VIA PRESS RELEASE | 60 years ago this summer, Stax Records’ biggest stars landed in the City of Angels for a two-night residency at South LA’s 5-4 Ballroom.

Billed as the Stax Revue, the whirlwind visit was a milestone for the young Memphis soul label and marked the first time that many of the artists on the bill—Rufus & Carla Thomas, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, The Mar-Keys, The Mad Lads, Wilson Pickett, and William Bell—had played to a Los Angeles audience. But the high-profile engagement, which took place on August 7th and 8th, 1965, was also set against a backdrop of racial tension—just days before the Watts Rebellion.

The audio from this historic concert was shelved for decades, with highlights initially released in 1991 as Stax Revue Live At The 5/4 Ballroom. Now, Craft Recordings proudly presents Stax Revue: Live in ’65!—a deluxe collection that not only includes the electrifying Los Angeles engagement, but also unearths a rare hometown showcase, captured earlier that summer at Memphis’ Club Paradise, featuring David Porter, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, The Astors, and Wendy Rene.

As a special bonus, the expanded album features previously unreleased recordings from both cities’ shows, including a charismatic set by Porter, a searing performance of “In the Midnight Hour” by Pickett, a lengthy jam of “The Dog” by Rufus Thomas, and a high-energy rendition of “Boot-Leg” from Booker T. & The M.G.’s which is available to stream as an advance single today.

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Celebrating Jim Lea in advance of his 75th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

You can forget all about Kiss Alive! because Slade’s Slade Alive! is the real thing–a gut-bucket blast of pure rock ‘n’ roll energy from the poorest spellers in the history of music. This 1972 studio live affair captures this band of Wolverhampton rowdies at their rawest, and the spirit of raucous fun is contagious.

This baby was released before Slade reached full maturity and here’s how you can tell–there isn’t a single spelling error on it. And here’s another way you can tell–four of its seven cuts are covers, and the other three you probably don’t know.

The foursome’s subsequent release, 1972’s Slayed?, cemented the band’s reputation as Top of the Pops hit makers, but on Slade Alive! they established their bona fides as a formidable live act–one that pitted musical brutalism against vocalist Noddy Holder’s formidable tonsils and crowd-rousing charisma.

Slade gets filed under “Glam,” but theirs was an awkward fit. They looked ridiculous in their glitter clobber–like a bunch of roofers playing dress up–and unlike most of their Glam contemporaries appealed directly to England’s working stiffs.

Their proto-Oi! placed pints above androgyny, and their audiences did the same. When Noddy Holder says, “All the drunken louts can shout anything they like” he’s talking to the entire crowd, and not just a couple of unruly yobs.

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I recently spoke with producer William Garrett. William is probably best known for his work as lead producer of Spotify Singles, where artists re-recorded one of their original songs alongside a cover of their choice. Over the course of this project, he recorded an amazing array of recording artists. The list is wild. I’ll just shout out some of my favorites because it would be too lengthy to list all 750 of them:

Yo La Tengo, Jack White, Idles, The Hives, Orville Peck, Toots and the Maytals, Yo-Yo Ma, Muse, Elton John, Lily Allen, Florence + The Machine, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem—you get the idea. Before all that, he was roaming around studios in NYC and Boston working with Sugar Hill Gang, Afika Baambaatta, and multiple albums with John Cale. Recently, he worked with Jon Batiste on the soundtrack to the movie Saturday Night and the Beethoven Blues album.

He just completed an album with the Shedrick Mitchell Trio and is doing a song with Amber Rubarth, Sara Bareilles, and Celisse. He just started a new album with Bandits on the Run, recording in a house in the Catskills and building a studio there from scratch. We talk about ALL of this. Tune in!

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

From England’s green and pleasant land, an unprepossessing and pleasant band—Squeeze aren’t out to change your life, just to provide you with friendly and understated pop gems, domestic and romantic tableaux of the sort that won me over even when I was at the height of my Anglophobia.

The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau more or less summed up my sentiments when he wrote of Squeeze’s 1982 compilation Singles – 45’s and Under, “They’re so principled in their unpretension, so obsessed with the telling detail, that their lesser moments are passively minuscule—not unfine when you squint at them, but all too easy to overlook.”

People are always talking about Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook as if they’re the McCartney and Lennon of the early eighties, but back me against a wall and the only Squeeze songs I can name are “Tempted,” “Pulling Mussels from the Shell,” and “Black Coffee in Bed.” And I considered myself a fan. Not a huge fan, but I saw them live on a pier in New York City once. Pity I was three sheets to the wind and almost fell off the pier.

