As part of the band’s ongoing 50th anniversary series, the Grateful Dead will release a two-CD deluxe edition and a special picture disc vinyl edition of Anthem of the Sun on July 13th.
The album combines studio cuts and live recordings of early Dead favorites like “Alligator” and the two-disc package (mastered by Grammy winner David Glasser) includes two versions of Anthem, one “from the original 1968 mix,” and the other from the “more well-known 1971 mix.” The vinyl version (limited to just 10,000 copies) will just include the 1971 mix.
The Anthem of the Sun 50th anniversary double CD edition also includes a previously unreleased live show recorded on 22nd October 1967 at Winterland in San Francisco. This audio has been newly remastered by Jeffrey Norman, and this is the first known recording of the Grateful Dead with Mickey Hart, who joined the band in September 1967
“This is one the most thrilling albums the Grateful Dead ever produced, mixing portions of live recordings from the first six months of Mickey’s tenure with the band, along with studio experimentations that would hint at where the Dead would go when they started recording to 16-track tape the following year,” Grateful Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux said in a statement.
“This is one the most thrilling albums the Grateful Dead ever produced, mixing portions of live recordings from the first six months of Mickey’s tenure with the band, along with studio experimentations that would hint at where the Dead would go when they started recording to 16-track tape the following year,”
“The 1971 remix, produced in order to make the album more accessible to the newer fans who were brought on board with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, has been the most commonly heard version for the past 45+ years. However, having this side-by-side with the original 1968 mix demonstrates countless differences, with the original mix being more primal, psychedelic, and experimental.”
20 vinyl LPs • half-speed remastered • includes hi-res downloads
Universal Music will issue The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2006, a lavish Rolling Stones vinyl box set in June.
This 20LP collection covers 15 studio albums, starting with 1971’s Sticky Fingers and ending with 2016’s Blue & Lonesome. Every album has been remastered and cut at half-speed at Abbey Road Studios, from “vinyl specific” original tape transfers. The records are pressed on 180g vinyl and each album comes with a download card for “HD digital redemption” of the catalogue. 15 studio albums on 180g heavyweight vinyl. Remastered and cut at half speed in Abbey Road studios. From Sticky Fingers – which includes fan favourites Brown Sugar, Wild Horses and Dead Flowers – to the renowned Exile On Main Street, which is featured on various lists as one of the greatest albums of all time! This release contains every album in between, right up to the very latest Grammy-Award winning Blue & Lonesome.
Housed in a highly bespoke box-set that gives the illusion of a 3D colour changing tongue, the product is individually numbered, with original detailed packaging replications, from the Andy Warhol design with working zip on Sticky Fingers, to the colourful and charismatic Some Girls cut out cover!
This collector’s item features every studio album release since 1971, all of which are cut at half speed, ensuring these are among the highest quality vinyl pressings that these classic albums will have ever received, creating an incredible sound quality for the listener.
Described as a ‘limited edition box set’, The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection comes with a numbered certificate of authentication and is presented in a “highly bespoke, lenticular mounted box”. The original packaging has been replicated, so Some Girls includes the 20 cut-outs on the cover, while the sleeve of Sticky Fingers is presented as Andy Warhol’s original design, complete with a working zip with a hidden image underneath and Exile On Main Streetcomes with a set of 12 original postcard inserts.
The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2006 is released on 15th June 2018.
Forth Wanderers know how to open an album. The band’s latest album begins with vocalist Ava Trilling boldly declaring, “I am the one you think of when you’re with her”, on their previous album, 2014’s Tough Love, the first words she hums, over solemn guitar harmonics, are “I want to be known as the girl who’s stone cold.”
“I’m still not known as that—it’s still a desire,” she says along with band members Forth Wanderers guitarists Duke Greene and Ben Guterl, the latter of whom is the band’s primary instrumental songwriter. They headlined recently at famous venue Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn there shortly after releasing Slop via Father/Daughter Records, and they’ve opened there for their mutual high school idol, (Sandy) Alex G (later, when Trilling shows me a video of her eight-month-old German Shepherd , “Proud” is playing in the background). It was back in high school that shared musical passions and live music brought Forth Wanderers together; after high school, the band recorded Tough Love just before all its members except Trilling, the youngest, left for college.
