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.

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Marvin Gaye’s career was cut short at the age of 44, as he was launching a comeback, when he was murdered by his father in 1984. In his short life, he made some of the best R&B and soul music ever, and his music transcended those genres.

Initially known for his slew of popular R&B crossover hits in the 1960s, including his duets with Tammi Terrell and, to a lesser degree, with Kim Weston and even Mary Wells, Gaye later recorded albums that reflected his maturation as an artist and not just a hitmaker.

The first was the iconic What’s Going On, released in 1971, an album that still resonates today with its themes of social injustice and ecological apocalypse. Gaye made one other album that, while not as monumental as What’s Going On, defined 1970s soul music: Let’s Get It On, in 1973.

The album was sensual, sometimes raw, like on “You Sure Love to Ball,” yet tender and untamed in its approach to music for lovers. The title song was a massive hit and set the tone for the album’s largely uncluttered sound. The end of side one features somewhat of a reprise entitled “Keep Gettin’ It On.”

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PHOTO: MIKE OWEN | Everybody has one Soft Cell song. For most people, it is “Tainted Love,” and that is fine. It is a perfect record. It is also a door, not a house.

I went through the door at fourteen and never came back out. What was on the other side was not a synth-pop novelty act with a Northern Soul cover to its name. It was Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, a song cycle about bedsits and hustlers and cheap glamour that owes more to Brecht and Weill than to the chart it briefly conquered.

It was The Art of Falling Apart. It was This Last Night in Sodom, the sound of a band detonating itself on purpose. Then came the solo work, where things got genuinely strange: Marc and the Mambas, Torment and Toreros, a double album Almond himself has described as the sound of a nervous breakdown. Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters. An entire album of Jacques Brel translations.

He is a pioneer of the form, one of the handful who took a cheap synthesizer and a drum machine and got a torch song out of them. He also never once stayed in the room he built. I have seen him play more times than I can count, and I have never seen him coast.

On September 25, Soft Cell will release Danceteria, their sixth and last studio album. Dave Ball finished it days before he died on October 22, 2025, and Almond has been plain about what that means: without Ball, there are no more Soft Cell records.

My favorite Soft Cell song has always been “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” and I have never had much of a defense for that beyond the fact that it takes me apart every time. It went to number three in Britain in January 1982, an Almond and Ball composition, a breakup staged in an ordinary nightclub and sung with more contempt and more tenderness than a chart single is supposed to hold.

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There is a version of every record you own that you have never heard. Not a remaster, not a better pressing—the one the people who made it were hearing while they made it. Ultimate Ears Pro has spent three decades building the hardware that grants that access, starting in 1995 with a pair of custom monitors for Alex Van Halen and ending up in the ears of a startling percentage of the artists on your shelf.

I have spent my listening life on the other side of that glass: speakers, a room, a needle, the compromises of moving air across fifteen feet. So, I sat in an audiologist’s chair and had impressions taken of my ear canals, then sat with UE Pro and blind-tested all eight monitors in its lineup until my own ears picked a winner, and about ten days later, took delivery of a pair of UE Premiers that fit nobody else on earth. Then I plugged them into a turntable. What came back wasn’t a smaller version of my system. It was a much bigger one. And because UE Pro would rather you hear this for yourself than take my word for it, they’re giving a pair away to one of you.

It starts with your ears, and that is where I had badly underestimated things. The mold is not packaging. It is the first component in the chain, and everything the monitor does downstream is built on top of it. A custom shell seals the canal completely, and that seal is what gives twenty-one drivers something to push against—without it, there is no real low end and no isolation worth the name. A universal tip approximates your ear. An impression doesn’t have to approximate anything.

I went to Ann Mundell-Noel at Amazing Hearing in Laguna Hills, and the appointment felt closer to a medical exam than a fitting, which is essentially what it is. She inspected both canals first, reading the depth and shape she’d be casting, clearing anything that would compromise the mold, and narrating every step a beat before she took it.

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Remembering John Coltrane, born on this date in 1926. —Ed.

