VIA PRESS RELEASE | “1000HP succeeds in bringing the hard in heavy doses with just the perfect smattering of melody in just the right places. There’s little doubt that with 1000HP Godsmack have re-establishing their place in the world of hard rock.” —Loudwire

Coming on the heels of the March release of deluxe editions of the group’s album The Oracle, remastered and special limited editions of Godsmack’s 2014 album 1000HP will now be released August 8 on UMe as both a black vinyl edition as well as a limited-edition color vinyl version, the latter of which includes bonus features. The black vinyl will feature the original U.S. album cover with the 10 tracks remastered; the color version will include the album’s alternate cover mostly unknown to U.S. fans (available on the album in all non-U.S. markets), along with a bonus 7” single of “Inside Yourself,” and appearing on vinyl for the first time, “Life Is Good.” Both formats are available for pre-order HERE.

1000HP (Godsmack’s sixth album) was released on August 5, 2014 and debuted at #3 on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart; like The Oracle, it was mixed and produced by Dave Fortman. Upon its debut, 1000HP garnered high praise, including Revolver, which gave the album four out of five stars and commended the band for “pushing their boundaries…with 1000HP, Godsmack offer up a few new sounds, while at the same time remaining firmly resolute in their musical mission.” ARTISTdirect added that the album was “a high watermark for the Boston group” and “the best hard rock record of the year.”

Read More »

Celebrating Jello Biafra, born on this date in 1958. —Ed.

In 2022, Manifesto Records reissued Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, the debut album from iconic Bay Area punk outfit Dead Kennedys on vinyl and CD in a freshly remixed version courtesy of Grammy-winning producer Chris Lord-Alge. Setting aside the question of whether the record actually needed a remix (it didn’t), nothing abhorrent transpires as these 14 tracks (there are no extras) blaze forth; those who love and own the original mix should test drive before buying, but for those looking to get acquainted with this band through their first and best LP, this edition will serve that purpose just fine.

It’s no secret that Dead Kennedys’ vocalist Jello Biafra and his bandmates, guitarist East Bay Ray, bassist Klaus Fluoride, and drummer D.H. Peligro, have been at odds, and for a couple decades now, all due to the most banal of reasons. That is, money. Of course, I don’t have a dog in that fight, though this doesn’t mean I haven’t formulated opinions on the subject. It’s just that my viewpoint on this particular falling out isn’t pertinent to the matter at hand, which is, you know, the music.

So, when I say that this 2022 Mix of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables exists for the most banal of reasons—that is, money, it’s not a dig at the band, but simply an observation, as money is the reason for the vast majority of remixed and remastered records (and quite a few straight reissues). And in turn, I can’t help but feel somewhat blasé about the existence of this new mix.

But on the other hand, Fresh Fruit isn’t just the best Dead Kennedys album, it’s my personal favorite. And yet, I hadn’t listened to it in a few years, so that I had to pull my vinyl copy off the shelf for a couple reacquainting spins prior to checking the new mix. The bottom line is that the input of Lord-Alge (a professed fan of the DKs) is far from egregious. He’s essentially just beefed up and subtly streamlined the record for the Epitaph Records generation.

Read More »

Born in Egypt and currently based in Montreal, Canada, Nadah El Shazly is a composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and also the producer of her new album Laini Tani, which is available now on vinyl (black or translucent yellow), compact disc, and digital through One Little Independent Records and Backward Music in Canada. Giving trad Arabic pop a wild experimental spin, El Shazly’s music is a fascinating, exhilarating ride that exemplifies the new.

Nadah El Shazly’s impressive debut album Ahwar was released in November of 2017, so it’s fair to say that this follow-up has been a long time coming. But let’s clarify a few things. She was part of Praed Orchestra alongside a slew of estimable players (amongst others Alan Bishop, Christine Kazarian, Sam Shalabi, Michael Zerang), the large group convened by Paed Conca and Raed Yassin to further expand upon the music created by their duo Praed.

The general thrust of Praed was to tap into the essence of the trad Egyptian musics Shaabi and Mouled (trance styles) and then expand further by integrating them with elements of rock, free jazz, and electronica. Assembled for a performance at Calligraphy Square on November 3rd, 2018, and documented on the 3LP set Live in Sharjah (released in 2020 and still available via Bandcamp), Praed Orchestra expands the duo’s concept even more.

