Celebrating Al McKay on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

Of all the things I’ve loved during my tenure on this planet, it’s hard to beat Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White. And not because he’s a musical genius and head honcho of one of the Seventies’ best soul/funk outfits. No, I love him because he’s the guy who sings, “Yowl!” on several occasions on the great “That’s the Way of the World.” They never fail to thrill me, those yowls, not since I was a young sprog and loved the hell out of MFSB’s “T.S.O.P.”

EWF’s songs dominated Top 40 radio when I was young, because unlike Sly and the Family Stone and Parliament/Funkadelic they were unapologetically middle of the road. But that doesn’t mean that their songs weren’t great, just that they were more like the black equivalent of Elton John than, say, Randy Newman. As the critic Robert Christgau noted about one of their prime LPs, “Most of these songs are fun to listen to. But they’re still MOR–the only risk they take is running headlong into somebody coming down the middle of the road in the opposite direction. Like The Carpenters.”

But so what? Earth, Wind & Fire have produced their fair share of timeless songs, and if they’re slick, the slickness works. Under the direction of White, EWF’s drummer, songwriter, and vocalist, the band’s sound was—and still is—an eclectic brew of funk, jazz, gospel, rock, smooth soul, blues, folk, African music, and disco, and what made them particularly remarkable were their group vocals, and especially the vocals of Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

Unrelentingly positive, their songs were a balm for the soul, and I for one think “That’s the Way of the World” is a slice of mystical brilliance and a song for the ages. All of those vocalists throwing in; it’s a sound so soulful I sprout an Afro every time I listen to it. And their horn section, the four-member Phenix Horns, also merits special attention; one listen to the opening of “Shining Star” and you know you’re in the presence of genius.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The life and career of pioneering heavy metal frontman Paul Di’Anno, the powerhouse voice heard on Iron Maiden’s early albums, will be celebrated in the forthcoming documentary, Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer, to be released by Cleopatra Entertainment this summer.

In a strikingly raw and intimate film, director Wes Orshoski captures the late singer as he rides an emotional rollercoaster toward the end of his life. Featuring appearances by James Hetfield (Metallica), Gene Simmons (Kiss) Maiden’s Steve Harris, and members of Exodus, Slayer, Megadeth, Overkill, and Sepultura, the film chronicles how two Iron Maiden fans encounter Di’Anno at the lowest point of his life and then set out to restore his health and relaunch his career.

Wheelchair-bound since the mid-2010s, Di’Anno’s health nosedived during the Covid-19 pandemic, when those two fans launched a crowdfunding campaign which ultimately led to him relocating to Croatia, where—through the help of those fans and doctors—he made a dramatic turnaround while running out of money, reuniting with his former Maiden bandmates, and falling in love. Eventually he makes a heroic and drama-filled return to the stage. All of this is captured in Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer, which Orshoski began shooting in 2017.

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Celebrating Mark Eitzel on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

Mark Eitzel, American music’s poet laureate of the alcoholic undertow, has never gotten his props. During his time with his band American Music Club he put out a number of great albums, each one more besotted than the last, and managed to write what I consider the best song (by far!) of the nineties, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”

So what if he brutalized me in comments following a review I wrote of a show at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. What really hurt was his saying, “If I’m as down as you say I am – then what gives you the right to kick me?” I wasn’t kicking you, Mark, I love you man—I was just unhappy that you were moving in the direction of stripped down torch songs.

Ah, but that’s bourbon under the bridge. I will always consider Eitzel a genius, what with his way of both bumming you out and making you laugh with his songs about himself and his burned-out friends. He can turn a phrase and has a surgeon’s eye for just where to put the scalpel in, and these gifts are, I think, on best display on 1991’s Everclear.

It led Rolling Stone magazine to declare Eitzel the Songwriter of the Year in 1991, but didn’t up his band’s exposure any; as Eitzel sadly noted later, “The next show there were about 20 people in the audience. And they were army guys and they thought American Music Club were some righteous American freedom-fighting, cool ass Springsteen-influenced Guns N’ Roses kind of guys. And we did not rock.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Rhino High Fidelity (Rhino Hi-Fi), the limited-edition audiophile vinyl reissue series, returns with two albums that helped reframe rock at the dawn of the 1970s: The Stooges’ Fun House and the Velvet Underground’s Loaded.

Each album was cut from the original master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram black vinyl at Optimal in Germany. Both releases feature glossy gatefold packaging with “tip-on” jackets and newly written liner notes. They are limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies and available today exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.

Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Don Gallucci, Fun House arrived in 1970 as The Stooges—Iggy Pop, Ron Asheton, Dave Alexander, and Scott Asheton—doubled down on everything that made their debut a year earlier so confrontational. It was a deliberate escalation—testing how far the music could be pushed without coming apart.

In the new liners, Pop writes, “Something about this record that I like is the way it begins with a couple of very short, fully structured numbers, and then slips farther and farther out of control…yet it never loses a structure of its own.” He adds, “This is not a meat-and-potatoes record. It’s not ‘ten really good songs that the consumer can depend on.’”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Five-time GRAMMY® Award-winning neo-soul trailblazer Erykah Badu commemorates the 25th anniversary of her influential sophomore album, Mama’s Gun, with the release of new limited-edition vinyl options out now. The 2LP UMe Ecomm variant is pressed on gold black ice vinyl and features a newly redesigned gatefold jacket, alternate cover, and special lithograph. Order HERE.

Finally, the Vinylphyle edition of Mama’s Gun features this album’s first ever hi-res remaster since its original CD release, sourced from the original production tapes. The 2LP, which features new liner notes personally penned by Badu, was cut by Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound Nashville and pressed at RTI on 180g black vinyl.

The Vinylphyle edition dropped recently, and is available HERE.

The indisputable influence of Mama’s Gun looms over every corner of the culture. It first arrived in stores on November 21, 2000. It peaked at #11 on the Billboard 200, scoring her strongest first-week sales ever and moving north of 191K copies. Within the span of only four weeks, it reached the threshold for a Platinum certification from the RIAA. Not to mention, this landmark body of work garnered three GRAMMY® Award nominations, including “Best Female R&B Vocal Performance” and “Best R&B Song” for “Bag Lady” and “Best R&B Song” for “Didn’t Cha Know?”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent Project Records (IPR) announced the release of a decades-spanning various artists compilation titled The Well, featuring many rare and unreleased tracks from the label’s vaults, as well as music from forthcoming releases, out now on Special Edition double CD.

For more than four decades, Independent Project Records has embodied what true independent record labels should stand for. This is its past, present and future rolled into two albums-worth of genre-defying, utterly unfettered music.

You’ll find them living together, post-punk and ambient, psychedelia and desert surf rock, dream pop and goth rock, well-traveled singer-songwriters and young college students with a penchant for bedroom pop: it speaks to and of the unique vision and relentless drive of both IPR and its artists that The Well plays not like a mishmash but like a coherent, endlessly fascinating statement.

New revelations are to be expected with each listen—this compilation promises to mesmerize, electrify and stupefy lifelong fans and newcomers alike.

The two-disc, forty-one song collection of genre-defying tracks features many previously unheard songs from IPR artists such as Barry Craig (A Produce), Camper Van Beethoven, David J, Lanterna, Middle Class, Savage Republic, Scenic, Shiva Burlesque, and more, as compiled by IPR co-owner and founder Bruce Licher.

Celebrating Roddy Frame on his 62nd birthday. —Ed.

While technically a band, Aztec Camera was always the creative brainchild of Scotsman Roddy Frame. On the debut LP High Land, Hard Rain, released in 1983 through Rough Trade in the UK and via Sire in the US, he made an outstanding case for himself as one of the decade’s great pop music auteurs. The album embraced intelligence and sophistication as it abandoned any pretense to a rapidly aging punk standard that spawned it, and if it isn’t perfect, 30 years after High Land, Hard Rain’s making it wears its minor flaws very gracefully.

High Land, Hard Rain opens with “Oblivious,” one of the record’s more famous tracks, though in hearing it with fresh ears after a very long absence I was struck by two elements. The first was the heights of Roddy Frame’s pop ability and at the tender age of 18; where much pop climbs to greatness in the details, “Oblivious” can be accurately assessed as an exceptionally written tune. It attains its success through sublime construction around a foundation that many well-respected songwriters twice his age had never managed to build.

The second element was Aztec Camera’s sheer level of dedication to an unabashedly erudite sensibility. This was maximal, accessible, unabashedly sophisticated Pop Music not only shirking off any tangible debt to punk but also steering far clear of the swelling tide of the synth-wave. And this relates directly to my third thought; in the bass line to “Oblivious” lays the key to so much of High Land, Hard Rain’s essence.

