Monthly Archives: May 2019

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Trafalgar Releasing, in collaboration with Eagle Rock Entertainment, today announced the global cinema release of The Cure – Anniversary 1978-2018 Live in Hyde Park London, celebrating 40 years of The Cure, cementing them as one of the defining rock bands of music history.

The film, slated for release from Thursday, July 11th, sees The Cure take the stage on a perfect July evening in London’s Hyde Park to deliver a set of a songs celebrating four decades of music making. The ensuing film Anniversary 1978-2018 directed by longtime collaborator Tim Pope, captures them in glorious 4K. The 5.1 audio mix by Robert Smith and Paul Corkett complements and completes this fabulously immersive cinematic experience. From Lovesong to Lullaby, from Boy’s Don’t Cry to Burn, from Fascination Street to Friday I’m In Love, Robert Smith and his extraordinary band – Simon Gallup, Jason Cooper, Roger O’Donnell and Reeves Gabrels – take us on a magical trip through time.

The now seminal gig received widespread critical acclaim including five stars from The Independent, calling it “a perfect set.” Rolling Stone said there was a “unique power in The Cure’s live performance,” whilst NME called it “epic” and The Metro awarded four stars saying that the show was a “testament to how iconic The Cure’s music is that ticket-holders covered all generations.” Lead singer of The Cure, Robert Smith says: “This really was the perfect way to celebrate 40 years of the band. It was a fabulous day none of us will ever forget.”

Marc Allenby, CEO at Trafalgar Releasing added: “The influence and impact of The Cure is unquestionable and last year’s 40th anniversary concert captured the band at their very best, representing the breadth of their amazing career. It’s a great honour for Trafalgar Releasing to be given the opportunity to work on this theatrical release and we look forwarding to sharing this special film with fans in cinemas around the world.

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“Vinyl is warmth, real grit, and tangible music come to life.”

“I’ll never tire of the ceremonial movement of putting on a new record. When the wax meets the needle and music casts a spell upon the room… few things make you appreciate the art of an album like listening to vinyl. No ads, no true distractions, just sound waves spinning on a table. Slowly my collection has grown since I got my first (shitty) record player at 19 and ever since I joined a record of the month club that my friends started (Vinyl Me, Please), I’ve been adding vinyl I wouldn’t normally seek out.

Nowadays I mostly search for rare Beatles pressings or in particular, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass because the copy I bought has Santana as the third disc. (!!!) When we’re on tour we search for three things in every town: good coffee, vegan food, and the best vinyl store, of course. My hope for the future is that vinyl lives on through this crazy age of streaming, for the sake of art and for the sake of all of us who create it.” —Evelyn

“My first memories of vinyl being played in my family’s home were very formative, and a lot was in the collection.”

“Anything from Simon & Garfunkel to Nat King Cole to ZZ Top got play, and I was as much fascinated by the music as I was the physical aspect of a spinning platter with a needle being dragged within the grooves of its surface to produce this glorious sound. It was contagious, what putting on a vinyl record did to a dead room.

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Mention the Rocky Mountains and music, and people immediately think John Denver, the chipmunk-cheeked eco-folkie who sang about sunshine on his shoulder making him high and going crazy and trying to touch the sun. I don’t know why the man’s considered such a square commodity. He sounds like a raving acid casualty to me.

John Denver will always be Colorado’s most famous spiritual son, in part because he was all over your television set and in part because he liked to hang with such high-profile glamour set types as the Muppets. But Colorado was also home to one of my favorite hardcore bands, Frantix.

If you’ve never heard of Frantix, I get it; Colorado was barely a stopping point on the hardcore circuit, much less a breeding ground for indigenous bands. Denver was Deadsville, and Frantix didn’t even come out Denver–they were spawned in the sprawling Denver suburb of Aurora. But no surprise there; many of America’s greatest hardcore bands emerged from the teenage wastelands of suburbia, and in the early ’80s Aurora had the distinction of being the fastest growing suburb in the United States.

