VIA PRESS RELEASE | In the winter of 1974, WAR were already a half-decade into their career and fresh off the success of the #1 Billboard best-selling album of 1973, The World Is a Ghetto. Following months of touring throughout the US, and then nearly thirty shows across Europe, WAR arrived in Japan for the first time ever, to perform a series of live shows in Shizuoka, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe. Now, recordings from these performances have been rediscovered and meticulously restored for Live In Japan 1974, the first live album to feature all seven original members in 50 years.

With the release of a Japan-exclusive CD set for January 29th, 2025—featuring a custom obi sleeve and liner notes by local music journalists—Live In Japan 1974 will get a global release on February 7th, 2025. The collection will be available in 2LP and 2CD sets worldwide, as well as digitally, and includes a variety of live recordings of classic WAR tracks like “The Cisco Kid,” “The World Is A Ghetto,” and “All Day Music.”

The liner notes, written and edited by Cory Frye, feature an in-depth interview with founding band member Lonnie Jordan and WAR’s longtime producer Jerry Goldstein, wherein Lonnie shares, “It was a fun, exciting experience because we’d never gotten that amount of people loving what we did, especially during that time.” Jerry adds, “They knew all the songs. It was pretty exciting, getting the vibe that everyone knew and loved what we were doing. They gave us a lot of standing ovations, and we did lots of encores.”

The liner notes also reveal the story behind the creation of yet another iconic WAR song, “Why Can’t We Be Friends?,” inspired by the band’s interactions with locals during their debut tour of Japan.

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Both in songwriting circles and in the oft harsh arena of departed personalities that never got their just due, the late Townes Van Zandt has grown into a mythic figure. Widely celebrated today for his very personal blend of smart country-folk expression, for the majority of his life Van Zandt was a frustratingly unknown entity. There exists numerous worthwhile entry points into the man’s rich body of work, but the best doorway is provided by his exquisite self-titled third LP from 1969, a record inching toward its forty-fifth year of existence with all of its artistic power undiminished.

Townes Van Zandt was one of the true bittersweet troubadours of American Music. The woeful obscurity that afflicted him during a life too short and rife with trouble (dead of a heart attack shy of his 53rd birthday in 1997 after many years of drug and alcohol addiction) is hard to reconcile with the nude beauty of his music.

The Velvet Underground’s now legendary lack of popularity while extant was basically tied to their being so defiantly ahead of their time, Big Star’s elusive sales figures were directly related to how they harkened back and revitalized the tidy appeal of ‘60s pop-rock in an era that greatly preferred excess, and Don Van Vliet was a kingpin of cult status mainly because he was such a blatant weird-meat, but Townes Van Zandt was just a powerful singer and brilliant songwriter whose early recordings should’ve been, if not huge, than certainly substantially bigger than they actually were at the time of their release.

From ’68-’72 Van Zandt recorded six albums that slowly solidified his reputation as a true rough diamond in the oft-problematic category of singer-songwriter, and it can be speculated that the guy’s natural blend of folk and country was perhaps a little bit urbane for the C&W hardliners of the time and maybe too tough for a folk-set that was preparing to turn the corner into the mellow hell of James Taylor etc. But at worst this should’ve somewhat limited Van Zandt’s appeal, not kneecapped it outright; it’s far easier to surmise that lack of promotion from the small Poppy label led to his misfortune as a musician’s musician.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Sacred Bones & Back Lot Music release the physical & digital release of Robin Carolan’s original motion picture soundtrack for Robert Eggers’ forthcoming film Nosferatu. The soundtrack is available for both physical purchase and to stream digitally following the release of the first two singles, with the film set to hit theaters nationwide on December 25th.

Robin Carolan’s latest soundtrack for the highly anticipated Nosferatu is a haunting, gothic-infused, and meticulously crafted work that draws from a vast palette of sounds, instruments, and inspirations. Following their successful collaboration on The Northman, Carolan reunites with Eggers to bring the legendary tale of Nosferatu to life, infusing the film with a score that is as complex and nuanced as the story itself.