John Coltrane’s Atlantic period presents an arresting convergence of circumstances. It was a time of raised profile and considerable transition, the artist’s confidence audibly growing as he united jazz tradition and experimentation; most of all, it was an era of major breakthroughs that established the saxophonist as a leader in his field. The Atlantic Years in Mono doesn’t include all of his work for the label, but it ably documents a thrilling era that brought Coltrane to a mainstream audience. 

By the time John Coltrane hooked up with the Ertegun brothers he’d already chalked up a significant list of achievements, serving as a powerful voice in post-bop’s development via the bands of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, guesting for a track on Sonny Rollins’ Tenor Madness, teaming with Hank Mobley, Al Cohn, and Zoot Simms for Tenor Conclave, and leading bands for Prestige and for one LP Blue Note.

Top billing came with Coltrane in 1957, and next was Blue Train for Blue Note, which many consider to be his first great album. John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio followed in ’58 (aka Traneing In for its ’61 reissue), and Soultrane retained the services of the Garland band. As Coltrane’s fame grew, Prestige would later release nearly a dozen albums under his name from unissued sessions and elevated sideman dates, in turn possibly lending a false impression of the saxophonist as unusually prolific during ’57-’58.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Velvet Underground’s influential 1969 classic The Velvet Underground is the latest addition to UMe’s Vinylphyle series, presenting Lou Reed’s intimate original “Closet Mix” of the album as a meticulously crafted new premium vinyl edition.

Marking a striking evolution for one of rock’s most influential bands, the record traded the abrasive experimentation of its predecessors for a quieter, more melodic approach that revealed a new emotional depth in Reed’s songwriting. Available to order today exclusively via uDiscover Music, the album is presented on 180-gram black vinyl pressed at RTI and housed in a tip-on gatefold jacket with a four-panel insert featuring source tape scans and newly commissioned liner notes by four-time Grammy nominee and author Scott B. Bomar.

Cut by Joe Nino-Hernes, The Velvet Underground is an AAA cut from the 1969 “Closet Mix” stereo album master, Reed’s intimate original mix featured on the earliest pressings of the album in 1969.

Originally released in 1969, The Velvet Underground represented a dramatic shift from the confrontational sound of the band’s first two albums. Songs including “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Beginning to See the Light,” and “After Hours” brought warmth and vulnerability to the group’s singular sound, while retaining the uncompromising perspective that had already set The Velvet Underground apart. The result was an album that stood distinctly apart from the two that preceded it and revealed another dimension of Reed’s songwriting.

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Celebrating Joan Jett on her 68th birthday. —Ed.

Joan Jett’s 1979 debut LP is one of rock music’s most joyful readymades–an utterly endearing romp through rock history from hoary old standards (“Wooly Bully”) to bubblegum pop to Gary Glitter to the buzzsaw sound of the Ramones, Bad Reputation is a veritable vinyl jukebox you’ll never get tired of tossing dimes into.

On Bad Reputation—original title Joan Jett—the runaway Runaway dares to wear her heart on her sleeve by pledging allegiance to the songs that made her who she is; this is Joan Jett’s Self Portrait, and with the exception of her too-stiff-by-half take on the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” she does her personal canon proud. Not only does she prove she’s the true successor to Gary Glitter (and by association her glam role model Suzi Quatro), she demonstrates conclusively that she’s her own gurl by contributing a couple of songs that (with the exception of the punk-tinged title track) blend seamlessly in with their esteemed company.

Jett (the Blackhearts were still in the future) chose her producers wisely. Top guys Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell (Sex Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook also lent a hand) were both proud Super K Productions alumni working under immortal bubblegum producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffrey Katz, and they brought their many years of throwaway pop songcraft to the table. Remember that version of Led Zep’s “Stairway to Heaven” set to the lyrics of the theme song from Gilligan’s Island? You can thank Laguna for it. And Cordell is the guy who bequeathed us both “I Think We’re Alone Now” and “Mony Mony.”

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Celebrating Nick Cave on his 69th birthday. —Ed.

Need a fitting soundtrack for tuning up that rattletrap fuel-guzzling dragster in the garage? Or are you looking for a fab backdrop whist brushing up on the books of the Old Testament, though not for their supposed lessons but rather for their rampant bloodletting and begetting? Maybe you’re desirous of the appropriate musical accompaniment for the dilapidated trailer-park whiskey-still explosion finale in your yet to be filmed epic screenplay? Well, a suitable listening for all three circumstances is Junkyard by The Birthday Party.

