VIA PRESS RELEASE | Miki Berenyi is best known as the lead singer, rhythm guitarist and founder member of UK band, Lush, who The New York Times note were “the brilliant, unsung underdogs of the ethereal pop wave that crashed through Britain in the late 1980s and early ’90s.” They reunited for a Coachella performance, tour and EP in 2016. Most recently, Berenyi has fronted the bands Piroshka and the Miki Berenyi Trio, who are set to perform in the US this May and June with Lol Tolhurst x Budgie supporting, and recently shared their cover of Lush’s “Light From A Dead Star.”

Today, Berenyi announces the North American release of her acclaimed autobiography, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, out on April 9th via Mango Publishing as well as the global release of the audiobook via Bonnier Books. Originally published in the UK in 2022, the searingly honest and beautifully written memoir by the musician is an incredible account of a trailblazing woman and a seminal band delivered with the vivid, emotional power of an accomplished storyteller. Pre-order the book HERE.

From the bohemian lifestyle of her Hungarian father’s social circle to the privileged glamor of her Japanese mother’s acting career, Miki’s young life was a blur of international travel, celebrities and peripatetic schooling. Frequent relocation, parental neglect and the dark presence of her abusive Nazi grandmother resulted in crippling shyness, mental health problems and a vulnerability to exploitation. The route out was music —a passion shared by schoolmate Emma Anderson. The teenagers began attending gigs together and would go on to form Lush in 1988.

Talented and exuberant the band became hot property as they moved from pub gigs to Shoegaze icons and finally Britpop darlings. This uncompromising autobiography documents the excitement of playing live, the camaraderie of the gang, the thrill of signing to 4AD and the craziness of Lollapalooza.

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Brothers Mark and Clive Ives have been making music since the early 1970s as the creative engine of the UK outfit Woo. Having released their debut in 1982, they collaborated with Independent Project Records later in the decade, and now, after a break of over 35 years, that relationship has been rekindled with Xylophonics + Robot X. Distinct but complementary, these two sets, initially assembled and issued in 2016–’17, are packaged together and given a physical release for the first time, available now on double vinyl (black or clear) and double compact disc, each exquisitely designed as is the IPR way.

As a significant portion of their early material has been reissued or given archival release in the 21st century by a variety of labels including Drag City, Emotional Rescue, and Palto Flats, Woo has been described as a cult band, a tag that fits as the Ives brothers’ work resists easy encapsulation. Additionally, Woo long persisted outside of the standard music industry mechanisms, with a high percentage of their recorded output initially self-released, a practice that has extended into our current digital reality.

Woo had been privately busy for roughly a decade before they put out Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong. Well received by the UK music press, that album was reissued by Bruce Licher’s Independent Project Records in 1988, with the label bringing out It’s Cozy Inside the next year. These initial releases inspired comparisons to kosmische, The Durutti Column, and Brian Eno, but as the ’90s progressed Woo had earned the New Age appellation, and fairly so, as much of their output was openly intended for relaxation, deep listening, healing, meditation, and therapy sessions.

After seeing widespread derision from the moment of its arrival (while being consumed in large quantities), New Age music has seen an upswing in esteem over the last few decades, and Woo’s work in this admittedly wide open territory (often just as easily assessed as ambient) belongs on the positive side of the style’s quality spectrum. But it’s clear straight off that Robot X stands outside the New Age genre while maintaining a few loose ties to the kosmische root.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 50 years ago, the Grateful Dead were cooking with gas. It was spring 1974, the band had successfully emerged from a series of hectic, harrowing times, and would soon follow their transformative Wake Of The Flood with the second acclaimed album release on their very own Grateful Dead Records: From The Mars Hotel.

During the mere eight months that had passed between those two beloved LPs, the group also played some of their most exploratory live music and largest venues to date, famously amplified by the homemade, 75-ton Wall of Sound that they debuted on March 23rd, 1974, at their hometown Cow Palace in Daly City, CA. Eternal staples such as “Scarlet Begonias,” “Ship Of Fools,” and “U.S. Blues” would first be introduced into setlists along that season’s tour, before the Grateful Dead spent two months recording and honing them in the studio for From The Mars Hotel.

Not to mention perennial classics like “China Doll” and “Loose Lucy,” or “Pride of Cucamonga” and “Unbroken Chain”—the final two tracks Phil Lesh would sing on a Grateful Dead studio album. Now, as Grateful Dead members and tributaries continue to celebrate and bring so many of these formative songs to the masses, From The Mars Hotel has been remastered and expanded with newly unearthed material and rarities, in honor of its 50th Anniversary.

