Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Legendary post punk band mekons announced today that they will be re-releasing their 2025 album HORROR on June 12 in conjunction with an entire new album of Dub remixes, entitled HORRORble (mekons Vs. Tony Maimone In Dub Conference) by Pere Ubu’s Tony Maimone via Fire Records as a 2xCD, white vinyl and digital configurations and can be ordered here. The first single “Mudcrawlers featuring Benji Webbe (Version)” is out today as well. In support of the new HORROR/HORRORble (mekons Vs. Tony Maimone In Dub Conference) album, mekons will be hitting the road in the United States and elsewhere beginning May 30.

Last year, mekons released their first new album in five years titled HORROR. It was also their first album to be released by Fire Records. The mekons have a long history, and we could talk about these two albums all day. So, here’s succinct, yet poignant view. Formed in Leeds UK long, long ago in the olden days of ye punke the good ship mekon has sailed the seven seas of musical mishaps releasing 40 or 50 albums and countless singles on one fantastic record label after another.

The mekons maintain a collective approach to their art. They are not beholden to the whims and niceties of fashion or even nice sounding tunes—they do what they want to do and mostly have a good time doing it and encourage you to have a good time too. With band members currently spread thinly across the imperial core they are planning to relocate to Greenland in 2027. Back in the day “The personal is political” was their motto and while that still holds true it morphed into “The political is political.” Now along with everyone else it’s: “organize and resist.”

When the mekons went into Elephante Studios in Valencia, Spain in August of ’22 to record what would become HORROR, they didn’t need to bring their crystal balls … mene mene tekel upharsin … the runes were carved—it was obvious which way the wind was blowing but a more apposite title would be hard to find to describe the live-streamed slaughtered gaslit erased criminal senile perverted present moment.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A quarter of a century to the day since its release, rap icon Eve celebrates her era-defining platinum-selling album Scorpion with a special 25th-anniversary edition available on limited-edition red-and-black splatter 2LP, featuring an autographed insert, out now. Order HERE. The news comes ahead of Eve co-hosting the 2026 MOBO Awards in Manchester later this month.

Containing some of the most celebrated hip hop tracks of all time, including “Who’s That Girl” and the Grammy-winning “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” Scorpion raided album charts around the world, going on to be certified Platinum in her native USA and Canada, and Gold in the UK and France. From Eve’s whipsmart lyrics and impeccable flow to its bold artwork and legendary videos, Scorpion marked a hugely impressive statement of skill, intent, and independence.

Her second album cemented Ruff Ryder’s first lady’s place as one of the greats and saw her bring in an impressive raft of featured artists to accompany her across its 16 tracks, including Gwen Stefani, DMX, Damian, and Stephen Marley. 25 years on, it remains as hard-hitting and vital as ever and has been streamed over a billion times.

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Celebrating Tom Scholz on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

The finest band to ever escape Planet Earth on a mammoth guitar-shaped spaceship topped with a snow globe of the Boston skyline, Boston took the solar system by storm with their eponymous 1976 debut, which boasted more hits than Joe DiMaggio. With songwriter, guitarist and MIT-trained musical inventor Tom Scholz at the helm, Boston was the epitome of corporate rock—buffed to a fine sheen, overblown, but catchy as a Red Sox center fielder.

Two long years passed before Boston released Don’t Look Back, amidst legal squabbles with Epic Records and Scholz’s legendary perfectionism. One gets the sense that, had he had his way, Don’t Look Back wouldn’t have seen the light of day until 2078. Anything less than one hundred years, in Tom’s view, and you were listening to a demo. As it was, the follow-up to Don’t Look Back, Third Stage, wouldn’t see the light of day until 1986, and something tells me the LP had to be pried from his fingers as he screamed, “There’s a note on track three I’ve been working on for two years and still can’t get right!”

But Scholz’s perfectionism cost the band plenty. Two years were a long time in an era that saw the advent of punk, and by 1978 many of the band’s fans had moved on to newer, edgier sounds. I loved Boston, but come Don’t Look Back I’d forgotten all about them. They may as well have been a fossil in a natural history museum.

