Category Archives: The TVD Storefront

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Recorded on a sultry hot August night at the Roman Amphitheatre, Théâtre Antique d’Arles, Schmidt recalls, “I remember a very beautiful atmosphere. It was a summer night in the South of France, everybody was stoned and the atmosphere was very special.” This incredible recording mirrors the gauzy ambience of the evening.

The new album—out on 25 September 2026—originates from a fan recording of the show, and documents a performance that founding member Irmin Schmidt remembers fondly. Can Live in Arles 1975 features the core line up of Irmin Schmidt, Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, and Holger Czukay. The concert, with Nico and Kevin Ayres as well as Ash Ra Tempel supporting, is remembered by two fans—including the author/journalist Pascal Bussy—for the sleeve notes, which also feature a translation of a French magazine article from the time.

The new album is the latest in a series of live recordings that have been unearthed from the Spoon Records vaults and from fan recordings, then painstakingly assembled by founding member Irmin Schmidt and producer/engineer René Tinner.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Originally released in March 1980, Nobody’s Heroes is the second album from Stiff Little Fingers. To be released on 18 September, this brand new reissue is available as both a limited edition 3CD/DVD box set and 2LP and 2CD editions. This release follows the huge success of their Inflammable Material reissue last year, which was voted the number two Reissue of the Year 2025 by Vive Le Rock magazine.

The limited edition 3CD/DVD set contains a brand new remastered version of the original album with six bonus tracks. The second disc brings together all the relevant BBC Radio 1 John Peel and Mike Read sessions from the period with the DVD offering five live TV appearances—three from Top Of The Pops, a BBC regional Something Else appearance and a rare Dutch TV romp through At The Edge.

The third CD of the set is a recently discovered and previously unreleased full live performance from April 1980 at Pop Met, Rotterdam that was originally broadcast on Dutch Radio. This special live recording features rarely played tracks—”No Change,” “Bloody Dub,” as well as a blast through the Undertone’s “Teenage Kicks.” The sleevenote booklet includes a plethora of previously unseen and rare photographs, an array of period memorabilia, and unique pieces from original manager Gordon Ogilvie’s archive.

The 2LP version contains the 2026 remastered album as well as a selection of the unreleased BBC Radio 1 sessions. The 2CD contains the 2026 remastered album with additional bonus tracks and a second disc of the unreleased BBC sessions. Both versions are available to pre-order now from here.

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It has been a banner year so far for fans of The Beatles. With news of the Rubber Soul deluxe edition box set coming in early October, let’s take a look at some of the excellent Beatles-related albums already released. So far, the biggest releases this year have been the two most recent solo albums from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

First up is Boys of Dungeon Lane from McCartney. Fans and critics have been unanimous in their high rating of McCartney’s last two solo albums, Egypt Station in 2018 and McCartney III in 2020. As good as those albums were, this new album is one of his most solid efforts and may be his best album since Flaming Pie in 1997.

What’s so refreshing about this album is how constructed it is and how it reflects the myriad talents and unique sound that have made McCartney one of the most beloved and successful musical artists in pop history. While McCartney III featured many contemporary guest musicians, this new album is focused more on McCartney doing what he does best.

There are brief moments of familiarity, like on the opening track with its echo of “Monkberry Moon Delight” and its searing guitar rock and rousing vocal, the melancholy of “Junk” on “First Star of the Night,” the psychedelic dreaminess of Magical Mystery Tour on “The Fool On The Hill”-like “Mountain Top,” and the almost Lennon-inspired “Never Know,” the best produced track on the album.

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The Los Angeles-based guitar duo Duffy x Uhlmann release their second album, Hot Creek, on August 14, a solid set of 13 vivid instrumentals that branch out into unexpected sonic terrain beyond the vistas established on Doubles, the 2023 debut by this collaboration. While still recognizably made with guitars, the pair’s latest offers stretches that are less easily taggable as belonging to a string-oriented thing. Instead, we enter into the realms of pure experimental sound that’s appealingly post-category. Hot Creek is available on vinyl (creek water clear, classic black), cassette (smoky gray), and digital through Orindal Records.

Along with extensive session and live work, Meg Duffy is known as the sole permanent member of the band project Hand Habits. Born in Amsterdam, New York, Duffy swapped coasts for the big burg of Los Angeles. An equally sensitive and dexterous player, their studio and touring credits include The War on Drugs, Sylvan Esso, William Tyler, Weyes Blood, Flock of Dimes, Amber Arcades, Perfume Genius, and SASAMI.

