VIA PRESS RELEASE | Jethro Tull’s first five studio albums introduced a band that would radically redefine the boundaries of rock, blending blues, folk, classical, and hard rock into a singular progressive vision. Rhino High Fidelity captures the meteoric rise and creative peak of that era in a new audiophile vinyl boxed set, Jethro Tull 1968-1972. It arrives, along with a reel-to-reel edition of the band’s biggest album, Aqualung.

The Jethro Tull 1968-1972 (Rhino High Fidelity) boxed set includes This Was, Stand Up, Benefit, Aqualung, and Thick as a Brick, all cut AAA from the U.K. analog master tapes by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Optimal in Germany. The set is housed in a leatherette slipcase. Each album comes in a glossy gatefold jacket with new liner notes featuring commentary from Ian Anderson. The set is limited to 3,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively at Rhino.com and select Warner Music Group stores internationally.

Aqualung (Rhino High Fidelity R2R) was duplicated in real time from a 1:1 copy of the original U.K. analog master tape. The result is a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of the recording. The 15 i.p.s. half-track 1/4” tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5” metal reel. The Reel-to-Reel edition is limited to 350 copies worldwide and available exclusively at Rhino.com.

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Celebrating Martin Lamble, born on this day in 1949. —Ed.

I know what you’re thinking—If you’re going to write about Fairport Convention, why not choose Liege and Lief, their undisputed masterpiece and the album that practically kick-started the English folk rock movement? Because I’d like to kick the English folk rock movement, that’s why. It’s what I call, unaffectionately, Renaissance Faire Musick.

And Liege and Lief exemplifies its most annoying hallmark, namely the tendency to recast Ye Olde English folk songs, complete with annoying verbal anachronisms, and add electric guitars. What you end up with is Sandy Denny singing in that ethereal voice of hers about kirtle greens (whatever they are) and dudes named Reynardine. Worst of all, she actually utters the word “maidenhead.” And unless used ironically (e.g., “Twas at a show by the Grateful Dead/That I lost my maidenhead/Beneath the bleachers/During ‘Tennessee Jed’”), I consider “maidenhead” (along with “merkin”) an automatic deal-breaker.

So while I like some of the songs on Liege and Lief—“Medley: The Lark in the Morning” hoedowns along like Roy Clark on Hee Haw—I ultimately opted to review Fairport Convention’s eponymous debut album instead. For one, the band recorded it before they got their folk freak on, and there isn’t a single song on it that goes, “So he’s gone ta fetch a claes prop/And he rammed it up the koondy.” (Rammed it up the koondy? His own koondy?? That sounds extremely painful.) Also—and this may be the real reason I picked it—Richard Thompson’s brilliant guitar playing is all over it.

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On Gerry Beckley’s new solo album, Merciful, it is perhaps the song transition from the thought-provoking title track to the blissful, upbeat “Get it Right” that most accurately articulates his sonic character.

His music, since his earliest recordings in the early ’70s, has always balanced shades of night and tones of daylight, moving from the uncertain and subdued to the purely joyful and optimistic. Though he is one-half of the rock-pop duo America with Dewey Bunnell—formerly a trio with Dan Peek, who left the group in 1977—Beckley remains consistently productive as a solo musician.

Merciful serves as a beautiful and coherent addition to his 50-plus years of recording output. Key themes that color the album range from resisting the temptation toward complacency, to keeping the faith, and honoring the eternal pact an artist makes with their creative talent.

A listener’s journey traverses from the haunting title track—where Beckley sings, “…merciful, are these cobwebs that we cling to,” tackling the inherently human fear of mortality—to the horn-forward “Goodbye Heartache, Hello Sunshine,” which reminds us that goodness is often just around the next corner.

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Is it possible that the greatest psychedelic noise rock group in the history of the world is an obscure Japanese band with a difficult name whose former members include a plane hijacker? And who couldn’t be bothered to release much of what they recorded? And whose singer/guitarist/resident genius, Takashi Mizutani, whose one-time association with members of Japan’s outlawed Red Army Faction led him to become a bona fide recluse out of fear he’d end up in prison?

It’s more than possible—it’s a fact. At their best, such as on the live recording YaneUra Sept. ’80—which wasn’t released until 2024, some five years or so after Mizutani’s death, the actual date of which is sketchy and didn’t become public knowledge until some two years after he passed away—delivered on some of the most ferocious guitar workouts ever to be committed to vinyl.