And it’s not as if Scholz’s fussiness paid off in a masterpiece. Sure, the title track is as good, or better, than just about every song on Boston, but it failed to distract listeners from the fact that the songs on Don’t Look Back simply aren’t as good as the ones on the band’s debut. But lately I’ve been wondering—is Don’t Look Back as great a disappointment as I’ve always thought? Or rather a top of the line slab of vinyl with zero chance of surpassing the band’s unsurpassable debut?

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The Primitive Art Group was formed in 1981 and lasted until 1986. The locale: Wellington, New Zealand. In the midst of the burgeoning Flying Nun scene, this collective stood far apart stylistically, taking influence from the titans of avant jazz and specializing in a wild and varied strain of often Euro-tinged free improvisation on their two studio albums along with dishing impressively inspired interpretations of Fire Music classics in a live setting.

The group’s studio records are paired with one bonus live track on the 2LP set 1981–1986. A sweet batch of performance stuff gets compiled on the cassette Live Cuts 1981–1983. Both collections are available now through Amish Records separately and in a Bandcamp bundle. The retrieval and wide dissemination of this material is, simply put, cause for celebration.

To shed light on this situation of immense and unexpected excellence, these reissues aren’t brand-spankin’ new. 1981-1986 came out in late October 2024, and Live Cuts 1981–1983 was released in February of last year. But this is a time where the lurching ugliness of fascism overtakes good news discoveries such as these beautiful bursts of freedom on a regular basis. And so, spreading the word is imperative.

There is also a book, Future Jaw-Clap: The Primitive Art Group and Braille Collective Story, that will provide a fuller historical picture for anyone interested. This writer has yet to read it but is eager, indeed positively salivating, to inhale its contents. The author is Daniel Beban, and it was published by Te Herenga Waka Press in November 2024.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | WaterTower Music is proud to announce the release of The Bride! (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), featuring original music by Academy Award®, Golden Globe®, Emmy®, two-time Grammy® and BAFTA®-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, with additional contributions by Fever Ray and cast members. The soundtrack is available everywhere now via streaming platforms.

Waxwork Records proudly unveils the premiere vinyl release as a deluxe double LP, designed to reflect the film’s striking visual identity and emotional intensity. Housed in heavyweight gatefold packaging, the release is offered in two distinct variants, including an iridescent Molten edition and a Waxwork Records exclusive “Inkblot” pressing, in which deep black vinyl is threaded with smoky white veining to create a one-of-a-kind visual effect unique to each pressing. An exclusive 12″ x 12″ art print completes the package, offering collectors an immersive introduction to the film’s visual and sonic world. The release is available for preorder now at www.waxworkrecords.com.

Composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, delivers a bold and emotionally charged score that blends orchestral grandeur with raw punk energy, capturing the film’s sweeping romance, dangerous sensuality, and unflinching humanity.

Hildur Guðnadóttir shares: “We wanted the Wedding March for The Bride! to be monstrous and intimate. Punk and classical. Romantic and roaring. All at once. A sonic rollercoaster. It was an absolute dream to record with some of my guitar heroes—to be in a punk band with them. And to have a classical orchestra playing live through thunderous amps and distortion. What a blast! Here comes The Bride!”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Ringo Starr has released “It’s Been Too Long,” featuring the lush vocals of Molly Tuttle and Sarah Jarosz. This is the first single from his forthcoming album Long Long Road, co-written and produced by T Bone Burnett, the 10-song album also includes collaborations with Billy Strings, Sheryl Crow, and St Vincent and is the highly anticipated follow-up to last year’s chart topping Look Up. Pre-Order HERE.

“I’m blessed to have T Bone in my life right now and working with me on these records,” Ringo stated. “After we did the last record, which I love listening to, this one just sort of happened. I like to say sometimes I make the right moves, like you can go left or right at any point, and one of the right moves was hooking up with T Bone for Look Up, and now for this one, which I’m calling Long Long Road, because I’ve been on a long long road.”

