VIA PRESS RELEASE | Released forty years ago this week on November 15, 1986, Beastie Boys’ landmark debut album, Licensed to Ill, introduced a global audience to Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D’s brash, rock-and punk-influenced take on hip-hop.

Driven by hard-hitting beats, rock guitars, and irreverent humor, the album made an immense and immediate impact, becoming the first rap album to top the Billboard 200. Produced by Rick Rubin and Beastie Boys, the album, which was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2015 for sales of more than 10 million units, has since been ranked by critics among the greatest hip-hop albums and debut albums of all time. Licensed to Ill features seven singles, including “Brass Monkey,” “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” “Paul Revere,” and “Fight for Your Right.”

In celebration of its 40th anniversary, Def Jam Recordings/UMe will mark four decades of Licensed to Ill with a limited Vinylphyle edition featuring mastering from original sources on March 18, 2027.

Pressed on 180-gram black vinyl LPs with lacquers cut from a high resolution digital transfer from the original 1986 1/4” album master by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound, this newly remastered Vinylphyle edition is housed in a gatefold tip-on wrapped jacket with a satin-matte finish and printed on clay-coated board and includes a four-panel insert with scans of the original tape boxes, a classic band-logo etching on the vinyl, and all-new liner notes by Public Enemy co-founder Chuck D.

Read More »

Celebrating Neil Young on his 81st birthday. —Ed.

Neil Young’s years spent “in the ditch” (his words) remain, for me, the most vital of his entire career. As the hippie dream fell apart so did Young, and on albums such as 1975’s Tonight’s the Night (a “howling facedown with heroin and death itself,” in the critic Robert Christgau’s words) and 1973’s live Time Fades Away Young proceeded to disintegrate, sick unto death with the deaths of his junkie friends and dissatisfied with the folk-rock box he’d put himself in with 1972’s mellow Harvest, the LP that made him a superstar.

On Tonight’s the Night the songs bear an almost unbearable weight of sorrow, and Young’s mournful wildcat yowl is a million miles away from the peaceful vibes of Harvest; one can only imagine what Harvest’s diehard fans must have thought of it, just as it’s hard to imagine what his concert-going fans made of the never-before heard songs on Time Fades Away, on which Young and his Stray Gators ripped into such raw, electrified (and electrifying) numbers as the title track, the great “Yonder Stands the Sinner,” and “Last Dance.”

Me, I’ll always think Tonight’s the Night is the greatest LP ever made about the demise of the Age of Aquarius, but Time Fades Away has its pleasures as well, even if Young himself has dismissed it on multiple occasions, saying in 1987 that it was “the worst record I ever made—but as a documentary of what was happening to me, it was a great record.” And on the original, unreleased liner notes to 1977’s Decade, he again expressed his unhappiness with the tour and ensuing record, before saying, “…but I released it anyway so you folks could see what could happen if you lose it for a while.”

Read More »

Some bands sing about Vikings. Amon Amarth sound like the longship itself —oak hull, iron rivets, and Johan Hegg’s growl rolling over the bow like a storm off the North Sea. Thirty-four years out of Tumba, Sweden, they have turned arena floors into rowing crews and made Odin a household name from pre-teens to grandparents. Thirteen albums in, The Allfather Awakens, out October 2 on Metal Blade, lands like a war horn: this band is not slowing down.

My copy arrived in the Odin’s Hunt variant, grey, white, and red marbled wax that looks like smoke drifting over a battlefield, tucked inside a gatefold jacket with a two-sided insert. I dropped the needle, sealed myself inside my Ultimate Ears Premiers and followed every word Hegg sang on that insert, not coming up for air until the run-out groove.

The production is flat-out stunning. The band wrote on the road this time, then cut the record over two sessions, months apart, at Jacob Hansen’s studio in Denmark, treating every track like a single. You hear that care everywhere.

Olavi Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg ditched their 5150s for Marshalls, and through the Premiers the difference is something you can almost touch. The riffs have grit and grain, the harmonies have room to breathe, and Ted Lundström’s bass sits right in my chest instead of hiding under the guitars. Jocke Wallgren’s kick drum is so tight you can count every stroke.

Read More »

It may be hard for the music listeners of today to fathom the significance of the self-titled debut album in 1969 from Crosby, Stills and Nash. While genres like folk-rock and country rock fused very specific styles, in the 1960s, psychedelia may have been the only genre to emerge that was completely new.

The Beatles, of course, kicked off the British Invasion, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the crowning achievement of their career and the ’60s. That album was also the peak of psychedelia. All of the music mentioned above could easily be analyzed, and the musical antecedents that gave birth to it could be explained.

