VIA PRESS RELEASE | Seminal Paisley Underground band Rain Parade announced today that they will release a deluxe edition of their 1985 “lost double album” Crashing Dream on Friday May 30 via Label 51 Recordings, run by Bill Hein, who headed up Enigma Records, the label that originally signed the band in the eighties.

This new, deluxe version of Crashing Dream features a remastered album on compact disc, vinyl, and digital formats and boasts an additional full album of previously unreleased, live, and alternate versions of tracks recorded at sessions and venues for this release.

“Rain Parade were excited that a major label was interested in us, but it became apparent pretty quickly that we had limited support within the Island Records infrastructure,” said the Rain Parade’s Matt Piucci. “The rumors that we were breaking up are false, as we played a US tour upon our return from the UK to support the record.”

“We began working on new material soon as we returned and those demos are on this release, as well as the demos for the Island album as well. It’s an old story, huge label signs band and has no clue what to do with them. We love these songs and are glad they are getting their proper due.”

This new expanded edition features a gatefold album jacket and CD packaging with extensive liner notes and photos from the era when Crashing Dream was recorded. Additionally, several tracks on the expanded edition are from Demolition, a very limited edition CD that the band self-released in 1991, an official “bootleg” of Crashing Dream demos. Demolition has been unavailable for 30 years. All of these recordings have recently been remastered by Rain Parade’s producer Jim Hill.

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Celebrating Bob Dylan in advance of his 83rd birthday tomorrow.
—Ed.

Lots of supposedly sane folks shouted “Masterpiece!” when Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind came out in 1997; Elvis Costello, to pick a seemingly sober-minded celebrity name out of a hat, said, “I think it might be the best record he’s made.”

Hoo ha, said I. Sure, Time Out of Mind was a marked–no, make that very marked–improvement on the rather desultory couple of albums he’d released before it. So if you wanted to call it a resounding comeback, that was fine by me. But masterpiece? Forget about it.

Well, time has softened me some. I still wouldn’t call Time Out of Mind a masterpiece–so far as I’m concerned Dylan stopped producing them in the mid-seventies, at latest. But it includes at least one song that stands with the very best of his work and a couple of others that are pretty damn good, and that’s not bad for an artist who was born before America entered WWII.

And the album as a whole is noteworthy for its unremittingly dark tone. Dylan sounds lost, desperate even; love makes him sick and has him all mixed up, things are disintegrating, and while it’s not dark yet, it’s getting there. This baby is one long twilight stroll through the graveyard of Dylan’s mind, and he’s not whistling; he taking a reckoning, and wondering whether the journey was worth the cost.

Time Out of Mind is an autumnal, and even elegiac, work; you can practically hear the shadows gathering. The dark and sublimely lovely “Not Dark Yet” is the album’s linchpin and one of the greatest songs Dylan will ever write. On it Dylan finally looks back, if only because there doesn’t seem much ahead; “Behind every beautiful thing,” he sings, “There’s been some kind of pain.” This is the sound of a man sinking beneath his burden of years, and you’re forced to wonder; does he fear the darkness, or look forward to it?

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Andi Harriman is a NY-based DJ, producer, music journalist, and the boss of the party/label, SYNTHICIDE, which promotes live and DJ events all over NYC. She is the author of Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace, the worldwide compendium of post-punk and goth in the 1980s. She is also an EBM artist, and you can find her work as Andi on Bandcamp and wherever you stream.

We recently spoke about her upbringing in a Pentecostal family in Appalachia, how she first discovered the ’80s Goth subculture, our shared love of Depeche Mode, and her unending energy to create environments that support lovers of darker and synth-driven sounds from multiple genres without barriers. We both agree that there should be more women everywhere.

I really love everything Andi makes and think she has an amazing story. I suggest heading over to Synthicide on Instagram, where you can keep track of the events. You can find Andi’s page @andi80s, which has links to her music and piles of great stuff, including vinyl, over on Bandcamp on the Synthicide page.

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, a New York-based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; (I’m quoting Ishmael from Moby-Dick here) whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself pausing involuntarily before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to listen to some Dope Lemon as soon as I can.

Because Dope Lemon (aka Angus Stone) has done the whole wide world a favor by inventing a whole new genre of music I call stoner yacht rock, and verily it is as efficacious a remedy for the hypos as ever devised by the hand of mortal man. From the moment I first heard “Miami Baby” from Dope Lemon’s 2023 LP Kimosabè, damp, drizzly November vacated my soul, and from there I went on to listen to his other four albums, and I haven’t methodically knocked off a hat since. Haven’t paused before any coffin warehouses either. I’ve been too mellow,

I simply haven’t heard music this chill in eons. Listening to Dope Lemon is like sailing a sea of blissful narcotics in a pleasure craft made out of honey and gold—I’m talking about some classic laid-back yacht rock with the occasional psychedelic overlay, and the guy’s lyrics are smart and he’s funny to boot. And if you take his lyrics at face value—and I don’t see why you shouldn’t—he sure does love his drugs.