I like the John Denver-Frantix dichotomy–it speaks to a Colorado schism that is both geographical and spiritual. You have Denver seeking God and Inner Peace in the mountains, and Frantix finding nothing worth living for in the God-blasted cities of the plains below. In their own ways both Denver and Frantix were spiritual entities–Denver sought the divine in the sanctified heights, while Frantix cursed God’s absence in the urban sprawl of materialist America’s equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings is proud to reissue The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker, a showcase of traditional (folk/country) sound and one-chord blues all with John Lee Hooker’s smooth baritone vocals.

Unaccompanied and playing acoustic instead of his usual amplified guitar, Hooker recorded a wonderfully varied set of deep Delta blues, moans, boogies, one field holler, and even a bit of hokum. Due out August 2nd, The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker was cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio. Pressed on 180-gram vinyl and housed in a tip-on jacket, these recordings are stripped down so the listener can hear the details and nuances from the original recording.

John Lee Hooker is the most down-home of the major post-war blues figures, “a most authentic singer of the way-back, close-to-the-soil kind of blues,” as Orrin Keepnews commented in this 1959 album’s original liner notes. Of Hooker’s innumerable recordings, the Riverside session is perhaps the truest to his Mississippi roots. Some are autobiographical, others reworkings of blues standards—all stamped with the hauntingly personal Hooker touch.

Born near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1917, the man who would become known as the “King Of The Boogie” credited his stepfather, a blues singer, for his unique guitar style. As a young man, Hooker worked his way from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia down to the Gulf of Mexico and across Texas. All the while, his mission stayed constant: play and sing the blues. Twenty or so years later John Lee found himself in Detroit working at a club called the Monte Carlo where he was discovered by local record label, Riverside Records.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | For his starring role in Netflix’s groundbreaking first original series, Lilyhammer, actor/musician Steven Van Zandt explored uncharted waters as a New York mobster who flees to Norway under the witness protection program. In addition to acting in, co-writing and co-producing the acclaimed show, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer also scored the music for most of the three seasons, where just like his character, the musician best known as Little Steven of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and an accomplished solo artist who helped pioneer the rock-meets-soul sound, also delved into some terrain foreign to him: the worlds of New York jazz and Norwegian folk music.

For the first time, the music from the show, which ended in 2014, has been collected together and will be released as two separate albums – Lilyhammer The Score – Volume 1: Jazz and Volume 2: Folk, Rock, Rio, Bits And Pieces – on CD, digital and 180-gram black vinyl on July 12 via Wicked Cool/UMe. Starting today, “My Kind Of Town, Van Zandt’s spin on the Frank Sinatra standard featured on Volume 1, and his Tito Puente-inspired mambo tune “Mojito” on Volume 2, are available for streaming and immediate download with the corresponding preorder.

The music of Lilyhammer was arranged and produced by Van Zandt and recorded at his Renegade Studios in New York and at various studios in Norway while in the midst of filming. It was recorded, mixed and co-produced by Geoff Sanoff and mastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering.

When Van Zandt was tasked with coming up with the music to soundtrack Lilyhammer, the veteran musician, songwriter and producer who had pretty much done it all in the worlds of songwriting, including dozens of albums, hundreds of songs, tracks for movies, a Broadway musical, as well as music supervision and musical direction, had never scored a television show and was up to the challenge. Knowing he wanted to create something that combined New York jazz to represent his character Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano with the Norwegian folk music of his exotic new environs, he turned to friend and fellow E Street Band member Max Weinberg for some advice on who could help him put a band together that could flawlessly execute these two disparate genres.

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Milwaukee-based, retro pop aficionados The Last Bees have been making waves with their eerily authentic odes to the British Invasion. TVD is pleased to offer an exclusive download of their latest single “True or False”—an acerbic stab at The Beatles’ catalog, more Lennon and less McCartney, but still a clear melodic ode to the direction they were forging in the early ’60s.

