Side projects can be a mixed bag, but Darling Black, the bonus activity/creativity of Lulu Lewis vocalist-songwriter Dylan Hundley, is unburdened with any disappointing, underwhelming factors. Instead, the truly solo endeavor’s eponymous debut full-length, releasing tomorrow as a Bandcamp exclusive and premiering here, is consistently engaging with the occasional surprise. Anybody with a penchant for post-punk dancefloor bangers should prick up those ears, toot sweet.

Darling Black isn’t a breakaway project but instead serves as a stylistic extension and more often is a complementary overlapper in the oeuvre of Dylan Hundley. “Shock” opens the record with a fun slice of resourced audio, and then, quickly following, Hundley’s breathy intoning enters the scheme atop a minimal groove.

With “8th and Alvarado,” things get edgy and body moving in the tradition of dance club No Wave. The mention of champagne and cocaine can’t help but bring Vega and Rev to mind (not a bad thing), but with the infusion of police sirens, the track radiates a more contemporary vibe.

“Everyday” floats out Kraftwerk-y Motorik motions, but with a sweet, tense atmosphere a la darkwave. Rhythmic repetition is also an integral component in “Dial,” and there’s more of that aforementioned and quite appealing post-punk edge. Instead of NYC No Wave, the track is decidedly Anglo.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | It’s a well-known fact that Halloween was not only Frank Zappa’s favorite holiday, but he also made sure to prioritize making All Hallows’ Eve a concert tradition in New York City. Every year, Zappa would play a run of shows over multiple nights in the Big Apple during the Halloween holiday. This concert tradition most likely probably began in New Jersey in 1972, moved to Chicago in 1973, and by 1974, finally found its home in New York City. The annual event grew in popularity over the years, culminating in a huge film event in 1977—see Baby Snakes – The Movie, which was released in 1979—with its peak happening in 1978.

Zappa’s interaction with his New York audience is the stuff of legend, and the Halloween shows during 1978 reached a fever-pitch. Although he released Halloween show highlights over a number of albums during his lifetime, fans have waited decades for the unedited shows to be released in superior quality from the master tapes that had long been secluded in his famous Vault. Now, for the first time, the October 31, 1978 show is being released in a new deluxe Halloween 78 5CD Super Deluxe Costume box set, after having been newly mixed and mastered from those original 24-track masters. The devilishly cool box, due October 24 via Zappa Records/UMe, will also feature a bonus performance from the opening show of the run from October 27, 1978.

Produced by Ahmet Zappa and Zappa Vaultmeister Joe Travers, Halloween 78 resurrects the Zappa costume box sets after five years underground and marks the fourth in the series which began in 2017 with Halloween 77 (Frank Zappa costume) and includes 2019’s Halloween 73 (FRANKenZAPPA) and 2020’s Halloween 81 (Count Frankula). This time around, along with the full 5CD concert, Zappa appears as the devil complete with ‘70s-inspired mask, plus a pitchfork with a UV light, and a grimoire book featuring concert photos by Lynn Goldsmith, liners and technical notes by Travers, and bespoke artwork by Fantoons who also designed the mask. It should also be noted that the pitchfork’s UV light illuminates certain “secrets” within the packaging.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (MoFi), the renowned leader in high-fidelity audio reissues, is proud to announce the definitive reissue of Linda Ronstadt’s landmark 1975 album Prisoner in Disguise, is available now as a numbered 180g 45RPM 2LP set at mofi.com. Celebrating its 50th anniversary and the ongoing Elektra 75 campaign, this edition offers a revelatory listening experience—remastered from the original analog master tapes and pressed with unparalleled care and detail.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes (1/4” / 15 IPS Dolby A analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe), this 45RPM edition provides exceptional clarity, depth, and warmth. Pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing in California and housed in a Stoughton Printing gatefold jacket, the reissue delivers elevated degrees of clarity, presence, and separation, revealing new detail and dimension throughout. The definitive vinyl edition of Prisoner in Disguise, it lifts prior veils that impeded the gorgeous singing and spectacular craftsmanship gracing the 11 songs.