The album’s contents are surprising and often exquisite, and directly in line with El Shazly’s objectives on her solo records. Right around the time of Live in Sharjah’s release, El Shazly began collaborating with vocalist-sound artist Elvin Brandhi in the duo Pollution Opera, conjuring up an intense blend of electronics, noise, and auto-tuned vocals with an emphasis on experimentation.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Celebrated Grammy award winner Ray LaMontagne today unveils a special remastered vinyl edition of his seminal debut album, Trouble, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the release—purchase/share here. The remaster marks the second full-length release on LaMontagne’s own Liula Records.

This August, LaMontagne will embark on the Trouble 20th Anniversary Tour, performing the album in its entirety for the first time since its release. The North American leg of the tour will see stops at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Toronto’s Massey Hall, Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and will finish with three nights in New York at Beacon Theatre. The Weather Station will support. In the UK and Ireland, LaMontagne will make stops at 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, and London’s Royal Albert Hall, in addition to a newly added London date at Eventim Apollo on June 9, 2026. Find full routing below and purchase tickets here.

LaMontagne reflects, “Today the 20th anniversary remaster of Trouble is here. What a journey the past twenty-plus years have been. Forgive me if I wear my heart on my sleeve for a moment. Holding this album in my hands, I cannot help but feel overwhelmingly grateful. Grateful to the universal consciousness for sharing these songs with me, and through me, so that I, in turn could share them with you.

Grateful for those of you who understood and appreciated my musical language right from the beginning. And grateful for those that didn’t, and who threw insults at me instead, which only served to strengthen my own belief in myself and the music. Grateful for the love and support of my wife and best friend of nearly 30 years, and for the love of my two boys, now men, embarking on their own adventures. Grateful for these ten songs. The songs that brought me to you, and you to me, and so enriching my life. And I hope, yours too.

Read More »

Celebrating Barry Manilow in advance of his 82nd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

Back in the mid- to late seventies, when America was flying high thanks to the exalted stewardship of such Churchillian figures as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, one all-around entertainer bestrode the Pop World like a colossus. Men wanted him. Women wanted to be him. He floated like a god in a bubble of fame so high above the rest of us it would have taken Ted Nugent with a surface-to-air missile to bring him down to earth, and he was known to one and all as: Barry!

Seriously, friends and neighbors, who better personified the soft-rock seventies–that epoch of saccharine supremacy–than Barry Alan Pincus, aka Barry Manilow? He was stardust, he was golden. To listen to his songs was to drink from life’s enchanted cup. To see him live was the musical equivalent of pissing on an electric fence. His voice was glorious treacle. It was said that the mere sight of his perfect feathered hair could cure cancer. His sleepy bedroom eyes were known to enchant your larger farm animals, giving them the ability to speak in the voices of men–a skill he liked to show off in his live performances.

Barry WROTE the songs that defined an epoch. Okay, so he wrote hardly none of them, including “I Write the Songs,” which was penned by the Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston. But so what? Jesus’s best material was penned by other people, including Brewer & Shipley, ZZ Top, The Byrds and Ministry, and He never catches any shit for it. Fact is Barry MADE those songs his own by sheer force of his iron will; he was the divine conduit through which flowed such immortal tunes as “Mandy,” “Can’t Smile Without You,” and “Copacabana (At the Copa).”

Manilow began his career as a folk singer, entertaining beatniks in such flea-ridden New York City coffeehouses as Gerde’s Folk City, the Cafe Wha? and the Greenwich Village Starbucks at the corner of Waverly Street and 5th Avenue. Said fellow folk musician Arnie Van Gleb, “They didn’t actually allow music in Starbucks, so he would sneak into the bathroom and play there. At least until they broke down the door and threw him out.”

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Elton John – Live from the Rainbow Theatre with Ray Cooper will be released on July 25 via UMe. One of Elton’s most celebrated performances, the live album was initially released on a limited vinyl run for this year’s Record Store Day. Now receiving a wider release, it will be available both digitally and on CD for the first time, alongside a vinyl repress. The CD and digital editions include a brand-new bonus track, “Goodbye,” plus the original twelve-song tracklist, personally curated by Elton, and additional liner notes.

In May 1977, Elton John took the stage at London’s iconic Rainbow Theatre with percussion legend Ray Cooper for a six-show residency. These performances were the first of 233 Elton-and-Ray only shows that would follow, and featured the live debut of deep cuts; “Roy Rogers,” “Cage The Songbird,” “Idol,” and “I Feel Like A Bullet (In The Gun Of Robert Ford).”

May 1977 was the first time in five years that a full month had passed without an Elton LP or single appearing on the UK charts. It had also been eight months since his last performance, after averaging one show every four days throughout the previous seven years.

