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New Release Round-Up 02-11-22
Eddie Vedder - Earthling - Republic
Earthling, the new album from Eddie Vedder, includes the tracks "Long Way," "The Haves," and more. It was produced by Andrew Watt and features special guest artists.
Priscilla Block - Welcome To The Block Party - Mercury Nashville
Priscilla Block draws listeners in with her unfiltered, relatable songwriting and catchy melodies. "I love writing about real-life experiences and the ups and downs that I've gone through," Priscilla says. "I don't sugarcoat anything, and I think that's the beauty of songwriting and being an artist. It's a little sass, a little trash and a little sad," she describes with a knowing wink as her catalog rolls easily from heartbreak to laughter. Features the Country radio hit, "Just About Over You."
Boulevards - Electric Cowboy: Born In Carolina Mud - Normaltown Records
“I was born in the North Carolina mud,” says Jamil Rashad, better known as Boulevards, one of the most idiosyncratic artists making music in the Tarheel State. His fourth album, Electric Cowboy: Born In Carolina Mud, is caked in the soil where he grew up, mired in the muck of this place—not stuck but freed. Grounded in personal experience and haunted by personal demons, Electric Cowboy is an album that reaches out, that embraces the world, that mixes the confessional and the communal. But the dominant sound—the dominant mindset—is funk: gritty, warm, weird, charismatic. Rashad once again composed and recorded with Blake Rhein, guitarist for Durand Jones & the Indications, after they had worked so well together on 2020’s Brother! EP. They corralled an all-star team that included Adrian Quesada from the Grammy-nominated neo-soul act Black Pumas and Colin Croom from the Chicago indie-rock outfit Twin Peaks.
Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Harold & Maude: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - A&M
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the landmark film's release, this new 180g LP version of the soundtrack combines nine Cat Stevens originals as well as - for the first time - additional dialogue and instrumental music from the film plus unheard audio masters for "Don't Be Shy" and "If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out." All audio has been remastered at Abbey Road Studios. This new edition features enhanced packaging - liner notes, lyrics, transcription of movie dialogue, and photos.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Kanye West - Donda [Deluxe 2 CD]
Alt-J - The Dream [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Milky Clear LP]
Alicia Keys - KEYS
Dan Andriano & The Bygones - Dear Darkness
Slash - 4 (feat. Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators) [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Purple LP]
Spoon - Lucifer On The Sofa
Alan Parsons - One Note Symphony: Live In Tel Aviv
Various Artists - Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2
Fort Romeau - Beings of Light
Empath - Visitor [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Bone LP]
The Cactus Blossoms - One Day
Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio - Cold As Weiss [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Clear w/Blue LP]
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Live In Melbourne '21 [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition 2 LP]
Nuclear Bubble Wrap - Problem Attic [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition LP]
Amos Lee - Dreamland
Urge Overkill - Oui [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Orange & Green Splatter LP]
Brandy - The Best of Brandy
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition 2LP]
Falle Nioke & Ghost Culture - Badiare EP [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Transparent Green Vinyl]
Pozi - Typing EP [Limited Edition Transparent Sea Green Vinyl]
Zeal & Ardor - Zeal & Ardor [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition White LP]
& More .....
Now Hear This! - February 2022
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New Release Round-Up 02-04-22
Hippo Campus - LP3 - Grand Jury
Minneapolis indie pop rebels Hippo Campus return with their third full-length, LP3. Their strongest and most complete work yet, LP3 is a freshly-inked portrait excavating young adulthood, identity and, more importantly, how that personal identity fits into a larger camaraderie.
Bastille - Give Me The Future - Republic
Give Me The Future, Bastille's wildly-ambitious new album, is a tribute to tech times and a glimpse of what could be to come. Exploring both the opportunities of new technology and the dark side of lives lived online, it’s as playful as it is thought-provoking, as dystopian as it is dancefloor-friendly and as electronic as Bastille have ever been. Executive produced by Ryan Tedder, Give Me The Future by Bastille will release this week.
