VIA PRESS RELEASE | On February 8th, Forbidden Beat: Perspectives on Punk Drumming will be available for purchase everywhere books are sold and is currently available for pre-order. It’s a book about punk rock, as told from the perspective of those behind the kit. Whether they’re self-taught bashers or technical wizards, drummers are the thrashing, crashing heart of our favorite punk bands.

In Forbidden Beat, some of today’s most respected writers and musicians explore the history of punk percussion with personal essays, interviews and lists featuring their favorite players and biggest influences. From ’60s garage rock and proto-punk to ’70s New York and London, ’80s hardcore and D-beat to ’90s pop punk and beyond, Forbidden Beat is an uptempo ode to six decades of punk rock drumming.

The list of contributors is a diverse collection of musicians and writers that includes: Lori Barbero (Babes in Toyland), Phanie Diaz (Fea), Bon Von Wheelie (Girl Trouble), Laura Bethita Neptuna (The Neptunas), Tre Cool (Green Day), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Jon Wurster (Bob Mould, Superchunk), Rat Scabies (The Damned) and many others. Full list below.

“Niche you say? We like Niche. In the weeds. Talking shop. This is a deep dive into an overlooked sport. A history lesson on the evolution of punk drumming from the source. From Rat Scabies to Discharge to Lori Barbero, most of my heroes are now trapped together between these covers.” —Brendan Canty, Fugazi and The Messthetics

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | It’s not often that an artist gets to do a Bowie by consciously carving their personal epitaph into the grooves of their final LP. The Highest in the Land is that rarity of an album, and it could not have been made by a more brilliantly poetic and fearlessly sarcastic writer than Pat Fish, also known as The Jazz Butcher.

“My hair’s all wrong / My time ain’t long / Fishy go to Heaven, get along, get along,” he sings, to a ticking-clock beat in “Time,” rhyming its title with “a one-way ticket to a pit of Council lime” in just one of many existentially charged moments on a record whose songs were written throughout the last seven years of Fish’s life before his untimely passing in October, aged only 63.

“Self-knowledge, urgency,” he wrote as a comment to this song in his private notes to the album’s producer Lee Russell, “He’d been around the block and knew he was on the last lap.” “We had closure,” Russell remembers, “We had worked together for three months, and then on the last day I drove him home. And for the first time we hugged and said goodbye, and that was it.”

Recent years have seen a long overdue re-appreciation of The Jazz Butcher catalogue, all the way back to that astonishing 11- album run of the first 13 years of their career, now celebrated and handily compiled in a series of box-sets after decades of shameful neglect.

Founded in Oxford in 1982 by Pat Fish and prodigious guitarist Max Eider, the band that would become synonymous with its leader embodied an anti-rockist, semi-ironically jazz-conscious indie aesthetic before the word had even been invented. In a world of po-faced poseurs this “Southern Mark Smith” proved that it was possible to be both smart and funny, erudite and unpretentious, the latter sadly to the detriment of his fame.

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The Dave Clark Five were one of the most successful and acclaimed bands of the British Invasion of the 1960s. Unlike The Beatles and many others of that time and place, however, they were not from Liverpool. The group was from Tottenham, in north London. Their big, booming, stomping, brassy and infectious sound propelled them to seven top-ten UK singles and eight top-ten US singles.

The DC5’s unique sound centered around Clark’s pounding drums, Mike Smith’s full-throated voice and wide-ranging keyboard styles, and Denis Payton’s honking sax. The group was rounded out by guitarist Lenny Davidson and bassist Rick Huxley. Huxley also played harmonica and all four members, other than Smith, supplied bracing backing vocals. Unlike most of the groups of the British Invasion, their sound did not center around guitars. They were the first British group after The Beatles to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and they were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.

The group disbanded in 1970, but Dave Clark, who was the group’s manager and producer, has always curated the group’s legacy with aplomb. Among his many other activities through the years are acquiring the rights to the seminal British music television show Ready Steady Go! and, in the 1980s, he wrote and produced the 1986 theatrical musical Time.

