VIA PRESS RELEASE | On November, 13 Chrysalis Records will release a brand new Midge Ure best-of collection Chapters: The Best Of 2026, showcasing music he created in the eighties. This follows his recently acclaimed new studio album A Man Of Two Worlds, released earlier this year.

Midge Ure’s remarkable life in music kicked off from the moment he arrived in London from his native Glasgow, in 1977. Initially, he joined Glenn Matlock’s Rich Kids, and the following year, he and Rich Kids’ drummer Rusty Egan formed Visage with Steve Strange. The lineup was completed by John McGeoch, Barry Adamson, and Dave Formula from Magazine, and Ultravox Keyboardist Billy Currie. Their second single, “Fade To Grey,” was a Top 10 hit.

In 1979 Midge Ure joined Thin Lizzy on a US tour, replacing Gary Moore and in 1980 he would co-write “Yellow Pearl” with Phil Lynott, which eventually became the Top of The Pops theme tune. The same year Billy Currie invited Midge to join Ultravox. What followed was six successful years in which the band scored two Top 3 and seven Top 20 singles, and two Top 5 and three Top 10 albums.

Throughout the 1980s, in addition to his work with Ultravox and co-writing and organizing Band Aid and Live Aid with Bob Geldof, Ure also released several successful solo albums, including the number 2 album The Gift, which featured the number 1 single, “If I Was.” The collection also features collaborations with the likes of Kate Bush on “Sister And Brother” and former Japan member Mick Karn on “After A Fashion.”

Read More »

Celebrating Steven Severin on his 70th birthday. —Ed.

My favorite Siouxsie and the Banshees fact: the early band, primitivists to the core, ditched axe player Peter Fenton because he was a “real rock guitarist.” Can’t have one of those gussying up one’s primal punk rawk sound, not if one wants to create something truly unique and new. Which is what Siouxsie and the Banshees created with their celebrated 1978 debut, The Scream. So revolutionary was their music that critic Clinton Heylin held that the post-Fenton iteration of Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with the formation of PiL and Magazine, marked the “true starting point for English post-punk.”

On The Scream, Siouxsie Sioux (aka Susan Janet Ballion), guitarist and saxophonist John McKay, bassist Steven Severin, and drummer Kenny Morris created a sound that perfectly melded discord and harmony—a twitchy, spiky, and seemingly chaotic ruckus that was actually filled with beguiling melodies.

Siouxsie’s vocals were by no means “pretty”—on The Scream, she’s more attack dog than traditional female vocalist, and that’s a large part of the LP’s charm. But the real beauty of her vocals is the way they perfectly mesh with the band’s jagged yet catchy melodies; she’s in total synch with McKay’s remarkable guitar lines, and the pounding and throbbing of Morris and Severin on drums and bass, respectively.

McKay in particular is brilliant; I listen to his surprisingly ornate guitar work on, say, “Jigsaw Feeling,” and I marvel. The same goes for his magnificent guitar riff on “Carcass,” which is undoubtedly the catchiest song on The Scream. Between his guitar and Siouxsie’s alternately choppy and flowing vocals, this baby is a keeper, especially when you throw in the glam handclaps.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | More than half a century after its original release, Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden, the extraordinary 1970 debut that introduced one of popular music’s most singular voices as a solo artist, returns to vinyl on October 2 from Capitol Records. The album is now available for pre-order.

Originally released by GRT Records, Come to My Garden is a lush, cinematic fusion of soul, jazz, pop, classical orchestration, and psychedelia, pairing Riperton’s luminous voice with the visionary production and arrangements of Charles Stepney. Meticulously mastered for vinyl by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering, this new edition brings remarkable depth, detail, and warmth to the recording, delivering a definitive vinyl presentation of Riperton’s timeless debut.

Recorded at Chicago’s Ter Mar Studios in November 1969, Come to My Garden arrived as Riperton was stepping out from the groundbreaking psychedelic soul group Rotary Connection and establishing an artistic identity entirely her own.