Ian Ash, the bands spearhead, wrote the track in collaboration with veteran songwriter and Grammy winner Jim Peterick. Peterick, formerly of the band Survivor, is credited as a co-writer of dozens of hit songs, including “Eye of the Tiger,” so it certainly lends a stamp of approval to The Last Bees debut EP. The song’s chorus is a complex network of major and minor chords that weave in and out of the seamless melody, creating a nostalgic slice of ’60s pop.

It’s a joy to revel in the sticky, lo-fi abandon, but there is also something fresh about Ash’s retro appropriations. After all, countless bands have cited The Beatles as inspiration, but few have recaptured their early sound with the same attention to detail as The Last Bees.

“True or False” is available as a free download on Soundcloud and can also be grabbed directly here.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Eagle Vision today announced details of this never-before-seen concert film which celebrates Carole King’s landmark first show outside of the United States. Performed live at the Montreux Pavillon in 1973 as part of the world-famous Montreux Jazz Festival, the set features hits from the albums Tapestry, Fantasy, and Writer. Live at Montreux 1973 finds King at a fascinating crossroads. It took place two years after she altered the course of pop history with Tapestry, and one month after she issued the album, Fantasy, which demonstrated her determination to move her music boldly forward.

The early segment of the concert exudes the intimacy that made Tapestry a personal touchstone to millions. “Usually I don’t get to see my audiences,” King beams, while addressing a crowd cozy enough to sit cross-legged on the floor before her. “Tonight, I’m seeing you.” Six weeks before Montreux, King headlined a free concert in New York’s Central Park that drew a whopping 100,000 fans. The early part of the Swiss concert gave her the chance to regain a closer relationship with her fans, while performing classics like “Home Again,” “Beautiful,” and “I Feel the Earth Move” alone at the piano. That kind of one-person set-up was a hallmark of the musical revolution King helped herald in the early ‘70s—namely, the singer-songwriter movement.

The camera work echoes the sincerity of the music, with close-ups and tight-shots capturing King’s fine, and playful, piano work as well as her easy relationship as a singer with the microphone. Everything about the presentation and performance signals authenticity, from her scant make-up and peasant blouse to the sisterly imperfections in her voice.

Five numbers into the show, King brings on stage an eleven-person band, including six horn and woodwind players. Together, they perform nearly every track from Fantasy, whose material was, at the time, untested. To up the stakes, almost everything about the new music broke with King’s past. This was her first attempt at a song cycle, a format which purposely blurs the songs into an unbroken piece, starting and ending with two distinct versions of the title track.

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My all-time favorite rude dismissal of second generation (and second tier) English Glam rocker Steve Harley comes from the New Musical Express’ Roy Carr, who wrote, “By the way Steve, when you’re finished with it, David Bowie would like his voice back and Bryan Ferry his vibrato. You can keep the clothes.”

Mean, I know. And not really fair, either; I suspect Carr’s onus was directed as much towards Harley the human being as it was towards Harley the singer. A childhood bout with polio left Harley with a limp, and like Shakespeare’s lame Richard III that limp left him a kind of egomaniacal villain. Harley shared Richard III’s pride and ruthless drive to become King, but unlike the cunning Richard, Harley lacked the guile and cunning to cloak his vainglorious ambitions. To put it bluntly, he invariably came off in interviews as a megalomaniacal twat. And he was a twat to his long-suffering band members as well.

That said, on 1974’s The Psychomodo, Harley’s second (and final) outing with the original members of Cockney Rebel, Harley delivers the glam goods. The man’s hardly a known quality in the States, and more’s the pity, because The Psychomodo is nothing less than a lost glam masterpiece.

The Psychomodo is a surpassingly strange LP. This is primarily due to the fact that Cockney Rebel was a band without a guitarist. Instead, the band’s sound was chiefly dictated by a pair of hyphenates–Jean-Paul Crocker on electric violin and Milton Reames-James on keyboards. Harley’s animus towards the electric guitar is almost hilariously fussy; he didn’t want them around because they made “rude noises.” Perhaps he was confusing them with whoopee cushions.

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