One might have expected the physical separation that college can cause—not to mention the emotional maturing it usually brings—to take a toll on the band’s first full-length, written across this distance. Instead, it’s made them tighter. As Trilling tells it, the process of writing Forth Wanderers“was the exact same thing” as with all their previous releases. If anything, the separation only enhanced the band’s charms: Trilling’s featherlight, melancholy singing and radically open-hearted lyrics; Guterl’s gradually unfurling guitar lines, which notably focus more on piercing single notes than on chords; guitarist Duke Greene, bassist Noah Schifrin, and drummer Zach Lorelli’s magical ability to transform Guterl and Trilling’s foundation into mid-tempo rock songs equal parts muscular and downtrodden.
“We never had the relationship where we would sit down and make the song together,” Trilling says. Their songs have always been Internet-born; Forth Wanderers began when Guterl, as Trilling recalls it with a hearty laugh, “kinda slid into my DMs” with a guitar demo. Greene and Guterl laugh, too, suggesting this is a story they recount often. “I shot my shot,” Guterl adds to even more laughter. Trilling then recalls sending a vocal track back to him without his prompting. “I blew his mind,” she jokes, the whole group still cracking up.
It’s clear that, if anything, Forth Wanderers are a strong bunch of friends as bandmates. Trilling, Guterl, and Greene are elated to be, for once, in the same room (“We’re the only friends we have,” Guterl, certainly the most wry and excitable of the three, jokes). These days, their time together is limited: The band had to record Forth Wanderersin just five days, which they did in their close friend Cameron Konner’s Philadelphia home studio.
Not that the band needs much time to perfect its music (in fact, they’d originally reserved two days with Konner). A Forth Wanderers song comes together in many rooms, with no pressures regarding time. On Forth Wanderers, a particularly impressive result of this freeform approach is Trilling’s increasingly confident melodies and lyrics, which she writes at home, alone. “Taste,” her favorite of the new songs, is exceptionally vulnerable. As she describes it, the “narcissistic and petty” viewpoint of “Nevermine” is riveting. And she’s so assertive on “Saunter” that it’s impossible not to root for her.
“After I write [lyrics], it’s therapeutic,” she says, “because I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh shit, that’s how I’m feeling. I had no idea.’” Even across state lines, Forth Wanderers is a space for all its members to relieve their stresses. “Our relationships are all stronger now, because we have this goal that’s really unique,” Guterl says. “We’re like a family in every sense of the word. We fight and work shit out. It’s the good and bad parts of being in a family.”
Band Members:
Ava Trilling (vocals), Ben Guterl (guitar), Zach Lorelli (drums), Duke Greene (guitar), Noah Schifrin (bass)
When first arriving on the Bay Area music scene in late 2014, Pllush made a dent with a powerful set of tracks that fit nicely within the rising wave of shoegaze/dream pop revival bands at the time. However, due to an undeniable songwriting prowess that extends far beyond convoluted pedal-board setups or louder amps, Pllush had elevated themselves into a league of sonic mastery, not dissimilar from obvious touchstone influences (i.e. Mazzy Star, Slowdive, Portishead). The quartet’s second batch of songs, Please, furthered their growing following and replaced their initial gravitation towards maxed-out guitars and splashed cymbals with an eerie, groove-filled bent, channeling Drop Nineteens at their most tender, and imbuing Grass Widow-esque layers of harmony into songs already dense with melody.
As the world around the band has changed in the interim between releases, they have followed suit- they added an “L” to the name, and undergone the whirlwinds of personal flux that naturally occur in such extended periods of time. But rest assured: the only dynamic of the band that has changed is by each member doubling down into the personal qualities that made this group so special in the first place. Which brings us to the year 2018, and the release of Pllush’s debut LP, Stranger to the Pain.