There have been excellent collections of the group’s music on CD and vinyl, but the latest reissue is the best yet. The group’s debut U.S. album Glad All Over, originally released in 1964 and one of four albums released by the group in the U.S. that year, has been reissued on white vinyl in glorious mono, from the original master tapes from BMG.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | There may be many great rock photographers but only one rock n’ roll painter: Steve Keene. Think you don’t own any of Steve Keene’s artwork? If you’re a fan of Pavement, The Apples in stereo, Silver Jews or Bonnie “Prince” Billy, you do.

One of Brooklyn’s most beloved sons, Steve Keene is a legend amongst music fans as much for his cheery, automated style as for his everyman prices of just $5 – $10 each. After a 30+ year career producing over 300,000 paintings, Keene is a pop culture icon and this June heralds the first published collection of his work: The Steve Keene Art Book.

Though perhaps best-known for his deep ties to the ’90s indie rock scene, Keene has chosen to immortalize some of the greatest names in rock/pop music including David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Roxy Music, The Clash, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and The Beastie Boys. But the heart of his work will always belong to indie rock artists like Pavement, Bonnie Prince Billy, The Arcade Fire, Minor Threat, Husker Du, and Joy Division.

“I consider myself as more of an installation artist,” confides Keene. “If people see fewer than, like, 800 of my paintings at one time, I think they don’t get it.” For someone operating outside of the traditional art world, Keene has shown his work at some of its most prestigious galleries, museums and fairs including Frieze New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art (LA), Marlborough Gallery (NY), Museum Goch (Germany), and the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne). The book was born from a 2016 exhibition at legendary artist Shepard Fairey’s own Subliminal Projects gallery in Los Angeles.

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Released in tandem and sharing a title with the Tate Britain art museum’s exhibition that’s showing now through April 3, Life Between Islands is the latest deep-dive compilation from the Soul Jazz label. Smartly assembled on 3LP and 2CD, the set is subtitled Soundsystem Culture – Black Musical Expression in the UK 1973–2006, with its contents exploring the impact of Caribbean sound systems on a wide variety of Black British musical styles. While reggae is dominant in the scheme, spanning from mucho lovers rock to Rasta to dub to dancehall, there are hybridizations and dalliances with jazz, R&B, hip-hop, techno, and pop. It all coheres into an illuminating listen that’s due in stores on January 28.

The stylistic range heard on Life Between Islands plays no small part in the collection’s success, but more important is that the music, inspired by Caribbean innovations but created in the UK, evinces not a trace of the watered-down, even as a significant percentage of the selections flirt with the pop sphere. Also, numerous musicians included are of Caribbean ancestry, which helps, but there is a consistent current of sensitivity on display throughout the sequence. Ultimately, Life Between Islands is about inspired extensions and continued innovations rather than shallow co-opting.

It helps that all six sides contain at least one absolute gem, so let’s get right to it. Black Slate set the proceedings in motion with “Sticks Man,” a solid dose of roots reggae that was released as a single in 1976. Formed in London in ’72, Black Slate didn’t get a LP out until the cusp of the ’80s, but then they persisted in releasing a bunch and are apparently still extant. That they were chosen to back up visiting Jamaicans is not a bit surprising.

Lovers rock singer Dee Sharp is next with “Rising to the Top,” a 1983 single that’s relationship to then contemporary R&B stylings is unsurprising given that it’s a cover of “Risin’ to the Top,” which was released in ’82 by Keni Burke of the Chicago group The Five Stairsteps. Amid the electro squiggles and the outro saxophone solo, the reggae groove is refined and somewhat restrained, but it’s still felt, and that’s alright.

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Remembering Warren Zevon, born on January 24 in 1947. —Ed.

