VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent Project Records (IPR) announced that today UK cult band Woo have reissued their debut album, Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong (originally released in 1982) as an expanded edition. IPR has signed an agreement with the band to manufacture and market the expanded album on their The Sunshine Series Records imprint.

Leading up to the album release, IPR shared singles and videos for tracks “Swingtime” as well as “The Attic.” The remixed and remastered expanded edition of Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong includes new album cover art (a collaboration between the band’s Clive Ives and IPR’s Bruce Licher) and ten previously unreleased bonus tracks presented as a bonus album. It’s available on both black and limited edition clear vinyl, as well as Special Edition CD and digital formats.

This genre and time-defying selection of songs marked the public’s first exposure to the wild sonic experimentations that Mark Ives and Clive Ives would be known for over the following decades. In 1982, as brothers Mark and Clive Ives first opened the doors to their home studio in South London, the world met Woo—a duo that escaped genre and definition, making music that was proudly unrestrained, constantly mutating and always surprising.

From its very title, debut LP Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong asserted the brothers Ives as tireless explorers of multifarious shape-shifting musical directions—the album blended kaleidoscopic jazz and analogue electronica, free-flowing pop and unearthly muzak, retro fun and futuristic adventures. “Woo can sound as soft as a Martini ad, as sharp as a stab of conscience and often, brilliantly, both,” the Melody Maker noted at the time.

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In The Wee Small Hours, the 1955 album from Frank Sinatra, is a recording weighted down by history. Its place in the evolution of 20th-century popular recording history is peerless. The album came out at a key point not only in Frank Sinatra’s career but also for his label, Capitol Records, and the recording world in general.

Capitol was Sinatra’s third label after RCA and Columbia. The album was his third on Capitol. His Capitol tenure up to this point had included producing Voyle Gilmore and, more importantly, the arranging and conducting duties of Nelson Riddle. Riddle is the most important collaborator Sinatra worked with, and it is Riddle’s ability to arrange strings in particular that distinguishes Sinatra’s best music.

Sinatra’s two previous albums on Capitol marked the beginning of the mature Sinatra period. The teen matinee idol was being replaced by a man who, for all his talents, bravado, and success, had been battered by life and wasn’t afraid to let it show. Dropped by Columbia, considered by some to be past his prime, battling voice issues and emotionally scarred by being spurned by actress Ava Gardner, Sinatra didn’t just sing a selection of great American songbook popular songs; he turned them into his own, wearing them like a perfectly fitting dinner jacket.

What he also did, with his producer and arranger, is produce the first fully realized concept album, a full twelve years before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from The Beatles. The album, through song selection, musical backing, and mood, gives voice to the lonely saloon singer, drinking in the wee small hours of the morning, at a mostly empty dive bar in some run-down part of town. The singer is thinking about that girl: the one that got away—the one who would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. Of course, the listener can relate, and it’s the simple universal appeal of that feeling that makes this album still sound so powerful 70 years later.

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Lene Lovich is an American-born, British-based new wave artist whose wild originality helped define the late-’70s post-punk sound.

After moving from Detroit to London, she immersed herself in the art scene, writing lyrics for Cerrone’s “Supernature” before breaking out with her 1978 debut Stateless. Its single “Lucky Number” became an instant classic—off-kilter, infectious, and unlike anything else on the radio—introducing her playful, theatrical voice and bold visual style to the world.

Through her releases on Stiff Records and beyond, Lovich fused punk urgency with pop hooks and art-rock experimentation. Her look and sound—braided hair, angular rhythms, bursts of yelps and whispers—pushed the boundaries of what pop could be.

After stepping back in the ’80s to raise a family, she returned with Shadows and Dust in 2005 and still performs today, an enduring symbol of creative freedom and eccentric brilliance.

We spoke about all these things in the midst of her current travels with The B-52’s and Devo here in the US, her first full US tour in 35 years.

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Erik Hall is a Michigan-based multi-instrumentalist. Along with recording under the moniker In Tall Buildings and in the outfits NOMO, Lean Year, and His Name Is Alive, Hall made a splash during that pandemic year of 2020 with a solo reconstruction of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” His latest release, Solo Three, out January 23 via Western Vinyl on LP, CD, and digital, expands the focus on the 20th-century classical avant-garde by tackling works by Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, Glenn Branca, and Laurie Spiegel.

Solo Three is the culmination of a trilogy. Between this new release and Music for 18 Musicians (Steve Reich), which came out in May of 2020, Canto Ostinato (Simeon ten Holt) hit the racks in February of 2023. That set featured a multi-tracked, hour-long recording of a piece by the late Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt that utilized grand pianos, electric piano, and organ.

Hall’s choices for this culminating entry in the trilogy establish an inclusive breadth, spanning from foundational Minimalist figures (Steve Reich and Charlemagne Palestine) to a pioneering woman electronic composer (Laurie Spiegel) to a guitar-focused disruptor who spiraled out of the NYC No Wave scene (Glenn Branca).

Hall’s version of Branca’s “The Temple of Venus Pt. 1,” the opening movement from a seven-part ballet recorded by a large ensemble in 1991, is a stunning transformation from the symphonic thrust of the original recording to glistening, reverberating repetitions. This interpretation retains recognizable aspects of the source work as heard on The World Upside Down (released by the Atavistic label in 1992) while intensifying the nature of Hall’s approach, which has grown into an increasingly signature sound.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | UMe/Mercury and Anthem Records label groups continue the comprehensive Rush albums expanded reissue series with the arrival of new Super Deluxe Editions of the band’s 1984 release, Grace Under Pressure, an album that saw the trio shifting gears to construct eight technology-driven tracks that were forward driving compositions from their previous works.

