Monthly Archives: January 2021

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Continuing the 50th celebrations and following December’s special multi-format release of Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, The Kinks return again with the unveiling of The Moneygoround one-man show live stream – available to watch as a one time broadcast HERE at The Kinks’ YouTube channel on January 29th at 8PM (GMT). Subscribe to the channel now to set a reminder.

​Ray commented: “The Moneygoround’ is a one-man show documenting a character facing the challenging circumstances of making an album under extreme pressure. This play, similar to a psychodrama, follows the ups and downs of the character as he plays out events in his life. He confronts the dark forces surrounding him after falling into an emotional and financial “hole” eventually he is saved by a song after confiding in his friend, Lola.” The 45-minute play is co-written by Ray and Paul Sirett, who worked with him on “Come Dancing” and the BBC Radio 4 play “Arthur.”

This unique audio-visual production has been intimately filmed with the actor Ben Norris as the leading character. The presentation will also feature video content inserts of archive footage. The whole show will also include the “Any Time 2020” lyric video, the “Lola” unboxing video, and the “Lola” lyric video.

Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, commonly abbreviated to Lola Versus Powerman, or just Lola, is the eighth studio album by The Kinks, recorded and released in 1970. A concept album ahead of its time, it’s a satirical appraisal of the music industry, including song publishers, unions, the press, accountants, business managers, and life on the road. One of the all-time classic Kinks albums.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Today, award-winning documentary filmmaker/ director Scott Crawford (CREEM: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine) and producer Paul Rachman (American Hardcore) launched a Kickstarter campaign in support of their new project, Something Better Change.

​The film documents hardcore punk band D.O.A.’s frontman and lead guitarist Joey “Shithead” Keithley’s unprecedented political rise in his native Burnaby, BC Canada and his 2022 re-election journey while also exploring how music and activism often interlink via raising awareness about important social issues, inspiring people to get involved, and fostering real, dynamic change. Directed by Crawford, the documentary will also feature former U.S. Congressman Beto O’Rourke, Henry Rollins, Keith Morris (Circle Jerks), Duff McKagan (Guns and Roses), Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), Krist Novoselic (Nirvana), Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), and many more.

Throughout the 1980s, defining hardcore punk band D.O.A. helped solidify and pave the way for the explosion of politically active punk artists in modern culture alongside other legends such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, and Minor Threat. After decades of fighting against oppression, homelessness, and corporate greed via D.O.A.’s music and in his own personal life, in 2018 frontman Joey “Shithead” Keithley, ran for city council in his native hometown of Burnaby, B.C. With only a $7000 campaign budget on a Green Party ticket, he won, while also helping to unseat the former five-term mayor Derek Corrigan who once famously said, “I would never bend over to give a homeless person a dime because he might steal my watch.”

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“True story… each of us got our first record player in the pandemic. One of us had been gifted one of those kitschy victrola remakes that sell like bananas on Amazon years ago, and it broke six months later, but outside of that, we are new to the vinyl revolution. It didn’t quite start here though. Melissa spent hours at Crooked Beat in Adams Morgan, DC (now located in Alexandria, VA), Alba at Feten Discos (in Salamanca, Spain), and Lillie at Mystery Train Records in Gloucester, MA. We’ve inherited our families’ dusty record collections and have found ourselves here, finally listening to records in our own homes.”

The one record that’s gotten us each through the pandemic…

MELISSA: Flashback to April of 2020. I had spent most of the past six weeks inside. One of the first records I played on my new turntable was Postcard by Mary Hopkin. Her version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” got me through hard times like no other. It’s weird, yet hopeful. And is the best to belt while dancing around your shoebox apartment. I’ve imagined Mary Hopkin recording that album and thinking how different it is now. We recorded the bulk of our debut album Mosaic from our home studios and would not have been able to put our music out in the world if not for the wonders of technology. So, I personally am the most luddite-esque of the group, but am endlessly grateful for having the gift of resources and knowledge to record at home.