With Daniel Pioro, one of Britain’s most exciting young classical musicians, at the helm as the orchestra leader and first chair for a vast majority of the recording, the soundtrack for Nosferatu features a vast orchestration, including 60 string players, a full choir, various horns and woodwinds, a harpist, and two percussionists. This orchestral richness brings a profound depth to the score.

“From the get-go, it was important to me that I not just write something you’d solely think of as a ‘horror score’,” Carolan explains. “I wanted to really lean into the melancholy, tragic aspect of the tale, and even make room for something akin to romance, albeit a very warped kind of romanticism.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan announces Lookaftering – Expanded Edition, a reissue of her legendary second album, out on February 7, 2025 via FatCat Records. 

Marking the occasion of 20 years since the first release, and coinciding with Vashti’s 80th birthday, the new expanded edition features the original studio album along with a second LP / disc of demos, an alternate take, and a live performance version. This edition also comes with reflective sleeve notes from Vashti, producer Max Richter, Devendra Banhart, and FatCat’s Dave Howell, as well as a 16-page lyric booklet featuring a collection of paintings by Vashti’s daughter Whyn Lewi—paintings that they both say have closely, and coincidentally, reflected the lyrics of the album.

Originally recorded between 2001 and 2005, the demos were created by Vashti at home, accompanying herself on electric and acoustic guitar, and experimenting with synth instrumentation—accordion, piano, strings, pipe organ, harmonium, recorders. The collection of demos offers a more stripped back sound compared to the finished album, and the live version of “Lately” recorded at an early “comeback” gig in L.A. in 2006, orchestrated as on the record, is absolutely pitch perfect.

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Beginning in 1966 with the self-titled debut album from Cream, the supergroup became a rock phenomenon that, even in an age that now seems to signal the end of the significance of rock bands, is still with us. The early era of the rock supergroup was primarily dominated by British groups other than Cream, such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer and another group like Cream that also included Eric Clapton, Blind Faith, among others.

Mixing one British artist (Graham Nash) and two Americans (David Crosby, Stephen Stills), Crosby, Stills and Nash released their self-titled debut album in March of 1969, establishing them as the American supergroup of the day. The album was a runaway smash and the group had created an entirely new sound that defied description.

As loaded with talent as CSN was, in mid-August they added yet another superstar to their lineup, Neil Young. Young had played with Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield. Interestingly enough, Crosby had previously played with Stills, when Young decided not to play with the Springfield at the Monterey Pop Festival way back in May of 1967. CSNY became an even bigger supergroup.

In 1969 CSNY set out on tour and began writing music and performing some of the songs that would make up their debut album Déjà vu, which would be released in 1970. CSNY was short-lived and other than a tour in 1974, the group wouldn’t work together in any capacity until they released their second album American Dream in 1988.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs is a Martin Phillipps passion project. A dedicated reimagining of his earlier unreleased songs that became his artistic farewell, a lasting legacy, and a reminder of his huge, underappreciated talent.

As the subject of an undulating life and times movie—The Chills: The Triumph And Tragedy Of Martin Phillipps—Chills’ singer, songwriter and main motivator, Martin Phillipps spent the last decade releasing studio and live albums while careering into his sixtieth year with typical gusto.

Amid such momentum, Martin was stilling digging through old tapes, searching for the foundations that resulted in global rapture in 1987, an overnight success that took a mere seven years to ignite. These early songs and musings were revisited, revised, and finally put to record. As such, Spring Board is the final chapter of The Chills’ immeasurably significant output.

“The album seemed like an easy option,” mused Martin, but breathing life into tunes that were penned by a twenty-something hopeful wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Cassettes fragmented, memories were hazy. “All of the songs needed varying degrees of rewriting; a 60-year old man couldn’t just stick to the lyrics of those formative years. And some of the songs were just vague recollections, incomplete, only blossoming during recording.”

Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs is alarming, personal, brittle and at times hopelessly upbeat. This is a man casting his mind back on an esoteric career that led to nothing short of cult status; someone rediscovering his roots, his innermost thoughts, hopes and fears.