Warren Zevon was one of rock’s great crazy men. When drinking—and in general pursuing oblivion the way Ahab did a certain white whale—Zevon was notorious for vomiting off interior balconies at staid record company meet-and-greets and much, much, worse. He never went to the Troubadour with a Kotex affixed to his forehead like John Lennon, but his wife was once awakened by gunshots to discover Zevon had put three bullet holes in his head—on the cover of his Excitable Boy LP. Call it suicide by proxy—and a cry for help—but all Zevon had to say was, “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

Meanwhile Zevon was writing songs like “Mr. Bad Example,” which included the lines, “I like to have a good time/And I don’t care who gets hurt.” In short, he was a latter day Jerry Lee Lewis, only 500 times more literate. While Zevon shared The Killer’s love for guns, at least he never managed to shoot one of his own musicians in the chest with a .357 magnum, as Jerry Lee did at his own 41st birthday party.

I’ve blown chunks at inappropriate moments and fired off guns in the house while drunk too, but I’m no Warren Zevon, who was a bona fide lyrical and songwriting genius. His second and third LPs (1976’s Warren Zevon and 1978’s Excitable Boy) established him as the only lyricist of the era who could hold a candle to Randy Newman, and the sheer insanity of his songs—it’s impossible to imagine anyone else writing about a walking headless mercenary seeking revenge on his killer, or a kid who builds a cage for himself from his girlfriend’s bones—left the competition in the dust.

Zevon may have kept bad company—one wonders what drew such a rabid wildebeest to the insipid likes of Jackson Browne and The Eagles—but their deleterious habits (like writing really shitty songs) fortunately didn’t rub off on him. But I’m wrong actually. As great as his songs are, they lack the rough edges that would have given them the raw immediacy to match his insane lyrics, and this has everything to do with his reliance on slick studio musicians and his equally slick rock star chums—them’s Don Henley and Glenn Frey singing harmony on “The French Inhaler,” and Jackson Browne and the loathsome J.D. Souther singing harmony on the great “Desperadoes Under The Eaves”—when making his albums.

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Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién hails from the Basque region of Spain. With Unfamiliar Minds, she releases her fifth full-length, a collection of ten songs that evolved and cohered during the pandemic after an earlier group of pre-Covid compositions proved unsatisfying and were then set aside. With a new reality of solitude taking hold, Setién reoriented her approach after finding inspiration and a creative reset in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. But if distinguished by its intimacy, her latest is also striking in its depth. Vibrant and full of unexpected twists, the album is out January 28 on blue vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Thrill Jockey.

After being quite taken with Elena Setién’s 2019 album Another Kind of Revolution, I then proceeded to miss out on Mirande, her 2020 collab with Spanish musician-producer Xabier Erkizia and the group Grande Days, who are also from Spain. I missed out likely in part because Mirande was released not by Thrill Jockey but by Spanish label Forbidden Colours; indeed, it was in Thrill Jockey’s promotional text for Unfamiliar Minds that I was hipped to Mirande, a short 6-song affair (I’ve seen it listed as an EP) with lyrics in her native Basque language.

Setién sings in English on Unfamiliar Minds, with Dickinson’s poetry described as the springboard for this choice (please note that Another Kind of Revolution was also sung in English). Erkizia contributes electronics to the album and also co-arranged the songs, with Joseba Irazoki playing guitar on two tracks. Along with writing all the tracks, the rest of the instrumentation is by Setién, specifically keyboards, violin, and on the title track, guitar. All the vocals are Setién’s, as are the lyrics, save for “I Dwell in Possibility” and “In This Short Life,” where the words are Dickinson’s.

Unfamiliar Minds begins with “2020,” a slowly paced cut structured around Setién’s piano, a setting similar to the opening track on Another Kind of Revolution, except here, the mood is significantly more contemplative. Distant bird chirping presages the keyboard and the entrance of Setién’s subtly multitracked voice, alternately breathy and lilting, pretty yet substantive. Then, the strings come in.

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