraordinary, as Showalter has crafted a poignant narrative that transcends his personal experiences and achieves a universality rooted not only in loss but joy, celebration, and newfound strength. The gorgeous opener “Galacticana” finds him telling us “I don’t want to drag you down,” a reassurance that his intentions lie in uplifting. But there’s a duality present throughout In Heaven that is palpable, as felt on “Easter,” an exuberant pop anthem featuring jaunty guitar and ethereal vocals courtesy of Iha, that both celebrates Showalter’s new life and references his efforts to “stop the boat from sinking.” It’s a powerful sentiment echoed in slow burner “Hurry,” which showcases some exceptional shredding by Broemel, and beyond, as Showalter explores mortality and a heightened sense of his own existence, intensified by a world where he no longer uses alcohol to cope.

Pairing smart, imaginative lyrics and striking arrangements, tracks like “Carbon” and its magnificent violin stand out, as does “Sister Saturn” with its funky, sinuous groove, and the sublime “Horses at Night,” which features one of Showalter’s most exquisite melodies to date. There’s also a discernible current running through In Heaven of homage to some notable losses in music—John Prine, Jeff Buckley, and Jimi Hendrix all play a part—for In Heaven is about moving beyond sadness or anger to a state of gratitude that we ever had these people to begin with. And while every song provides some clue to Showalter’s personal heaven, the jubilant “Jimi and Stan” says it all, wherein Hendrix and his beloved cat Stan are hanging out, going to shows, and looking at stars together.

And as our musical odyssey ends in the warm embrace of “Under Heaven,” the weight of everything Showalter has manifested—the beauty, and the sadness, and the immensity of it all—hits with tremendous impact. But any sense of hopelessness or melancholy yields to a different feeling entirely, just as he intended. Perhaps we’re feeling stronger, more prepared for something. Or maybe it’s just a reminder: call your parents, text your friends, hug your pets. Listen to your favorite records. And think about what it means to be alive. 

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing in gatefold jacket. Pianist McCoy Tyner was an acknowledged force of nature. On the aptly named Expansions, Tyner fronts a remarkable band consisting of Woody Shaw, Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, Ron Carter, Herbie Lewis, and Freddie Waits. Standouts in a program of four Tyner originals and one standard include the masterpiece "Peresina" and the opening track "Vision." Blue Note Tone Poet Series features all-analog, remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging. Produced by Joe Harley. Mastered by Kevin Gray.

Presented for the first time ever on vinyl! Audiophile 180g pressing of the seminal 1995 Cris Cross albums showcasing Brad Mehldau & Mark Turner. Remastered from the original tapes. "Consenting Adults" captured all of us when we were right at the beginning of developing our own voices" - Brad Mehldau

Side A:
1. Belief
2. Little Melonae I
Side B:
1. Phantasm
2. Afterglow
Side C:
1. Limbo
2. Consenting Adults
Side D:
1. From This Moment On
2. Peace
3. Little Melonae II

1967-1974 is a 10CD box set that celebrates 50 years since the eponymous debut album of British blues/rock band Ten Years After. This collection gathers long-players from the Chrysalis and Deram eras and includes eight studio albums, one live album and a bonus disc of never before heard recordings from 1972 called The Cap Ferrat Sessions, which has been newly mixed by Chris Kimsey. All the albums have been remastered from the original quarter-inch production master tapes. The unreleased- The Cap Ferrat Sessions - exists thanks to Alvin Lee's widow, who discovered a box of recordings in their house in Spain. Chris Kimsey recorded and engineered the original recordings during The Rock N Roll Music To The World album sessions. Kimsey: These re-discovered recordings were not rough demos, not rehearsals, but completed masters that did not make the album due to the time limitations of vinyl at the time. This is a revised package of the previously available, but sold out, book version comes in a clamshell case with a perfect bound booklet featuring extensive sleeve notes by Chris Welch and interviews with the remaining band members, Alvin Lee's family, as well as additional recording notes by Kimsey. The 10CDs are housed in individual album CD wallets.