Monthly Archives: June 2021

Remembering Tommy Keene on what would have been his 63rd birthday with this look back from our 2015 archives. —Ed.

As we noted earlier this month with our review of his latest release, “In guitar pop circles Tommy Keene is an utter fount of reliability. On the radar since the late ‘70s, he grew from underground beginnings and briefly landed on a major before transitioning into an unimpeachable elder of melodic rock, and one still active over three decades hence.

Make that active and undiminished, for Laugh in the Dark finds Keene in excellent form. Featuring typically sturdy songwriting and the bold production values associated with musicians who came of age when rock radio truly mattered, and it’s out now on LP/CD/digital via Second Motion Records.

Choosing Keene’s strongest record is no easy task…but Laugh in the Dark is a major development in a career of rare longevity and worth; if it’s not Tommy Keene’s best, it doesn’t miss the mark by much.”

In person, Tommy is warm, candid, funny, and seemingly has been and played just about everywhere—making an afternoon perusing the record bins an absolute delight. So, c’mon—we’re record shopping with Tommy Keene at Washington, DC’s Som Records.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Beggars Arkive is happy to announce the reissue of The Charlatans self-titled fourth album. Set for release on October 8th, the pressing is on marbled double yellow vinyl with a gatefold sleeve and it hasn’t been pressed on vinyl in over twenty years. The audio is via transfer to 96khz/24 bit, with vinyl mastering by Frank Arkwright at Abbey Road.

​This, their fourth album, a self-titled release, came out in 1995. It was their most ambitious and focused album to date, and returned them right back to the number one slot in the charts. The album also spawned three UK top 40 singles, “Crashin’ In,” “Just Lookin,’” and “Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over” which peaked at no. 12

When the Charlatans started out, there were countless bands “similar” to them, but they immediately catapulted to the forefront of the Madchester scene, standing alongside such icons as The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays.

The band was/is successful because in addition to being able to ride the groove, they could also write amazing songs. These were the gifts that made them among the greatest British survivors of our time, rolling through tragedy and stylistic changes to amass a terrific body of work—one that was modern enough to play in clubs but classicist enough to stand the test of time, and one that continues to grow to this day. They have notched up thirteen Top 40 studio albums—three of them number ones—alongside twenty two hit singles, four of them Top 10.

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Celebrating Andy Scott on his 72nd birthday. —Ed.

We live in complicated times. This was brought home to me years ago, when I TWICE found myself on board flights from Frankfurt to Berlin with the band Sweet. They were flying peon class just like me, and looked haggard, hungover, and very thick in the middle. But what complicated matters was this: while I knew they were Sweet (I chatted up the drummer, who was sitting morosely beside me) I had no idea whether they were Steve Priest’s Sweet, Andy Scott’s Sweet, or Brian Connolly’s Sweet.

That’s right. During those years there were three different bands calling themselves the Sweet out there, keeping themselves alive primarily by playing glam oldies shows in Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc., with the likes of Suzi Quatro. Now you might think three Sweets is four too many, and I would be inclined to agree with you, that is if I hadn’t just spent days listening to the band’s 1974 classic, Desolation Boulevard. Opened my eyes, it did. Sweet is primarily known for two songs, at least in the United States, but Desolation Boulevard has a slew of tasty tracks, even if some of them sound like uncanny copies of other bands’ sounds.

Recorded before Sweet exploded into multiple Sweets, Desolation Boulevard included original members lead vocalist Brian Connolly, bassist Steve Priest, guitarist Andy Scott, and drummer Mick Tucker. Formed in 1968, they quickly teamed up with the pop songwriting machine that was Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, with whom they produced bubblegum hits with titles like “Funny Funny,” “Co-Co,” “Wig-Wam Bam,” and the horrifying, “Little Willy.”

But by 1974 Sweet wanted to be taken seriously, and in so doing parted ways with Chinn-Chapman, although Desolation Boulevard, or at least the U.S. version (which differed drastically from the English release), consisted of a Side One consisting solely of Chinn-Chapman contributions. As for their new, tougher, rougher sound, it won them some real critical respect; indeed, Pete Townshend asked Sweet to open for The Who, an offer Sweet had to turn down due to severe throat injuries suffered by Connolly in a fight. It also resulted in his not handling lead vocals on a pair of tunes on Desolation Boulevard.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “I had no idea that participating in the Explorer Tapes debut album would be such a refreshing opportunity to fall in love with modern music in a way that I hadn’t for a very long time. The highly original compositions of Max and Drew showed me firsthand that there were still contemporary pop artists out there that valued melody, wit, prowess, emotional conveyance and attention to detail as much as I…the perfect blend between the head and the heart.” —Roger Manning (Jellyfish, Beck, Cheap Trick)

​The story of Explorer Tapes is a classic tale of popular music. Two guys from the Dallas/Fort Worth area with a lifelong friendship decide to start a band. They gather some additional talented musicians from the surrounding area, write some songs, play some shows, make some videos, then pack everyone in a van and drive to LA with the hope of getting signed to a publishing company, a record label, or even better, both.