But just because I don’t remember most of the songs on Singles – 45’s and Under doesn’t mean they’re not worth hearing. There’s a real warmth to Squeeze’s music, even if Difford and Tilbrook are rather cool customers. They’re Apollonian formalists, and pure popcraft is their strong suit. I’m talking immaculately put-together songs with smart words about heartbreak and occasionally irresistible melodies.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | You’ve heard Bernard “Pretty” Purdie drum on more albums than you can count.

Besides releasing some 30 albums as a bandleader, and acting as Aretha Franklin’s musical director, Purdie played on records by Miles Davis, Herbie Mann, King Curtis, Tom Rush, Albert Ayler, James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Roberta Flack, Cat Stevens, Todd Rundgren, Steely Dan, Al Green—and that’s just scratching the surface!

He also invented “The Purdie Shuffle,” tapping triplets against a half-time backbeat, among other rhythmic innovations. This rare record from 1972 is only the third he recorded as a leader, and, no surprise, he is surrounded by a stellar cast of musicians including guitarist Cornell Dupree, bassist Chuck Rainey, keyboardist Harold Wheeler, trumpeter Snooky Young, and reedman Seldon Powell.

Needless to say, it’s a funky, eclectic affair, with plenty of great breakbeats, highlighted by the proto-rap tune “Artificialness” featuring Gil Scott-Heron! Comes in the original gatefold jacket art, too. Crate diggers gonna dig this one.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | In 1994, having left Iron Maiden for a time (he rejoined in 1999), Bruce Dickinson released his second solo album, entitled Balls To Picasso. Named in honor of the cubist pioneer whose representations of spherical objects were as squares and reflected on the cover in graffiti style on a tiled bathroom wall, the album belied its irreverent title by solidifying Dickinson’s reputation as a serious solo artist.

His first record with collaborator Roy Z, recorded with Z’s band Tribe Of Gypsies, went through various iterations before its release, produced by Shay Baby. The original album included a number of classic tracks and live favorites from Dickinson, including the singles “Tears Of The Dragon” and “Shoot All The Clowns,” alongside the much-loved epic “Laughing In The Hiding Bush,” which was the album’s original title.

Yet despite its positive reception at the time, it never quite captured Dickinson’s original vision, which was even more expansive in scope and ambition. However, with the ability to revisit his solo catalog—and following on from Dickinson’s hugely acclaimed album The Mandrake Project in 2024—the brand-new partly re-recorded, remixed, and newly mastered version of the album, now entitled More Balls To Picasso, reimagines it as a fresh and contemporary release; a roaringly full-throttle and ambitious collection of supremely crafted and realised songs.

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Remembering Brian Wilson. —Ed.

The Beach Boys have arguably created the most fulsome and legendary canon of hit songs by any American group in popular music history. While most of those hits are confined to one decade (the ’60s), they are unmatched in durability, cultural relevance, artistry, sound and being perfect examples of post-war, popular American music.

While the youthful themes of the group’s songs of surfing and especially cars have lost most of their luster over the years, the themes of yearning love, girls, and the beach still endure. The group’s peak run (from roughly 1962 until 1966) ended with the release of its most important album, Pet Sounds, but the group continued to make more fine albums. While certain of those later songs were not bona-fide chart hits, they are key parts of the group’s unmatched legacy.

At this point in history, with the long procession of music formats that have come and gone, from singles, albums, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and downloads to streaming, one would think that for a group whose biggest hits have been packaged and re-packaged, yet another greatest hits collection would be redundant. Disabusing that notion is the mostly welcome new updated and expanded edition of the group’s Sounds of Summer best-of package.

Originally released in 2003 as a single-CD, 30-track compilation and a digital, best-of package, it was the de-facto replacement of the group’s analog Endless Summer vinyl set, as the definitive hits collection of the group. Before and since both Endless Summer and the new Sounds of Summer, there have been many other worthy greatest hits packages of the group’s music, but these two are the most acclaimed and representative of their respective eras. This new expanded version of Sounds of Summer, now must be considered the most comprehensive and as far as packaging, design, and collectability, it can’t be beat.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Delving into the Great American Songbook of Howe Gelb, Sandworms: The Songs of Howe Gelb and Giant Sand (out 15th August) is a new collection that rephrases and rephases their legacy. This release offers new perspectives from Water From Your Eyes, Deradoorian, Jesca Hoop & John Parish, Lily Konigsberg, Holiday Ghosts, Ella Raphael, Monde UFO, The Golden Dregs and Gently Tender.