In addition to Hand Habits, Duffy is half of yes/and, a collaboration with producer Joel Ford that cut an eponymous album in 2021. As a duo set, it compares interestingly with the trajectory they have taken in partnership with Gregory Uhlmann. As stated, Doubles is a clear exercise in guitars intermingling melodically, with casual precision, and in patterns of flowing intricacy. Hot Creek is frequently less sonically specific, without losing focus, and is a development that is at once intriguing and satisfying.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Nearly six decades after they helped ignite Minnesota’s garage rock explosion, The High Spirits are celebrated with a career retrospective album, I Believe, out October 16 from Sundazed Music. Available on LP and CD, and now available for pre-order, the full-length album gathers the band’s complete run of coveted 1960s singles alongside 10 additional recordings from the vault, many released for the first time, documenting the evolution of one of the Twin Cities’ most influential teenage bands.

Including extensive liner notes chronicling the band’s extraordinary story, I Believe stands as the definitive document of The High Spirits’ brief but unforgettable career, one that helped shape the foundation for the Twin Cities’ rich rock tradition, and gives one of the region’s most important garage bands the full-length album they never had the chance to make.

The High Spirits’ evolving lineup included Owen Husney, Doug Ahrens, Cliff Siegel, John “Jay” Luttio, Brad Berguson, and David “Z” Rivkin, who recently passed, making I Believe an especially meaningful celebration of his enduring musical legacy and the band’s lasting impact on generations of Minnesota musicians.

Long before Minneapolis became synonymous with boundary-pushing rock, The High Spirits were laying the groundwork. Their raw blend of British Invasion energy, garage rock swagger, blue-eyed soul, and increasingly adventurous psychedelia helped define the burgeoning Twin Cities music scene while inspiring countless musicians who followed. Three members would later play key roles during the earliest years of Prince’s Minneapolis musical empire, but it all began with the fearless teenage spirit captured on these recordings.

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Celebrating Jah Wobble on his 68th birthday. —Ed.

Okay, so in everybody’s life, there comes a day so bleak that not even Joy Division can do it justice. And on that day, there’s only one recourse: to crank up Public Image Ltd.’s Second Edition. John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band’s sophomore release, also known as Metal Box because it initially saw light as a metal 16mm film canister containing three 12” 45rpm records in 1979, was reissued in 1980 as a double LP.

But regardless of format, it was designed to brutalize the listener with music that was as remorselessly and relentlessly down-in-the-mouth as it was utterly hypnotizing, thanks to Lydon’s deranged vocal stylings, Jah Wobble’s loping and rhythmic dub-inspired bass, and Keith Levene’s splintered and utterly unique guitar riffs. Me, I find it soothing when I’ve reached the end of my tether; it lets me know I’m not alone.

Lydon was wise to abandon punk rock; he’d said everything that needed saying in that genre and knew damn well it was a dead end. And it’s a credit to his musical knowledge—which was far more wide-ranging than anyone would have given him credit for—that he went the avant-garde dub route.

Sure, the Sex Pistols posed an existential threat to everything that had come before them, but Second Edition is downright SCARY at times, and sounds every bit as demented as the Sex Pistols did menacing. Plus, you could dance to it, as the band’s legendary (and hilarious) performance on American Bandstand proved.

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Listeners smitten with the sound of the drone who haven’t made the acquaintance of Eleh are in for an utter low-end treat. On the scene for two decades, the project of John Brien has stood apart from the tide of like-minded artists in this rewarding field, in part through intensity and the robustness of the tones he sustains. Eleh’s debut, Floating Frequencies / Intuitive Synthesis I, was released in 2006 through Important Records, the label Brien has run since its beginnings in 2001. Important remains the source of this album’s very welcome reissue, which is out now on vinyl and digital.

It wasn’t until 2020 that John Brien made it publicly known that he was the person behind Eleh. By this point, the project had released a significant number of albums. Even if exactly who was responsible for Eleh (one person? More?) wasn’t a burning question or a built-in aspect of the project’s allure (ala Jandek before he came out of the shadows), learning who was responsible was still appreciated. Drone music is human music, after all.

