Monthly Archives: July 2017

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Ask a fan of any band to name their favourite album by said act and there are not many sets of fans whose first choice would almost unanimously be a live album. But Slade are most definitely one of those bands and the album that tops most fans’ lists is Slade Alive! And their legendary frontman Noddy Holder agrees, maintaining to this very day that it is the band’s greatest album; “I think it had the essence of what Slade was all about as a band. It was very basic and raw, it captured a mood and it also helped set us apart from other pop acts. We weren’t just a singles band anymore—we had a credible, raunchy hit album too. We were pop and we were cool. It was perfect.”

With their first monster hit single “Coz I Luv You” poised to spend four weeks occupying the coveted UK No.1 spot in late 1971, Slade aka Noddy Holder (vocals/guitar), Dave Hill (guitar), Jim Lea (bass), and Don Powell (drums) were a young West Midlands band on the cusp of international rock stardom. Manager & producer Chas Chandler was keen to get an album into the shops fast in order to capitalise on the imminent success of “Coz I Luv You” and a live album seemed by far the quickest and easiest solution.

Famously recorded for the princely sum of just £600 over three nights (between 19th-21st October 1971) of loud, hot, and sweaty 300-capacity fan-club only gigs at a packed Command Studios, Piccadilly London W1, Slade pushed the club’s PA system to its limits as Chandler set about the tricky task of capturing on tape the sound of a band at the absolute peak of their live power. Speaking of the album recently, Don Powell said, “Memories are still vivid of the three nights in Command Studios at Piccadilly Circus where we recorded Slade Alive! It was also a small theatre where we invited fan club members. We actually used all of the second night for Slade Alive!”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Verve Records/UMe are celebrating the legacy of the incomparable multiplatinum GRAMMY® Award-winning singer and pianist Diana Krall by releasing The Very Best of Diana Krall on vinyl for the first time in the U.S., as the greatest hits collection nears its 10th anniversary.

The album is available as a two-LP set on audiophile-favorite 180-gram vinyl and follows last year’s release of eight essential Diana Krall albums on vinyl as part of Verve’s 60th anniversary celebration. Covering the years 1996-2006, this 15-track collection compiled by Krall in collaboration with her longtime producer, the late Tommy LiPuma, features highlights from her first decade as a recording artist, during which time the Grammy winning singer/pianist’s expressive vocals and delicate, soulful piano work gained her international stardom.

“Easily the most high-profile female jazz artist of her generation,” says The New York Times, Krall has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, making the Berklee College of Music graduate one of the best-selling jazz artists of all time. The Very Best on vinyl arrives as Krall celebrates the May release of her acclaimed new album, Turn Up the Quiet, and current tour that will last 2+ years, and take her around the world.

The selections on The Very Best range from intimate trio work to pieces recorded live with a full symphony orchestra. Krall delivers some deeply personal moments and reimagines timeless vintage standards by some of her favorite composers as George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Van Heusen and Cahn, and Bacharach and David.

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“My parents moved to Australia from the UK in the 80s—my Dad being a bit of a DJ in London had a great vinyl collection.”

“I didn’t think much about vinyl again until I was about 21 when a friend went to a big second-hand market sale and picked out a present for me—I love Edith Piaf and she found one of her records. I had the record but no record player.

I drove across Australia, moved from Perth to Melbourne, and this record came with me and I had still not even heard it. It stayed packed up in a box until recently. I’ve now got a record player and finally listened to the Edith Piaf record that I’ve had for 5 years for the first time.

My collection is now growing. On a recent trip to LA I bought several pieces of vinyl including records by Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, and D’Angelo. In Melbourne I’ve been picking up records by the likes of Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix.

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Nina Simone was truly one of a kind. A proud black woman unafraid to sing out about racial inequality—she would later say she wrote her defiant 1964 song “Mississippi Goddamn,” about the ugly events then occurring throughout the South, “in a rush of fury, hatred and determination”—Simone (who was later diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder) was notoriously irascible, tempestuous, and unpredictable.

Just how unpredictable? Well, she liked her guns, and once attempted to shoot a record executive whom she accused of stealing royalties. She also pulled a gun on a store clerk who refused to allow her to return a pair of shoes. (Suggestion to shoe clerks—give the woman her damn shoes!) And in 1995 she actually succeeded in shooting a neighbor’s child with an air gun, unhappy because she found his laughter distracting. On the political front she went from preaching nonviolence to subscribing to the notion of violent revolution, and ultimately left the United States in protest against the Vietnam War to live out the remainder of her life in Barbados, Liberia, and various European countries, most notably France.

