Who begins a debut album with a dirge-like, mournful song taken at a heartbreakingly slow pace like Richard Manuel's "Tears of Rage?" The Band did on their debut album that didn't exactly hit the pop charts running.
This is not Sam Beam's (A/K/A Iron and Wine) latest album. It dates from 2007. His first release, The Creek Drank the Cradle, was released back in 2002. Somehow that one, this one, his newest and all of his work escaped my attention until last year's AXPONA audio show in Jacksonville Florida where I saw the collected works in the bins of a Florida audio store owner who had a room at the show. I asked to hear something and he played a cut from this introspective, atmospheric and sonically enticing and well-produced album. I was hooked.
All of Fiona Apple's albums have been been personal and confessional (some might say "self absorbed") but this one is really personal and confessional and attractively self-absorbed too.
The Rolling Stones have just released their first studio album of all-new material in 18 years, Hackney Diamonds. Naturally, it begs the question: Will Hackney Diamonds ultimately become a classic Stones album? We don’t know that answer for sure just yet, but read Mark Smotroff’s review to find out if the 180g 1LP vinyl edition of Hackney Diamonds and/or its litany of variants are worthy of many a repeat spin. . .
There’s nothing groundbreaking on this 1960 Parlan-lead session, but that’s okay. The lure here isn’t the musical construction, since it covers familiar grooves and doesn’t move jazz forward. In fact, you’ll hear familiar gestures, some gleaned from Miles’ modal Kind of Blue issued a few years earlier, others from common blues.
It’s been heavily bootlegged over the years, and yet Paul McCartney & Wings’ One Hand Clapping is still something of a holy grail among fans. These 1974 live-in-the-studio recordings find the group firing on all cylinders — and then some. Finally, this vital Macca music has been officially released today, June 14, 2024, by MPL/Capitol/UMe as both a 180g 2LP set and a web-exclusive edition that also includes a bonus six-track 45. Read on to see why Mark Smotroff feels One Hand Clapping offers some of the most rocking Macca & Wings music on vinyl to date. . .
The back story here is that in May of 1963, the Yardbirds’ first guitarist, “pimply” 15 year old Anthony “Top” Topham stepped on stage with the new group at the Eel Pie Island Club.
Fleet Foxes’ new live and mostly acoustic A Very Lonely Solstice LP leans more toward the full-album concert experience I was hoping for on record. There is a nice sense of the church ambiance — this performance was recorded live at St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York in December 2020 — that wonderfully captures the woody essence of Fleet Foxes bandleader Robin Pecknold’s strummy nylon-string guitar. Read on to learn more. . .
The beating heart of this remarkable collaboration between electronic musician/composer Sam Shepherd, better known as Floating Points, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and The London Symphony Orchestra is a repeated series of ethereal drops of glistening arpeggiated sonic dew Shepherd plays on synthesizer, piano and what sounds like a harpsichord over which Pharoah Sanders delicately flutters and dances—only occasionally producing the voluminous blasts heard in his late ‘60s and early ‘70s albums.
The classically trained Cuban-born jazz pianist Elio Villafranca and his group the Jass Syncopators recorded this album Direct-to-Disk last Winter at the "Least Significant Bit Studios", which is actually a large room in the Sound-Smith.com production facility converted into a performance space/recording studio.
The double LP set is but one of many DirectGrace D2D records produced by Sound-Smith's founder Peter Ledermann to benefit a charity dedicated to helping some 215 million exploited children around the world enduring child labor, or abandoned to the streets due to the AIDS epidemic and other public health catastrophes.
Before the folk revival of the 1950’s and ‘60’s fomented by the likes of The Weavers and later The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, there were the originals like Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. He was born in the 1880’s (exact date unknown) and he died in New York City, December 6th, 1949 of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known as “Lou Gehrigs Disease.”
Instead of re-issuing this yet again, some folks argue that Analogue Productions should reissue newer albums. They are tired of hearing again what they already have. What they forget is that the last reissue of this classic was many years ago. Sorry, but time flies, especially as you get older. And guess what else? That issue by Classic Records is long out of print as is the one Mobile Fidelity first issued around twenty years ago when the label decided to re-enter the vinyl market and press its own records in Sebastopol.
There's no mystery about why this seventh Foo Fighters album succeeds artistically and commercially. Dave Grohl tempers his scream fest tendencies with focus, clarity and discipline. Producer Butch Vig, who worked with Nirvana tightens it all up and doesn't leave any loose ends hanging in a recording done in Grohl's garage. Grohl brings back Nirvana and Germs guitarist Pat Smear as well as Krist Novoselic on bass and accordian on "I Should Have Known." It's almost a reunion.
While hard-bop tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin’s best known work was with Charles Mingus and his later Prestige albums are regarded as the hub of his solo recordings, this 1961 Candid set offers plenty of muscular grit, superb Nola Penthouse sound and the stellar backing trio of George Tucker on bass, Al Harewood on drums and one “Felix Krull” on piano, most likely a Nat Hentoff-assigned name given to Horace Parlan who was contracted to Blue Note at the time. In fact, Tucker and Harewood were part of Parlan’s quartet, as was Ervin for a spell.
When your wildly influential band dissolves after five albums and a decade of indie acclaim, separating yourself from your past is near impossible. If any band defined the old “critically adored, publicly dismissed” adage, it was Pavement. If you came of age in the sixties or seventies it’s probably hard to believe lines like “Lies and betrayals/ Fruit-covered nails/ Electricity or lust/ Won’t break the door” have had as much impact on a certain generation as anything by Dylan or The Beatles; but it’s true. Sure, it happened to be Generation X, but ask anyone who uses the words “indie”, “alternative”, or “college rock” more than once a month to name the best album of the nineties, and you’re bound to hear a whole lot of “Like, wow…that’d have to be, like, Slanted & Enchanted dude.”