The New York-based Holy Hive consists of Homer Steinweiss on drums, Joe Harrison on bass, and Paul Spring on vocals and guitar. Their second album is a self-titled affair coming out on Big Crown Records, as did their debut from last year. The label connection might inspire thoughts of neo-soulfulness, but while that’s not an inaccurate assumption, particularly as Steinweiss has backed up Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Adele and others, it’s only part of an equation that has been impressively honed on this ample 15-track set. It’s available digitally, on compact disc and on either standard black or translucent pink with blue spatter vinyl on September 24.

Holy Hive stands out in the Big Crown catalog through a sound that’s been dubbed Folk Soul. As I mentioned in an assessment of their debut in these web pages from June of 2020, this style hybrid might conjure positive visions of Bill Withers and perhaps Terry Callier, or maybe even Curtis Mayfield (and late period Tim Buckley as a significant negative), and then not much else.

Folk Soul is certainly an applicable tag for Holy Hive’s sound, indeed as the band’s bio details the meeting up Minnesota way of neo-soul session ace Steinweiss and Spring, a traveling folk singer. But after completing the band with Harrison and then enlisting a bevy of guest contributors including, either on this album or the last, harpist Mary Lattimore, trumpeter Dave Guy (of The Roots), singer-bassist Shannon Wise (of The Shacks), and guitarist Robin Pecknold (of Fleet Foxes), Holy Hive have fomented a well-controlled atmosphere that’s frequently reminiscent of gentle psych and even mellow pop.

Key to Holy Hive’s success is how they never misplace the backbeat nor the range of emotion at the microphone (a soul necessity), as Spring has a superb falsetto. Both elements are foregrounded in Holy Hive’s crisp opener “Color It Easy,” which sounds like it could’ve been a hit single anywhere from 1968 to ’72, except that the drums wouldn’t have hit quite this hard back then (and yet with consummate restraint), and some producer would’ve no doubt marred the situation by slathering on canned strings or something similar.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Greenwich Entertainment announces the release of Karen Dalton: In My Own Time, a brand new documentary that not only honors the long-overlooked legacy and musical impact of the late folk legend, but saves her largely misunderstood story from near devastation.

Directed by Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete, and executive produced by the multi Academy Award-nominated Wim Wenders, Light in the Attic Records and Delmore Recording Society, the film will open in theaters across the country beginning October 1, 2021, with a premiere at New York City’s Film Forum.

Following a tragic fire in 2018, which destroyed all the remains of Karen Dalton’s personal archive, Yapkowitz and Peete worked closely with her family and estate to capture the vanishing fragments of her life. From troves of newly unearthed material and raw footage, to candid conversations with Dalton’s daughter Abralyn Baird and commentary by loved ones, ex-lovers, collaborators and close friends, Karen Dalton: In My Own Time serves as an essential portrait of her singular voice and indelible influence.

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time also features Karen Dalton’s handwritten poetry and journals read by Angel Olsen, music composed by Julia Holter, plus interviews with fans like Nick Cave and Vanessa Carlton, Woodstock creator and Dalton’s one-time label head Michael Lang, country singer-songwriter Lacy J. Dalton, Peter Walker, Peter Stampfel and more. The film was produced by Traci Carlson and Richard Peete at Neighborhood Watch (Blue Ruin, Low Tide, Super Dark Times), and The Hollywood Reporter says, “As [Karen Dalton: In My Own Time] introduces a one-of-a-kind artist to the uninitiated and celebrates her for aficionados, above all it listens – and invites us to do the same.”

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Remembering Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, born on this day in 1954. —Ed.

On which the late metal minimalist/ genius/ proud-to-be-a-lummox Lemmy Kilmister delivers the hard rock goods live in a couple of halls not including London’s Hammersmith Odeon. No sleep ‘til Hammersmith features Motörhead at their ferocious and pummeling best, and is the perfect corrective to the lyrical excesses, grand themes, and emphasis on musical virtuosity that characterized much of the metal then popular.

With the able assistance of “Fast” Eddie Clarke on guitar and backing vocals and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor on drums, Lemmy bangs out some tunes (most of them of unfashionably short length and unfashionably fast tempos), announces in DIY fashion that Motörhead is its own damn road crew, and demonstrates that his very hoarse bark has real bite.

Kilmister possessed not a whit of glamor and about as much charm, but that’s exactly what made him so lovable; he wasn’t good looking, his tonsils hardly made the little girls swoon, and when push came to shove he was the perfect antithesis of, say, Robert Plant. “No Class” is addressed to (or so I suspect) some anonymous groupie hanger-on, but Lemmy would no doubt have agreed it applied to him as well; he had about as much class as your average lorry driver, and never pretended to have better manners than your average lorry driver.