Whereas on earlier releases, singer/guitarist Karli Helm merely teased her abilities as a singer, here she fully embraces her natural pop-tinged mastery of the human voice, on standouts like “Restart”, pushing the boundaries of the Rock and Roll genre while layering dizzying harmonies over an instrumental track that Built to Spill would kick themselves for not thinking of first. Meanwhile, Eva Treadway provides a perfect foil with an effortlessly cool approach to laying her sometimes light-hearted (“Ortega”) and frequently heartbreaking (“Fallout”) lyrics over her more driving style of guitar playing, as indebted to Slanted and Enchanted era Pavement as it is to the best work of The Donnas, seamlessly working clanging guitar abrasion into pop gems. Dylan Lockey and Sinclair Riley fill out the rhythm section on drums and bass, respectively, with Lockey’s snap-tight precision guiding the mood and tempo of the record (i.e. highlights such as “3:45”), and Riley’s complex bass work constructing a rich and deeply melodic backbone for Helm and Treadway to build upon. Stranger to the Pain is the kind of record that reintroduces a band whose previous catalog stands assuredly on its own as a new and fresh face- and like a conversation with an old friend, once it’s over, you will want to restart.
San Francisco’s Pllush will release their debut album, Stranger to the Pain, on June 8th, 2018. Listen to the track “Ortega” which the band calls “an honest reflection on growing up.“Stranger to the Pain” will be available on Oxblood + Bone Half & Half (limited to 300) and Bone (limited to 300) vinyl. Both variants come with a full color, double-sided insert, download card, and exclusive postcard illustrated by artist, Faye Orlove.
The rollicking guitar pop of Aussie band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever captured our attention at SXSW 2017. Now signed to Sub Pop Records and with a full length album Hope Downs on the way this summer,
Fresh off Coachella, Melbourne-based indie rock band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever performed live on Morning Becomes Eclectic. With two outstanding Talk Tight and French Press EPs already released and a debut full length album on the way – this quintet bounced around their catchy catalogue with ease (including an unreleased standout track and an Orange Juice cover).
It’s rare that a band’s debut album sounds as confident and self-assured as the Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s“Hope Downs”.
To say that the first full-length from the Melbourne quintet improves on their two buzz-building eps from the last few years would be an understatement: the promise those early releases hinted at is fully realized here, with ten songs of urgent, passionate guitar pop that elicit warm memories of bands past, from the Go-Betweens’ jangle to the charmingly lo-fi trappings of New Zealand’s Flying Nun label. but don’t mistake Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever for nostalgists
Hope Downs is the sound of a band finding its own collective voice. the hard-hitting debut album is a testament to the band’s tight-knit and hard-working bonafides. prior to forming the band in 2013, singers/guitarists Fran Keaney, Tom Russo, and Joe White had played together in various garage bands, dating back to high school. when Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever . started, with Joe Russo [Tom’s brother] on bass, MarcelTussie, Joe White’s then-housemate on drums, the chemistry was immediate. after a split ep with You Yangs (another Russo brother’s band), released in the form of a frisbee, they self-released talk tight in 2015, which Sydney-based record label Ivy League gave a wider release the following year. talk tight garnered plaudits from critics, including legendary rock scribe’s. In 2017, Sub Pop released the French Press ep, bringing the band’s chugging and tuneful non-linear indie rock to the rest of the world as they settled into their sound with remarkable ease.
Hope Downs was largely written over the past year in the band’s Melbourne rehearsal room where their previous releases were also written and recorded. the band’s core trio of songwriters hunkered down and wrote as the chaos of the world outside unavoidably seeped into the songwriting process. “we were feeling like we were in a moment where the sands were shifting and the world was getting a lot weirder. there was a general sense that things were coming apart at the seams and people around us were too,” Russo explains. the album title, taken from the name of a vast open cut mine in the middle of Australia, refers to the feeling of “standing at the edge of the void of the big unknown, and finding something to hold on to.” with the help of engineer/producer Liam Judson and his portable setup, the band recorded Hope Downs live, and co-produced ten guitar pop gems over the course of two weeks in northern New South Wales during the winter of 2017. Hope Downs possesses a robust full-band sound that’s all the more impressive considering the band’s avoidance of traditional recording studios. if you loved Talk Tight and the French Press, you certainly won’t be disappointed.
