Monthly Archives: May 2021

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent Label Market celebrates its 10th anniversary with a special Summer Market on Saturday 10th July. Taking place at Coal Drops Yard, Kings Cross with a first class line up of independent labels and partners including 4AD, Rough Trade, Sunday Best, Moshi, and Music Declares Emergency. A celebration of music and vinyl culture plus DJ sets throughout the day and an after party at Spiritland. ILM is also teaming up with Dice and London Brewers Market to offer 10% discount on their finest beer, sign up here in advance. In 2021, the ILM Mentoring Scheme is working with Clue Records and Sad Club Records.

​ILM is looking forward to a knock out summer event as 2021 marks the 30th London edition and 10 years of Independent Label Market. It all started with humble beginnings at Soho’s Berwick Street market in the summer of 2011. Since then, ILM has hosted 68 events across the globe and shared adventures with an eclectic crew of 600+ independent record labels from all over the UK to Paris, Berlin, Bari, Barcelona, Rome, LA, Hamburg, Toronto, New York and LA.

Joe Daniel, ILM Co-Founder says “When we came up with the idea for an indie label market, we never imagined doing a second one, let alone another ten years of events. The idea back in 2011 was to bring together our favourite labels to celebrate a particular kind of creativity and passion that you only find in the independent sector. The fact that we are here ten years later is a huge credit to the community of labels who consistently find new and exciting ways to grow and adapt in a fast changing industry. We love the camaraderie and their tireless commitment to presenting the most envelope-pushing music around.”

The ILM Summer Market takes place Saturday 10th July at Coal Drops Yard, King’s Cross with an all star crew of labels including 4AD, Bella Union, Brownswood, Caught by the River, Cherry Red, Erased Tapes, Fierce Panda, Fire / Earth, Full Time Hobby, Gare du Nord, Heavenly Recordings, Hyperdub, Late Night Tales, LEX, Matador, Memphis Industries, Moshi, Mukatsuku, One Little Independent Records, Partisan, Rough Trade, Sonic Cathedral, Sunday Best, Upset The Rhythm, Whities/ad93 and many more.

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Celebrating Eric Burdon on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

No single album can encompass the range of The Animals’ ’64-’65 run, but ABKCO’s recent vinylization of the ’88 compact disc The Best of The Animals comes pretty close. Gathering all the early hits without neglecting the enduring appeal of their R&B core, it sports the same cover photo as MGM’s 11-track ’66 LP while slightly modifying and significantly expanding the contents. 

The pop success of great rock bands, and the one formed in Newcastle upon Tyne when Eric Burdon joined the Alan Price Rhythm and Blues Combo definitely qualifies, often gets belittled as concession, cash-in, or more likely some combination of the two. The reality is that music and commerce, particularly in the middle of last century, weave together like amorous but argumentative vines. The four largest hits of The Animals’ first two years are all represented on this fresh reissue, which places onto vinyl the contents of a CD designed to usurp an LP not all that hard to locate in used bins at the time, at least in my neighborhood; this sequencing of The Best of The Animals (there have been others) includes the A-sides from the first nine 45s.

“House of the Rising Sun,” easily The Animals’ biggest commercial success, also endures and by a wide margin as their most famous recording. Indeed, sans exaggeration it can be described as one of the defining singles of the 1960s. A few may balk, but the sheer seriousness, ambition and intensity was unusual for ’64.

Gleaning a traditional tune found on Bob Dylan and Just Dave Van Ronk and in the process setting folk-rock into motion with an intercontinental smash (#1 in four countries, #2 in Australia, Top Ten in two more), it was a massive chart breakthrough achieved without compromising The Animals’ angelic comingling of blues, R&B, and R&R (it’s gobsmacking to note, but their producer Mickie Most was initially disinclined to record the song).

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The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is the twentieth album in the discography of singer-songwriter Damien Jurado (there are nearly as many EPs), but it’s the first he’s issued himself, doing so through his own imprint Maraqopa Records. Self-produced and stripped-back but methodically so (inspired by records like Lou Reed’s The Bells and Paul McCartney’s Ram), it’s another powerful statement that’s also distinctive, making it a fitting inaugural release for his new label. It’s out May 14 on vinyl, compact disc, and digital.

