An essential rock artefact tracing The Groundhogs from their pre – ‘Thank Christ For The Bomb’ blues roots to the final live show for the classic line up of Tony McPhee (guitar and vocals), Pete Cruikshank (bass) and Ken Pustelnik (drums).
Never before heard recordings from the Warner Brothers’ vaults including a vintage 1969 set from their show at the Richmond Athletic Ground (AKA The Crawdaddy Club) and their final explosive set at the Pocono Raceway track.
Includes the live debut of what would become the anthemic ‘Cherry Red’ and McPhee’s seismic destruction of ‘Amazing Grace’. A career-spanning gem from the ultimate heavy rock power trio book-ending 976 days and 250-plus live shows.
“In their stage act they concentrate on being as heavy and as hard-hitting as possible.” The Scene magazine “Performing on stage we feel that the emphasis is on excitement so we play the numbers that involve the greatest amount of movement and dynamics,” Tony McPhee told Star Pop.
Brisbane band The Saints were as good as any international punk band and better than many. ‘EternallyYours’ (1978) is a punk rock classic with the addition of a horn section being an inspired creative choice that would reach even greater heights with the band’s follow up album ‘Prehistoric Sounds’ released later the same year.
Australia’s The Saints predated the punk releases of soon-to-be iconic UK bands like the Sex Pistols, releasing debut single ‘(I’m) Stranded’ in September 1976. By 1978 however, with their second album “Eternally Yours”, they had already moved on from punk, pivoting to an R&B oriented sound backed by horns.
on Music On Vinyl. Includes insert. Due 17th January 2025
The Saints were the punk era band from Australia featuring lead guitar ace Ed Kuepper. “Prehistoric Sounds” was the last album he featured on before everything got a bit frayed between him and singer Chris Bailey. It showcases how their rock-orientated sound blended with horns and a soul influences which yielded Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding covers.
John Cale was never very kind to his solo debut, “Vintage Violence”. When it was released in early 1970, Cale had been out of The Velvet Underground for less than two years. He wanted to prove he could be the songwriter, the person penning the words and melodies behind which a band could work. “I was masked on “Vintage Violence,” he wrote much later. “You’re not really seeing the personality.” Indeed, Cale’s personality as a polyglot seemingly interested in everything emerged more and more on his next two solo albums, his only two for Reprise: 1972’s bracing and exploratory classical sojourn, “The Academy in Peril”,and 1973’s masterclass in anxious but accessible songcraft, “Paris 1919”. By reissuing both records in tandem, it reaffirms the artistic fearlessness Cale then fostered at the edge of 30, when all of music seemed like one inviting playpen.
“Paris 1919” is richly poetic and hugely ambitious for the time, a sublime fusion of rock, classical and avant-garde music.
“Revisiting work from the past is a double-edged sword for me. Of course, it’s bound to happen when you’ve been making music for 60 years or so. . . What’s unique about this process with Domino, is their desire to get it right. Not merely re-issue something for the sake of an anniversary or racking up a catalogue favorite – but finding new treasures and highlighting what made it special in the first place. After hearing the test pressings, it occurred to me that the new mastering was a major part of how these works will be presented, rather than simply being preserved. There are moments of clarity and even a laugh or two had by revisiting not only the music, but recalling the sessions (and antics) that made up what became these two recordings. It is my pleasure to share these with you . . . again.” – John Cale, September 2024
Includes previously unreleased outtakes and a brand new recording, “Fever Dream 2024: You’re a Ghost.”
Recorded as a live film in their Los Angeles practice space in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic, and originally billed as “Live From The Astral Plane“, Death Valley Girls’ “Levitation Sessions” live album has finally been given a physical release. Featuring songs from the garage rockers’ fourth album “Under The Spell Of Joy” get an airing alongside other career highlights.
Neon swirl vinyl LP on The Reverberation Appreciation Society.
Off the back of winning the 2024 Mercury Award for their debut album This Could Be Texas; Leeds’ finest band English Teacher release an exclusive limited edition 140 gram, 10” Crystal Clear vinyl of their Live from Maida Vale EP. The EP includes 2 stunning covers of “Birds of Feather” by Billie Eilish and LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down”.