Paul McCartney And Wings - Wild Life: 50th Anniversary - UMe
Following the eclectic charm and intimacy of 1970's solo McCartney and 1971's homespun lo-fi indie-pop progenitor RAM credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, Wild Life found Paul once again redefining his post-Beatles creative identity, this time beginning his tenure as a founding member of Wings. A rollicking left turn from its predecessors, Wild Life was recorded in barely more than a week, with more than half of the songs captured in a single take. The end result would be eight songs running the gamut from joyous freewheeling jams to proto-chamber pop to spare introspective musings — all bristling with a raw, jagged energy akin to the grungiest of garage bands—whether on the careening blues-rock rave-up of opener "Mumbo," a reggae-tinged reimagining of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange," or the plaintive and heart wrenching ballad "Dear Friend." Indie Exclusive Limited Edition 50th Anniversary Half Speed Master LP
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up There [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Blue Marbled 2LP]
Animal Collective - Time Skiffs [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Translucent Ruby 2LP]
Korn - Requiem [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Milky Clear LP]
Mitski - Laurel Hell
Cate Le Bon - Pompeii [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Sun Yellow LP]
Erin Rae - Lighten Up
Mason Jennings - Real Heart
As It Is - I WENT TO HELL AND BACK
(Hed) P.E. - Califas Worldwide
Jennifer Lopez & Maluma - Marry Me O.S.T.
Wild Rivers - Sidelines
Venom Prison - Erebos [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Ivory LP]
Converge - You Fail Me (Redux) [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Red & Black Smoke LP]
Various Artists - West Side Story (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Dooms Children - Dooms Children [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Black w/ Yellow Splatter & Black w/ Blue Splatter LP]
Hollis Brown - In The Aftermath
Natalie Cole - Unforgettable...With Love [30th Anniversary Edition]
& More .....
What's New 1-28-22
On What Happens Next, roots singer-songwriter and guitarist Davy Knowles boldly steps forward with timeless and cohesive songwriting, sleek modern production, and a lyrical, play-for-the-song guitar approach informed from soul, folk, rock, and blues. It’s 12 songs are equally influenced by The Black Keys, Fantastic Negrito, Gary Clark Jr., as they are Muddy Waters, Junior Kimbrough, and R.L. Burnside.
11:11 is an unqualified triumph, an album that seizes listeners with hook-filled songs imbuing feelings of warmth, urgency, and poetic beauty, even as it asks some of life’s big and difficult questions. “It spends equal time on optimism, community, reaffirming what we are and how it’s our duty to look out for one another” says singer Evan Stephens Hall. “There’s anger, love, hope and grief. The record has all of that.”
Five years sober, creatively rejuvenated, and sagely insightful, Gales is ready for the fight of his career. Aptly, he calls his masterful new album, Crown. Here, the blues firebrand opens like never before, sharing his struggles with substance abuse, his hopes about a new era of sobriety and unbridled creativity, and his personal reflections on racism – all delivered with clarity and hope for positive change.
A fever dream in sonic form, The Alien Coast is the first album recorded in their hometown of Birmingham, AL. 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.
Dawn FM is the fifth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter The Weeknd. The album is narrated by Jim Carrey, and features guest appearances from Tyler, the Creator and Lil Wayne. Majority of the production was handled by The Weeknd himself alongside Oneohtrix Point Never-who produced the majority of the tracks-as well as Max Martin, Oscar Holter, Calvin Harris, and Swedish House Mafia, among others.
With Swan Song, The Plot In You have laid their souls bare and offered us access to the most honest and intimate parts of themselves. Perhaps it’s their way of cleansing themselves, or them taking the opportunity to reassure us as the listener – and themselves – that life gets better when things are bleak. The record is harrowing and beautiful in equal measure, and one of the most important learning experiences this year will offer.
Although a gospel 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. Following in the footsteps of his country music heroes, his new album, And Now, Let’s Turn to Page… offers 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.
Alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins follows-up his acclaimed debut, Omega, with another striking album featuring his remarkable quartet with pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Daryl Johns, and drummer Kweku Sumbry. An hour-long suite comprised of 7 movements strives to bring them closer to complete vesselhood by the end, where the music would be entirely improvised and channeled collectively.
Lu's Jukebox is a six-volume series of mostly full-band performances recorded live at Ray Kennedy's Room & Board Studio in Nashville, TN. Each volume features a themed set of songs by other artists curated by the multi-Grammy award winner, Lucinda Williams. The series aired as ticketed shows in late 2020 with a portion of ticket sales benefitting independent music venues struggling to get by through the pandemic.
Over the course of a more than 40-year career, Steve Vai has routinely transformed what would appear to be outrageously impossible into something very, very possible... and still also pretty outrageous. Inviolate’s nine-song opus does indeed push the boundaries of instrumental guitar music as this time out, Vai quite literally invented not just a new guitar, but also a new guitar-playing technique.