But you might also be surprised at how the band’s sound has grown. there’s a richness and weight to these songs that was previously only hinted at, from the skyscraping chorus of “Sister’s Jeans” to the thrilling climax of album closer “The Hammer.”Hope Downs is as much about the people that populate the world around us—their stories, perspectives, and hopes in the face of disillusionment—as it is about the state of things at large. it’s a record that focuses on finding the bright spots at a time when cynicism all too often feels like the natural state. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are here to remind us to keep our feet on the ground—and Hope Downs is as delicious a taste of terra firma as you’re going to get from a rock band right now.
Earlier this month, Swedish psych monoliths Goat released, ‘Let it Burn’, their first offering since 2016’s ‘Requiem’ LP. The track is an enchanting, fuzzed-out workout that sees the masked troupe amp up their lysergic psychedelic motifs tenfold to create a truly mesmerising piece of work that could be their finest to date.
‘Let it Burn’ was written specifically for the climatic scene in the short movie Killing Gävle, a The Guardian produced film (the video above uses footage from the film) directed by the very talented Joe Fletcher about the famous Gävle Goat in Sweden which every year local custodians of Gävle try to protect a giant straw goat that is built for the town every Christmas being burnt down by mischievous pagans. Obviously Goat’s music was the obvious to soundtrack the film – their back catalogue is used throughout the film but up to now it was the only place you could hear a segment of the 6 minute+ fuzz groove of ‘Let it Burn’ but now thanks to Rocket Recordings it can be heard in all its glory.
Full version is taken from the single ‘Let it Burn’ released 25.05.18
The joy of discovering that a love crush feels the same way about you is so pure, so unimpeachable, so fragile that it threatens to swallow itself whole almost immediately. From the upcoming album I’m All Ears,Let’s Eat Grandma crystallizes the high of newfound infatuation into a three-minute pop gem.
“It’s Not Just Me” begins right when the realization finally kicks in. “And just when we discover that we need each other here,” sighs Rosa Walton, “our lives keep pulling us away.” SOPHIE’s production conjures a fun house of shattered mirrors, as per usual, but here with The Horrors’ Faris Badwan, carves chaotic synths into a sleek glass house that’s already beginning to fissure at the base. The feeling is tenuous and uncertain, but Walton and Jenny Hollingworth revel in it for as long as they can.
“It’s not just me, I know you’re feeling the same way,” the two recite in unison on the chorus. There’s equal parts disbelief and pleasure in their repetition of the line. Let’s Eat Grandma gallivant through seaside vistas and abandoned buildings in the video directed by Balan Evans, driving through the uncharted territory of young romance together. Crushes come and go, but, as with everything attached to the Let’s Eat Grandma project, Rosa and Jenny will stick together.
I’m All Ears releasesJune 29th on Transgressive Records
Brooklyn songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett leads the exquisite folk-pop trio Half Waif, whose new album, Lavender, arrives April 27th. Watch them perform the lovely album opener “Lavender Burning,”
Nandi Rose Plunkett is a seeker. As frontwoman of synth-pop outfit Half Waif, Plunkett writes songs that travel profoundly inward over beds of electronic instrumentation that expand and recede like ocean tides. But there is a darkness that cuts through Half Waif’s songs, hinting at a searching that is often born of loss and struggle. Lavender, the group’s latest album, centers on questions of loneliness and isolation, of the consequences of hard-fought wisdom and self-knowledge.
Half Waif has spent months on the road leading up to the album’s recording, and it shows; many of Lavender’s songs have a narrator who feels adrift, reaching towards an unattainable sense of home. “You used to say / ‘When are you coming back?’ / Then came the day / When you no longer asked,” Plunkett mourns on “Torches.” In an essay about her single “Back In Brooklyn,” a stunning piano ballad from the album, Plunkett describes how returning from tour left her feeling isolated and aching: “I was unmoored and questioning everything — not least of all my decision to forgo the stability and community I had cultivated in New York for something more ephemeral … There is a loneliness about this life that is hard to describe.”