Ticket holders expecting to see a typical Elton concert were in for a big surprise. The first half of the set would be Elton alone at the piano, the second half would see him accompanied by Ray Cooper, the two performers working together telepathically, harking back to the earliest days of Elton’s rise to superstardom. The stripped-back performances have since been regarded as some of the finest of his career.

The material selected represents a generous sampler of Elton’s career to date, yet without the big hits that were part of his regular set, offering a glimpse of what he would have been playing had he been a cult artist, not the global superstar he had become.

Read More »

Once you’ve grown blasé, as I have, about the Swedes having given us dynamite, Abba, and Swedish meatballs (which they inexplicably just call meatballs), you’re bound to ask, as I have, “What else you blond and perfect people got?”

The answer is Viagra Boys, who since 2018’s Street Worms have been making some of the darkest, funniest, and most musically explosive music to come along since, well, Abba accidentally blew themselves up with dynamite while tinkering with a radical new meatball recipe back in the 1980s.

Ever since I first saw the videos for “Research Chemicals” and “Sports” I knew Viagra Boys were something special—a band to whom you can attach as many labels as you want (punk rock, post-punk, art punk, dance punk, new rave, cave rave, and I could go on) and still miss the essence of what they’re doing, which is mating black humor to music that is endlessly adventurous and makes abundant use of (amongst your more traditional instruments) a skronking saxophone. They sound like nobody else, and certainly no one else is as prone to sheer lyrical weirdness as vocalist Sebastian Murphy, who, to add to the oddness quotient, just happens to be a native of San Rafael, California.

Viagra Boys have released four LPs in all, my favorite being the third, 2022’s Cave World, which is a sort of combination Devo-school study of de-evolution and mocking critique of your modern conspiracy theorists of the QAnon school. It’s a concept album, in other words, but the concept is loose enough to allow for such outliers as “Punk Rock Loser” and “Ain’t No Thief.” The concept gives Murphy the opportunity to go full QAnon nutjob on tracks like “Creepy Crawlers,” “The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis,” and “Return to Monke,” but know what?

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | 60 years ago this summer, Stax Records’ biggest stars landed in the City of Angels for a two-night residency at South LA’s 5-4 Ballroom.

Billed as the Stax Revue, the whirlwind visit was a milestone for the young Memphis soul label and marked the first time that many of the artists on the bill—Rufus & Carla Thomas, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, The Mar-Keys, The Mad Lads, Wilson Pickett, and William Bell—had played to a Los Angeles audience. But the high-profile engagement, which took place on August 7th and 8th, 1965, was also set against a backdrop of racial tension—just days before the Watts Rebellion.

The audio from this historic concert was shelved for decades, with highlights initially released in 1991 as Stax Revue Live At The 5/4 Ballroom. Now, Craft Recordings proudly presents Stax Revue: Live in ’65!—a deluxe collection that not only includes the electrifying Los Angeles engagement, but also unearths a rare hometown showcase, captured earlier that summer at Memphis’ Club Paradise, featuring David Porter, Booker T. & The M.G.’s, The Astors, and Wendy Rene.

As a special bonus, the expanded album features previously unreleased recordings from both cities’ shows, including a charismatic set by Porter, a searing performance of “In the Midnight Hour” by Pickett, a lengthy jam of “The Dog” by Rufus Thomas, and a high-energy rendition of “Boot-Leg” from Booker T. & The M.G.’s which is available to stream as an advance single today.

Read More »

Celebrating Jim Lea in advance of his 75th birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

You can forget all about Kiss Alive! because Slade’s Slade Alive! is the real thing–a gut-bucket blast of pure rock ‘n’ roll energy from the poorest spellers in the history of music. This 1972 studio live affair captures this band of Wolverhampton rowdies at their rawest, and the spirit of raucous fun is contagious.

This baby was released before Slade reached full maturity and here’s how you can tell–there isn’t a single spelling error on it. And here’s another way you can tell–four of its seven cuts are covers, and the other three you probably don’t know.

The foursome’s subsequent release, 1972’s Slayed?, cemented the band’s reputation as Top of the Pops hit makers, but on Slade Alive! they established their bona fides as a formidable live act–one that pitted musical brutalism against vocalist Noddy Holder’s formidable tonsils and crowd-rousing charisma.

Slade gets filed under “Glam,” but theirs was an awkward fit. They looked ridiculous in their glitter clobber–like a bunch of roofers playing dress up–and unlike most of their Glam contemporaries appealed directly to England’s working stiffs.

Their proto-Oi! placed pints above androgyny, and their audiences did the same. When Noddy Holder says, “All the drunken louts can shout anything they like” he’s talking to the entire crowd, and not just a couple of unruly yobs.

Read More »