Damien Jurado just keeps putting out solid record after solid record, productivity that is duly noted in the music press (often with accolades) and soaked up by his listenership, but also without the sort of hubbub that frequently accompanies the activities of musicians with discographies as prodigious as the one Jurado has built.

That he’s a guy with a guitar and a voice singing songs (of which there is no shortage in the world) surely adds to the fairly measured response, but on the other hand, Jurado debuted on Sub Pop (back in 1997, with Waters Ave S.) and after four full-lengths with that company, commenced a long stretch, 11-albums deep, with Secretly Canadian (a run culminating with The Horizon Just Laughed in 2018).

Since then, he’s recorded two that were co-issued by Mama Bird Recording Co. in North America and Loose in the UK and Europe, which plants us firmly in the present. In the grand scheme of things, Jurado’s achievements can be assessed as substantial and his longevity rare, considerations that only increase after time spent with The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Each month, Run Out Groove allows fans to vote on the label’s next high-quality vinyl pressing, chosen from selections of unreleased material, reissues of out-of-print titles, or brand-new collections compiled from the Warner Music vault.

​In honor of Black Music Month this year, Run Out Groove is proud to offer two new and exciting releases that have been given the “special” ROG treatment. Curtis Mayfield’s classic debut album, Curtis, is ROG’s new pre-order title #1. Chicago-born Mayfield was one of the most influential musicians in soul and politically conscious African American music in the 60s. Curtis won a Grammy Legend Award in 1994, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and is a double inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

This expanded and limited edition of Curtis features a second LP of bonus tracks making their debut on vinyl and new liner notes by British DJ, soul expert and GM of Acid Jazz Records, Dean Rudland. The 2LP 180g set comes in a beautiful gatefold tip-on style jacket with an exclusive Curtis turntable mat, only available in this release.

Our second featured Black Music Month title is Charles Mingus At Carnegie Hall (Deluxe Edition). A bigger than life icon, Charles Mingus is considered one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Herbie Hancock.

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Celebrating Donovan on his 75th birthday. —Ed.

Where have all the flower children gone? And more importantly, where would they have been without Donovan Phillips Leitch? Stuck eating their FLT (flower, lettuce, and tomato) sandwiches to the sound of Scott McKenzie’s faux Flower Power ode, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair),” that’s where. It was Donovan who best channeled the gentle and peace-loving vibes of the love-bead set into song, and without the fey Scot they’d have been, to quote one of the man’s lyrics, “as dragged as any hippie should be in old hippie town.”

Donovan began his career as a folkie and Dylan clone, right down to Bobby D.’s trademark corduroy cap. Donovan’s blatant aping of his hero reached its absurd culmination at the infamous Dylan/Donovan confab at London’s Savoy Hotel in 1965, when Donovan proudly offered to play his idol a brand new song. Which turned out, much to Dylan’s amusement, to be a note-for-note rip of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Small wonder Donovan serves as a running joke amongst the caustic Dylan entourage in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary “Don’t Look Back,” with Dylan himself at one point saying, “Donovan who?”

Donovan might have gone the way of Phil Ochs, but in 1966 he went from Dylan manqué to Sunshine Superman after dropping acid and tapping into the Universal Mind to watch groovy Technicolor mind movies of a smiling God grokking the ineffable infinite. The turned-on Donovan promptly helped pioneer the psychedelic sound, which in tandem with his gentle-to-the-point-of-wimpy voice (think Belle and Sebastian’s Stewart Murdoch, twee factor multiplied by 10) and mellow yellow emanations quickly made him the perfect avatar for the Age of Aquarius. A string of U.S. Top Ten hits followed, including “Sunshine Superman,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and “Atlantis,” which started life as a b-side but reached No. 7 after DJs flipped the 45 and flipped their lids to the far-freaking-out Atlantean sing-along. (Surprisingly, the great “Season of the Witch” was never released as a single, either in the United States or the United Kingdom.)

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“I remember playing with my parents’ turntable as a kid. They had boxes and boxes of old records that I’m sure they assumed they’d eventually never have any use for after all those albums gradually became available on CD, and I recall marveling at the fact that you could see, right there on the record, exactly where the information was that would tell the needle to tell the machine to tell the speakers what sounds to make.”

“Long songs were thick, short songs were narrow; a visible scratch would mean a corresponding skip in the audio. I would flip the things back and forth for hours, staring mesmerized at the slowly spinning discs, thinking there was something so thrilling about being able to physically see and feel what a musical recording would sound like.