But all of that—with the exception of her fiery political beliefs and adamant commitment to civil rights, of course—is ultimately irrelevant, because in the end Simone will be judged a singer and songwriter of prodigious talent. From her beginnings as a lounge singer in Atlantic City in the mid-fifties Eunice Kathleen Waymon—who took the stage name Nina Simone because she didn’t want her family to know she was playing the Devil’s Music—developed a style of jazz singing all her own, and while her recorded output slowed after 1970 or so she continued to produce albums until 1993. (She died in 2003 in southern France.)

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Three For Silver – The Way We Burn
Broken Bellows – In the Deep
The Woggles – Hard Times
Matt Tarka – Time Travels
The March Divide – Cherry Bomb
Tree Machines – Fade On
PARENTZ – Single

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
The Church – Another Century

Peace to Mateo – Thinking of You
Renraku – Gravity Well
Cross Culture – Faded Away
Blank Space – Promiscuous Mortality (Demo)
GoodLuck – Find Me In The Forest (PaulWetz Remix)
R.Kelly – Ignition (Pink Panda “The Good Life” Remix)
Tommy SPITZ – King Spitzo
MORTEN – China White

VIA PRESS RELEASE | …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead’s landmark album, Source Tags & Codes, will be released as an expanded vinyl edition on August 11 via Interscope/UMe to commemorate its 15th anniversary.

Housed in a gatefold sleeve, the album, which will also be available digitally, will be pressed on black vinyl as a double LP for the first time ever and include three tracks previously only available on various rare and international releases (“Invocation,” “Life Is Elsewhere,” and “Blood Rites”). The back cover will be a replica of the Japanese version which features a drawing of a teenage boy while the iconic image of a cackling Henry Miller from the compact disc and North American back cover will be represented with a unique etching on Side D of the second LP. A very limited amount of 500 copies will be available on midnight navy vinyl exclusively via The Sound of Vinyl, available for pre-order here.

Few albums in 2002 were as highly anticipated as Trail of Dead’s major label debut, Source Tags & Codes, which saw the band making the leap from venerable indie Merge Records to Interscope. Having already amassed a rabid fanbase off the strength of two acclaimed albums and their legendary, nihilistic live shows, the Austin, Texas-based band—fronted by dual vocal powerhouses and multi-instrumentalists Conrad Keely and Jason Reece and rounded out with Neil Busch and Kevin Allen—had many waiting with bated breath to see what their move to the majors would produce.

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PHOTOS: RICHIE DOWNS | It’s become somewhat of a common practice when we’re coordinating our In-store at Som Records shoots, when there’s a band involved, to suggest that at least 2 members try to be available for the filming. Over time we’ve found that this lends itself to comfortable on camera interaction and more free flowing conversation and ultimately a stronger outcome—although we’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past among several solo outings.

Which brings us to the Pixies whose tour came through Washington, DC a number of weeks back in support of their current release Head Carrier. Happily their record store friendly team was open to our request to participate and offered that Mr. Joey Santiago—the band’s vinyl aficionado—would be delighted to come by for a hang and a record rummage. “Fantastic!” we replied and suggested that an additional Pixie or 2 might benefit the segment as well for the reasons noted above.

“No, no—alllll you’ll need is Joey,” we were told. And that proved easily accurate.

Not only was he just up for the shoot, Santiago popped by the shop the afternoon prior to filming to get the lay of the land and do some pre-shoot browsing. He’s that guy with the vintage audio gear and the attention to detail when it comes to tubes and wires and cables he told us with genuine enthusiasm—and he’s pretty fucking funny too.

So, let’s wait no further—we’re record shopping with the Pixies’ Joey Santiago at Washington, DC’s Som Records.

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What a disappointment. Here I’ve been hearing about what a definitive live document and astoundingly raw slab o’ Iggy at his Iggiest Metallic K.O. is FOR YEARS, and having put off the fun until this late date because hell you have to have SOMETHING to look forward to in your golden years I discover it ain’t all that.

Sure, the LP positively drips egg-yolk authenticity (“I’ve been egged by better than you,” says the Iggster) but when my favorite moment on an album is a cover of “Louie Louie” I really have to ask myself how much I love that album. And I once heard a better live version of “Louie Louie” by cult legend and very outsider artist Mikey “Mayor of South Street” Wild in Philadelphia, so put that in your crack pipe and smoke it.

Yeah, Metallic K.O. is “live” alright—you get to hear Iggy deliver such cracks as “We’re the hardest working band in the business, I don’t care we’re if the best” and—on the three and one-half minute waste of space called “Iggy Talks”—“Let’s hear it for the singer. I AM the greatest.” But beyond that I don’t know what you’re paying for, besides “Louie Louie” and an okay version of “Raw Power” and a just alright version of “Cock in My Pocket,” which Iggy says was “cowritten by my mother.” Which is my way of saying this is a comedy album, and while I love comedy as much as the next guy I dislike Lou Reed’s live comedy LP Take No Prisoners for a reason.

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