Richard Rudolph, Riperton’s longtime creative partner and husband, played an integral role in shaping Come to My Garden, co-writing several of the album’s defining songs and penning its evocative title track. Stepheny, Riperton’s collaborator in Rotary Connection, produced, arranged, and orchestrated the album and wrote or co-wrote nine of its ten songs, bringing remarkable cohesion to its songwriting and sound.

Read More »

The British-American band Foreigner was the late Seventies/early Eighties Great Hard Rock mean—commercial radio conformists who delivered on the occasional great song, and dumb but just smart enough to make their stand in the middle of the road, the passing tractor-trailers in both lanes be damned, because they knew conquering the airwaves by fair or foul was their ticket to infamy and fortune.

Well, they were right, and the proof lies in the fact that their eponymous 1977 debut sold a shitload of units. In short, they were savvy customers and laughed the whole way to their Lamborghini Countach LP400s.

Their professionalism and Foreigner’s slick and immaculate production were catnip to people who value such things, but they have detractors galore—Robert Christgau skewered them every chance he got (of Foreigner, he wrote “You’ve heard of Beatlemania? I propose Xenophobia,” while in his review of 1978’s Double Vision, he called Foreigner “the world’s dullest group”). And another critic dismissed Foreigner as “sanforized, sanitized and safely sterilized into three basic chords.”

Christgau took the broader view—if Foreigner boded anything, it couldn’t be anything good. (And he had a point.) Listeners weren’t so picky—they heard songs like “Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold as Ice” and swooned. And the piano, synthesizers, flute (!), and layered vocals didn’t turn them off, because undiluted hard rock was too primitive.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, announce the reissue of the landmark box set Miles Davis & John Coltrane – The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955–1961.

The expansive collection of recordings capturing John Coltrane and Miles Davis’ legendary collaborations between 1955 and 1961 will be reissued as 9LP and 6CD sets in honor of Davis and Coltrane’s centennials this year. Produced by Michael Cuscuna and Bob Belden, Miles Davis & John Coltrane – The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955–1961 won two GRAMMYs (Best Boxset or Limited Edition Package and Best Liner Notes) and was only released on vinyl in a super limited edition via Mosaic Records.

Now available widely for the first time, the 9LP includes vinyl of Mark Wilder’s remixed and remastered audio from 2000 cut directly from the analog tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound. Each LP is in an individually-designed jacket housed in a luxe slipcase accompanied by a gorgeous 60-page adaptation of the original book with stunning rare photography and essays by original producer George Avakian and Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb, insightful GRAMMY-winning notes by noted critic Bob Blumenthal, timeline and further notes by Cuscuna and Belden, and the original liner notes to Kind of Blue by pianist Bill Evans.

The CD reissue re-configures the 2000 6CD set with its 116-page book and 6 individually designed minijackets, all housed in a beautiful slipcase.

Read More »

Celebrating Jules Alexander in advance of his 83rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic as a cheap plastic peace symbol.

But hey–as that great philosopher Huey Lewis pointed out, it’s hip to be square, and all of your REAL swinging girls and boys know The Association is the Nazz. So what if they flunked the Acid Test and would have been more at home at Tricia Nixon’s wedding than a Human Be-In? The Association rose above it all, producing a rapturous dream pop that Tricky Dick himself might have tapped a toe to.

And you can hear The Association in all their vocal glory on the 2018 Anthology: Just the Right Sound. It’s 51 songs are a definite case of overkill–and I’ve docked it a half-grade accordingly–but it’s worth the purchase price (and more!) if you want to hear not only the songs that melted your heart but such berserker numbers as “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies,” to say nothing of a couple of cuts off 1972’s justifiably neglected Waterbeds in Trinidad!

Read More »

Some albums arrive. Anghellic detonated. Twenty-five years ago, Tech N9ne split himself into three acts—Hell, Purgatory, Heaven—and dared the rest of hip-hop to keep up with his tongue. It cracked the Top 60 of the Billboard 200 and hit No. 50 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart, but chart position was never the story. The story was that nobody in 2001 sounded remotely like this, and nobody since has caught him.