I am now an adult, and I write instrumental music about landscape—it’s a funny niche to have fallen into, but one I’ve found extremely gratifying for years now. For the first several years I was doing this, I mostly focused (largely without meaning to) on big places: national parks, oceans, rivers, wilderness areas, and vast plains, but with my new project, an album I released in April called The Trouble With Wilderness, I tried making a change.

I was concerned that I might be reinforcing an impression among my audience members that nature was something exotic and separate from the world they knew—something to go and visit rather than to appreciate where you find it—and so to correct this, I tried writing about small places: weeds growing out of the sidewalk, gardens, roadside plants, and other places where it’s harder to say exactly what is wild and what is not.

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Talk about your camouflage. On the surface Paul Revere & The Raiders were five smiling and well-groomed (at least by Fab Four mop top standards) young men tricked out in Revolutionary War garb complete with tricorn hats. They certainly didn’t look like long-haired sex fiends out to run off with your daughter to San Francisco where she’d die from an LSD overdose. They looked like The Monkees, and everybody knew The Monkees were safe as Milk Duds.

But 1967’s Greatest Hits (Expanded Edition) tells a different story. Boise, Idaho’s Paul Revere & The Raiders weren’t The Monkees. They were a garage rock band like The Seeds and The Standells, and if America’s parents had just listened to them they’d have packed their daughters off to the nearest nunnery and sent their sons off to military school the minute they found a copy of this baby in their rooms.

Most of the songs on the compilation come straight out of juvenile hall. The Rolling Stones comparisons are obvious–the Raiders follow the Stones’ career trajectory from scruffy R&B to subversive “Under My Thumb” pop, and vocalist Mark Lindsay comes off like an American Mick Jagger. But you also get The Who on “Just Like Me,” an intercontinental kissing cousin of “I Can’t Explain,” and some derivative Beach Boys on “Action.”

But what you mainly get is lip and a bad attitude. When Lindsay isn’t laying down the law with a shameless social climber (see garage rock masterpiece “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”) he’s snarling mad ‘cuz he’s been hearing rumors his girl’s been running around and he isn’t going to put up with it (see “Steppin’ Out”). Our boy has woman problems galore, and he’ll chew your ear off talking about them if you let him.

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Celebrating Bob Seger who turned 76 yesterday. —Ed.

Through no fault of his own—or maybe it is his fault, I don’t know—Bob Seger has never gotten any respect. He’s the Rodney Dangerfield of rock, and this despite the fact that he’s written his fair share of memorable, and even great, songs. He’s always been the consummate journeyman—someone you might go to see, but without being totally psyched about it—but in the bicentennial year of 1976 he rose above his station to produce two very, very good LPs, Night Moves and Live Bullet.

The former included a couple of instant standards, while the latter made a convincing argument that seeing him live might just be a better bet than you think. I’ve liked him since I first listened to my older brother’s copy of Live Bullet way back in 1976, and I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for him, this despite the fact that he’s the force of evil who bequeathed us such awful songs as “Like a Rock,” “We’ve Got Tonight,” and the dreadful “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which to his credit he didn’t write but still recorded, which probably merits the electric chair. Why he even helped the Eagles write “Heartache Tonight,” a song that deserves to be burned at the stake.

But I forgive him, because he’s also given us such great tunes as “Get Out of Denver,” “Turn the Page,” “Beautiful Loser,” “Looking Back,” “Katmandu,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Night Moves,” and “2 + 2 = ?” And his version of “Nutbush City Limits” is almost as good as Tina Turner’s. As much a product of Detroit as the trucks he’s helped to sell via the suckass “Like a Rock,” Seger played in or founded a number of bands—the most notable being The Bob Seger System—without achieving much more than regional success before forming the Silver Bullet Band in 1974. Live Bullet finally propelled him to national stardom, and Night Moves solidified his status as a player in the big leagues.

Unlike fellow Detroiters the MC5 and The Stooges, Seger was never a firebrand; instead he was the epitome of Heartland Rock, which pays due respect to rock’s origins and doesn’t have a musically radical bone in its body. He was John Mellencamp before there was a John Mellencamp, a purveyor of meat and potato songs that told stories and that never veered too far from a relatively conservative template that fit neatly into the classic rock tradition. Which is undoubtedly why he’s been inducted into that den of iniquity, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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“What are you about, man?” That’s the question Frank Ene asked himself when writing and recording the music for his latest EP, “No Longer.” As Frank explains, this was his opportunity to gaze into the mirror and paint a musical portrait of who he is, or who he was.