Out June 21st via Rhino, six days before the album’s original release on June 27, 1974, From The Mars Hotel (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) features remastered audio by GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer David Glasser, with Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction. Produced for release by Grateful Dead Legacy Manager and Audio Archivist, David Lemieux, the deluxe edition also includes demos of “China Doll” and “Wave That Flag”—the song that became “U.S. Blues”—as well as a previously unreleased live performance of the Grateful Dead at University of Nevada-Reno on 5/12/1974.

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Bob Seger was thirty and practically a geriatric (thirty is sixty in rock years!) when 1976’s Night Moves finally took him nationwide, big time. It came as a surprise. Seger seemed destined to spend his career as a journeyman—a big fish (although hardly as hip a fish as The Stooges, the MC5 and Alice Cooper) in the Detroit area, just another band everywhere else. He was a second-tier rocker who put on high-energy rock shows and had written some great songs including the 1968 classic “2 +2 = ?”and 1975’s “Beautiful Loser,” none of which—with the exception of 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”—broke into the American Top Forty.

He began his recording career with the Bob Seger System before going solo and then forming the crack Detroit unit Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, but fame eluded him until Night Moves (with its title track, which may well be the greatest and most poignant song ever written about growing old and looking back) went to No. four on the charts. It says everything you need to know about Seger’s genius that “Night Moves” sounds like the work of a much older man—thirty is a bit early to be singing about autumn closing in. But Seger pulled it off with ease, perhaps because all that touring left him wise beyond his years.

Night Moves broke Seger, but he made his first inroad towards national attention with the previous year’s two-fer Live Bullet with The Silver Bullet Band. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall before a vocal and partisan crowd, Live Bullet is a galvanizing non-stop hard rock party and call to arms. Live Bullet demonstrates that Seger was a no-frills roots rocker with a voice that was all road grit who put on an electrifying live show, heavy on irresistible, high-octane, old-school scorchers that should have made him a star but didn’t. And the covers (of songs by Tina Turner, Van Morrison, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry) are barnstormers as well. When the announcer at album’s open shouts, “You are here because you want the real thing!” he isn’t fooling.

Seger projects almost as well as John Fogarty—he may have been in Cobo Hall, but I’ll bet you the kids could hear him giving it his all in North Dakota’s Iron Range. And Seger and band seemed to have a constitutional aversion to going the ballad/love song route or even going the speed limit; aside from “Turn the Page” and “Jody Girl,” the adrenaline never flags. Simple, loud and fast: it’s the oldest formula there is, but there’s a reason Seger would go on to sing about loving that old time rock and roll—he loved that old time rock and roll. It’s an awful song, granted, and a real blot on his permanent record, but a true reflection of his Chuck Berry-loving self.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | With 14 Academy Award nominations, seven Grammy awards, and an Emmy to his credit, Thomas Newman has a track record second to none among modern screen composers (and even among his family, which is saying a lot considering he is son to Alfred, brother to David, and cousin to Randy Newman).

But among all his Academy Award-nominated scores—to classics like The Shawshank Redemption, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Road to Perdition—his score to the 1999 Academy Award-winning Best Picture American Beauty (the first of his many collaborations with director Sam Mendes) remains his most distinctive. That’s because Newman made the bold choice of composing a score almost entirely with percussion instruments, brilliantly intuiting that the lack of melodic resolution in the film’s themes would echo and amplify what he termed the “moral ambiguity” of the script.

The result was a haunting and wholly original film score that is instantly recognizable to anyone who has seen the picture. Real Gone Music is very proud to present this work of genius on blood red rose vinyl to match the original album art (here used for the first time on vinyl release) and the film’s shattering conclusion.

Celebrating Jim “Dandy” Mangrum in advance of his 76th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Black Oak Arkansas may well be—and I say this with affection, and as a fan—the most stunningly inept band in the history of rock. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau once rhetorically asked why Black Oak—despite relentless touring and a big name tour manager—still couldn’t “sell out the Academy of Music on a Saturday night.” His answer: “They are actively untalented, incapable of even an interesting cop.”

Me, I think Christgau’s right about Black Oak’s incompetence, but wrong about everything else. I find Black Oak Arkansas tremendously interesting, exciting even, thanks in large part to the uncanny vocal acrobatics of the perpetually shirtless James “Jim Dandy” Mangrum. I find it hard to describe Mangrum’s voice except by comparing it to the pitching of Dock Ellis on that immortal June night in 1970 when he threw a no-hitter while on acid. Ellis’ pitches may have been all over the place—he walked eight batters, and probably narrowly missed hitting and killing a few more—but nobody could touch them, because Ellis was possessed.