The career defining album from Pennsylvania's heaviest, The Last Ten Seconds of Life is the sound of a band attempting to transcend the turning of tides within their scene. Straddling the Nu Metal, Rock, Death Metal and Downtempo genres in equal measure, TLTSOL have created a magnum opus of a record that will appeal to fans of Korn and Slipknot as much as it will to fans of Alice in Chains or Pantera.
New Release Round-Up 01-28-22
The Weeknd - Dawn FM - XO Records
Dawn FM is the fifth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter The Weeknd. The album is narrated by Jim Carrey, and features guest appearances from Tyler, the Creator and Lil Wayne. The production was handled by The Weeknd himself alongside Oneohtrix Point Never-who produced the majority of the tracks-as well as Max Martin, Oscar Holter, Calvin Harris, and Swedish House Mafia, among others. The album serves as a follow-up to The Weeknd's fourth studio album, After Hours (2020).
Bad Suns - Apocalypse Whenever - Epitaph
Bad Suns sound - dreamy '80s pastiche flanked by Stratocasters through cranked Vox amps, pulsing synths, and palpable rhythmic energy - that endeared listeners to the band in the first place, and their fourth LP, Apocalypse Whenever, uses that musical foundation as the jumping-off point for their next evolution. Conceived as "the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't yet exist," the 13-track album, helmed by longtime producer Eric Palmquist (MUTEMATH, Thrice) at his Palmquist Studios and the band's North Hollywood rehearsal spot, is more conceptually rigorous than anything they've ever attempted - but no less compelling or accessible. "We also knew we wanted the album to have a through-line, a story from beginning to end," frontman Christo Bowman explains, so the band did what any good directors would: They assembled a mood board, filtering their neo-noir version of Los Angeles through the dreamlike haziness of author Haruki Murakami, the futuristic flair of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Blade Runner, and the lifted cinematography of Spike Jonze's HER. These disparate influences don't just offer APOCALYPSE WHENEVER an expanded palette of sonic choices to color Bad Sun's airtight hooks - they help give the songs an emotional complexity that works on a multitude of levels depending on how listeners choose to receive them.
Eels - Extreme Witchcraft - E Works / PIAS
Eels have had one of the most consistently acclaimed careers in music. The ever-changing project of principal singer/songwriter E (Mark Oliver Everett), Eels have released thirteen studio albums since their 1996 debut, Beautiful Freak. During the height of the pandemic lockdown in early 2021, E got an out of the blue message from Mark Romanek, director of the first Eels video, "Novocaine For the Soul". It triggered him to reach out to John Parish, who was in between numerous projects and immediately got to work in his HonorSound studio in Bristol and began sending ideas to E. "I'd sneak out of bed at 4 in the morning to hear the latest thing John had sent, and try to add my part to it and get it back to him quickly before my 4 year old son woke up," E says. The resulting album is Extreme Witchcraft.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
St. Paul & The Broken Bones - The Alien Coast [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Gold Nugget LP]
Fruit Bats - Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021) [Indie Exclusive Deluxe 2LP]
Amber Mark - Three Dimensions Deep
The Temptations - Temptations 60
Lucinda Williams - Lu's Jukebox Vol. 6: You Are Cordially Invited....A Tribute To The Rolling Stones
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake - Demos
Tori Amos - Ocean To Ocean
Rick Ross - Richer Than I Ever Been [Deluxe]
The Magnetic Fields - The House Of Tomorrow EP [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Opaque Green Vinyl]
Brent Cobb - And Now, Let's Turn To Page...
Various Artists - SING 2 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Jethro Tull - The Zealot Gene [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Red 2LP + CD]
Aaron Lewis - Frayed At Both Ends: Deluxe
Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 2 [RSD Essential Clear w/ Red & Teal Splatter 2LP]
FKA Twigs - Caprisongs
Grateful Dead - Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA 3/1/1969 [SYEOR 2022 Limited Edition 3LP]
Margo Price - That’s How Rumors Get Started [Sliver LP + 7in Single]
Wiz Khalifa - Kush & Orange Juice
Lady Wray - Piece of Me [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Deep Emerald LP]
Charlotte Day Wilson - Alpha [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Opaque Pink LP]
Indiana Mandy - ... EP [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Green Vinyl]
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