They weren’t exactly prolific songwriters—most of their many releases feature the same maybe dozen or so songs, which they would play completely differently on any given night. And the sound quality varies from recording to recording—one of the many advantages of the live YaneUra Sept. ’80 is that it sounds clear as a bell.

The band’s early sound from the late sixties to early seventies was truly chaotic, and so cranked-up in volume that someone said, “It was so loud, it hurt my skin.” They would cover songs like “Twist and Shout” (a must-hear) to “Tobacco Road” and played mostly at the destined-to-be-razed OZ club, hence the seminal OZ Tapes, which wasn’t released until 2022 by the frequent LRD chroniclers at the Temporal Drift label. There’s also OZ Days Live, a twofer released in 1973.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Girlschool never did things the easy way.

In August 1981, little more than two years after the all-female south London metal band launched itself onto the UK club scene, they were firmly established among the very few New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts either capable of, or deserving to, top the first night bill the annual Reading Festival—the first female rock band ever to headline the festival and, all these years later, still the only one.

They were fabulous, as well; indeed, by the end of the festival, filing out drunk on 26 bands’ worth of music, more than a few voices reckoned that Girlschool should have headlined the entire event. No-one could better have wrapped things up late on Sunday night.

But first, the band’s hired car—a pink Caddy said to have belonged to actress Jayne Mansfield—was involved in a fender bender and arrived at the venue “broken and rattling.” Then, one of the roadies restrung lead guitarist Kelly Johnson’s guitar with two D strings; and, finally, the band’s flashing neon backdrop was sabotaged by one of the other bands on the bill.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings and HighTone Records proudly announce a new deluxe reissue of Blackjack David, the esteemed 1998 album from GRAMMY®-winning Americana icon Dave Alvin. Featuring highlights such as “Abilene,” “Evening Blues,” “California Snow,” and “Blackjack David,” the album will be available on October 16 on 2-LP, CD, and digital (including hi-res) and is available for pre-order/pre-save.

This special reissue also includes two bonus tracks: “Dixie Highway Blues,” which was written for the album but originally released on 2008’s The Best of the HighTone Years, and the previously unreleased “Angel On Your Shoulder,” recorded during the same sessions, with finishing touches added recently by Alvin and his longtime producer, Greg Leisz. Alvin says of the track, “[It] got away and it shouldn’t have, so it’s great to have it be part of the canon now.” Physical formats also feature new liner notes by music journalist and No Depression co-founder, Peter Blackstock.

GRAMMY-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer Dave Alvin (b. 1955) has long been counted among the pioneers of Americana music. A Southern California native, Alvin began his career in 1979 as a founding member of The Blasters, alongside his brother Phil. Their unique blend of punk, rockabilly, and classic American music soon made them a fixture in the early Los Angeles punk scene. By the middle of the decade—after stints with X and The Knitters—Alvin was eager to embark on a solo career, launching with his 1987 debut, Romeo’s Escape.

By the mid-’90s, Alvin was finding his groove in stripped-down settings—a departure from the high-voltage, electric stylings of his earlier work. 1998’s Blackjack David marked the pinnacle of this era, with primarily acoustic arrangements that let his storytelling and emotive vocals take center stage.

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Remembering Tim Bogert, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.

To soak up Vanilla Fudge’s talent as song interpreters, the best route is their eponymous ’67 debut. A further understanding of them as a singles act is best gleaned from the Rhino compilation Psychedelic Sundae. If an immersion into the multifaceted positives and negatives of these trailblazing late-‘60s hard rockers’ everyday reality is what one wants, however, then one should look into the contents of Near the Beginning.

There’s no question that Vanilla Fudge is an important band. “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the group’s reading of a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune originally by The Supremes, is a vital evolutionary brick in the hard rock megastructure, and it stands as a one-song distillation of nearly everything good and potentially less than stellar about this hard-touring quartet.

There are two versions of the Fudge’s recording, a just shy of three-minute single edit and the take found on their debut; that one’s over twice as long, and this duality is to an extent indicative of the group’s creative problems. It’s far from that simple, though, and their somewhat brief and highly eventful initial existence provides a consistently interesting story, if one that’s only sporadically fruitful in musical terms.