I’ll start by mentioning that I’m not smitten with Campbell Owens’ playing on the song, which is lightly and tastefully funk-tinged in a manner undeniably ‘80s, though my lack of regard for the bassist’s swagger hardly sinks the whole. Aztec Camera at this point functioned as a band, with Bernie Clark on keyboards and Dave Ruffy on drums/percussion alongside Owens’ bass and Frame’s vocals, guitar and harmonica, but they also operated squarely in the pop zone and lacked any significant rock gestures.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | ​Wewantsounds is delighted to release for the first time on vinyl Brion Gysin’s cult recordings, produced by Ramuntcho Matta in the ’80s and early ’90s.

The release features the hypnotic 32-minute journey “Dreamachine,” which transforms the effects of Gysin’s legendary light art device into a mesmerizing audio experience, alongside the track “The Door,” featuring the visionary saxophonist Steve Lacy. A towering figure in avant-garde art, literature, and sound, Gysin influenced generations of creators, from William Burroughs to David Bowie and Laurie Anderson. Newly remastered and accompanied by liner notes by Gysin scholar Jason Weiss, this LP edition coincides with a major exhibition dedicated to Gysin at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, opening Spring 2026, underscoring his lasting impact on contemporary culture.

Wewantsounds continues its exploration of the archives of French producer and musician Ramuntcho Matta with the first-ever vinyl release of these cult recordings by Brion Gysin, one of the most radical and influential figures of 20th-century counterculture. A pioneering artist whose work spanned literature, sound, performance, and visual art, Gysin remains inseparable from the Beat movement and his long-time friend William Burroughs.

Born in England and raised in Edmonton, Canada, he lived in Paris in the ‘30s, New York in the ‘40s, Tangier in the ‘50s—where Paul Bowles introduced him to the Master Musicians of Jajouka—and returned to Paris by the end of that decade, becoming a central figure among writers and artists experimenting with new forms of expression. His cut-up technique, permutation poetry, and cross-disciplinary approach influenced generations of creators including David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Genesis P. Orridge, and Burroughs himself.

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The late Gary Young is best known as the talented and eccentric drummer on Pavement’s early records, including their breakout full-length Slanted and Enchanted. Naturally, there is more to the man’s life story, and the recent documentary directed by Jed I. Rosenberg does a solid job telling the musical side of it. Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young & Pavement (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) gathers various relevant aural threads into a cohesive and pleasurable package. This portraiture is out on vinyl, compact disc, and digital January 30 through Independent Project Records.

Those with a casual appreciation of the band might not grasp the reality, but Jed I. Rosenberg’s loving but non-hagiographic cinematic tribute to Gary Young makes it pretty clear that Pavement simply wouldn’t exist in the form that we now know without his crucial shaping input as drummer and producer.

Louder Than You Think was Young’s studio in Stockton, CA, the town where Pavement was formed. Based on Young’s involvement in the local music scene, Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg chose his studio as the place to record Pavement’s debut 7-inch. Essentially a dual-guitar duo project, Young added drums and a guiding production principle that generated the initial subterranean buzz that first took them to Drag City and then to Matador Records.

Young’s often-entertaining, and just as frequently erratic, behavior is a major part of Pavement’s history. It can be argued that Young is the drummer for Pavement during their greatest discographical stretch. He hit the skins hard and loose, and loved drum fills in a manner that underlined his elder status in the lineup. If Young’s craziness could situate him as the Keith Moon of the band (which soon added Bob Nastanovich and Mark Ibold), his age added a curious wrinkle to the group dynamic.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | What happens when you wake up the morning after leaving the most important rock band of all time?

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, the intimate new feature documentary by Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy Award-winning director Morgan Neville, explores Paul McCartney’s creative rebirth after The Beatles’ breakup. The film will be released in cinemas for one night only by Trafalgar Releasing on Thursday, February 19, 2026. Tickets to see the film first, in select cinemas worldwide, are available from Wednesday 4th February at manontherun.film.

In April 1970, Paul released his first solo album, McCartney. When asked what he’d do next, he said his only plan was to grow up. Paul McCartney: Man on the Run captures Paul’s transformative decade in the wake of The Beatles’ break-up and the rise of his new band Wings. Through stunning archival footage, Linda McCartney’s exceptional photographs, interviews with Paul, Linda, Mary, and Stella McCartney, a number of Wings band members, Sean Ono Lennon, Mick Jagger, Chrissie Hynde, and more, the film examines this time through a uniquely vulnerable lens.

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run will be released theatrically in select territories worldwide. In addition to the film, each theatrical screening includes a bonus conversation between Paul McCartney and director Morgan Neville, exclusive to cinemas. All participating cinemas and ticket listings can be found at manontherun.film from February 4th at 2pm GMT / 9am ET / 6am PT. Fans are encouraged to sign up to the email newsletter for event alerts.

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