The ever-present Giant Sand and their one-man cerebral traveller, Howe Gelb, are anchored by a reputation for idiosyncratic storytelling. A “natural storyteller,” Gelb’s multifarious musical delivery adds an enduring sense of wonder as he extols the virtues of happenstance. This collection celebrates the esoteric and singular journey Giant Sand has taken, through alt-country, jazz, lo-fi experiments, and beyond, while their music is reimagined here by a new generation of artists paying tribute to their lasting influence.

Brooklyn duo, Water From Your Eyes, known for their stoner humour with a hazy undercurrent of fatalism and a verve for art-pop, bring a delicate balance between punk riffing and dream pop escapism on “Warm Storm”—a tune first heard on Giant Sand’s Ramp (1991).

“Happenstance” (from 1994’s Glum) with its consequential questioning of our state of mind is the kind of nagging puzzle that any Canadian baritone with the burr of Leonard Cohen would marvel at; Whitney K do just that, whispering sweet somethings in your ear. “This rendition came together like happenstance—right place, right time. Howe reached out across the void with a song to be sung. We humbly obliged and like serpents made it our own,” adds Konner

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Born in 1931 in an Alberta, Canada mining town and deceased in 1988 from heart failure, Bruce Haack is rightfully considered one of the trailblazers of electronic music. He’s responsible for an eclectic and often eccentric oeuvre, but his most famous LP is the one he made for Columbia in 1970. The Electric Lucifer remains an inimitable and visionary work.

Quickly dropping out of Julliard in the mid-‘50s, Bruce Haack initially made a living writing both pop songs and scores for dance and theater, but on his way to electronic music immortality he also simultaneously devoted his energies to serious composition, completing work in the highly prescient musique concrète style, a form wildly popular with the ‘50s avant-garde. He was also a creator of early synthesizers, with his inventions landing him on television programs such as The Tonight Show and I’ve Got a Secret, where Haack often demonstrated his heat and touch sensitive Dermatron. As such, he’s often linked with Raymond Scott as an inhabitant of the oddball-visionary wing of electronic music, the ties to Scott enhanced by a significant portion of his discography being designed for the enjoyment and benefit of youthful ears.

In the case of the three volumes of Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby, the intended audience was still lolling in the crib, but the records produced by Haack for his own Dimension 5 label took on a more educational approach. Offered in homemade black and white covers with the assistance of dance instructor Esther Nelson, pianist Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, and later Haack’s friend and business manager Chris Kachulis, their look and sound does give off a strong whiff of the unconventional.

However, spending time with Emperor Norton’s 1999 CD/LP survey Listen Compute Rock Home – The Best of Dimension 5 reveals an aesthetic that’s ultimately not much stranger than the early personality of Jim Henson, sharing with the Muppet man a desire to engage the growing mind through imagination rather than exuding superciliousness or thinly veiled attempts at conformity. And the creativity and frequent sense of humor allow the music to transcend its didactic aims and to be of continued interest to inquisitive adults.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Marley family, UMe, and Island Records are continuing to honor Bob Marley’s legacy with a year-long celebration commemorating his 80th birthday milestone, his importance in the uprising of global music, and the fight for social justice and equality.

Today, in celebration of the 45th anniversary of Uprising, an exclusive merch capsule is being released, which includes unique items and a special, limited-edition “liquid sunshine”-filled vinyl reissue of the album that is housed in a special die-cut sleeve. Uprising was the final album released during Bob Marley’s lifetime and features fan favorites “Could You Be Loved,” “Redemption Song,” and “Forever Loving Jah.” Preorder the “liquid-sunshine” LP and check out the exclusive merch options, HERE.

Adding to the 80th festivities, Natty Dread (1974) and Rastaman Vibration (1976) are both now available in Dolby Atmos®. With Dolby Atmos, fans can immerse themselves in their favorite Marley tracks like never before, experiencing every nuance with stunning depth, precision, and clarity. Natty Dread and Rastaman Vibration were mixed by Nick Rives, who also mixed the albums Burnin,’ Catch A Fire, Exodus, and Legend, as well as the Bob Marley: One Love soundtrack in Dolby Atmos in collaboration with the Marley estate.

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