VIA PRESS RELEASE | Love, led by the brilliant and complicated Arthur Lee, is one of the most influential American rock bands of all time, whose legend continues to grow. The 2014 reissue of their 1974 RSO album Reel to Real on High Moon Records showed the band at the height of their rock/soul/funk powers, and included twelve previously-unreleased outtakes from the master tapes of the original sessions.

​This special release features five of those tracks appearing on vinyl for the first time, including three original Arthur Lee compositions unearthed from the multitrack tapes and never heard before the 2014 reissue: the sweet and soulful “You Gotta Feel It,” a catchy rock-pop tune called “I Gotta Remember,” and “Do It Yourself,” a blast of high-energy, horn-infused funk driven by Lee’s strutting vocals. The EP includes the original version of “Everybody’s Gotta Live” (recently featured in the acclaimed film Jojo Rabbit, and covered by Mac Miller on his posthumous album Circles) as well as a full-band electric performance of “Everybody’s Gotta Live” and an explosive alternate take of “Singing Cowboy.”

Remastered for vinyl by Dan Hersch and cut at 45 RPM, this 12 inch EP is graced by original artwork from iconic artist Jess Rotter.

“I just recently (as in a few weeks ago) purchased my own big girl record player. Not one in a little hipster suitcase that sounds like garbage but a decent starter Audio-Technica turntable. The next thing I need to do is upgrade my speakers because I’m just listening through slightly better than average desktop computer speakers.”

“A few years ago, I inherited my grandmother Bobby’s soundsystem—a tower of tape decks, 5-disc CD player, radio, and turntable on top. It came with a good quality record player, but it broke during the move from Florida to Texas. I kept meaning to get it fixed and just never did. It would have been too expensive; it wouldn’t have been worth it. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to throw that soundsystem away for a long time because it had been hers. She loved records, especially opera singers. She was legally blind the last time she upgraded her own soundsystem so the buttons had fuzzy stickers on them so she could feel her way to “play,” “pause,” “skip,” and “select input.”

Now that I have my own turntable, I’ve slowly started purchasing albums. I’ve got the new Indigo Girls record, Look Long, and I’ve preordered Amythyst Kiah’s and Allison Russell’s forthcoming LPs. I got a “best of” collection of Townes Van Zandt, a Rosanne Cash record, and a few local Austin albums made in the eighties and nineties by bands I’ve never heard of. I haven’t listened to the Austin bands yet but I’m excited to. I love the idea of getting to discover music made on that kind of a small scale, in my own backyard, not reissued or available anywhere else but in the bargain bin at the local record store. It’s kind of like having a time machine to the Austin of yesteryear.

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Bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus is an eternal jazz heavyweight, but with the release of Mingus At Carnegie Hall Deluxe Edition, his stature, and more specifically his late-career potency, has been given a boost, as the set expands the severely truncated initial single LP drawn from the January 19, 1974 concert, now offering the complete performance on two compact discs via Rhino Records, released on June 11 to coincide with Black Music Month, and on triple vinyl through Run Out Groove, available July 16. Soaking up the entirety of the evening is to luxuriate in the footprint of this giant of 20th century music as realized by his stellar sextet and guests, including Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Although on the original album cover as replicated by this edition, Mingus’ group is listed as pianist Don Pullen, tenor saxophonist George Adams, baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, and drummer Dannie Richmond, this seems to repeat an error of omission in concert promoter Art Weiner’s opening remarks, as he momentarily forgets to mention trumpeter Jon Faddis and begins his introduction by describing the evening as divided into two parts, the first featuring Mingus’ quintet and the second expanding the quintet with guests for a jam session (Faddis is part of the band for the whole performance, however).

Atlantic extends Weiner’s error on the cover by crediting Faddis as a guest alongside saxophonists John Handy, Charles McPherson, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who also plays the stritch. While opening this review by emphasizing Weiner’s mistake might not be a particularly auspicious beginning, rest assured that Mingus At Carnegie Hall Deluxe Edition is an utter gem, with the exquisite mayhem of the original LP sweetly intensified by the context of the evening’s progressions.