Following the huge success of their 2024 debut album “This Could Be Texas” that culminated in their Mercury Prize win, Leeds’ finest indie band English Teacher reveal a new live EP “Live From BBC Maida Vale”. Largely recorded for BBC Radio 6Music, these five tracks include two great covers of Billie Eilish’s ‘Birds Of A Feather’ and LCD Soundsystem’s ‘New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’.
Our version of ‘Birds of a feather’ by Billie Eilish from our ‘Live from BBC Maida Vale’ EP
A bruising and shadowy return to form from original Smashing Pumpkins members Jimmy Chamberlin, James Iha, and Billy Corgan. Recorded in the immediate aftermath of their 33- song concept album, “Atum”, “Aghori Mhori Mei” harkens back to the band’s early 90’s canon; where guitars, bass, drums, and spiking vocals ruled, A return to the classic Pumpkins sound of the early 90’s, featuring the original line-up of Corgan, Chamberlain and Iha, unfortunately sans D’arcy (when will those guys make up?!?). Expect fuzz-drenched guitars, pounding drums and the main man big ol’ Billy to craft more pop hooks than you can shake a gish at.
The Smashing Pumpkins’ catalogue is a study in duality, alternating between explosive, metallic hard rock and shimmering, experimental art-pop. “Sighommi,” the lead single off “Aghori Mhori Mei, lands in the former category, full of lithe grooves and bone-crunching guitar chugs. Billy Corgan’s melodic sneer is the cherry on top, giving “Sighommi” an intangible sense of longing even as its guitars crash like waves against the rocky shore.
LP on Martha’s Music. Includes poster exclusive to indie stores.
“Shazam” is the second studio album by English rock band the Move, released in February 1970 by Regal Zonophone. The album marked a bridge between the band’s quirky late 1960s pop singles and the more aggressive, hard rock, long-form style of their later albums.
It was six songs, three Roy Wood originals on Side One, and three seemingly disconnected cover versions on the flip, all delivered with Rick Price’s growling electric bass, the off-kilter drum fills of Bev Bevan (the edges of which got sanded off somewhere around ELO’s second album), lots of 12-string electric guitars from Wood and the stylish veddy-veddy British vocals of Carl Wayne. (And some between-song comments from passers-by recorded on Great Portland Street in London.)
“Shazam” bears down and never lets up, even on would-be ballads like “Beautiful Daughter” that hold some elements of that gritty aftertaste of menace that the harder rocking tunes embrace, like “HelloSusie” which jumps into a 6/8 time middle-eight, stretching further afield with some Bevan tom-tom fills, drenched in a tight echo. The song in a more sanitized version was a hit for Amen Corner, sung by Andy Fairweather-Low, but said hit never equalled the nutty abandon of the Move’s original.
The centerpiece of “Shazam” is “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited,” a wayward revision of an earlier track the band had done on their debut album; with musical quotes from The Nutcracker, Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” liberally ladled into the midsection of the song, the re-do stretches the original version into nearly nine minutes of musical insanity, topped by CarlWayne’s neo-cabaret delivery of Wood’s sing-song lyrics.
And turning a Frankie Laine cover of Mann-Weil’s “Don’t Make My Baby Blue” into an exercise in glorious heaviosity highlights the disparity between Wayne’s sweet singing and the grinding electric backing track.
Overall, “Shazam” was and is an incredibly satisfying listening experience; fifty-four years old, and still a regular resident of my turntable. And when I play “Hello Susie” on my car stereo, the windows go down, the volume goes up and the singalong starts anew.
NonesuchRecords releases a deluxe edition of Wilco’s 2004 Grammy Award–winning album “A Ghost is Born”. The box set comprises either nine vinyl LPs and four CDs or nine CDs – including the original album, alternates, outtakes, and demos, charting the making of “A Ghost Is Born” plus the complete 2004 concert recording from Boston’s Wang Center and the band’s “fundamentals” workshop sessions. It includes 65 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a 48-page hardcover book with previously unpublished photos and a new liner note by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr.
“A Ghost Is Born” was released commercially on June 22, 2004, debuting at No. 8 on USAchart. The album, which Mehr calls ‘an eclectic array of dark ballads, upbeat pop songs, Krautrock chug, noise rock freakouts, and roots rock abandon,’ was widely acclaimed as one of 2004’s best, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NPR, NME, the Associated Press, The Wire, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Uncut, among many others. The album earned the band its first Grammy, for Best Alternative Music Album. The album also won a Grammy for Best Recording Package.