As the title implies, and like Ringo’s own journey, Long Long Road has solid roots in Country and Americana, and evolved into something broader, creating an aural mosaic of Starr’s musical legacy and influences, including Carl Perkins. “I recorded two Carl Perkins songs with The Beatles, and both T Bone and I wanted one on this record,” Ringo explained, “and he found this beautiful track I’d never heard before, ‘I Don’t See Me In Your Eyes Anymore’.”

Recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles, this record sees the return of many of the Look Up musicians including the core band (that T Bone affectionately dubs The Texans after the 1959 band Ringo played with in Liverpool) featuring Paul Franklin, David Mansfield, Dennis Crouch, Daniel Tashian, Rory Hoffman, Patrick Warren, and Colin Linden.

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Remembering Ornette Coleman, born on this date in 1930. —Ed.

Ornette Coleman is most often associated with his numerous quartets, but his Blue Note debut found him exploring the possibilities of the trio configuration. At the Golden Circle Stockholm Volume One is the first half of that journey into addition by subtraction; it not only inaugurates the highpoint of Coleman’s Blue Note run, it also stands amongst the very greatest work the trailblazing saxophonist has recorded.

The end of the 1980s was swiftly approaching, and the jury was still out on the music of Ornette Coleman. The temporary reign of compact discs was well underway, and it gradually became easier to actually hear (instead of just read about) the sounds that so divided jazz at the dawn of its most tumultuous decade. However, for my first two Coleman purchases I had to settle for cassettes. Until the CD reissues of Ornette’s Atlantic efforts began showing up in the racks (or more appropriately put, started getting listed in catalogs as being available for purchase), hearing the man’s groundbreaking early material was a struggle. Even the ‘70s fusion work with Prime Time and his ‘80s albums were difficult to locate.

What’s more, none of the meager number of older jazz heads I’d become acquainted with at that point appreciated him; when the subject arose a few were downright dismissive. And dialing the handful of jazz radio programs that my stereo tuner managed to pick up in the wee hours of the AM proved just as futile.

I’ll never forget the short but pleasant conversation I had with one of those DJs, the voice of the gent on the other end of the line informing me that he loved Coleman but had sworn off playing him due to the swarm of angry calls he’d receive in response. So deep was the animosity over a divergence from and perceived threat to the post-bop standard that nearly 30 years later merely offering it on the radio brought an influx of opprobrium via the telephone.

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There is a particular kind of courage in a man who once set dancefloors ablaze, deciding at 60 years old, to sit down at a piano and simply stop moving. Moby has never been easy to categorize—rave architect, punk misfit, vegan provocateur, accidental pop deity—and that stubbornness to defy expectation is precisely why he remains essential. Twenty-three albums in, with Play still echoing across every coffee shop and car commercial that came after it, he has earned every right to follow the silence.

Future Quiet, released February 20 via BMG, is not a surrender. It’s a deliberate act of subtraction—and in 2026, with the world screaming at full volume, that restraint is its own kind is truly radical.

Strip out the beats, the samples, the euphoric drops. What you get here is Moby alone at the keys, augmented by strings, the occasional ambient synth wash, and a handful of guest vocalists deployed like brushstrokes rather than centerpieces. The production is hushed and deliberate throughout—pianist first, composer second, electronic artist a distant third. This isn’t ambient wallpaper. It breathes differently.

“When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die,” reworked from his 1995 Everything Is Wrong and freshly unearthed by Stranger Things—opens with Jacob Lusk (of Gabriels) delivering the kind of vocal that physically relocates you. Lush orchestral strings pool beneath him like rising floodwater, and I had goosebumps before the first minute passed.

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The folks in Welsh band Los Campesinos! are smart, clever, funny, and not Welsh. I don’t know what the hell they are. What I can say is that since coming together at Cardiff University in 2006, the band—who are currently seven in number—have released scads of classics with titles like “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives,” “Death to Los Campesinos!,” “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed,” and “We Are All Accelerated Readers.”