This is, in fact, what happened to the group. Not long after reaching LA, Max Townsley and Drew Erickson, a.k.a. Explorer Tapes, signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell Music. After writing several songs with more established writers (David Baerwald, Dillon O’Brian, Steve Lindsey), the duo had the good fortune of having Keith Urban record their song “Texas Time.”

The group soon signed to Warner Records and were assigned hot producer Mike Elizondo, a protégé of Dr. Dre and known for his production of artists as varied as 50 Cent, Eminem, Carrie Underwood, Fiona Apple, and Twenty One Pilots. The songs and recordings came together quickly and the album was more or less done in three weeks in January 2015. After unforeseen circumstance, including a regime change at the label, the record stayed on the shelf at Warners for over six years, with no release in sight . . . until now.

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Extant for over two decades, Snowglobe has been described as a Memphis indie rock institution, with the foundation of this esteem grooved into a pair of fresh reissues. Listening to their first album, 2002’s Our Land Brains, which hit vinyl for the first time last November as a double set, and its follow-up, 2005’s Doing the Distance, also debuting on wax July 2, it’s easy to understand why folks would get behind them, or more accurately, stand facing them as they play a set of tunes; the sound is vibrant, also tough, and yet personable. The reissue of Snowglobe’s first album is out through Nine Mile Records of Austin and their second via Black & Wyatt of Memphis. Observations on both are found below.

The scoop with Snowglobe is that they formed not in Memphis but in Athens, GA in 1999 and with connections to the Elephant 6 neo-psych scene of the time. Specifically, there were ties (i.e. shared living spaces) with Elf Power and the Olivia Tremor Control. To put a fine point on it, Snowglobe aren’t an official part of the Elephant 6 Collective, as there’s no listing of them amongst the 47 acts ordered alphabetically at the E6 website, but their strain of psych-pop, regularly seasoned as it is with horns and strings, solidifies the association, nonetheless.

Circa these two albums, Snowglobe was (and appears to still be) comprised of Brad Postlethwaite, Tim Regan, Brandon Robertson, Jeff Hulett, and Nahshon Benford. On Doing the Distance, Postlethwaite and Regan play six instruments each (not including vocals), with Robertson playing five, so I’m dispensing with individual credits here, though I will note that additional hands do help out with strings and pedal steel.

I didn’t hear Snowglobe when these two records were first released (though I was aware of the band’s existence). Being introduced to both records now undeniably alters my point of view. To elaborate, I feel confident that the grade awarded to Our Land Brains below is higher than it would’ve been had I been exposed to the album in 2002.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | True Romance is one of the great action flicks of the ‘90s and a stone-cold cult classic.

​Though it was directed by Tony Scott, the 1993 film True Romance displayed all the signature themes and images of its writer, Quentin Tarantino, from its grisly violence to its B-movie homages to its gleeful amorality. And the same could be said of the soundtrack; alongside composer Hans Zimmer’s riff on Carl Orff (which itself was an homage to another violent road movie, Badlands), True Romance offered a playlist that smacked of Tarantino in its embrace of rockabilly (Charlie Sexton, Chris Isaak), grunge (Soundgarden), honky-tonk (Shelby Lynne), and romantic machismo (Robert Palmer’s take on “[Love Is] The Tender Trap”).

Vinyl would seem a natural for such a “warped” soundtrack; and, for this reissue, we’ve crafted a custom jacket sporting production stills from the film. What’s more, this release of True Romance comes in blue with magenta splatter “Alabama Worley” vinyl. Consider this a colorful homage to one of the greatest cult classic films of all time.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings is pleased to celebrate Pride by partnering with the GRAMMY®-nominated electronic duo David and Stephen Dewaele AKA Soulwax to produce a fresh and joyful remix of Sylvester’s 1978 disco classic, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”

​“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) (Soulwax For Despacio Remix)” is available across digital platforms today, while a 12-inch release with an exclusive instrumental version on the B-side is available to pre-order now. It was made to play on the Despacio sound system, a 50,000 watt, state-of-the-art, vinyl only sound system which they created with James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem, DFA Records) and powered by McIntosh & Jordan Acoustics.

Since 1995, the award-winning duo have consistently pushed their creative boundaries, remixing artists such as Fontaines DC, Tame Impala, Robyn, The Rolling Stones, SG Lewis, and Chet Faker, among many others. In addition to their work as Soulwax, the brothers regularly DJ as 2manydjs and run their own record label, DEEWEE.

Nearly 40 years later, in 2019, the Library of Congress inducted “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” into their National Recording Registry, recognizing the song for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Music journalist Peter Shapiro, meanwhile, described the track as, “an epochal record in disco history” and “the cornerstone of gay disco” in his 2005 book, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco.