Vanilla Fudge’s beginnings are in The Electric Pigeons, the soul cover unit featuring organist/lead vocalist Mark Stein and bassist Tim Bogert. They soon acquired guitarist Vince Martell and drummer Carmine Appice, and after hooking up with Shangri La’s producer, Shadow Morton, they changed their name and focused their attention on the studio.

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Songs written inside a prison cell. A producer chased down by hopping a fence, climbing a tree, and waiting outside a trailer with cash in hand. Collaborations that happened because the right people walked through the door at the right moment. There is nothing tidy about the way Not Free Money, the new album from Dale and the ZDubs, came into existence—and that is exactly what makes it worth your time.

The record itself is another matter. Produced by DENM and Surfer Girl, Not Free Money is deliberate, layered, and thoroughly modern, stretching well past the boundaries of reggae rock into pop, hip-hop, and punk. Underneath all of that production is something considerably more raw. Much of the material traces back to the three years Dale Rodman spent incarcerated, where he never stopped writing.

I’ve known Dale for about five years, and in that time, I’ve watched a tremendous amount of growth, personally and musically. The artist I first met was already driven, but the songwriter I spoke with for this interview has clearly been shaped by everything that’s happened since. He talked with The Vinyl District about writing behind bars, chasing down his producers, the record’s long list of features, and how a prison nickname became one of its most personal songs.

For people who may just be discovering Dale and the ZDubs for the first time, how would you describe who you are as a band and what you bring to the reggae-rock scene?

What makes us stand out is the amount of range we have. We’re a multi-genre band—rock-reggae-based, but we can get pretty poppy and downtempo, and we can also get heavy and hard-rocking. We focus on songwriting, and I think our lyrics stand out compared to other bands in the scene. In the reggae-rock scene, there’s a lot of predictable, linear songwriting. I think we sing about more than just smoking weed, sunshine, and girls.

You’ve been doing this for a while now. When you look back at your early days compared to where you are now, what do you think has changed the most, both musically and personally?

First, I want to say that we still feel—and know—that we’re a small band. But the sound evolves and the relationships within your band evolve. What’s changed is the caliber of the songwriting and the playing. We were pretty bad when we started. I was a mediocre-to-bad singer, and I was a pretty dismal songwriter too. But it’s been thousands of hours over 15 years, and a lot of those hours went into the craft—singing and songwriting—when I was incarcerated. There’s still a long way to go, but it comes down to putting those hours in.

Let’s get into the new album, Not Free Money. What does the title mean to you, and why did it feel like the right title for this particular record?

A lot of the songs were written in prison. “Not free money” is something we would say, kind of a colloquialism. Anytime it seemed like you were cutting a corner or beating the system, you’d say, “Not free money.” We released a record in 2024 called Off the Rip, and a handful of those were written in prison. But I had more, and I really wanted to get DENM to produce them. He’s one of my favorite producers and one of my favorite artists. I think he’s bending the boundaries of what it means to be an American reggae artist.

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Those who are diligently on the lookout for a bountiful heap of beautifully bent sounds should saunter, swagger, or sashay (your preference) right up to the latest offering from White Gourd, the wild and woozy project of Mainer Suzanne Belle Stone, she of Million Brazilians and a major thread in the weave of the Psychic Sounds Collective.

(To Walk in) Justice (Calls for) Strength is the new White Gourd album, and it’s loaded with saxophone wiggles, hearty vocal ululations, hovering soundscapes, thumps, squeals, steamy hisses, and a striking swinging back and forth between coming together and falling apart. The limited vinyl is out now through Feeding Tube Records.

Belfast, Maine, is known as the subject of a film by the late and very great documentarian Frederick Wiseman. It’s also where herbalist, teacher, and musician Suzanne Belle Stone resides. A native of Maine, she departed west for a while to live in Portland, Oregon, a storied enclave if ever one was, and where White Gourd and Million Brazilians both put down roots. But, as humans often do, Stone eventually migrated back home.

Recordings of Stone’s work as White Gourd span back to 2009, beginning with the cassette Unprotected Sax for the Karamazov Tapes label. Million Brazilians, an outfit often described as avant-jazz (but with a whole lot of sweet snaky groove-thing in their high-stepping), predates White Gourd by a few years.

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