“Back In Brooklyn” is the most unadorned of Lavender’s songs: just Plunkett’s voice and the piano (and a brief sample of a New York subway horn). It’s perhaps the only place on the record where Plunkett’s voice breaks from its classically-trained veneer: For all the impressive clarity and range she demonstrates across the record, there is something nearly heart-stopping about the way her voice cracks as she begs her listener to “listen for me now.” Her formal training shines through, too, in the careful stacks of electronic arrangements in these songs and her layers of vocal harmonies. Bandmates Adan Carlo (bass and guitar) and Zack Levine (live drums) add touches that ground and structure the songs, providing a stable base for Plunkett’s waves of synths and keyboards.
Lavender is, in many ways, an album about isolation, but its inverse threads its way into many songs; themes of connection — specifically, matrilineal connection — appear across the album. The album is named in honor of Plunkett’s grandmother, who had a habit of picking lavender from her garden to boil on the stove — a ritual of beauty, but also one of purification, Plunkett believes. On “Salt Candy,” Plunkett addresses her beloved maternal figures directly: “I was once a thousand other things now I’m not / I don’t understand why / Mother do you recognize your daughter? / Little head so full of big ideas.” There’s an ache to the song, which — like many on the album — pulls gently on the tangled threads of growth, dependency, the self and family, earnestly seeking an answer yet fearful of triggering a total unraveling. But across its 12 tracks, Lavender shows Plunkett coming to terms with the reality that pain is often an important intermediary to wisdom, that a little unraveling can help let the light in.
Half Waif – “Lavender Burning” Recorded Live: 4/16/2018 – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Lavender comes out April 27th through Cascine Records.
First time reissue on any format of the 1994 album by Spectrum. Spectrum is the project of Sonic Boom (ex-Spacemen 3 as well as Experimental Audio Research) and collaborators. Technically his 3rd album but the 2nd under the name Spectrum. Carrying on the signature sound exemplified on Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) , Highs, Lows, AndHeavenly Blows lulls the listener into a deep trance with it’s droning and hypnotic tracks and treated vocals on top of a myriad of analog synths and Sonic’s recognizable guitar treatments. The first track Undo the Taboo sets the stage for a meditative ride that doesn’t let up until the last track. Absolutely crucial and long awaited reissue.
Working with guitarist and sometime vocalist Scott Riley as well as regular collaborators Pete Bain aka Bassman from Spacemen 3Alf Hardy Sonic led a new version of Spectrum into murkier waters with the low-key but quietly powerful Highs, Lows and Heavenly Blow. There’s nothing like “How You Satisfy Me” and its immediate pop blast here, while the generally lighter and more gently spaced tones of “Soul Kiss” as a whole are mostly absent until the album’s conclusion. There the wistful amble of “Don’t Pass Me By” and the similarly minded “I Know They Say” help set up the great conclusion, “Take Me Away,” as pristine a psych confectionery as there’ll ever be, with the pace and delivery of the best lullaby around. Other inspiration comes in part from the freeform work on the first Experimental Audio Research releases, only here meshed, at least part of the time, with song structures.
Subtle ones, admittedly –– “Undo the Taboo” makes for one heck of a minimal (to the point of almost non existent) melody and understated delivery, and that was the single from the album. “Take Your Time” is almost an anthem in context thanks to the great lead piano/keyboard melody, a drawing on the blues/gospel roots that helped inform some of his best work as much as his old bandmate Jason Pierce’s. Other songs call to mind earlier Sonic highlights — “Then I Just Drifted Away” uses the spoken word/steady pace approach familiar from songs like Spacemen 3’s“Ode to Street Hassle” and his solo single “Angel,” only even more sedated, slurred, and completely floating. Elsewhere, Sonic’s increasing tendency toward freeform exploration comes to the fore, resulting in the instrumental work of tunes like “Feedback” (living up to its name, if very beautifully sculpted and arranged feedback).
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