Among numerous shifts in personnel, Jamie Stewart is the founding and constant member of Xiu Xiu since the outfit’s formation in 2002, but for their last pair of albums, the core lineup has solidified into Stewart, Angela Seo, and David Kendrick. It’s this trio that shapes, with various additional contributors, the dozen cover songs heard on new album Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1, which releases January 16 on vinyl in various color configurations, compact disc, and cassette through Polyvinyl. Collecting a project that began in 2020, the finished works are adventurous yet cohesive.

Covers albums from a single act, when corralling material from assorted sources rather than pinpointing one artist or band (as Stewart did with Nina, their 2013 tribute to Nina Simone) or focusing on a theme (such as the 2016 Record Store Day release Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks) are most often hit and miss affairs. Occasionally, a set of covers that’s dedicated to various artists can be consistently bland, and less frequently, an utterly disastrous, embarrassing affair.

There’s likely something about stylistic source range that allows for peaks and valleys of inspiration. A collection of micro tributes is also possibly less burdensome when compared to a large-scale single artist salute. But even so, a covers album from a single act that’s focused on material from diverse sources that ultimately shapes up as steadily superb is as rare as, indeed rarer than, the unmitigated catastrophes.

Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 gets in the ballpark of being consistently excellent, perhaps in part because the songs were released individually and then collected as an album after completion and satisfaction rather than conceived as a single release from inside a short timeframe. There are also some thematic realities to consider, including a pocket of songs that fit into an electronic/industrial framework.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Band of Horses announce they will celebrate the 20th birthday of their Gold-certified 2006 debut album Everything All The Time with a newly expanded 20th Anniversary Edition, out on March 20, 2026 via Sub Pop.

The expanded 19-track edition is accompanied by an additional LP of bonus tracks, including the 2005 tour EP, a trove of previously unreleased studio and live tracks, and rarities like “The End’s Not Near” (as featured on The O.C.) and a demo version of the double Platinum single “The Funeral.” The album has been fully remastered for the anniversary edition, with the artwork refreshed and expanded into a gatefold jacket, including new liner notes by the album’s producer, Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, Built To Spill, Modest Mouse, Father John Misty).

In his liner notes, Ek shares, “I’ve always believed that albums need to feel special and should transcend the recording process. I want records that I produce to feel like you can walk into them, to have a three-dimensional depth. The music should stay as fresh and exciting as the first time you heard it. Achieving this requires a lot of time, trust, and effort in the studio, but it pays off in the end. Twenty years on, I still think Everything All The Time exemplifies this fully.”

Reflecting on the anniversary, Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell adds, “This album made all of my dreams come true. Forever grateful for the desperation that fueled its inspiration.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Emotions were one of the greatest girl groups of all time.

Girl group greatness, courtesy of the Chicago-based Hutchinson Sisters (with Theresa Davis on this record) and co-producers Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and Ronnie Williams! Recording at Muscle Shoals and Stax studios seems to have added a little grit to The Emotions’ sound, too; this 1971 classic on the Volt label offers the perfect blend of sweet and sassy.

“Show Me How” was the hit, but it’s “Blind Alley” that made Untouched one of the most collectible albums of its kind: that track’s one of the most sampled in all of pop and hip hop, most notably by Big Daddy Kane (“Ain’t No Half-Steppin’”) and Mariah Carey (“Dreamlover”).

Pressed in black and clearwater blue vinyl editions, and cut ALL-ANALOG from the original two-track master.

Celebrating Wayne Coyne on his 65th birthday. —Ed.

Attention psychonauts! We interrupt your lysergic day trip across the fifth dimension to announce that the musical programme has been changed. Instead of The Beatles’ 1967 LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—which depending on your point of view is either thee ultimate psychedelic masterpiece or a middling work chiefly distinguished by its revolutionary recording techniques, which in effect turned the studio into a de facto fifth Beatle—you’ll be hearing 2014’s With a Little Help from My Fwends, The Flaming Lips’ track-by-track re-imagining of The Beatles LP. As a result, you can expect significant turbulence, fuzz, distortion, dissonance, noise, and oh yeah, Miley Cyrus, along with numerous other fwends of the band. In short, fasten your seat belts because there are interstellar speed bumps ahead, and hallucinations in your rear view mirror will be closer than they appear.