Take the opening lines from the great “John Belushi” from 2025’s Golden Wolf, his latest: “I’m doped out, self-medicated at all times.” Which he follows shortly thereafter with “Chain me up to the fridge and sell tickets/I’m a freakshow and I want more.” You wanna see the yacht Dope Lemon’s on you’re going to have to look up, way up just left of the crescent moon, because that boy is sailing.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent Project Records (IPR) announced that they are releasing the posthumous, final solo album from Jeffrey Runnings, Piqued, on Friday July 11 on vinyl, CD and digital formats. All formats will include four bonus tracks of rare recordings from the late ’80s. Pre-save and pre-order the album HERE.

The first single from Piqued, “Batman Forever,” is out today on all streaming services. Runnings was the creative force and guiding light behind Nebraska post-punk pioneers For Against. Runnings died on Monday, March 3 due to stage 4 cancer as reported in Pitchfork.

Some forty years after a fan letter from Nebraska resulted in Independent Project Records commencing a decades-long collaboration with post-punk cult favorites turned dream pop visionaries For Against, Piqued is the last album from For Against’s chief songwriter, lead singer, bass player, and only constant member, Jeffrey Runnings.

Piqued is a celebration of the artist’s lifelong quest for a sound that, stripped to the bones, is all the more powerful and cathartic for its restraint. Recorded by Runnings at home on an old 8-track cassette machine, the album plays just like a late ‘80s mixtape, lovingly compiled to showcase the beautiful emptiness of post-punk’s more eloquently quiet peaks.

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Remembering Sun Ra, born on this day in 1914. —Ed.

No musician better fits the descriptor “beyond category” than Herman Poole Blount, aka the late, great Sun Ra. Indeed, those simply assessing him as one stone mug in free jazz’s Mt. Rushmore have clearly not listened to much of the man’s stuff. The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, originally released in 1962 on the Savoy label, is recognizably a jazz record, but it’s only tangentially freeform. And yet, it’s consistently exploratory as it blends edgy, advanced post-bop with aspects familiar to the Exotica genre. 

Upon release, The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, the pianist-composer-bandleader’s fourth LP and first to be cut outside of Chicago, didn’t exactly make a big splash, even with the ostensible muscle of a long-extant record label behind it; the prior two Sun Ra albums, 1959’s Jazz in Silhouette and ’57’s Super-Sonic Jazz, were self-released micro-editions on Sun Ra’s now legendary imprint El Saturn, and his debut, also from ’57, Jazz by Sun Ra (aka Sun Song, the title Delmark gave it for reissue) was put out by Transition, the label of Tom Wilson, who happens to be the producer of The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra.

If it can be properly said that Sun Ra ever made a big splash on the scene, it was probably through the two The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra volumes ESP-Disk issued in ’65, mainly because they aligned the artist and Arkestra with a “bohemian” audience in the years between Beat’s winddown and the Hippie explosion. But still; nearly five years elapsed before Sun Ra made the cover of Rolling Stone, so it’s probably more accurate to say the man and his band just indefatigably plugged away incrementally, until they were eventually firmly ensconced into the landscape of 20th century subterranean artmaking.

Folks who come to The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra having only heard a few of the Arkestra’s wilder dives into abstraction can be struck by the general lack of mayhem (“The Beginning” is this album’s main exception), and by extension, drawn conclusions often define the music here as embryonic. I disagree with these assessments while acknowledging that the set’s 11 “miniatures” (to borrow a description of the tunes from liner essayist Ben Young) present a distinct and much more accessible approach than what’s on later records like the two Solar Myth Approach volumes and Concert for the Comet Kohoutek.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue Charles Kynard’s 1972 cult classic Woga, recorded in Los Angeles for Mainstream Records and featuring top-tier musicians Chuck Rainey, Paul Humphrey, Arthur Adams, and George Bohanon.

Produced by Bob Shad, the album stands as one of the label’s funkiest releases, showcasing Kynard’s signature Hammond organ grooves. Woga is reissued here on vinyl for the first time since its original release, complete with its original gatefold artwork using first-generation session photos. This edition also includes the bonus track “Smiling Faces Sometimes” and comes with newly remastered audio plus a two-page insert featuring new liner notes by Kevin Le Gendre.

Organist Charles Kynard, born in St. Louis in 1933, passed away relatively young at the age of 46 in 1979. Despite a short career, he left a lasting impression on the international jazz-funk scene with a string of soul-jazz classics, culminating with Woga, recorded in 1972 for Bob Shad’s Mainstream Records.