Grace Under Pressure: Super Deluxe Edition will be available in five distinct configurations, including the (1) Super Deluxe Edition 4-CD + Blu-ray, (2) Super Deluxe Edition 5-LP + Blu-ray, (3) Super Deluxe Digital Edition, (4) Dolby Atmos Digital Edition, and (5) Grace Under Pressure Tour: Live in Toronto 1984 at video DSPs. They can all be pre-ordered here.

Grace Under Pressure, Rush’s tenth studio album, was originally released in April 1984, and it features some key sonic-template modifications resulting from the band’s decision to further evolve its sound by enlisting a new producer after a successful decade of working with Terry Brown behind the board.

The eight songs comprising Grace Under Pressure build from where September 1982’s Signals left off by fully embracing the tech and temper of the times while still remaining true to the band’s knack for blending progressive roots with radio-welcome song arrangements.

Grace Under Pressure was co-produced by Rush with Peter Henderson and engineered by Paul Northfield with assistance from Frank Opolko and Robert Di Giola. It was the fourth in a series of Rush recording sessions ultimately held at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec. Rush’s instinctive recording process at Le Studio had been DNA-infused during sessions held there for the aforementioned Signals, in addition to February 1981’s Moving Pictures and January 1980’s Permanent Waves.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Not just a brilliant lyricist…one of the most interesting writers of the Seventies.” —Rolling Stone

High Moon Records is proud to release David Forman’s Who You Been Talking To on CD and LP. Recorded for Arista Records in Los Angeles in 1977 but never released, Who You Been Talking To is a revelation—a lost masterpiece of blue-eyed soul and literary street poetry produced by the legendary Jack Nitzsche (Neil Young, Rolling Stones, Phil Spector) and featuring an all-star cast of L.A. session players including Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, David Lindley, Fred Tackett, Tim Drummond, and Flaco Jimenez.

The album is accompanied by deluxe packaging with extensive liner notes by acclaimed journalist Joe Hagan, featuring exclusive interviews with David Forman, Aaron Neville, Jim Keltner, songwriting partner David Levine, and other collaborators. The package includes rare photographs by legendary downtown New York photographer Peter Hujar (whose other subjects included Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, and Candy Darling), along with never-before-seen memorabilia from Forman’s extraordinary life.

In 1976, Rolling Stone declared David Forman a songwriter on the same level as Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and Tom Waits, comparing his vocals to Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson. His self-titled debut album for Arista Records, produced by Joel Dorn, was hailed as “an artistic success” before Forman seemingly vanished from the music world.

But Forman didn’t vanish—he recorded a second album.

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Remembering Lead Belly, born on this date in 1888. —Ed.

Of Lead Belly records, there are a ton, and the reasons why are simple. Foremost, this titan of American music possessed a deep reservoir of songs, but he was also something of a crossover artist, robust enough in style to appeal to subsequent generations of blues fanatics as diversity of subject matter and musical approach ensconced him as a godfather-cornerstone to the burgeoning mid-20th century folk movement. Smithsonian Folkways’ reissue of Easy Rider: Leadbelly Legacy Volume Four is a tidy encapsulation of the man’s aptitude for social commentary.

Born in January of 1888, Huddie William Ledbetter was a performing musician prior to the 1920s commercial boom for the blues, which party explains the breadth of his talent beyond the form. Like many early blues players, he’s just as aptly described as a songster (versatility allowing a player to become something of a one-man show in those days), and while an effective multi-instrumentalist, his excellence on the 12-string guitar was matched by the strength of his voice and an ability to consistently communicate the essence of his songs, many of which were handed down from oral tradition.

All of these attributes found Lead Belly fitting nicely into the early US folk scene, but it was probably his relationship to the pre-recording industry roots of folk tradition (he was an eight-year elder of Blind Lemon Jefferson) that sealed the deal. This places him historically in strong and varied company; think Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins for starters, but with the crucial difference that Lead Belly wasn’t a subject of rediscovery after an earlier dalliance with commercial record makers.

He was discovered, however. Like many others of his circumstance in Jim Crow USA, it was during a stay in prison, with Lead Belly first recorded in 1933-’34 by John and Alan Lomax while serving a term in Angola. These songs weren’t commercially released until the ’60s, but once he’d been given early release in ’34, the man took the ball of interest in his music and ran for a career-securing touchdown.

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That World’s Gone Wrong is Lucinda Williams’ 16th studio album is a striking fact to consider. This new record, an unapologetically topical undertaking, benefits from the enduring creative clarity of Williams and the potent energies of the band she’s assembled. It’s out January 23 through Highway 20 Records and Thirty Tigers.

Lucinda Williams hit the scene modestly but solidly with a pair of LPs for Folkways: Ramblin’ on My Mind, released in 1979, and Happy Woman Blues from the following year. The contents established her as one of the earliest examples of Americana, a sound (indeed a genre) she would continue to refine and help to define.

A self-titled third LP, issued in 1988 by Rough Trade, raised her profile a bit and included “Passionate Kisses,” which won Williams her first Grammy award through its cover by Mary Chapin Carpenter, a sizable hit in 1992. However, Williams remained somewhat underappreciated as a performer, at least until her two ensuing albums, Sweet Old World from 1992 and especially Car Wheels on a Gravel Road from 1988, brought record sales and tours to match the critical acclaim.

Williams has been building on that momentum ever since, but primarily through album sales, as her work maintains an edge that’s kept her from making too big a splash on the singles charts. This is notable when considering her ability as a songwriter and her continued vitality as a singer, even as her voice has matured. Disinterested in the safety of pigeonholing, Williams has collaborated with jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd and UK punk survivors The Mekons.

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We’ve closed TVD’s HQ for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. While we’re away, why not fire up our Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?

Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow, 1/20.