“The 13th Floor Elevators’ “We Are Not Live” serves as both a historical correction and a long-overdue gift to fans of psychedelic rock. To understand its significance, one must first look back to the original 1968 album “Live”. Issued while the band was fracturing under the weight of legal troubles and Roky Erickson’s declining mental health, the 1968 record was one of the most notorious “fake” live albums in rock history.
The label, desperate for content but lacking a professional live recording, took studio outtakes, alternate versions and existing masters, then crudely overdubbed the sounds of a cheering crowd. Legend has it the audience noise was lifted from a boxing match, and the result was a sonic mess where the applause swelled at inappropriate moments, distracting from the raw, garage-psych energy of the Austin pioneers. “We Are Not Live” finally strips away that artificial veneer to reveal the music as it was meant to be heard.
By removing the intrusive crowd noise, the album functions as a “de-mixed” restoration of those 1966–1968 sessions. It transforms what was once a source of frustration for purists into a crisp, essential collection of studio performances. The tracks included represent the band at their most visceral, featuring the piercing, soulful vocals of Erickson and the rhythmic, otherworldly pulse of Tommy Hall’s electric jug — an instrument that provided the Elevators with a sonic signature unlike any of their contemporaries.
Rod Stewart’s “Alternate Atlantic Crossing” serves as a fascinating sonic time capsule, peeling back the polished layers of one of the most pivotal albums in rock. When the original “Atlantic Crossing” was released in 1975, it was a total transformation of Stewart’s identity. Having left the boozy, loose camaraderie of Faces and the foggy shores of Britain for the sun-drenched studios of Muscle Shoals and Los Angeles, Stewart was aiming for a global, soulful sophistication.
This version offers a rare glimpse into the laboratory where that new sound was forged, stripping away the radio-ready sheen to reveal the raw, rhythmic nerves of the recording sessions. Produced by the legendary Tom Dowd, the sessions were famous for their “Fast Side” and “Slow Side” structure, a dichotomy that defined Stewart’s career between raucous rock and tender balladry. In these alternate takes, that divide feels even more visceral.
The fast tracks crackle with an uninhibited energy. Meanwhile, the alternate versions of the slow tracks provide an intimate, almost voyeuristic experience. These are some of the most famous melodies in the Great American and British Songbooks, and hearing them in a less-than-final state highlights the vulnerability in Stewart’s signature rasp.
“Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: Live From Asbury Park 2024 is more than just another entry in the band’s exhaustive live archive; it is a profound homecoming that closes a 50-year circle. Recorded during their headlining set at theSea.Hear.Now Festival on September 15th, 2024, the album captures a performance that felt less like a standard tour stop and more like a spiritual reclamation of the boardwalk that birthed the Springsteen legend.
For three hours, the band played to over 35,000 fans on the very sand where Bruce once wandered as a busker and a young dreamer, delivering a setlist that leaned heavily into the local mythology of his early career. What makes this live recording particularly essential is its thematic focus. While recent tours have centered on meditations on mortality and the power of memory, the Asbury Park set was a vibrant celebration of origins. The album opens with a sequence that feels like a time capsule unearthed, featuring rare performances of tracks from “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J”. and “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle”. Hearing “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?” and “Growin’ Up” played within sight of the Stone Pony and the ghost of Madam Marie’s gives the music a visceral, atmospheric weight that studio recordings can’t replicate. “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” serves as a bittersweet postcard from a bygone era and remains the definitive anthem of the Jersey Shore.
Box Set Of x5 LP Vinyl – Available for the first time on vinyl, hear Bruce Springsteen’s electrifying homecoming performance in Asbury Park at the 2024 Sea.Hear.Now Festival. Spanning over three hours of powerhouse performances in front of 35,000 people, this 5LP set features Springsteen at his dynamic best, backed by the legendary E Street Band. Spanning Springsteen’s iconic catalogue, this record includes hits such as “Thunder Road” and “Dancing in the Dark,” plus songs that Springsteen wrote just down the road from this stage, including “Blinded By The Light” and “Growin’ Up.”
Son Volt’s “Sound Signal Serenades” offers a potent return to the elemental alt-country strengths that have defined Jay Farrar’s career since the dissolution of Uncle Tupelo. The record is anchored by Farrar’s unmistakable, unvarnished baritone, which serves as a steady guide through a landscape of restless guitars and melodic clarity.