And so it goes for Mangrum. He can’t carry a tune in his purse, and is likely to go from a macho growl to high-pitched keening to flat out making rabid possum noises in the amount of time it took me to write this sentence. And it’s not like he’s trying. For the horrible truth is that Big Jim has no control of the sounds coming out of his mouth whatsoever. All he can do is let rip and hope nobody gets hurt. It’s scary but in a wonderful way, that is if you possess a sense of humor and are wearing a state-of-the-art batting helmet.

The band’s 1972 sophomore LP Keep the Faith includes all of the hallmarks of the Black Oak Arkansas sound—a three-guitar attack that is far too psychedelic to fit neatly into the “Southern Rock” genre, a barely competent backbeat, and the snake oil ululations of Mangrum, who pitches his vocals just about everywhere but over the plate. And despite what Christgau says, Black Oak Arkansas has some more than decent songs on offer, even if the boys in the band don’t exactly do a stellar job of performing them.

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Often on this program, I interact with artists and creators, who do their best work when they are by themselves.

It’s in solitude that a musician often finds the freedom and flexibility to create just what it is they want to develop. However, there is surely something to be said about the chemistry between two people, two artists. When two musicians sit before one another and unite for the good of performing or recording one song, the tension can be palpable. Such a situation can reach Olympic level heights when the musical duel is between two experts in their field.

Lau Noah knew that for her next musical project she wanted to engage in this kind of intimate match-up. And so on her new album A Dos she’s chosen to pursue musical conversation with some of her favorite artists, and what artists they are. Chris Thile, Jacob Collier and many more met with Lau to assist her to communicate with her audience the compositions that she’s worked so hard to create.

Interestingly, as you’ll learn by listening to our conversation, is how Noah was adamant about recording these tracks face-to-face rather than utilizing the remote technology that is so prevalent in today’s music production. So, what you hear when you listen to her new record is that moment, that spark where two people meet and combine their forces into one.

One may be the loneliest number, as they say, but it sure can be helpful when a composer must concentrate on what they’re overall artistic vision is. But, that solitude sometimes eschews the excitement and competition that can be found in a suitable partner. After all, it does take two to tango, doesn’t it?

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.

It’s safe to say that 1972’s glam-infused Transformer will always be ex-Velvet Undergounder and Andy Warhol acolyte Lou Reed’s signature album, his biggest crowd pleaser and the one he’ll best be remembered for. It was certainly the album that finally transformed him (see “album title as self-fulfilling prophecy”) from cult figure amongst the decadent NYC demimonde to rock star—songs like “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day” finally brought him a listenership commensurate with his talents. But is it his best album? Is it even a great album? Hell, is it even a good album? Does it live up its exalted rep?

One thing is certain—Reed would never record a solo album that matched the brilliance of the albums he released with the Velvet Underground. Never even came close. He released strong albums, weak albums, middling albums, annoyingly boring high-brow albums (1992’s Magic and Loss), viscerally powerful albums (1982’s The Blue Mask), depressing-as-fuck albums (1973’s bummer Berlin) and eleven live albums that ran the gamut from great (1974’s Rock n Roll Animal) to beyond-belief bad (1978’s “comedy record” Lou Reed Live: Take No Prisoners).

He also bequeathed us perhaps the biggest fuck you to his fans this side of Dylan’s Self Portrait (1975’s immortal Metal Machine Music) and a couple of collaborations both pretentious and boring (1990’s Songs for Drella with John Cale and 2011’s much-denigrated Lulu with Metallica). Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t trade the lot of them for the Velvet Underground’s final album, 1970’s Loaded. Hell, the only Reed solo albums I ever listen to are Rock n Roll Animal, 1975’s Coney Island Baby, and The Blue Mask, and I’m rarely at a loss for reasons NOT to listen to them.

Everybody knows the background of Transformer. Reed’s debut solo album was a good-to-excellent commercial dud, and Reed (as he always had) wanted to be a star. Who doesn’t? So along comes David Bowie who’s like the It Person of the Galaxy thanks to his androgynous space alien Ziggy Stardust shtick and Lou, smitten by glam and Bowie’s openness about his bisexuality and hoping some of the Zigster’s glitter dust would rub off, asked Bowie and Spiders from Mars guitarist and mad genius arranger Mick Ronson to produce his next album.

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