Anghellic: The Resurrection is not a victory lap. It is Tech taking the master tapes back and finishing an argument he started a quarter century ago.

He went back in with engineer Ben “Bengineer” Cybulsky and remixed and remastered the record himself, and you hear that intent immediately. The low end has weight now instead of mud. The Halloween piano, the talkbox, the horror-movie air around the vocals, all of it has been pulled apart and given room to breathe. Nothing is scrubbed. It just hits harder.

Then there is the object. This is a 2xLP, one disc a devil-red crimson, the other a light celestial blue, the whole Hell-to-Heaven concept sitting in your hands before the needle drops. Four sides also means the three-act sequence lands in chapters instead of one long haul. The fold-out is stacked with photography and full song credits, the kind of packaging that makes you sit on the floor and read while side one plays. Vinyl earning its keep.

Read More »

Remembering Linda McCartney, born on this date in 1941. —Ed.

Paul McCartney was the member of the Fab Four whom so many used to relish knocking around. Whether it was in spirited bar chats or animated discussions at parties, when the tide turned to The Beatles, somebody could always be counted on for a hearty jibe at Macca’s expense. And in my above use of “so many,” I’m generally referring to males, and by “somebody,” I’m specifically speaking of those who indisputably consider John Lennon to be the Best Beatle.

While for those truly devoted fans of the band, there could never be a Worst, for many, Paul was the Square Beatle, a designation not borne out by the facts, for he was as interested in the avant-garde as any other member. Hell, in ’68 he co-produced “I’m the Urban Spaceman” by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, for Pete’s sake, an act that places him rather high up on the cool meter. However, others derided him as the Corporate Beatle. And yeah, it’s true that Paul never lost track of the business aspect of the whole affair. Still, his behavior in this regard hasn’t really played out as particularly odious in comparison to other rock star types of not even half his stature or talent.

But both Paul’s image and the assessment of his post-Beatle solo career have rebounded in recent years. Much of this might have to do with the Four’s constantly regenerating fanbase, which is consistently growing older and perhaps letting go of the rebelliousness that once inspired easy identification with Lennon or Harrison. It might also be related to the race for the Coolest Living Beatle being down to him and Ringo “No More Mail, Thanks” Starr.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Naked Raygun, one of the most influential bands in Chicago punk history, will release Live at Riot Fest on November 6, 2026 via Loud Pizza Records. The 2xLP, pressed on Raygun Infra-Red vinyl, captures the band’s game-changing November 5, 2006 headlining set at the Congress Theater, the reunion show that brought Naked Raygun back from a 14-year absence and relaunched a second act that continues today.

Few bands have shaped a city’s sound the way Naked Raygun did Chicago’s. Active in various lineups from 1980 to 1992, with reunion shows in 1997, the band was one of the first and longest-running Chicago punk bands, and its influence on the scene is hard to overstate. Naked Raygun was one of the few bands to span the entire decade of the 1980s, playing with or helping bring along most of the era’s defining acts. The band reformed in late 2006 and remains active today. In 2021, they released Over the Overlords, their first full-length album of new material in 31 years, proving the reunion was no fluke.

For Riot Fest founder Mike Petryshyn, Naked Raygun’s music was his introduction to the city he’d come to love. “They introduced me to the Chicago I would ultimately fall in love with: loud, uncompromising, beautifully authentic, perfectly abrasive, yet somehow profoundly comforting,” he says. “There was never any pretense with Naked Raygun… It was simply intrinsic to who they were.” That influence became foundational to what Riot Fest itself would become.

“Naked Raygun is inextricably woven into the fabric of this festival: the attitude, the humor, the sense of community, the distinctly Chicago obstinacy, and the conviction that you can create something entirely on your own terms without soliciting anyone’s permission or approval,” he says. Even now, when the band plays Riot Fest, he describes it as something more than another band on a stage, a set with real gravity behind it, carrying a sense of history, continuity, and homecoming.

Read More »