In short, you could relate to Lemmy Kilmister. He sang about all of the things you cared about, and said fuck it to the darkest depths of Mordor. He was a creature of the road and of the tedium and excesses that entailed, didn’t give a shit about Xanadu or hobbits, and didn’t want to write the next “Stairway to Heaven” either. He was down to earth, didn’t look like he placed a very high premium on personal hygiene, and probably would have come in handy in a bar fight. He’s as close as English music has ever come to producing an outlaw country musician.

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Readers with an insatiable appetite for synth-pop and new wave should prepare themselves for a treat. On September 24, the Dark Entries label is releasing Back Up: Mexican Tecno Pop 1980-1989, its ten tracks enlighteningly enjoyable and with a prevailing DIY sensibility that lends appealing cohesiveness to the whole. Just as important is range in both style and temperament, so that the contents are likely to please curious newbies as well as obsessives. It’s out digitally and on vinyl combined with a 12-page booklet printed on neon green, pink and orange paper and loaded with photos, lyrics in Spanish, and background info in English.

Right up front, the most fanatical of synth-wavers mentioned above may already be hip to the majority of the selections featured on this set, as eight of the ten were snagged from Backup: Expediente Tecno Pop, a collection issued in 2005 by the AT-AT label. But as that release was a CD-only affair, the Dark Entries edition earns the distinction of being the first ever vinyl compilation of Mexican new wave and post-punk, with this stature enhanced by two exclusive tracks.

There is also some reconfiguring of sequence, as side one begins with the CD’s twelfth track (out of 13), “Pesadillas” by the Tijuana-based trio Avant Garde. The sound is tangibly Euro-wavy (the cited comparisons are Ultravox and Alphaville), but with fidelity that favors tape hiss over glossiness. While surely not the band’s preference, the modest acoustics do reinforce that Mexican Tecno Pop was largely an underground phenomenon. Instruments were scarce (it was an economically precarious time) and monied record labels were reportedly disinterested).

And as captured audio of a live performance (unreleased prior to the 2005 CD), “Pesadillas” does honestly represent how Avant Garde sounded: rhythmically punchy with a dash of retrofuturist iciness and modest levels of crooning. These ingredients are also present in “Cambios en El Tiempo” by Tijuana four-piece Vandana, but in a song that’s appreciably more anthemic and sporting higher levels of glisten. I’ll submit that Vandana is what Avant Garde would’ve sounded like if they’d gotten into a legit studio, but with the caveat that I’m not operating from a position of expertise with these bands.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Abramorama announced today that they have acquired distribution rights to Jesse Lauter’s music documentary Learning To Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen. An electrifying documentary jam-packed with music spotlighting the celebrated “Mad Dogs & Englishmen,” Joe Cocker’s short-lived tour featuring a mammoth thirty-piece band, told through the lens of the reunion of 12 remaining band members, 45 years later, to perform with Grammy Award-winning Tedeschi Trucks at the Lockn’ Festival. The film features archival footage alongside current performances and interviews with Leon Russell, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Rita Coolidge, Chris Robinson, Jim Keltner, Dave Mason, Claudia Lennear, and many more.

Filmmaker Jesse Lauter stated, “The original Mad Dogs & Englishmen album and documentary played a foundational role in my early years as a music producer and musician, so it’s only appropriate that my first film as a director is about this critical piece of music history. There has always been a shroud of mystery around this tour—how it came about, what was it like, why it never happened again—so I felt it was my duty to reveal the truth, beauty, and yes drama, behind the music, in hopes to uncover why this music has resonated for so many generations. It was the greatest honor of my career to capture this once-in-a-lifetime reunion.”

Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks added, “Mad Dogs & Englishmen were one of the groups that inspired us from when we first started our band and paying tribute to their work with so many of the original members on hand was a highlight on many levels. This film is a labor of love many years in the making, and we’re so proud to share the music and the stories of the men and women of Mad Dogs & Englishmen.”

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Celebrating Jarvis Cocker’s 58th birthday yesterday. —Ed.

Some albums give off light; others suck it up like a black hole. They’re so dark you’d need Diogenes’ lantern to negotiate their lightless depths. Such an album is Pulp’s 1998 release This Is Hardcore, one of the most unremittingly bleak LPs this side of Lou Reed’s Überbummer Berlin. The brainchild of Jarvis Cocker, jaded romantic in search of purification through immersion in the squalid, This Is Hardcore is a joyless (but always melodic) diagnosis of the human condition, and the diagnosis isn’t good.