These days, Nick Cave is a well-respected man of letters, an unabashed litterateur whose eternally thin visage gets brief cameo spots in the big Hollywood films that happen to sport his scripts. Indeed, he can be located in Lawless, currently (hopefully) playing in a theatre near you as directed by his friend and collaborator John Hillcoat. But it should also be noted that once upon a time, Cave was a completely punk-centric scribe, his scrawling taken seriously by only a small handful beyond the ‘80s subterranean music playground. In fact, his double duty as a musician and writer placed him in the direct company of such names as Henry Rollins, Lydia Lunch, and Chris Desjardins, aka Chris D.

Way back then, Cave’s “thing” as a pen wielder was totally wrapped up in how he presented a booze-soaked and drug-bent updating of the Southern Gothic tradition as previously staked out by such Advanced American Lit-Class stalwarts as William Faulkner and especially Flannery O’Connor at her most darkly acidic. Yes, even though the dude hailed not from the Southern US but from the very down under climes of the Australian continent. And why not? Hell, at the time Cave started putting pen to pulp, there was hardly anybody in the states besides the late Harry Crews who was even bothering to up the ante on this fine patch of fictive territory anyway.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Pink Floyd announce a new San Tropez Orange Marble vinyl edition of their landmark 1971 album Meddle, for this year’s National Album Day, via Sony Music. Out on October 17th, you can pre-order Meddle here.

A pivotal moment in the band’s development, Meddle was the sixth studio album by the British rock group, originally released in 1971. Produced between touring commitments and widely regarded as a notable progression from their previous work, the band devised a series of novel recording and writing experiments, which also inspired the album’s “Echoes.”

Alongside this, it’s also announced that a newly restored high-resolution version of the iconic “Echoes” sequence, the final chapter from cult-classic 1973 surf film Crystal Voyager, will be available via Pink Floyd’s YouTube channel on 17th October.

The 1973 documentary directed by David Elfick was written and narrated by futuristic surfer, photographer and filmmaker George Greenough. Its iconic closing sequence shot by Greenough showcased his innovative new technique for filming in the water, involving a self-developed and built seventeen pound camera rig, which allowed the audience to see footage from inside a wave for the first time ever.

Greenough was looking for an appropriate soundtrack for this groundbreaking footage, and stumbled across a record his mother had bought for him. Upon hearing the closing track, and noting its perfectly matched 23-minute run time, he knew he had found what he was looking for. Then came the necessity of getting permission to use the song.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Vinylphyle is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bee Gees’ 1976 smash Children of the World with a meticulously crafted new premium vinyl edition of the group’s transformative 14th studio album. Featuring the No. 1 hit “You Should Be Dancing,” Children of the World captured Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb at a pivotal moment as the group embraced the funk and dance-floor rhythms that would help define their next era.

Available 9/23 exclusively via uDiscover Music, the album was cut by Joe Nino-Hernes from the 1976 copy tape and is presented on 180-gram black vinyl pressed at RTI. Housed in a tip-on gatefold jacket, the edition includes a four-panel insert featuring tape box scans, additional photography and new liner notes featuring an interview between John Merchant, the Bee Gees’ engineer for the last 35 years, and Karl Richardson and Albhy Galuten, co-producers and engineers for the band’s 1970s hot streak.

Released in 1976, Children of the World was the Bee Gees’ first album produced by the group themselves, working in tandem with Richardson and Galuten. Building on the rhythmic direction that had begun reshaping their sound, the album paired the Bee Gees’ unmistakable harmonies and melodic instincts with a deeper embrace of funk and dance music.

The result was a Top 10 album led by the No. 1 hit “You Should Be Dancing,” alongside the ballad “Love So Right” and funk-driven “Boogie Child” and “You Stepped Into My Life.” The album’s blend of soaring harmonies, propulsive rhythms, and sophisticated production helped usher the Bee Gees into one of the most celebrated chapters of their career.

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