LATEST ADDITIONS

If there’s a musician who’s taking better advantage of that figurative Dorian Gray picture on their wall than singer/songwriter/guitarist Dion DiMucci, we haven’t met them. The eternal Bronx-born Wanderer is still going strong at age 84, having issued three all-new 180g 2LP sets in the past four years. The most recent of which is Girl Friends, a four-sided, 12-track affair that celebrates Dion’s collaborative spirit and spark with a plethora of female artists, and it was just released by Keeping The Blues Alive this past Friday, March 8. In a recent Zoom interview with AP editor Mike Mettler, Dion discussed why he sequences his LPs like a live show, how “The Wanderer” is one of his definitive “bragging rights” songs, and why he’s considering resurrecting some of his personal favorite songs from years past on vinyl. . .

Clearaudio sure have a notable signature style when it comes to their high-end turntables, and they’ve just announced a special edition of their Concept Signature table — redubbed more simply as the Signature turntable — that has been made both specifically and exclusively for the U.S. market, and it will be distributed stateside by Musical Surroundings. Read on to see what Clearaudio’s Q2-arriving stateside Signature table has to offer. . .

As many of you know, Rekkord turntables have been handcrafted in the company’s factory/facility in the Black Forest in Germany for the better part of a half-century. Back in November 2022, Rekkord garnered a new North American distribution deal with VANA, with the intention of making a combination of fully automatic and manual tables available over the course of the following year-plus — and now, it’s finally time for the Rekkord M600 to stake its claim in the domestic marketplace. Read on to see what’s what with the features and specs for the top-of-the-line M600. . .

The Move, in their heyday — which was roughly 1967-71 — were quite popular in England and in Europe, despite never quite breaking through in a big way here in the States. Even so, The Move’s reputation has since continued to grow in stature — and their celebrated, hard-to-find sophomore LP, February 1970’s Shazam, has just been reissued by Esoteric Recordings. Read Mark Smotroff’s review to see if the Esoteric update of Shazam belongs in your collection and on your turntable. . .