They were branded as twee, and have worked hard to escape the label by recording darker songs, but they still sound twee to me—it’s there in the vocals, and in the exuberance of their music. But out of respect to the band, I will happily say they’re not twee and punch anyone in the kisser who says they are. I guess I’ll have to start with myself.

What is undeniable is that the words matter to Los Campesinos!—these are the same people who founded a literary magazine in 2010. What is also undeniable is that their music is happy-making, no matter how dark the subject matter, for the most part because the music is exuberant and ecstatic, with just enough of an edge to let you know they’re in love with rock and roll.

Just check out “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1.” Or the amped-up guitar rocker “Romance Is Boring,” which, like all of their songs, makes hay with vocals piled upon vocals (Gareth Paisey and Aleksandra Berditchevskaia handled the bulk of the singing duties until the latter left the band in 2011, but there are lots of gang vocals)—and great accents.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | This Record Store Day, one of the most haunting and misunderstood soul albums of the 1970s returns as a limited-edition vinyl release: Changin’ Times by Ike White.

Recorded inside a California prison by a man serving a life sentence for murder, the album remains the only full-length studio release by the self-taught multi-instrumentalist. Fifty years after its original release, Changin’ Times is regarded as one of the most extraordinary and tragic albums ever made, and now returns in a special Record Store Day edition worthy of its singular legacy.

This 2026 reissue, arriving exclusively for Record Store Day on April 18, 2026, features audio cut directly from the original analog tapes by legendary mastering engineer Bernie Grundman. The release also includes brand-new liner notes by Cory Frye who sat down in conversation with the project’s music producer, Jerry Goldstein, the longtime producer of WAR and manager for Sly Stone, who first discovered White and oversaw the record’s original recording behind prison walls. Illuminating the album’s long-obscured legacy, this edition offers fans and collectors a rare opportunity to experience Changin’ Times in its fullest and most faithful form.

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Celebrating David Gilmour on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

I have a dream. It’s that someone will put out a LP of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here made out of sugar and heavily laced with LSD. That way you could lick it before turning it on, and hear the damn album the way it should be heard, while you’re peaking.

It would be appropriate; has any major band ever been as associated with acid as Pink Floyd? (Yeah. The Grateful Dead, dumbo.) But not even the Dead managed to put out LPs (like 1969’s Ummagumma) that I would ONLY listen to while I was on hallucinogens, because they were unlistenable to anyone on the uninitiated side of the doors of perception. That said, I’ve since put on Ummagumma and found its first side to be bearable and its second side to be complete and unadulterated bullshit (“Several Species of Small Furry Animals” or “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entertainment),” anyone?). And while my recollections are hazy, I have come to the conclusion that the guy in the dorm who owned it was so far out there he’d only play side two while tripping balls.

The Pink Floyd story is a familiar one. The band was formed in London in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright, with David Gilmour coming aboard in 1967, destined to be the substitute for Barrett, who despite the band’s success and his status as the band’s chief songwriter was coming unhinged.

After numerous legendary on-stage fiascos involving increasingly odd behavior on the part of Barrett—he might stand in the hot stage lights, crushed ludes melting in his hair, looking off into the distance with his arms dangling down, declining to play his guitar for the entire set—the band more or less decided to not pick him up for a gig, and just like that he was gone, although his living specter (he showed up, bald and bloated, at the Wish You Were Here sessions, and his evident madness left several of his former band mates in tears) would haunt the band and indeed inspire some of their best work.

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I recently spoke with Martin Bisi, the founder of BC Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn—one of the most storied independent recording spaces in New York history.

Martin engineered and produced records for Sonic Youth, Swans, John Zorn, Afrika Bambaataa, and countless others across the no-wave and post-punk underground. We got into Martin’s life views, the relevance of New York culture, and the perils of capitalism.

I encourage you to dive deep into Martin’s entire catalogue including his own work as an artist and find him on Instagram at @maritinbisibc to follow along with all his happenings.