You have to admire the Flaming Lips’ pluck. Wayne Coyne and the boys might have thrown us a dayglo marshmallow along the lines of 1999’s easy-on-the-ears The Soft Bulletin. Instead they came through with a nerve-jarring and challenging aural experience that harkens back to their Oklahoma days of unconscious screaming. The LP is enormous fun, but not for the faint of ear, and I have no doubt there are Beatles fans who find it nothing short of an act of desecration. The Flaming Lips—and their bwesties—gleefully fold, spindle and mutilate The Beatles’ classic, but their version has moments galore of beauty and wonder—they’re simply buried in a lot of white noise. Can cacophony be lovely? With a Little Help from My Fwends answers the question in the affirmative.

With a Little Help from My Fwends is a better adaptation than The Flaming Lips’ 2009 reworking of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which is a mite surprising given that the Lips’ views on existence have always been surprisingly… dark. Death has always been a preoccupation—from their early days through “Do You Realize” on 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and songs like “Evil Will Prevail,” “Charles Manson Blues,” and “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain” (with its lines “My hands are in the air/And that’s where they always are/You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t/Five stop mother superior rain”) don’t exactly reflect the sunny surrealism of their live shows.

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Recorded in 1981 but not released until 1987 on Restless Records with an assist by Steve Wynn’s discerning Down There label, Pigus Drunkus Maximus by Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs is a key punk-blues document. Neck deep in inspired covers, the record kicks like the Blasters circa their second album crossed with The Doors at their leanest and meanest, and with a full injection of guitar snarl. A long-overdue remastering and reissue is now available on vinyl and for the first time on compact disc, January 16, through Blind Owl Records.

Although their fanbase was wide-ranging, there’s no denying that the biggest portion of Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs supporters were aligned with the punk scene. For listeners amenable to the sounds of X, The Gun Club, The Flesh Eaters, The Plugz, The Cramps, The Blasters, and Los Lobos, it was very likely that a copy of Pigus Drunkus Maximus, either on LP or cassette, was close at hand.

Reinforcing the durability of Top Jimmy’s threads in the early 1980s, Cali-centric roots punk weave was a fair amount of overlap with the bands listed above. Fronted by, naturally, Top Jimmy (aka James Paul Koncek, who passed in 2001), the core band as heard on their sole LP featured guitarists Dig The Pig (Richard Aeilts) and Carlos Guitarlos (Carlos Ayala), bassist Gil T (R. Gilbert Isais), drummer Joey Morales, and saxophonist Steve Berlin.

Having played with The Blasters, Los Lobos, The Plugz, and The Flesh Eaters, it’s Berlin who’s the common bond. Pianist Gene Taylor of The Blasters joined in for the album, and D.J. Bonebrake of X (who also played with The Flesh Eaters) sat in on drums for the majority of the session.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Death Cult laid the groundwork for the band we now know as The Cult, and in 2023, to mark the band’s 40th anniversary, Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy along with John Tempesta on drums and Charlie Jones on bass, revived Death Cult for a special run of shows.

Out on January 16th, 2026, Paradise Live is a 16-track live album that documents this rebirth of Death Cult. Recorded at the iconic Albert Hall in Duffy’s hometown of Manchester on November 18th, 2023, the release will be available on double LP, CD, and digitally. Two editions of the vinyl will be available. A black splatter edition is available exclusively from the band’s webstore, and a white splatter edition is available everywhere else.

As New Noise magazine wrote, “Ian and Duffy are brothers in musical cause and are counterparts to a quintessential era of Gothic New Wave or First Wave, Camden-era punk. Death Cult were the brothers of The Clash and Siouxie and The Banshees. They were in the scene. And now they are progenitors of alternative music from Los Angeles.”

Ian spoke to Spin in October who explained that “the idea of resurrecting the Death Cult name came to Astbury after spending time with those old songs, while also noticing a new generation of artists embracing a similar darkwave sound (Vowws, Cold Cave, Molchat Doma, Twin Tribes, et al.), which he likes to call “gothic futurism.” It felt relevant to the times, and his feelings for a world racing toward a dead end in the 21st Century, which he describes with a grim stream of labels: “Zero point, dystopia, a glitch in the matrix…”. “I became fascinated with that period of music again,” Astbury says. “It just instinctually felt like picking up on a dystopian frequency.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | What do executives from iconic American guitar brands Fender, Gibson, Taylor, D’Angelico, and Martin Guitars’ legendary builder Dick Boak have in common with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman?