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Based in Hoboken, NJ by way of Midland, MI, and with time spent in Chicago, New Orleans, and Albuquerque along the way, Tim Foljahn has amassed considerable credits as a guitarist, including Cat Power, Thurston Moore, and Half Japanese. But he’s also a singer-songwriter, with his skills in this regard fortifying the discography of the band Two Dollar Guitar (with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums) and releases under his own name, of which I Dreamed a Dream is his latest. It offers writing as confident as the instrumentation is rich, and with diversity the ace in the hole. The album is out now on 180 gram black vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Cart/Horse Records.

Going way back to the Kalamazoo hardcore scene, Tim Foljahn was in Strange Fruit (aka Strange Fruit Abiku) with Steve Shelley, though like much of the best stuff associated with the HC era, their 7-inch from 1983 doesn’t play by the loud fast rules. Purchasable and perusable digitally with bonus cuts via the Bandcamp page of Shelley’s Vampire Blues label, it’s better described as an inspired mashup of dubbed-out post-punk, no wave abrasion, and art damage in general. There was a full LP, Sin Eaters Picnic, released the following year, but sadly, I’ve yet to hear its contents. Maybe one day.

Foljahn first entered my consciousness around a decade later through Two Dollar Guitar, and roughly simultaneously (I can’t remember which I heard first), as part of Mosquito, an intensely creative trio, again with Shelley and rounded out by Jad Fair, the estimable leader of Half Japanese, the u-ground institution Foljahn also joined during this very fertile indie rock period.

But to drive home Foljahn’s association with Shelley even further, along with helping to back up Chan Marshall on Cat Power’s first few terrific records, they comprised yet another trio, this time with Thurston Moore, releasing one 7-inch (plus a couple comp tracks) as Male Slut in 1995 before recording Moore’s solo LP Psychic Hearts, which was released the same year.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The White Stripes are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their landmark 2001 third studio album, White Blood Cells, with today’s release of a newly expanded digital edition. White Blood Cells (Deluxe) includes a bonus live performance of the classic album, recorded in its entirety at Detroit, MI’s famed Gold Dollar on June 7, 2001. Additionally, a video of the electrifying rendition of “I’m Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman” from the same Gold Dollar show premiered today on The White Stripes YouTube channel.

​Hailed by Rolling Stone upon its original June 3, 2001 release for “fusing inescapable, eerily eternal melodies with dirty-ass, brain-scrambling riffs,” White Blood Cells will return to record store shelves everywhere later this year with a standard black vinyl edition arriving Friday, October 22; pre-orders are available now. In addition, limited edition red-and-white pinwheel colored vinyl will arrive that same day at Third Man Records Nashville & Detroit as well as at select independent record stores nationwide. Additional details will be unveiled soon.

As part of the White Blood Cells 20th anniversary celebration, the album has also been remastered in HD from the original tape using the Plangent Process to hear on all digital retailers and streaming services offering high quality audio functionality, alongside HD remasters of The White Stripes’ self-titled 1999 debut album and 2003’s milestone Elephant.

Additional White Stripes albums will be available in HD later this year. A special $7.99 limited time anniversary album sale on the entire White Stripes catalog has begun on Apple Music as well. The anniversary is further commemorated with a custom peppermint swirl Twitter emoji which appears automatically when using any of the following hashtags: #TheWhiteStripes, #WhiteBloodCells20, #WhiteBloodCells, #FellInLoveWithAGirl, and #HotelYorba.

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Early in the production process of 1973’s The Exorcist, director William Friedkin decided to bring a surprising consultant on board: Satan. “Details are everything,” Friedkin would later say. “I was aiming for total authenticity, and I wanted to get Linda’s dialogue right.”

A relaxed Satan would later tell Spin magazine, “Billy [Friedkin] asked me if I’d be interested in participating in the project. And I was really quite pleased. Nobody ever asks for my input. The Rolling Stones got their hands on a speech I made to the Dayton, Ohio Chamber of Congress, but did they show me any sympathy? Not with Jagger singing they didn’t. I’ve dealt with sewing circles more Satanic than him. Have you ever seen a macramé pentagram? Scary as hell.”

As a favor to Friedkin, Satan agreed to weigh in on the film’s score. The director ran a number of ideas past the Prince of Darkness, but he didn’t like any of them. Then one day Friedkin walked into Satan’s office with a copy of Mike Oldfield’s 1973 debut LP Tubular Bells. “Listen to the opening,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.” The Evil One took the LP back to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and a week later burst into Friedkin’s office.

“We can’t use this!” he shouted. “It scared the shit out of me! I haven’t slept for a week! I haven’t been so frightened since I heard Blood, Sweat & Tears’ ‘Spinning Wheel’ and I still can’t get that damned song out of my head!”

“Isn’t that the idea?” asked Friedkin, inviting Satan to take a specially designed asbestos–covered sofa he’d had made after Satan had accidentally set his previous one on fire.

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