LATEST ADDITIONS

Subtitle this one, …And Vinyl for All. To wit: Metallica and Furnace Record Pressing have jointly announced that Metallica has acquired the majority interest in Furnace, a leading provider of high-quality vinyl and related services based in Alexandria, Virginia. Read on to see what the revised vinyl-oriented partnership entails, and how Furnace founder Eric Astor and Metallica co-founders Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield have to say about it. . .

In 1972, Stax Records — the influential Memphis-based label that brought the likes of Otis Redding, Booker T. & The M.G.s, and Albert King to the world — recognized the need for a large-scale, highly visible public event to help heal America’s fractured African American communities. Craft Recordings, the current owners of Stax’s tracks, has seen fit to honor the gamechanging event that was duly dubbed Wattstax with a fantastic 50th anniversary reissue series, the jewels of which are a pair of timely analog-mastered gems: Wattstax: The Living Word and The Living Word: Wattstax 2. Get into the Wattstax groove by reading Mark Smotroff’s review of both of these fine 140g 2LP collections. . .

Audio Intelligent Vinyl Solutions (a.k.a. AIVS) has been making reputable record cleaning products for going on 20 years now, and they’ve just added a pair of key offerings to the product line — namely, Ultra-Low Foaming Formula No. 27 and Enzymatic Concentrate for ultrasonic record cleaning machines. Read on to see if these two new solutions might be the exact right solutions you need to clean your own LPs accordingly. . .

Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau launched onto the jazz scene in the 1990s, and he quickly made his mark as one of the more important modern-day jazz pianists of our times. Mehldau’s latest effort, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles, is a live tribute album that celebrates the very scope of The Fab Four’s music itself — and, ultimately, its impact on popular music as we know it today. Read Mark Smotroff’s review to see if Mehldau’s new LP is worthy of spinning on your own fab turntable. . .