And what do four of the world’s most influential online guitar teachers—Marty Schwartz (USA), Justin Sandercoe (UK), Tyler Larson (USA), and Charlie Wallace (New Zealand)—share with distinguished academics, a neuroscientist, a CNN medical analyst, and owners of some of the most iconic guitar shops in the US and UK? The answer is String Theory: Guitar Obsessed, a feature-length documentary that explores the passion, psychology, culture, and obsession behind the guitar—told by legends, innovators, and some truly unexpected voices.

Directed by 2x Emmy Award–winning filmmaker Jarett Bellucci and created alongside comedian and writer Randy Levin, String Theory: Guitar Obsessed takes a humorous yet reverent look at why the guitar continues to shape lives across generations, professions, and continents.

Bellucci and Levin first met in the spring of 2022 while working on a television commercial. Bonding immediately over their shared love of guitar, Levin soon pitched Bellucci the idea for a small documentary. Initially envisioned as a 10–15 minute YouTube video, the project quickly grew beyond expectations.

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Celebrating Blixa Bargeld on his 67th birthday. —Ed.

At long last, a rock album capable of shattering my nerves. I’ve sat through all manner of horrible noise for decades, but the sheet-metalheads and industrial music pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten are the first to make me wish I was deaf.

Einstürzende Neubauten may translate as Collapsing New Buildings to English speakers, but they don’t sound like an architectural disaster to me. They sound like the foundry where I worked during my summer years at college only worse, because Einstürzende Neubauten are both foundry and insane asylum, and the lunatics have taken over the machinery.

Is Einstürzende Neubauten’s Industrial Revolution clang and clamor a negative commentary on the robotic dehumanization celebrated by the futurists in Kraftwerk? A conservative retreat to the glory days of steam power, when manly men forged manly things with their manly calloused hands? The final revenge of metal shop kids over the pencil-neck geeks destined for lucrative jobs in the towering high-rises of the private sector? All are questions worth pondering, but having just listened to Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1981 debut Kollaps, I have too much of a headache to think clearly.

Theirs is, I must admit, a novel concept–establish rhythmic din by means of building tools, scrap metal and sundry other detritus of the machine age, then set Blixa Bargeld to the task of barking, growling, muttering, moaning, shrieking, bellowing and ululating all over them. It works wonders, that is if your idea of a good time is having ground augers shoved in your ears whilst being beaten over the skull with a 2-1/2 inch split head hammer.

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Remembering Bobby Weir. —Ed.

Well I’ll be damned. I didn’t think Bob Weir, the eternal boy howdy of the Grateful Dead, had it in him. After decades of coasting—his last great solo offering, 1972’s Ace, was released a shocking 44 years ago—here comes Weir, looking as weather worn as Grizzly Adams in his white beard, or like the great D.B. Cooper finally emerging from the Washington state wilderness, with an album that is not just good, but downright excellent. It just goes to show you—never count a fellow out until he’s six feet underground, and for at least three days at that.

2016’s Blue Mountain is an album of “cowboy songs,” according to Weir’s collaborator Josh Ritter, and was inspired, according to Weir, by his days as a 15-year-old ranch hand in Wyoming. But this is not a collection of other people’s music; Weir had a hand in writing the music for every song, while Ritter both contributed to the music and penned the better part of the lyrics. And so far as the descriptions of it as “campfire music” go I disagree; many of these songs are far too lush and musically sophisticated to cook weenies on a stick to.

But two things they are for sure: beautiful and thoughtful. They demonstrate that the eternal Peter Pan of the Dead has finally grown up and gotten wise, and has honed his songwriting skills in the process. Compared to his previous solo outing, 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool, which utilized lots of studio hacks and frankly sucked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, Blue Mountain is a cool breath of fresh Wyoming air.

Blue Mountain is the work of a man who has finally come face to face with his own mortality, as Weir demonstrates on the elegiac and lovely album closer “One More River to Cross,” in which he acknowledges he’s tired but nearing that final home in the bye-and-bye. And the very rhythmic “Lay My Lily Down” is an unreconstructed death ballad complete with rattling chains, and has Weir singing, “Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground/Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow/To lay my Lily down.”

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