The songwriting on “Sound Signal Serenades” avoids nostalgia for its own sake, instead opting for a forward motion that balances personal memory with broader themes of history and endurance. Sonically, the album moves fluidly between stripped-down acoustic intimacy and high-energy, full-band drives, blending folk-rock and electric grit with the confidence of a band that fully understands its own identity.”
Son Volt’s latest album, “Sound Signal Serenades“, is released as a Record Store Day exclusive. Featuring twelve originals, Son Volt’s return to the elemental strengths that have long defined their sound-restless guitars, melodic clarity, and songs rooted in the lived experience of American landscapes. Anchored by Jay Farrar’s steady, unvarnished voice, the record balances reflection and resolve, drawing lines between personal memory and the wider currents of history, change, and endurance.
The songs move fluidly between stripped-down intimacy and full-band drive, blending folk-rock, country, and electric grit with the confidence of a band that knows exactly who they are. There’s a sense of forward motion throughout the album-never nostalgic for it’s own sake, but deeply aware of where it’s been. Lyrically, Farrar explores themes of connection, resilience, and place, finding meaning in both the ordinary and the unsettled. This album stands as another chapter in Son Volt’s enduring catalogue: honest, grounded, and quietly powerful, reaffirming their role as one of America’s most consistent and thoughtful rock bands.
Limited to 3,000 copies and pressed on sky blue opaque vinyl.
Sonic Youth’s “Diamond Seas” represents a monumental return for a band that had redefined the boundaries of guitar music decades prior. While the group’s legacy was firmly cemented in the noise-rock pantheon, this project arrived not merely as a nostalgia trip but as a complex, avant-garde reimagining of one of their most transcendent compositions. The release serves as a “plunderphonic” orchestration of “The Diamond Sea”, the sprawling epic that originally anchored their 1995 album “Washing Machine“.
By enlisting the expertise of composer and digital pioneer John Oswald — the visionary behind the landmark Grayfolded project Sonic Youth managed to transform their history into a singular, continuous sonic tapestry. At the heart of “Diamond Seas” is an ambitious technical and artistic feat: the seamless weaving together of 32 distinct live performances of the title track recorded during the band’s peak experimental era of 1995 and 1996. Oswald treats the band’s live improvisations as raw material, layering Thurston Moore’s cascading leads, Lee Ranaldo’s bell-like harmonics, Kim Gordon’s propulsive bass and Steve Shelley’s rhythmic foundation into a dense, orchestral wall of sound. The result is a recording that feels both familiar and entirely alien, capturing the collective intuition of a band that operated at a near-telepathic level.
This release has 32 live performances of Sonic Youth’s “The Diamond Sea” plunderphoniclly orchestrated by John Oswald (of Grateful Dead “Grayfolded” fame) – providing two distinctly new experiences of the classic track from “Washing Machine“.
Side A features 1995 performances exclusively while side B spotlights only 1996 performances.
Each side clocks in at precisely 20:44. A sonic experience that will spin dry your ears!
Side 1: Diamond Seas 1995 Side 2: Diamond Seas 1996
Nonesuch Records releases a vinyl EP from Robert Plant this Record Store Day, “Saving Grace: All That Glitters..”.
The record follows his recent critically acclaimed album, Saving Grace; both feature singer Suzi Dian, and a band of musicians from the English countryside that Plant calls home. The EP’s four tracks, recently recorded especially for RSD, explore the folk and Americana songs that Plant and the band love: the traditional tunes “The Blackest Crow” and “Two Coats,” arranged by Robert Plant and Saving Grace, as well as Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl” and Bert Jansch’s “Poison.”
“Robert Plant And Saving Grace’s EP All That Glitters… follows their critically acclaimed album “Saving Grace”, including a band of musicians from the English countryside that Plant calls home. The EP’s four tracks explore the folk and Americana songs that Plant and the band love:
The traditional tunes “The Blackest Crow” and “Two Coats“, arranged by Plant and Saving Grace, as well as Gillian Welch’s “Orphan Girl” and Bert Jansch’s “Poison”. Saving Grace is what Plant calls “a songbook of the lost and found.” Its genesis was during lockdown, when Plant’s customary wandering was all but forbidden. It was in the English countryside that he connected closely to this diverse group of musicians who had a shared lean towards his corners of evocative song.
For more than sixty years now, the musical development of Dan Penn has been like a movie that is constantly in production with every glimpse of the director’s work in progress sought after by his fans. There have been countless stills from the movie in the form of the many classic recordings of his material by other artists that have cemented his place in the songwriters Pantheon. Very occasionally, we’ve had the pleasure of enjoying his own work through the handful of solo albumshe has released as full studio productions – “Nobody’s Fool” (1973), “DoRight Man” (1994) and “Living On Mercy” (2020).