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In the annals of jazz, tenor saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins is simply incomparable. A man without a creative weakness, he is equally celebrated as an innovator and for his sublime transformations of jazz standards and classic American song. No record gets to the core of Rollins’ greatness better than Way Out West. Originally released in 1957, it comes out in a fresh 180 gram vinyl edition this week via Craft Recordings as part of the label’s Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds series, remastered from the original tapes by Bernie Grundman and tucked into an utterly swank tip-on jacket.

Having debuted on record in 1949, backing hipster jazz vocalist Babs Gonzalez in his band Three Bips and a Bop on a 10-inch 78 rpm disc for the Capitol label, Sonny Rollins played and recorded extensively and by the mid-1950s he was the top tenor saxophonist in jazz. After cutting an LP a year as a leader from 1953-’56 for Prestige, Rollins exploded onto the marketplace in ’56 with a half dozen albums, all for Prestige, including what many consider his greatest recording, Saxophone Colossus.

After exiting his Prestige contract, Rollins became something of a free agent across an equally productive stretch, cutting three albums for Blue Note and one record for Riverside, plus half of a split album shared with the Thad Jones Ensemble for the Period label and the record under review here, all released in 1957.

Of the studio albums, Way Out West stands out for it’s lack of piano. On Rollins’ trip to California (hence the title and its accompanying cover motif, which was reportedly Rollins’ idea), he was joined by bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne in a foray into what the saxophonist described as “strolling,” which in short means improvising in a band that lacks a chordal instrument (e.g. piano or guitar).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Steely Dan’s sophisticated jazz pop fourth album, 1975’s Katy Lied, with such standouts as “Black Friday,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Doctor Wu,” will return to vinyl for the first time in more than forty years on January 31, 2025, via Geffen/UMe, continuing the extensive reissue program of the band’s classic ABC and MCA Records catalog.

The series, which began in November 2022 with the Dan’s legendary debut LP, Can’t Buy A Thrill, is being personally overseen by founding member Donald Fagen, and returns the group’s first seven records to vinyl, most of which haven’t been available since their original release. The series will close out with 1976’s guitar-driven The Royal Scam (“Kid Charlemagne,” “The Fez”) in mid-2025.

Katy Lied has been meticulously remastered by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes for release as a limited edition premium 45 RPM version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions is also releasing this series of titles on Super Audio CD (SACD). UMe’s standard 33 1/3 RPM 180-gram version has been remastered by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound from high-resolution digital files and pressed at Precision. They will be housed in reproductions of the original artwork.

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Monk’s Music was the fifth Thelonious Monk LP released by Riverside Records across a strong mid-1950s stretch. It helped to increase the pianist-composer-bandleader’s visibility on the scene and repair an undeservedly formidable reputation, but even after it was selected for inclusion in the Original Jazz Classics series of reissues, it’s become one of the less celebrated masterpieces in Monk’s extensive discography. But a fresh mono edition by Craft Recordings should help raise the profile of an immensely pleasurable session with an august supporting cast. It’s available now on 180 gram vinyl, mastered from the original tapes in an attractive tip-on sleeve.

It might seem strange given Thelonious Monk’s secure position in the jazz pantheon, but the first two records he cut for Riverside consisted solely of standards, with his debut for the label entirely devoted to compositions by Duke Ellington and the second offering a blend of well-known selections from the American Songbook. Both hit stores in 1956.

Thelonious Monk debuted on record as a leader in 1951 for the Blue Note label with two 10-inch discs, each titled Genius of Modern Music. In 1956, those volumes were expanded into LPs with additional material from the original series of sessions Alfred Lion organized from 1947–’51, plus one more date from the following year. Those two albums, further expanded in the CD era, are the logical place to begin a solid Monk collection, but they didn’t a cause retail firestorm. The five records Monk cut for Prestige from ’52–’54 saw no curtailing of creative momentum but befell similar the same commercial fate.

In 1957, Riverside’s Orrin Keepnews pivoted with Brilliant Corners, which featured all Monk tunes save for one. Later in the year Thelonious Himself, a more balanced mix of originals and standards, was released. As the title suggests, Himself is a solo piano affair, with the exception of closing track “Monk’s Mood,” where tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and bassist Wilber Ware are added.

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