LILLIE: Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon by James Taylor. Specifically, side two, “You Can Close Your Eyes.” There’s just something about it—between “Hey Mister, That’s Me on the Jukebox” and “Machine Gun Kelly” it’s like this surprise, little gem of sincerity and peace between these two cynical songs. In other words, you have two doses of “Damn, James, that’s a blue kind of time” with a helping of sunlight right between them. If that isn’t like the pandemic experience sandwich…I’m not sure what is. We’re all stuck at home trying to figure out our lives, but also, here’s our band ALMA releasing our debut record song by song. Pandemic sandwich!

ALBA: A Change in Diet by Elliot Moss! Elliot actually gifted me my first record player right before the pandemic started—I had arranged some horns for a couple of tracks in the album, so he gave me a copy of the vinyl as a keepsake. Then the pandemic hit, so it was the only vinyl I had for months! I listened to it on repeat, savoring every track. That record holds a special place in my heart.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The book, decades in the making, will be of interest to music fans (especially reggae, soca and calypso) as well as those interested in NYC cultural / immigrant success stories, entrepreneurship and women’s empowerment. It tells the important history of Patricia Chin, 84-year-old co-founder of VP Records, whose 60-year journey in music has taken her from Kingston, Jamaica to Jamaica, Queens, and far beyond.

​It would be an understatement to say that reggae matriarch Patricia “Miss Pat” Chin has seen and accomplished a great deal in her life. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1937, she helped build a reggae empire in her homeland (the Randy’s Record Mart store and Studio 17; where the careers of artists ranging from Bob Marley & the Wailers to Augustus Pablo and Toots & The Maytals were started and nurtured) alongside husband, Vincent “Randy” Chin.

After nurturing one of her children, reggae music, alongside her four children throughout the ‘70s, she uprooted her business and family to emigrate to New York in 1978, landing in Queens, where she still lives today. At that point another challenging and fascinating journey—the history of VP Records, “the world’s largest reggae label” (New York Daily News, Jared McCallister)—began.

VP was—and is— family owned-and-run business, and a deeply important and inspiring American immigrant success story. VP’s first release was in 1979 and the history of the label, which built a new wave of reggae legends from scratch, including Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Lady Saw and Sean Paul, can be heard and seen in the acclaimed deluxe 2019 VP box set, Down In Jamaica: 40 Years of VP Records.

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PHOTO: ROBERTA BAYLEY | First released in 1982, Destiny Street was the second of only two albums ever issued by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. After starting the Neon Boys with Tom Verlaine and helping form Television, Hell helped define punk by being one of the first with spiky hair, ripped tight clothes and safety pins—fashion trends quickly picked up by England’s forming punk scene. But mostly he influenced through his music and the anthemic 1977 Blank Generation that helped define the moment.

Voidoids Ivan Julien and Marc Bell left the band after British tours with The Clash and Elvis Costello. Only guitarist Robert Quine remained for the second album, alongside drummer Fred Maher (who, like Quine, would go on to famously work with Lou Reed). Also added to the band was guitarist Juan Maciel, whose stage name was Naux.

While Destiny Street had the material Hell wanted, he was never happy with the production, and having been told that the master tapes were lost, he gave up the idea of a remix, until he ran across a cassette for with the basic rhythm tracks in the early 2000s. He was about to have Julian and Quine come in to re-record their parts when the guitarist died in 2004 at 61. Faux died soon after. So Hell brought in two other acclaimed guitarists with original styles, Marc Ribot and Bill Frissell to join Julian for a remade album called Destiny Street Repaired in 2009.

A decade later, the original 24-track master tapes were found after all, so he embarked on a remix of the original with Nick Zinner, the producer and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist. Rather than decide which was best, Omnivore Recordings is releasing all three—plus some leftover live tracks and demos—in a two CD deluxe set, Destiny Street Complete on January 22. (A stand-alone vinyl edition of Destiny Street Remixed is also on its way.)

We talked to Hell, who has been a writer the past few decades, about the project, the pandemic and his poetry. He assesses his future in music (dim), names the three records that formed him, and dismisses a longstanding myth about his punk legacy.