For the “A Ghost Is Born” recording, Wilco was Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Leroy Bach, Glenn Kotche, and Mikael Jorgensen; Jim O’Rourke, who mixed the band’s previous release “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, co-produced the album with Wilco. Leroy Bach left Wilco at the completion of the sessions and the band announced the addition of two new members: Pat Sansone and Nels Cline. Sansone and Cline toured with Wilco to promote “A Ghost Is Born” and that line-up has remained unchanged since 2004.
As Tweedy said to Mehr for his new liner note, “Making that record, and then finding this line up, that was the start of something – of having a band that can play anything. That’s why, 20 years later, we’re still here and still going.”
Wilco first began sessions for what would become “A Ghost Is Born” in early 2002 at Chicago’s Soma E.M.S., where they had mixed “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot“. Much of the album was tracked live in the studio with O’Rourke and engineer Chris Shaw. They also reunited there with engineer and soon-to-be-bandmate Mikael Jorgensen.
At Soma, the band began sketching out music using Tweedy’s notebooks of lyrics, poetry, and prose. Mehr notes: ‘In between more traditional song tracking, the group would engage in a series of conceptual improvisations in the studio. These musical experiments, broadly known as ‘Fundamentals’… were part of what Kotche said was ‘an attempt to search for a new group identity. To see what we could make this band into.’’
In the fall of 2003, the band relocated to New York to finish recording at Sear Sound. “It seemed like the band needed to get out of Chicago, get out of the working mode they’d been in, and only be thinking about making a record,” O’Rourke told Mehr. There, playing together in the corner of a large studio, the album began to take its final shape.
Emerging from a period of addiction and rehab, Tweedy discussed how he feels about “A Ghost Is Born” in retrospect. As he told Mehr, “I was worried the album was going to feel like something dark and not me anymore. But the album was ahead of me as a person. It was the part of me that I was trying to preserve – enthusiastic and furious about the world, as well as open and loving. I reached that in the music, before I could get there emotionally on my own.”
“A Ghost Is Born”was the second Wilco release on Nonesuch Records, preceded by the landmark “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. The relationship with Nonesuch would last nearly a decade and include two more studio albums – “Sky Blue Sky” and “Wilco”(the album) – along with a live album and a live DVD, plus reissues of earlier records, before Wilco began its own label, dBpm.
Tom Petty’s estate have approved an expanded reissue of Petty and The Heartbreakers’ cult favorite “Long After Dark” as well as a limited theatrical reissue of “Heartbreakers Beach Party”, a legendary lost documentary created for MTV by Cameron Crowe in his directorial debut. But the party isn’t over yet: the estate is teaming up with Third Man Records to release a vinyl-only live set for the first time.
“Live in Edinburgh 1982: The Gennaro Tapes” is a triple album capturing a set at the Edinburgh Playhouse in Scotland at the close of 1982, just about a month after “Long After Dark” hit record store shelves.
With the band newly energized following the addition of new bassist Howie Epstein, this set captures a powerful 20-song set that includes tracks from the new album (lead single “You Got Lucky,” “Change of Heart,” Straight Into Darkness,” “A One Story Town”), favourites from their growing catalogue (“Don’t Do Me Like That,” “Refugee,” “Breakdown,” “Listen to Her Heart” and a powerful opening version of “American Girl”), and even a fistful of classic rock and soul covers (The Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” a one-two punch of The Isley Brothers’ “Shout” and The Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star”). The set was captured on cassette from the soundboard by one of the band’s most loyal road crew members, house mixer Gennaro Rippo, and “has not been touched since the day it was captured, pressed directly from cassette to vinyl.”
“Live in Edinburgh” will be available on vinyl in three colour variants: turquoise (for Petty’s official web store), orange wisp (for all independent record retailers), and maroon “reverse splatter” (for Third Man’s official web store; we’ll update with this link as it goes live). All tracks recorded live at the Edinburgh Playhouse, Edinburgh, Scotland – 12/9/1982.
All three versions will be released next Friday, November 29th.
The Fat Angel Sings 