It’s also worthwhile to highlight Faddis as part of the sextet, as this particular Mingus group is a vibrant representation of jazz music’s stylistic breadth. Bluiett, Adams, and Pullen are all affiliated with the avant-garde, but to varying degrees, with Pullen having recorded in duo with Milford Graves and on Giuseppi Logan’s two ESP-Disk albums in the ’60s, and Bluiett co-founding the Black Artists Group in St. Louis (roughly comparable to Chicago’s AACM) in the late ’60s, and later in the ’70s, the World Saxophone Quartet.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Ornament Tree, Bert Jansch’s 1990 album for small British label Run River, was a revelation: a fully-rounded, beautifully and powerfully realised concept. As had been the case with the all-instrumental project Avocet (1979) over a decade before, Bert had set out with a very clear idea and had delivered consummately.

​For The Ornament Tree Bert was joined on any given track by up to four musicians from a pool of eight, including current Pentangle colleagues Peter Kirtley and Nigel Portman Smith, and not least Steve Tilston and Maggie Boyle. Kirtley, a soulful, spiky player from the North East, had been a Jansch fan for years, following Bert’s career from afar and recently socialising with him through a mutual friend:

“Working with Bert never crossed my mind,” says Kirtley. “We used to play darts, have a few pints and talk, basically. But I was thrown into it pretty quick. He just said one day, ‘I’m going to Ireland next week, do you fancy coming?’” An accomplished, dynamic player capable of great sensitivity and wild bursts of energy, often in the same song, Kirtley had long realised that the key to enhancing Bert’s music was first understanding fully how it was constructed and performed: bass lines, melody lines, ornamentation, rhythm and whatever else was happening on that one guitar.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Craft Recordings celebrates the 20th anniversary of Drowning Pool’s best-selling debut, Sinner, with the album’s first-ever vinyl release. Set for release on September 17, 2021, and available for pre-order today, the nu-metal classic features such favorites as “Tear Away,” “Sinner,” and the band’s platinum-selling signature hit “Bodies.” In addition to the standard release, two special editions of the vinyl are available: a Revolver exclusive turquoise vinyl limited to 1,000 units and a band exclusive red vinyl limited to 666 units and only available through the band on tour.

​“Sinner is literally perfect. I remember hearing and seeing it all come together,” says Drowning Pool frontman Jasen Moreno. “We shared the local Dallas scene back then—Drowning Pool and an old band I used to be in—and I’d like to say we kept each other honest and made each other better through competition… but it was never even close. Dave and the guys were the dudes shaping the scene. I shared many stages with Drowning Pool before I was ever their lead singer, and I remember feeling hyped after each performance.

I remember believing we’d finally upstaged them. I would have that hope right up until they took the stage and began to play, and then the truth was evident—Dave, Stevie, C.J., and Mike were always multiple steps ahead of any other band on the scene. The Sinner album was magic, and the guys were on fire. I believe that the record is perfect as a whole, full of catchy hooks both vocally and musically. I heard and saw those songs before a million other people around the world did, and I knew back then that Drowning Pool was destined to win. It feels crazy to go from a hater to their frontman, but let that be my testimony to the undeniable force that remains Sinner.”

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Celebrating Roger McGuinn, born on this day in 1942. —Ed.

So I died and went to Heaven (naturally) and who should I see as I step off that divine airline but The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. Which took me back a bit, as McGuinn is still very much alive. So I said, “Roger, sir, what are you doing here?” and he replied, “God likes my music so much he’s given me a hall pass to come and go as I please.” So I asked him what the Lord’s favorite Byrds songs are and he said, “Well, you’d think it would be ‘The Christian Life’ but he actually doesn’t like that one very much. Says it’s a straightedge bummer. No, the song that always gets him is ‘Wasn’t Born to Follow’ or, if he’s been partaking of the magic mushrooms that are everywhere up here, ‘Eight Miles High.’ Says it can turn the most twisted trip into a Holiday Inn of the Mind.”