Eleh’s reclusiveness did bring an air of mystery that widened the distance between his work and others in the drone field. This isn’t to equate calculated anonymity with insularity. A sizable number of records in the Eleh discography are splits, with those sharing a side of vinyl with Brien including such major figures as Pauline Oliveros, Sun Circle, Nana April Jun, Ellen Fullman, Duane Pitre, Tara Jane O’Neil, Christina Kubisch, Richard Chartier, and Caterina Barbieri.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Go-Betweens are one of the most beloved and influential Australian groups of all-time and were the quintessential cult band. Throughout their hugely acclaimed career they sustained an unparalleled artistic consistency which year by year matched the very best of their contemporaries.

We are pleased to announce that their three Beggars Banquet albums will be made available individually on vinyl for the first time in over 30 years. The records were remastered in 2019 for the second volume of Domino’s G Stands For Go-Betweens Anthology, and will also be available on CD.

The albums were recorded in what could be called the band’s “London Years”—when they lived and recorded in the city. Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (1986) and Tallulah (1987) are studio albums, while Fountains Of Youth, catches the group in imperious form at the Town and Country Club in May 1987.

Many of the songs for 16 Lovers Lane (1988) were written at this time, before the band returned to Sydney to record the album. The majestic sun-filled “Streets Of Your Town” was the first single off the record.

Formed in Brisbane in 1978, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster were two Queensland University students with a passion for films, mid-Sixties Bob Dylan, and the New York punk scene. They both sang, played guitar, and wrote songs. The set up of the band with two independent singer-songwriters at the helm was an unusual one, but in this case, it worked beautifully. Robert’s edgy, dark romantic compositions were perfectly balanced by Grant’s highly melodic, pop poetic contributions.

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Celebrating Ian Anderson on his 79th birthday. —Ed.

Sometimes you amaze yourself. Or perhaps I should say stupefy, dumbfound, perplex, befuddle, mystify, outrage, and downright disgust yourself. Such was the case when I recently ran over a “little person” in an abortive attempt to pass the DC driver’s test. I never saw him; in my defense, he was a very little person. More like a half-little person. And such was also the case when I decided to review Jethro Tull’s Stand Up, solely as a joke and a chance to pan defenseless Englishman Ian Anderson, who, for some inexplicable reason, stands poised on one leg while playing the flute, like a hippie flamingo.

Only to discover, horror of horrors, I actually like the damn thing. Who was it that said, “He came to mock but remained to pray”? Because I’ve always considered Jethro Tull, despite a handful of songs I truly like, ridiculous, due largely to Anderson’s flute, an instrument (in my humble opinion) suitable only for tossing out the window. What’s more, Jethro Tull always struck me as fairly dim. I clearly remember thinking, when they put out 1972’s Thick as a Brick, that it wasn’t the brightest move, touting one’s low IQ on one’s own album cover.

I picked 1969’s Stand Up for the historical reason that it includes the song “Fat Man.” A Facebook friend gave me the idea, and I fully intend to unfriend her. A short history: Jethro Tull (they filched their name from a pioneer of the English Agricultural Revolution) was formed in 1967 as a blues-rock outfit in Luton, Bedfordshire, a town once famed for hat-making. The concrete hat was invented there, and the resulting epidemic of neck injuries very quickly put an end to hat-making in Luton.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Thirty years after Butthole Surfers crashed into the mainstream with their landmark 1996 album Electriclarryland, Capitol Record Club commemorates the anniversary with a definitive new collector’s edition celebrating one of alternative rock’s most daring and influential releases.

Available August 28, this exclusive Capitol Record Club edition presents Electriclarryland as a newly remastered 2LP 45 RPM set, mastered for vinyl by Levi Seitz, giving the album’s explosive dynamics, dense sonic textures, and production greater depth and clarity. The album is now available for pre-order.

Released in the summer of 1996, Electriclarryland introduced a broader audience to the Butthole Surfers’ singular universe while refusing to compromise its gloriously unhinged identity.

Anchored by the unlikely alternative radio smash “Pepper,” the album remains one of the defining alternative albums of the 1990s and a testament to the fearless creativity that made the band one of underground music’s most influential acts.

The expanded 30th-anniversary edition gathers four rare recordings from the Electriclarryland era. Included are “Hybrid,” originally released as a non-album track on international editions of the “Pepper” single; soundtrack contributions “Pottery” and “Whatever (I Had a Dream)”; and the previously unreleased “Valuable Charcoal,” making this the most comprehensive vinyl edition of the album to date.