How are you handling the pandemic?

I was about mentally prepared for it to be winding down by now, so it is dreadful, literally. It fills one with dread to picture the coming months. It’s a good thing about the vaccinations.

But the thing is, for me, as it turned out, I kind of thrived on the isolation. The outside things I was doing, the assignments that I was accepting, the journalism and that kind of thing that I had been doing pretty regularly over the last 20 years or so just kind of dried-up, and I didn’t make any attempt to solicit that kind of work, so I literally had nothing to do all day except what I had my own initiative to do. I’ve been doing a lot of writing in a way that I hadn’t really since my teens and early 20s, so even though It’s been a really anxiety-filled and horror-filled period, for me it’s also been productive. So I have mixed feelings about it.

The thing I was describing kind of got interrupted by the big push for this music release. For the past couple of months, that’s been a full time job. And I’m kind of glad that I can go back to what it was before, where I just get up and have nothing in particular to do, so I start writing in a way that has no other purpose except to meet my needs instead of anybody else’s needs. So, yeah. It’s been mixed.

Is it poetry?

It’s funny you say that because people are always asking me about poetry. I have to remind them I’m not a poet. As a young man I had that ambition for a few years, and then it kind of got replaced by music. Then I started doing other kind of writing—fiction and journalism, non-fiction. Just because I had that couple of three years in my late teens, people focus on that and I always try to correct them about that, because it’s not really accurate. But all that being said, you’re right. It is poetry. And that’s what’s been fun. And it’s weird to call it fun because the writing itself is very work-intensive and takes a lot of focus.

It’s not confessional but I try not to hold anything back. So it’s intense. The actual act of doing it can be really exhausting. But it is fun in the sense that it’s very fulfilling for me. It’s weird, for the last eight months, up until I had to work on the Destiny Street Complete thing, I feel like it is the first time I’ve actually been a poet. At the age of 71, I hit this situation where it’s my identity, it’s what I was doing. It’d be, like, a poem or two a week, which is a big output—way larger than I’ve ever done before. So yeah, as long as you ask, that is what I’ve been doing for the first time since I was 19.

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In 2017, the Now-Again label released the compilations Welcome to Zamrock Vols. 1 and 2 on double vinyl and compact disc, with the sets delivering an ample serving of the fuzzy, funky rock music made in 1970s Zambia. Two tracks from the Ngozi Family stood out as highlights, one of them from the band’s ’77 LP 45,000 Volts, which is fresh out on wax through Now-Again in its first official reissue. Featuring guitarist-lead singer-band leader Paul Ngozi with bassist Tommy Mwale and drummer Chrissy Zebby Tembo (both of whom add appealing harmonies), the contents groove and glide amid plentiful amplifier bite. Rather than a mere approximation of US-UK hard rock, this album is its own sweet thing.

A characteristic that’s often shared by compilations shedding retrospective light upon hitherto unheard realms of sound, especially when the music on the records is of consistently high quality (this is the case with the Zamrock volumes detailed above), is the sense of mystery over whether the assembled music constitutes the tip of a worthiness iceberg or instead represents the delectable cream skimmed from atop a larger but lesser body of work.

Of course, mileage will frequently vary depending on an individual’s level of investment in a particular style. To elaborate: if some enterprising label dishes a comp of previously unheard vault recordings by ’60s garage bands from the state of Nebraska, what many listeners will chalk up as not much more than competence will strike a fervent few as another delightful chapter in the history of the genre.

A big part of the Ngozi Family’s success on 45,000 Volts derives from its solidity as an album as it’s the most recent reissue illuminating Zamrock’s qualitative depth, following earlier editions from Now-Again by Chrissy Zebby Tembo, Witch, and indeed, a prior set from the Ngozi Family, the 1976 album Day of Judgement.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Neil Young announces the release of Way Down in the Rust Bucket, a never-before released, incendiary and essential live album and concert film documenting a legendary 1990 show with Crazy Horse in Santa Cruz, California.