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Joe Jackson, one-time lounge pianist for the Portsmouth Playboy Club, lies somewhere on the New Wave Continuum between The Knack and Elvis Costello. He combines the intelligence of the former with the melodic and lyrical skills of, well, the former. Not that this has stopped him from selling records.

For me, Joe “I’m the Manque” Jackson has always come to mind when people say the words “New Wave.” Trouble is, I always hated the whole idea of New Wave. I would define New Wave as “The bunch of lame-O bands and artists who came along after punk croaked.” Dull and shallow artists who showed up with synthesizers or (in Joe’s case) without synthesizers, forcing the Minutemen to write “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”

Judging by record sales, very few people wanted the truth. On the positive side, Jackson is an activist on smoking bans. He’s against them. I may dislike Joe’s music, but when it comes to Smoking OPs, he’s on the side of the angels. I simply hope I don’t find out he smokes cigars. People who smoke cigars never want to hear the truth.

Jackson came out of the starting blocks with 1979’s successful Look Sharp! It included the pretty darn swell “Is She Really Going Out with Him.” He followed it the very same year with I’m the Man. On the cover, he dolls himself up as what the Brits call a “spiv,” or person who makes his dubiously legal living selling knock-off timepieces and the like, using the inside of his suit jacket as a kind of display window.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Hot on the heels of the Tokyo bliss and Funk Tide sets, Tokyo-based DJ Notoya delivers Tokyo Pulse a new juicy selection of Funk and Modern soul recorded in Tokyo in the ’70s and ’80s. Most tracks here are making their debut outside of Japan and the album, like its predecessors, has been designed by Manuel Sepulveda (Optigram) and is annotated by DJ Notoya. The audio has been newly mastered in Tokyo by Nippon Columbia Records and remastered for vinyl by Colorsound in Paris.

Tokyo Pulse’s lush funk selection opens with the nocturnal groove of Naomi Chiaki’s “Yoru E Isogu Hito,” recorded in 1978. The track perfectly sets the mood with its laid-back tempo and late-night atmosphere. From there, Yumi Murata’s “Ranhansha” (1979) brings a funkier touch, before the mellower funk of L-E-V-E-L’s “Bagdad No Atari Nite” signals the stylistic shift toward the early 1980s. Side one closes with GAM’s “Lake In The Forest,” an elegant reggae-inflected piece from 1980, played by several musicians from the cult Arakawa Band.

Side two opens with a leap into the late 1980s via Nami Shimada’s “Mitsumeteirunoni,” a superb mid-tempo electro-funk track. This is followed by the earthy folk-soul of Bread & Butter’s “Memory,” originally released in 1974 on Blow Up Records, and featuring a who’s who of Japanese music, including Haruomi Hosono, Ray Ohara, Tatsuo Hayashi, and Shigeru Suzuki.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Detroit’s legendary Westbound Records continues its partnership with Org Music to restore, reissue, and celebrate the label’s most vital recordings. Following the widely praised reissue of Funkadelic’s 1970 self-titled debut, Org Music now announces Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, arriving May 1 on LP, CD, cassette, and digital formats.

Released in July 1970 amid political unrest, cultural fragmentation, and creative upheaval in America, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow did not attempt to comfort its listeners. It confronted them. If Funkadelic’s debut introduced a new hybrid of psychedelic rock, gospel, blues, and heavy funk, this second album intensified the vision, pushing further into distortion, repetition, and spiritual confrontation.

The record’s origin story has become part of rock mythology, reportedly recorded during a single marathon session on LSD. The result was one of the most saturated and uncompromising sonic statements of its era. The album marked the official introduction of keyboardist Bernie Worrell, whose elastic harmonies and tonal experimentation would become central to the expanding P-Funk universe. Upon release, the record reached No. 92 on Billboard’s Pop chart, signaling that even its most radical impulses were finding an audience. More than five decades later, it stands as one of the boldest entries in the Westbound catalog and a defining document of Black psychedelic expression.

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