The debut CSN album, though borrowing from the folk- and country-influenced music of The Byrds (Crosby) and the Buffalo Springfield (Stills), featured an indescribable sound that could not be classified or put into any genre. It was a wholly new music. While some of the album’s success was attributed to the three’s excellent songwriting, the distinct blend of their voices truly made it special.

Though The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Hollies (Nash), and others, such as The Beach Boys and the Bee Gees, all boasted soaring harmony singing, it was still, except in occasional moments, basically group choral harmonies. The CSN blend and the myriad ways the group arranged their vocals were completely new.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Drawn together amid NYC’s Lower East Side, the men of Chavez—Matt Sweeney, Clay Tarver, James Lo, and Scott Marshall—pioneered a sound that blended jagged punk dissonance with the spooky power of ’70s hard-rock hooks.

On Ride the Fader (1996) the band perfected that formula. For proof, look no further than album opener “Top Pocket Man,” where soaring riffs and drum-fill fireworks give way to drop-tuned sludge just in time for the chorus. If you missed it back then, you’re not alone. Ride the Fader did not conquer the globe upon release (Despite what you may be led to believe upon watching the video for “Unreal is Here.”) Instead, its legend has accumulated gradually, burnished over decades via cool kid-to-cool kid tip-offs. Truly one of the most stacked and transcendent guitar records of this or any era.

Ride the Fader returns to us today in a clear-colored LP repress. We’ve also unearthed a massive tranche of era-appropriate video content: a new video for “New Room,” the remastered classic “Unreal is Here,” a 1997 live set, Little Twelve Toes (Chavez in the studio), and the tour documentary Boys Making Music, Music Making Men.

What’s more, we’ve also excavated a long-lost version of Boys that includes a commentary track from Scott’s father, the late great director Garry Marshall. “There was a lot of grab-assing, as they used to say in my generation. Jumping around and fooling around,” he observes, capturing the essence of Chavez’s 1996 European run with Guided By Voices.

Read More »

Celebrating Dennis Coffey, born on this date in 1940. —Ed.

As a guitarist, Dennis Coffey was a member of the storied Funk Brothers’ studio band and the architect of the million-selling instrumental groove monster “Scorpio,” while as a producer his credits include the initial LPs by Sixto Rodriguez of Searching for Sugar Man fame; the recent emergence of a 1968 live set spotlights Coffey’s talents as part of a trio perched at the intersection of soul, funk, jazz, and rock. 

The vast studio-based brilliance that helps to shape the musical prestige of the 1960s is by now well established. Alongside the Wrecking Crew, the Nashville A-Team, and the assorted members of the Stax and FAME studio bands, the group of Detroit musicians known as the Funk Brothers stands tall, their talent lent largely (but not entirely) to the immortal product of Barry Gordy’s Motown enterprise.

Dennis Coffey was part of that band, and his work with producer Norman Whitfield on a slew of Temptations recordings, including the classic hits “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today),” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” “Just My Imagination (Running Away from Me),” and “Psychedelic Shack” are enough to secure the guitarist’s place in the narrative of Motown and in the story of Detroit’s musical heyday overall.

Read More »

Today on Radar, I recently spoke with David J, co-founder, co-songwriter, and bassist of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, and one of the most influential figures in post-punk.

David formed Bauhaus in Northampton in 1978 with his brother Kevin Haskins, Daniel Ash, and Peter Murphy. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” came out the following year and pretty much drew the map for everything goth that followed. When Bauhaus split, David, Daniel, and Kevin went on as Love and Rockets. Alongside the bands, he has built a long solo career, sixteen albums deep. He also wrote the memoir Who Killed Mister Moonlight? and has made theatre and visual art alongside his prolific musical career. We talk about all of it.

His new single, “Walking With The Angels,” came out of a session in Prague that fell apart. He was there to produce another artist, and the sessions were cancelled, but the orchestra was still booked. So he stayed up all night writing, then cut the vocal in one take the next day with two dozen players from the city’s Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras. His friend, the actor Marc Warren, was in the room and shot the video in one take too.

The song closes his new album, Postcards From The Afterlife, out November 27 on Label 51 Recordings. It’s 14 songs that move from Cohen-style chanson and ’60s orchestral pop to the alternative rock he’s known for. David calls it a record about “the poignant persistence of connection, be it in life or in death,” and it’s a beautiful one.

Read More »

The late Jon Hassell remains one of recorded music’s great explorers. A diligent collaborator with an adventurous mind right up to the very end, Hassell’s talents are on vibrant display during Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three), which is not only his final concert recording but also the last piece in the Pentimento Trilogy (available as a CD box set). Few musicians are well served by their late works, as Hassell and his cohort blur the distinction between studio and live recordings. Music Is Invisible is out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Hassell’s Ndeya label in partnership with Warp Records.