Kynard began his professional career in St. Louis before relocating to Los Angeles in the early ’60s, where he started recording for the Pacific Jazz label. There, he worked with renowned musicians such as Howard Roberts, Sonny Stitt, and Buddy Collette, releasing his debut album for the label in 1963. A few years later, he switched to Prestige Records, recording a series of albums that would become staples of the soul-jazz canon—including Reelin’ With The Feelin’ (1969), Afro-Disiac (1970), and Wa-Tu-Wa-Zui (1971). These records, rich with breakbeats provided by the likes of Bernard Purdie, Paul Humphrey, and Idris Muhammad, have since been sampled by artists such as Bonobo, Cypress Hill, and The Chemical Brothers.

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New York City’s Springhouse is noted for being early US adopters of the shoegaze sound in the great alternative-indie blitz of the early 1990s. But in 2008, they returned with From Now to OK on CD from Bruce Licher’s Independent Project Records. Flashing forward to right now finds that set receiving an overdue expanded vinyl reissue from IPR that includes instrumental versions, demos, and live tracks all beautifully designed, as is Licher’s way. The set is out now. Our review follows below, along with a video premiere of the album track “Moving Van.”

Springhouse is the band of guitarist-vocalist Mitch Friedland, bassist Larry Heinemann, and drummer (and The Big Takeover publisher) Jack Rabid. On From Now to OK they enlist a lot of help to realize a crisp, vibrant melodic sound that veers away from the shoegaze textures of their two prior albums, 1991’s Land Falls (with sleeve design by IPR) and ’93’s Postcards from the Arctic (no IPR design and it appears it’s yet to see a vinyl release).

Springhouse’s approach on From Now to OK has been described as folk-rock, and there’s no need to quibble with that assessment, but it’s worth noting that a fair number of the disc’s 12 songs connect like classic Hoboken guitar pop. This is true of the jangly bah-bah-bahs of “Moving Van,” though “Time Runs Out,” with its acoustic strum, keyboard swells, and horns, broadens the template.

Opener “Passion” features punchy punky bursts in the choruses but also dishes some sweet faux mellotron in the back end. The strum of “No More Yesterdays” has a decidedly Anglo feel by way of NYC/Jersey, so the influences continue to traverse the big pond. “Grateful” is a likeable slow build to the symphonic, but Friedlander’s vocals are still reminiscent of a band Bar/None Records might’ve added to their roster around 1987 or so.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The musical legacy of the late, great Gregg Allman continues with the release of The Gregg Allman Band – One Night In DC, May 15, 1984, a full-length concert recording arriving digitally and on CD June 20, 2025, via the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s posthumous label, Sawrite Records.

Recorded live at The Bayou in Washington, DC before a capacity crowd of 900 lucky fans, the latest release from Allman’s personal archives sees the Gregg Allman Band flying at full force after three years of non-stop touring, rocking the house with a stacked setlist highlighted by new songs, iconic covers, and fiery renditions of classic songs from the Allman Brothers Band repertoire. Highlights include the Allman Brothers Band classic, “Dreams,” premiering today at all digital streaming services.

Though his passing in 2017 has left an immense space in rock ‘n’ roll that can never truly be filled, Gregg Allman Band – One Night In DC, May 15, 1984 stands as a stunning audio snapshot in time that magnificently captures Gregg Allman during his quest to prove that no matter what the challenges, the road would go on forever. Having spent more than three years playing anytime, anyplace, for anyone who wanted to listen, the Gregg Allman Band had truly hit its stride.

The core line-up of Gregg on vocals and Hammond organ, Danny Toler on lead guitar, his brother Frankie on drums, bassist Gregg Voorhees, Bruce Waibel on rhythm guitar, and percussionist Chaz Trippy had been augmented by the addition of keyboardist Tim Heding, which brought another lead instrument to the GAB. A further advancement was that Gregg was writing new songs with the brothers Toler, which further expanded the band’s repertoire.

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Many people have dreamed about being in a movie. While it amounts to no more than a dream, for many, finding the perfect movie soundtrack to play whenever you want is quite easy. The two releases covered here will not only provide a fantasy soundtrack, but will whisk you away to England in the ‘60s or Italy in the ’70s and early ‘80s.

Alfie was one of the most important films of the 1960s. Released in 1966, it was a galvanizing cinematic success that not only solidified London as the center of world cinema for a brief time in the early and mid-‘60s but also provided the breakthrough role for Michael Caine, which launched him into international stardom. He’s never looked back.

For a film that would be considered the height of ’60s Swinging London, this soundtrack is an American jazz tour de force. While Italian clothes, scooters, and cappuccino highly influenced the mod movies and culture of the time, Jamaican music and American jazz and R&B fueled the sound of the early stages of Swinging London.

Original copies of this highly sought-after soundtrack album fetch big bucks on the collector’s market, due to its immaculate sound and innovative jazz music. Though primarily the musical brainchild of saxophonist Sonny Rollins, Oliver Nelson’s arrangements set the cool cinematic mood. The title song, done here in instrumental fashion and written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was recorded by many artists at the time, most notably Cilla Black and Dionne Warwick. Black’s version is not included here, but was played during the end credits. The US soundtrack release included a version sung by Cher.

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