So here I am, typing this in between playing chess with Sam Cooke and drinking brandy with Richard Manuel, and basically all I want to say is that The Byrds were a great band, a very great band. Stylistically they traveled a weird but not unique road from their early days as the Jet Set, from folk rock to psychedelia to pure country to a combination of all of the above, while establishing themselves as the world’s best Dylan interpreters—so that with every new album you didn’t know what you were going to get, but you knew it would be interesting. Between the band’s extraordinary harmonies to McGuinn’s guitar tuned to the key of LSD it was hard to go wrong. And the talent! Between McGuinn (who was calling himself Jim then) and David Crosby and Gram Parsons and Gene Clark and Chris Hillman and Clarence White—all of whom passed through The Byrds at one point of another—they had enough great musicians to fill a whole wall in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And the problem with The Byrds is figuring out which album to review, because between the innovative folk rock of their first LPs, the psychedelia of their later LPs, the cosmic country of Sweetheart of the Radio, and the powerful but not so easy to categorize later albums such as The Notorious Byrd Brothers (which inexplicably features three of The Byrds and Mr. Ed on its cover) I’ll be damned if I can choose a favorite, which is why I’m reviewing The Byrds’ Greatest Hits, which is great but limited because it came out in 1967—after only four albums—and hence before they recorded some of their best songs, such as “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” “Hickory Wind,” “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” “Bad Night at the Whiskey,” and “Chestnut Mare.” It’s also too heavy on the Dylan—four songs out of ten? Come on!—but it remains the best alternative to anyone looking for a single LP overview of the band’s many transmutations.

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Based in Los Angeles by way of Nashville, guitarist and songwriter William Tyler is well-known for his contributions to Lambchop and Silver Jews, and more recently for a string of ambitious instrumental solo albums. On the 4-song EP “Understand,” he collaborates with pedal steel ace Luke Schneider, who currently hangs his hat in Nashville with credits including Margo Price, Caitlin Rose, and Orville Peck, and with a budding solo career of his own. A tidy and fresh mingling of ambient and Krautrock influences, “Understand” is available on limited edition cassette (250 copies) and digital July 12 through Leaving Records.

Although “Understand” was recorded in one day in a Nashville studio during the pandemic 2020, the collaborative fruits of William Tyler and Luke Schneider run deep, as the latter lends his skills to the former’s second and third full-length solo records, specifically 2013’s Impossible Truth and ’16’s Modern Country, both terrific, and additionally, the no less nifty EP “Lost Colony,” which dates from 2014, all three released by Merge.

There are a few moments across Tyler’s discography that forecast the direction the duo has taken on “Understand,” but the primary artifact of precedent is Schneider’s solo debut, Alter of Harmony, released by Third Man a year ago last May, with all of its sounds made by Schneider on a 1967 Emmons Push/Pull pedal steel guitar.

That Schneider goes it alone rather than basking in the spotlight accompanied by a band might read as an unusual choice for a pedal steel guitarist, but then again, after learning that Alter of Harmony is a New Age album, perhaps not. The best part of the whole scenario is that Schneider, as stated in an article published by Bandcamp last year, was shooting to make a private-press-style New Age record, which means its contents are as edgy and weird as they are meditative and expansive.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Forty years ago, on July 8th and 9th in 1981, a group formed by the splintering of some of Bristol’s essential post punk bands, entered the hallowed studio at Berry Street in London to record their debut single.

​What would emerge was not only an exuberant post funk classic on the a-side, but also a wildly influential dub workout on the flipside, whose reverberations can still be heard today. Both songs have proven essential in very different ways. Celebrating this occasion, 1972 Records will lovingly reissue this landmark 12” from Maximum Joy, with “Stretch (12” Version)” backed with “Silent Street – Silent Dub,” available on September 24, 2021.

A focal point for the unique punk-funk that was coming together in Bristol as the bridge from the ’70s to the ’80s arrived, Maximum Joy was formed by Glaxo Babies multi-instrumentalist Tony Wrafter and 18 year old vocalist Janine Rainforth. Soon they drafted in additional Glaxo Babies in the form of drummer Charlie Llewellin and bassist Dan Catsis, along with guitarist John Waddington, fresh from The Pop Group.

The group set about making a one-of-a-kind mix of funk, punk, pop, jazz, dub, soul, afrobeat and reggae; creating a brilliant charge of danceable tunes wrapped around elastic basslines and complex percussion, punctuated by melodic horns and stabs of guitar, all of it highlighting Rainforth’s naturally enthusiastic vocal style.

Bursting at the seams, “Stretch” feels like it can barely be contained within the studio walls. Rainforth delivers a vocal performance that can only be found within the freedom of someone recording their first ever single. I’m not lying when I say there isn’t another song that sounds quite like it.