A trumpet player, composer, and a sonic architect of the highest rank, Jon Hassell debuted with the still striking Vernal Equinox in 1977 through Lovely Music, Ltd. and followed it up the next year with Earthquake Island on Tomato. But Hassell’s big splash came with his Brian Eno collaboration Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, released in 1980 by Editions EG.

Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two came out in ’81, also on Editions EG, as Hassell’s musical approach was firmly planted at the crossroads of ambient and world music. Back then (less so today), many derided these overlapping categories (and related genres such as new age, environmental-space music and neo-classical) as insubstantial and lacking in substance, but there was plenty of good stuff stocked in this corner of the record store during this era (late ’70s-late ’80s), with Hassell ranking high in mix.

That’s because there’s just so much going on in Hassell’s best stuff, and what’s going on is often wonderfully strange. It’s not background music, but there are plenty of subtleties that can give finicky attention spans the fidgets, and Hassell’s trumpet playing, while clearly influenced by jazz, and by Miles Davis in particular (and Chet Baker to a lesser extent), drifts and ripples and occasionally surges rather than rips and wails and swings.

Read More »

RALEIGH, NC | Some fans waited 20 years for this night. On Wednesday at The Ritz in Raleigh, Saosin played their 2006 self-titled album from start to finish, with Cove Reber back on the mic, for a room that mixed day-one fans with kids who weren’t old enough to crowd surf when the record dropped. Add three hungry openers, a light show I’m still blinking from, and a closing singalong two decades in the making, and this was a night that earned every bit of its nostalgia.

The night started early. The crowd was trickling in slowly, as a mix of people getting out of work and throwing on their black band tees joined a younger crowd. By the time the first band hit the stage, you could feel both generations waiting for the same thing.

The first band to play was Save Us, a newer act on its first tour. The transatlantic trio, fresh off the October release of their debut album, Death To Something, came out much like the crowd, slowly warming up to louder, more pounding melodic tones. They had the unenviable job of playing to a room that was still filling in, and they did an excellent job of getting the crowd ready while gaining a new audience.

Next up was Like Moths to Flames, and their frontman didn’t want anyone standing still. The Columbus, Ohio metalcore band came out with a fury, and their light show matched the chaos—I don’t think I’ve seen that mix of colors before. Every breakdown landed harder than the last. They got the crowd moving and set the tone for everything else to come.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Third Man Records is celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Raconteurs’ classic debut album, Broken Boy Soldiers, with a new opaque green vinyl variant out on Friday, December 11 and available at select record stores on December 18. Pre-orders are available now.

In addition, today sees the digital premiere of Broken Boy Soldiers (Deluxe) featuring the original studio album plus a full-show recording at New York City’s historic Irving Plaza on April 7, 2006—the band’s first-ever live performance in the United States. While previously available as a one-time, vinyl-only pressing in a truncated form, this digital reissue of the Raconteurs first-ever show on American soil at Irving Plaza from April 7th, 2006 adds three previously unreleased takes from the encore.

Here, the Raconteurs’ barn-burning “Blue Veins” is in elevated company with blistering covers of “It Ain’t Easy,” as popularized by David Bowie, along with the frenetic “Headin’ For The Texas Border,” originally by the Flamin’ Groovies.

This announcement follows The Raconteurs’ surprise reunion during Jack White’s concert at Nashville’s The Truth on October 10. The five-song encore, which marked the band’s first live performance in nearly seven years, saw performances of Broken Boy Soldiers favorites “Steady, As She Goes,” “Hands,” “Level,” and “Broken Boy Soldier,” as well as “Carolina Drama” (from 2008’s Consolers of the Lonely).

Read More »

Remembering Screaming Lord Sutch, born on this day in 1940. —Ed.

This very heavy solo debut by renowned English loony Screaming Lord Sutch (aka the 3rd Earl of Harrow) comes with some very heavy baggage. And I’m not referring to the late Lord’s Heavy Friends, who included such rock luminaries as Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, John Bonham, Noel Redding, and Nicky Hopkins.

No, I’m talking about the album’s deplorable reputation. A 1998 BBC poll crowned Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends the worst album of all time, to which I can only reply that the people polled did a grave injustice to Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII. And plenty of others have heaped scorn upon this benighted 1970 LP, which mortified just about everyone, including the people who played on it.

Me, I think they’re being unfair. I rather like Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, and not as kitsch either. The musicians who recorded the LP would go on to condemn it as a bunch of demos that should never have been released, but to my ears it sounds like rock’n’roll primitivism at its best. The album has a lovably raw-boned, one-take feel to it, and what it lacks in polish (there is no polish), it makes up for in pure bluster and monolithic garage-rock raunch. If you’re a fan of “You Really Got Me,” Blue Cheer, the Troggs (and who isn’t a fan of the Troggs?), or any number of sixties garage bands, you’ll most likely dig what’s on offer here.

Read More »