The music on “No Longer” is dark, and the ’90s kids in the room might hear some influences in the way of Enigma, or late-stage Duran Duran, and Frank is happy if that’s what you hear because he loves those sounds from the 1990s as well which he fuses into his own subterranean musical landscape.

But, Frank will not be typecast. Nope, in fact, the way he tells it, he’s already completed his next album and is working on the next one and neither of those records will sound like this one. So, while we hope you enjoy the music you hear from “No Longer,” don’t get used to it, you may not hear it again, at least not from Frank.

Or, maybe you will. That’s the fun thing about Ene: he seems to always be driving himself to the next destination, but if he’s so inclined and can find a good artistic reason for doing so, he might just turn that car around. Perhaps from the back seat you’ll see Frank’s eyes flash in the rearview and hear him ask, “What are you about, man?” Will you have an answer?

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector, and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Evan Toth Show and TVD Radar on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

“Some of my earliest memories of music begin with the crackle of a needle drop.”

“I can distinctly remember sitting in my childhood friend’s family room at age 4 or so, around 1980, listening to Disney’s Main Street Electrical Parade and being hypnotized by the disc going around and around on the turntable, totally immersed in the sound and the cover art and all the spectacle and ceremony of the whole thing.

My parents had some vinyl which I listened to—I still have their original 45 of “Funkytown” right here next to my desk—but the first brand-new, just-released record that was my very own was Business As Usual by Men At Work, and I couldn’t get enough of “Who Can It Be Now?” Still can’t. Around that same time, I got The Beatles’ Blue and Red album compilations on cassette and found myself stuck on that first volume of Blue, it simply entranced me. I went through multiple copies of that one.

A bit later I got Synchronicity by The Police on vinyl, around the time when “Every Breath You Take” became a hit, and after hearing side one with the “I” and “II” bookends I have to say I was hard-pressed to even turn it over (same thing happened with side one of Back to Oakland by Tower of Power when I was in high school many years later).

But there was one particular musical experience in 1987 which I still think about frequently. I was 10 years old or so at the time and had been a regular watcher of the syndicated series Solid Gold. The show typically featured hits of the day, but this one episode had a guest who had a hit many years before, making his first appearance on TV in quite some time—the British singer Arthur Brown, performing (cough, lip-syncing, cough) his 1968 hit “Fire.”

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What a rotten deal. The Faces were one of the premiere bands of the seventies–and one of the best live acts as well–and what do we have in the form of a live LP? This crumby piece of half-baked crap. Recorded during the Faces’ sad downward slide (they would never release another album) and including only three Faces originals, 1974’s Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners is nothing less than a travesty of justice.

By the time the Faces got around to recording Coast to Coast they weren’t really the Faces in name only. They’d become Rod Stewart’s de facto backing band–just check out the billing on the album cover. The Faces acquiesced to the demotion with the exception of bassist (and band heart and soul) Ronnie Laine, who wrote or co-wrote such classics as “Ooh La La,” “Glad and Sorry,” “Debris,” and ‘Too Bad,” amongst others. Laine opted to quit the band and go solo, and his replacement Tetsu Yamauchi was left the impossible task of filling his shoes.

It was inevitable, I suppose. Stewart’s 1971 solo album Every Picture Tells a Story transformed him into a superstar, and the Faces–from his perspective at least–had outlived their usefulness. He would use the Faces on his solo albums as sidemen, but he was done recording or touring under their name. The band might have gone on without him, but the additional loss of guitarist Ron Wood–who would continue to play and write with Stewart before ultimately joining the Rolling Stones–was a death blow.

Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners reflects the schizophrenic state of Stewart’s career come 1973. As mentioned, only three of its songs are Faces originals, while another six appear on Stewart’s solo albums. Also included are two covers (the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain” and John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”) not released by the Faces or Stewart. In short Coast to Coast is a rags and bone affair that doesn’t cohere, and it doesn’t help that the boys tuck “Amazing Grace” in the middle of “Borstal Boys” and tack the chorus of “Every Picture Tells a Story” to the end of “Too Bad.” What listeners are left with is a confusing mishmash, and the LP’s running time is short to boot.

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