​Available for pre-order today and out on February 26, 2021, Way Down in the Rust Bucket features the debut public performances and much of the songwriter’s grungy, cranked-up 1990 album, Ragged Glory. Vinyl, CD and Deluxe box sets will be available via The Greedy Hand Store at Neil Young Archives and music retailers everywhere and digitally via NYA and all DSP’s. Purchasers of Way Down In The Rust Bucket from the Greedy Hand Store will also receive free hi-res digital audio downloads from the Xstream Store © at NYA.

After recording Ragged Glory at Broken Arrow Ranch in the spring of 1990 and releasing it that September, Young and Crazy Horse took the stage at The Catalyst in Santa Cruz on November 13 to unleash the songs upon a live audience. In true Crazy Horse fashion, the incendiary show ran across three sets and over three hours, with songs like “Love and Only Love” and “Like a Hurricane” hypnotically stretching past ten minutes.

The Catalyst gig also marked the first time “Danger Bird”—a cut from Young’s 1975 album Zuma—was played for a live audience, thundering on into psychedelic six-string fireworks. Other live debuts on Way Down in the Rust Bucket include “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze,” “Love to Burn,” “Farmer John,” “Over and Over,” “Fuckin’ Up,” “Mansion on the Hill,” and “Love and Only Love.”

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“I was talking to someone the other day and it dawned on me that I would not have started making music if I only had access to Spotify.”

“The three LPs that I started my own vinyl collection with are Mariah Carey (Charm Bracelet), Jennifer Lopez (On the Six), Songs in A Minor (Alicia Keys)—I listened to their CDs religiously on my pink Walkman, so it was a no-brainer to get them in another format.

These artists in particular taught me how to sing. Vinyl really gives you the chance to immerse yourself in the music. I honestly don’t think I would have chosen music as a life without the intimacy of experiencing music the way the artist intended.

Personally, vinyl gave me the opportunity to actually think about the music and sit with it, paying attention to the details. Non-digital audio is still so important. Listeners are active in making the sound come out of the stereo and you actually get to touch it! Vinyl definitely makes me feel closer to the artist.

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Cooler Returns is the sophomore full-length from Kiwi Jr. and is additionally the Toronto four-piece’s first record for Sub Pop. The titular suffix and the releasing label are representative of an unreservedly indie state of mind, with the use of the affectionate nickname for New Zealanders insinuating that the album’s 13 songs will dig a little deeper than the expected norm. Theirs is a bright, catchy, energetic sound with an undeniable likeness to Pavement, and if Kiwi Jr. don’t reach the heights of that ’90s indie behemoth, the resemblance is one of shading rather than mimicry. Cooler Returns is out on vinyl, CD, cassette and digital January 22.

Kiwi Jr. consists of vocalist-guitarist Jeremy Gaudet, bassist Mike Walker, drummer Brohan Moore, and guitarist Brian Murphy (he of Alvvays). To get right down to it, the similarity to Pavement is directly related to Gaudet’s singing, as the man frequently just sounds like Stephen Malkmus. In fact, at a few points, Gaudet really sounds like Malkmus, though more often there is a liveliness (that can border on exuberance) that brings tangible distinctiveness to the table.

Some whose ears were active during Pavement’s original tenure may wonder if there is a difference between Kiwi Jr. and ’90s acts of a decidedly Pavement-like bent such as Silkworm and The Grifters. Well, there is, and it’s absorbed through Cooler Returns’ straightforward pop sensibility, a consistent facet that is inextricably tied the Gaudet’s spirited approach at the mic.

And instrumentally, Kiwi Jr. are tidy rather than disheveled (as was Pavement’s wont). But this pop inclination maybe isn’t such a surprise for a band whose 2019 debut Football Money came out on noted Canadian indie label Mint (distinguished for releasing or co-releasing the first few records by the New Pornographers). The connection is plainly discernible in the strummy, then punchy, then anthemic opener “Tyler,” but it’s really driven home in the infectious but muscular “Undecided Voters.”

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