You’ve got the Fear, says Cocker, because you’re taking too many drugs, and you equate sex not with love but with pornography, and you fail your young and are terrified of growing old. And there aren’t enough kicks or kink out there to save you; and even the man who does right is dissatisfied.

Cocker is the same fellow who 3 years earlier had written “Sorted for E’s & Wizz,” which eviscerated rave culture and reduced it to a lost soul who’s seriously lost the plot: “And this hollow feeling grows and grows and grows and grows/And you want to phone your mother and say/’Mother, I can never come home again/Cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere/Somewhere in a field in Hampshire.'” A nattering nabob of negativity he may have been, but no one else of Cocker’s time–which was marked by a rebirth of pride in the culture of the UK–wrote so cogently and forthrightly about the “hollow feeling” at the core of Cool Britannia.

Pulp was formed in 1978, but it wasn’t until 1995’s Different Class–with its hits “Common People,” “Mis-Shapes,” “Disco 2000,” and “Something Changed”–that the band became bona fide rock stars and reluctant members of the Britpop movement. And while Different Class was chock full of class-conscious satire and dark sarcasm, it sounded upbeat; “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” may well be the cheeriest-sounding song ever written about the down side of a drug culture, while “Common People,” as sarcastic a song as any ever written, is also perky and upbeat sounding.

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Much of the music we listen to today comes from different generations. It may be an old favorite like Led Zeppelin, or it might be a group that was under the radar for many years before finally having their hey day long after they’d ceased to exist as a group, like Big Star. Behind the contemporary music scenes, there is a full-blown industry involved in keeping popular records in print and releasing albums that deserve a second chance.

Meet Gordon Anderson who has spent much of his life doing both things. He was the founder of the ubiquitous Collector’s Choice label in the 1990s which—long before streaming—was the easiest and most sonically pleasing way to track down classics from the ’50s and ’60s. After leaving Collector’s Choice, Anderson and his business partner Gabby Castellana have created Real Gone Music, which is, as they describe it, “a reissue label dedicated to serving both the collector community and the casual music fan with a robust release schedule combining big-name artists with esoteric cult favorites.”

With nearly ten releases per month, Real Gone Music probably has something in their catalog that will appeal to everyone, in fact, it’s this populist, all-encompassing acceptance that gives the label its unique spin: if enough people want it, Real Gone Music will try to find a way to serve it up.

Anderson and I take a deep dive into the world of running a record label, the business of music reissues, and the vinyl comeback. We also question what’s going on with our old buddy the CD, and learn about the origins of Real Gone’s celebrated Black Jazz label reissues. It seems difficult to comprehend, but if it weren’t for guys like Gordon Anderson keeping vintage music catalogs alive, you might not even know that some of your favorite music ever existed.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

There’s a game I like to play. It’s called “Who’s the worse poet, Jim Morrison or Patti Smith?” Morrison generally wins by a nose. Like Patti Smith, the late Mr. Morrison viewed himself as a visionary in the grand tradition of 19th Century French poète maudit Arthur Rimbaud, but the duo’s sum contribution to poetry consists of a few decent song lyrics and some very bad books of poetry.

So why don’t I give the nod to Morrison? He wrote “L.A. Woman” for one. And he possessed a sense of humor. “Some of the worst mistakes in my life were haircuts” is a great one-liner, as is “Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.” So far as I know Smith hasn’t delivered a legitimate quip in her life—she’s far too busy taking herself seriously.

All of which brings us to 1978’s disgraceful American Prayer, which I doubt Morrison would have found amusing. What you get for your wasted money is shit and shinola without the shinola. American Prayer is a dog’s breakfast comprised in part of short (and purposeless) fragments of Morrison spouting off at live shows and “collages” melding well-known Doors’ songs to scraps of Morrison’s verse.

But what you mostly get are tracks on which the surviving Doors add after-the-fact musical accompaniment to Morrison’s poetic detritus. Most of said music is mediocre jazz fusion along the lines of later Steely Dan, although you also get tastes of bad funk and (believe it or not) disco.

American Prayer includes examples of Morrison at his poetic worst. There are too many examples to cite in full, but let’s start with “Lament,” with its lines “Guitar player/Ancient wise satyr/Sing your ode to my cock.” Equally awful is the title track’s “Cling to cunts & cocks of despair/We got our vision by clap/Columbus’s groin got filled with green death.”

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