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You know what’s harder to find than the ghost of Lord Haw-Haw chatting up Harry Styles in a brawler pub in green and pleasant mugger-happy Croydon? A good British noise rock band. Names get batted about—Fudge Tunnel, Vile Imbeciles, Jockstrap, Wales’ Mandy, Indiana—but none of them sound like noise rock to me. Frankly, they sound like ponces.

But seek, and ye shall find, and there is an authentic noise rock band in the UK, and they hail from Cardiff, Wales. Mclusky (Andy Falkous on vocals and guitar, Jonathan Chapple on bass and vocals, and Matthew Harding on drums) are my idea of a noise rock band, insofar as they sound like the Midwestern bands (Cows, Killdozer, Scratch Acid/the Jesus Lizard and Big Black, although Steve Albini’s drum machine fetish always put me off) that changed my life during noise rock’s Golden Age, which dates from the early eighties to the late nineties, or up the present day if you include Pissed Jeans and Mclusky. Flipper and early No Trend are honorary members.

That’s not very many bands, and the reason is that I’m a noise rock purist. To my way of thinking, a great noise rock band must include the following: 1) a rumbling bass that makes you feel like a claw hammer is removing your tonsils, but in a good way. 2) Impossibly loud guitars that stretch the limits of feedback and bad attitude. 3) Vocalists who are either hilariously foghorn loud lyrics geniuses (Killdozer’s Michael Gerald), criminally insane bugle blasters (Cows’ Shannon Selberg), or not quite as criminally insane live show menaces (the Jesus Lizards’ David Yow).

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We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for our annual summer break. While we’re away, why not fire up our Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up, and we’ll see you back here Monday, 8/10.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sony Music Vision is proud to announce that Queen Budapest, the first Western stadium rock show to take place behind the Iron Curtain, and the final filmed Queen live performance, will be presented in cinemas and IMAX worldwide beginning October 7 through Trafalgar Releasing.

Queen Budapest will be released to mark the 40th anniversary of this pivotal moment in the band’s history, and the film has been meticulously restored in 4K from the original filmed 35mm footage by Sir Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production facility in New Zealand, with newly remixed audio from the original multitrack recordings to deliver the most immersive presentation of the performance to date.

Captured on July 27, 1986, at Budapest’s Népstadion, during the band’s “The Magic Tour,” the concert was a groundbreaking moment, as Queen became the first Western rock band to perform behind the Iron Curtain during a period of profound cultural and political change. In addition to 80,000 tickets selling out, an estimated 45,000 people listened to the group outside, and some fans had travelled from as far away as Russia and Poland to see the concert.

The show was professionally filmed on 35 mm movie film by 17 of Hungary’s best cameramen. The gear employed included 17 cameras and 25 miles of film, which was all that was available in the country, and the Hungarian government approved the entire operation, which was a first for a Communist State.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Soon has been a long time coming. The new album from Scott Fagan has been some 55 years in the making. Its songs, all drawn from the 1971 Broadway rock opera of the same name that Fagan conceived and wrote with songwriting partner Joe Kookoolis, were originally intended as the follow-up to his classic 1968 debut, South Atlantic Blues, but fate intervened.

A radical call-to-arms against the complacency of the modern world, and a tone poem about art, radicalism, commerce, and corruption, the rock opera told an age-old story of an artist forced to make a devil’s bargain between their principles and success. It drew on Fagan’s own experiences in the music industry, and featured him in the lead role, alongside Richard Gere, Barry Bostwick (later the lead in Grease and The Rocky Horror Show), Joe Butler (of Lovin’ Spoonful), Vicki Sue Robinson, and Peter Allen.

The original Broadway production, subject to creative meddling that compromised its creators’ vision, closed the day after its opening. A year later, it was restaged in Los Angeles for a brief two-week run. Then Fagan’s opus was lost to time. The album was shelved, never to be recorded or heard. Until now.

Recorded over seven days in July 2025 at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, a hallowed studio that has hosted Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Alex Chilton, and The Cramps among others, the sessions found the now 80-year-old singer-songwriter working with a crack Memphis rhythm section—drummer Terence Clark (Brandi Carlisle, Keith Urban), guitarist Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, North Mississippi All Stars) and keyboardist Rick Steff (Cat Power, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Lucero).

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