Legendary singer-songwriter Dan Penn — author of some of the most enduring tunes in popular music history — has released few albums in his entire storied career. With “Smoke Filled Room“, a personal collection of songs, he adds one more. Rooted in the red clay of Alabama and shaped by the studios of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Penn’s work has long been central to the beating heart of Southern soul. An understated, yet powerful late-career offering, “Smoke Filled Room” adds to his legacy.
The album gathers rare and previously unreleased material from across Penn’s catalogue, which he has revisited and refined over a lifetime in music. Though Penn, now 84, has spent nearly 70 years writing songs for countless artists, his own studio output has been remarkably sparse.
As a result, his songwriting demos have long been prized by devoted fans and collectors. Over the past few decades, several collections have surfaced. He continues to revisit his archives, shaping overlooked material into fully realized works; “Smoke Filled Room” is his latest expression of that process. With “Smoke Filled Room”, Dan Penn reminds us that great songs don’t age. They deepen — and gain new resonance.
And then of course there is the Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham live album, “Moments From This Theatre”, where the songwriters’ skills are so spellbindingly executed publicly in their purest, naked form.
Like all writers, he is constantly jotting ideas, returning to them time after time to spark them into life. Many get left behind but there are some that keep developing. Itches that need to be scratched. Periodically, we get to admire some of these survivors when Dan releases a collection of songs that he deems good enough to share with the outside world. So far, there have been few in the series of “demo” albums issued privately on his own Dandy label. “Blue Nite Lounge” was the first in 1999. It came out because he had been in Louisiana on a songwriting trip with Carson Whitsett and Bucky Lindsey recording their efforts for what he intended to be his next full studio production. When he got back home and heard the results, he decided that he simply couldn’t match the vocals he had done so it got released after a bit more work.
Inspired by the reception it got, he followed it up in 2008 with “Junkyard Junky” as a consequence of him re-evaluating some archive material and deciding it was too good to just gather dust. He repeated the process with “I Need A Holiday” in 2013.
But aside from “The Inside Track On Bobby Purify” (which was a look through the songwriter’s keyhole at the Bobby Purify album he produced in 2006), it’s been a long wait for this latest collection of his demos. “Smoke Filled Room” is the most recent review of his musical scrapbook and it has revealed original versions of some great songs that somehow never made it further than the Penn workbench.
As ever, the icing on the cake is Dan’s soulful singing and southern groove which bursts out of every track.
This selection clearly illustrates the breadth of his range as a writer, especially when he is bouncing ideas around with the other collaborators on these sessions and in particular, with Carson Whitsett and Bucky Lindsey. Their contribution at the song writing summit meetings with Dan was always fruitful. Sadly,we’ve lost both of these musical architects now, but they live on through this release and their other work. These gatherings were regular events over the course of the trio’s friendship, and it is a real joy hearing Carson’s contribution on keyboards on so many of these recordings. Bucky’s inimitable voice on “Crazy Ol’ Girl” is a treat too.
Let’s not forget that these tracks on “Smoke Filled Room” really are just demos because you might well do when you’re listening to them. Normally, this kind of stuff doesn’t get heard outside of the world of song-pitching. They are not made with any intention of being released in the original format. It is just part of the daily work of the songwriter and so it’s interesting listening to them and imagining how they might be interpreted by other artists. However, there is nothing quite like hearing them from the creator himself.
When he told me that he had another collection ready for public consumption and asked what I thought of the idea, I said that if Dan Penn reckons that they are good enough to be heard that’s good enough for me.
Next in the line-up of foundational Little Feat albums to get the Rhino Deluxe treatment is the band’s 1971 self-titled debut album. Releasing as a 2LP vinyl set exclusively for RSD 2026, it includes the original album, AAA-cut from original master tape, alongside a bonus disc of rare previously unreleased alternate versions and outtakes from their early recording sessions.
The self-titled debut album by Little Feat, originally released in 1971, stands as one of the most sophisticated opening statements in the history of American rock ’n’ roll. While it didn’t achieve immediate commercial superstardom, it established Lowell George as a singular force — a slide guitar virtuoso with a surrealist’s wit and a soul singer’s phrasing.
The “Little Feat” Deluxe Editionfinally gives this foundational record the expansive treatment it deserves. Curated with the participation of surviving band members, this is a masterclass in the spirit of the band’s early days, blending country-rock, blues, and folk into a greasy, soulful stew that could only have come out of Los Angeles in the early ’70s.