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PHOTO: KEVIN W. CONDON | A classically trained pianist since the age of four and a teenage punk rocker, Bailey Cooke is creating music under the moniker of GOLDEN. Landing on Tunecore’s “21 Women to Watch in 2021” list, the creation of her brand of bedroom pop is an organic process with all songs written, performed, engineered, and produced by Cooke alone.

Everything from the her recordings to her music videos are created in her Brooklyn apartment, but this wasn’t always the case for Cooke. In the early stages of GOLDEN, she wasn’t well versed in the “brotools,” her word for more technical recording equipment—you know the stuff the dudes go to school for. Creating demos on her voice memo app, she’d plug her analog drum machine through her Echoplex into a bass amp and her voice into a guitar amp, and with said equipment she’d drag all 250lbs of it and her 100lb self in an Uber just to play a live show.

The weight has lifted since learning to engineer and produce her own songs, a path she never set out upon. “Like most emerging artists I was on the search for the perfect producer, and really by sheer luck I fell in with the crew of engineers at Electric Lady Studios,” she says. Through a friend Cooke was introduced to Grammy award-winning recording and mix engineer Phil Joly, a major collaborator with The Strokes, Courtney Barnett, Violent Femmes, Lana Del Rey, Common, and many more.

On off days, Joly would let her hook up her gear in Studio D at Electric Lady, nudging her to learn more. “I think it’s a dangerous spot to be in—needing someone else to figure out how your music should sound or finish your song. It’s sorta similar to expecting someone to read your mind,” she says.

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I have a grudge against the Descendents. Sure, the Manhattan Beach, California punks were the first to inject hardcore speed and aggression with catchy melodies, and to come up with the novel idea off writing songs about girls and love and what have you. And that’s exactly the problem. By doing so they invented pop punk, and inspired bands like Blink 182, The Offspring, Green Day, the All-American Rejects and other shitheel bands dedicated to the proposition that success lies in–to paraphrase the great H.L. Mencken–giving the kids what they want and giving it to them good and hard.

It’s unfair to blame perfectly good parents for the crimes of their children, but I do anyway; the Descendents’ 1982 debut Milo Goes to College is a template for unspeakable things to come. Milo Goes to College is a groundbreaking album by a band with an undeniably great backstory–very young suburban kids form band, elect band hanger and bespectacled dweeb Milo Aukerman to be their frontman, and proceed to inspire a later generation to copy their formula with horrific–and commercially successful–results. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in this case the imitators have proven dangerous.

The Descendents are hardly your “No Future” types–you’ll have to look long and hard to find a band fronted by a guy who, from the band’s beginnings, had his sights set on a career in microbiology. The Descendents of Milo Goes to College care less about the decline of Western Civilization than they do conformity, shitty parents, the suburbs, marriage (they’re for it), hope (they have it), romance (pro-), punk (they’re not), boats (theirs is in need of repair), and bears (they want to be one).

My problem with the Descendents is just this–I can’t listen to them without hearing the shitty bands who followed in their wake. It’s impossible to listen to the Descendents’ past without hearing the unspeakable present, and I defy anyone to listen to “Bikeage, “Hope,” “Jean Is Dead,” or “Marriage” without thinking Blink 182. The songs have the same catchy melodies your mom has come to love, and the same earnest approach to subject matter.

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Let’s start with the bad news, so we can get it out of the way. Musician A.J. Croce lost his father—famed singer-songwriter, Jim Croce—before he was two years old. As if that weren’t enough, A.J. went through a long period of blindness as a child, and in 2018 he lost his wife from a rare heart virus. Faced with those challenges, most of us might not be able to find the strength to carry on, let alone produce a rich catalog of music and maintain a busy performing schedule, but that’s exactly what Croce has done, and that’s the good news.

His brand new album, By Request on Compass Records, features Croce utilizing his impressive piano skills and vocal stylings on a number of familiar songs, but with his own reworkings and unique spin. The goal behind the album was to give listeners an experience as though they were attending a house party thrown by Croce and hearing him entertain the intimate gathering with well-known chestnuts and unexpected gems.

Join Croce and me on this episode of Radar as we discuss the new record, his very eclectic vinyl collection, and the importance of the healing power of music; how sometimes music is the only prescription that truly succeeds in mending our wounded souls.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Sharp Notes each Saturday evening at 6pm and TVD Radar on Sundays at 5AM on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.