The first disc features a pristine remaster of the original 11-track album. But the second disc is where the Deluxe label truly earns its keep, offering a treasure trove of previously unreleased outtakes, demos, and alternate versions from the 1970 sessions at United Western Recorders. These archival tracks provide a fascinating “fly-on-the-wall” perspective of the band finding their voice. Perhaps most exciting are the session outtakes that feature different instrumental arrangements, revealing the band’s willingness to experiment with tempo and tone.
This limited-edition release of Mark Lanegan’s album “Bubblegum” marks the first time that his original plan for the record is being presented. During the sessions, Mark and his stellar cast of collaborators (PJ Harvey, Joshua Homme, Greg Dulli, & Duff McKagan etc) recorded enough material for two albums, but things changed and the album’s final track listing ended up being much different. This edition presents his original plan for the album.
The excavation of Mark Lanegan’s creative vault reaches a definitive peak with the release of “Bubblegum” (Original Draft), a comprehensive archival project that strips away the polished veneer of his 2004 masterpiece to reveal the jagged, skeletal remains of its inception. Released as part of a massive 20th-anniversary celebration of the original album, this collection serves as a sonic ghost story, documenting the transition from Lanegan’s folk-rooted melancholia into the heavy, industrial-blues hybrid that would define his later years.
The original “Bubblegum” was already a sprawling, star-studded affair featuring the likes of PJ Harvey, Josh Homme and Izzy Stradlin, but the Original Draft provides a voyeuristic look at the solitary demos and alternate takes recorded in hotel rooms and low-rent studios across the globe.
It is an essential document for understanding how a singer often associated with the grunge explosion of the 1990s managed to reinvent himself as a high-priest of the desert-rock avant-garde.”
Tracklisting: A1. When Your Number Isn’t Up, A2. Hit the City (feat. PJ Harvey), A3. Mirrored, A4. Methamphetamine Blues, B1. One Hundred Days, B2. Bombed, B3. Like Little Willie John, B4. Strange Religion, C1. Josephine, C2. Come to Me (feat. PJ Harvey), C3. Message to Mine, C4. Wedding Dress, D1. Lexington Slow Down, D2. Skeletal History, D3. Blood (Crackers & Honey)
Pressed on white vinyl, this 2XLP has been beautifully mastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road. Profits from the record will be donated to the newly created Mark Lanegan Foundation.
Foxtide are made up of Elijah Gibbins-Croft, Oey James and Ian Robles, Foxtide are a byproduct of being bred by the beach and raised by a DIY house-show scene. The SoCal three-piece were formed around garage jam sessions and earned their cult following through the intense vitality of their live shows. First starting to release music in 2019, it was the band’s second EP “Visions” in 2021 that took them from a hometown secret to a band to watch nationally.
Foxtide have played alongside Backseat Lovers, Echo & The Bunnymen, Lime Cordiale, Sarah & The Sundays, Mustard Service, Beach Goons, and more. Moving into the chapter of their next project, Foxtide are abandoning the idea that they need to create “perfect” music, and simply making what they like to listen to. Tinged with the aloofness of early 2000s rock, while experimenting with the formulas of modern pop, all threads are knotted in the authenticity behind Foxtide’s unrelenting love for music.”
Foxtide’s album “Entropy” is set to be released on April 17th, 2026. The album will feature 11 songs and has a total duration of 17 minutes.
Fans can listen to the album on various platforms, including Apple Music and Amazon Music.
Arriving on April 17th via Position Music, Foxtide will release their second album titled “Entropy”. A more mature step away from the surf-rock foundation the band introduced themselves with, “Entropy” draws near to the disorderly quality of life. Where celestial, nostalgic synths soar, the record remains tethered by guitar-forward arrangements and unguarded lyrics
San Diego’s Foxtide release one more single ahead of their new record, titled “Wait it Out.” The closing track of the upcoming album, Foxtide show themselves a lot of grace on the new song. Tender, patient, and anthemic, “Wait it Out” leafs through the pages of a chapter without allowing the book to slam shut.
Singer Elijah Gibbins-Croft said, “‘Wait it Out’ can be a message to yourself or the ones you love. That you’re willing to be patient for yourself or for them. Whether it’s waiting until you see them again or waiting with them for the hard times to pass.”
The album is described as a more mature step away from the surf- rock foundation, with celestial, nostalgic synths and guitar-forward arrangements. The title track, “Wait it Out,” is a message of patience, encouraging listeners to wait for themselves or loved ones.
The Fat Angel Sings 