A platinum-certified success and the follow-up to Heart Like a Wheel, her No. 1 breakthrough album, Prisoner in Disguise cemented Ronstadt’s status as the leading female voice of the 1970s. Working again with producer Peter Asher and joined by an elite lineup including James Taylor, JD Souther, Russ Kunkel, Emmylou Harris, and more, Ronstadt delivered a masterclass in emotional interpretation and genre-blending artistry.

“It’s hard to believe that it’s been fifty years since the initial release of my sixth solo album, Prisoner in Disguise,” Ronstadt writes in a newly penned personal letter. “I remember being very glad to get a demo from my friend Neil Young… I was immediately taken with a song called ‘Love is a Rose.’ It became the opening track on the album.”

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The Zombies are primarily known for their British Invasion hits of the 1960s, such as “Tell Her No” and “She’s Not There.” Rock critics, pop music historians, and those who are deeply in the know about the key albums of the 1960s likely know about the group’s second album, Odessey and Oracle, with Odyssey misspelled.

Released in the UK in April 1968, it comprised the original lineup of singer Colin Blunstone, keyboardist Rod Argent, guitarist Paul Atkinson, bassist Chris White, and drummer Hugh Grundy. It isn’t a stretch to say that the album shares much with the Pretty Things’ album SF Sorrow, also released in 1968, in that it is an obscure, underrated gem from the ’60s. However, it is more of a seminal rock opera than a psychedelic pop masterpiece. Odessey and Oracle is also an album that can easily be mentioned in the company of Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In fact, the album was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, where The Beatles had recorded Sgt—Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Pepper, and was very much influenced by that album.

While all those kudos are merited, the album was nearly not released in America and effectively marked the end of the group’s ’60s run. If it wasn’t for Al Kooper (Blues Project, Blood Sweat & Tears) working in a somewhat A&R and staff producer role with Columbia Records at the time, it’s hard to say what the fate of the album might have been. It was his suggestion to the top brass at the company to release the album, which, by the way, contained perhaps the group’s biggest hit, “Time of the Season,” the last song written for the album and one that in some respects has more in common with the group’s earlier hits.

The group now holds full rights to the album, and their label has just reissued it in mono for the first time in the US. The group produced the album themselves for a mono release. Throughout 1965 and 1966, the band primarily released singles on Decca that they did not produce. Their time with CBS in the UK was no better, and when the group finished Odessey and Oracle, the label told them to remix it in stereo. It was the last straw for the frustrated group, and only a month before the album’s release, they broke up. Even though the group had broken up, Kooper’s advice to release the album in the States paid off, as the last track on the album, “Time of the Season,” eventually became a hit, peaking at number three in February 1969.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the release of Tokyo Funk Diva, a compilation highlighting the work of Hitomi “Penny” Tohyama, one of Japan’s leading funk voices of the 1980s. Blending funk, boogie, and soulful grooves, Penny brought a distinctive energy to Japan’s music scene during the decade. Compiled by Nick Luscombe—who previously curated Tokyo Dreaming for the label—the set marks the first time Hitomi’s music has been compiled outside of Japan. Featuring newly remastered tracks and liner notes by Luscombe, the release offers fresh context to Penny’s work and its role in the evolution of Japanese funk and groove culture.

Hitomi “Penny” Tohyama was one of the few female singers to fully embrace Japan’s burgeoning funk and boogie movement of the 1980s. Born in Okinawa in 1957 and raised partly in California, she developed a cosmopolitan outlook that would shape her music. At a time when the country’s pop scene was shifting toward slick, funk-oriented productions, Penny crafted a distinctive style that fused boogie, disco, and funk with her confident, soulful delivery. Her albums for Nippon Columbia recorded in the ’80s capture this vibrant moment, combining sophisticated studio craft with the pulse of Tokyo’s nightlife.

The selection includes cult classics such as “Sexy Robot,” “Love is the Competition,” and “Instant Polaroid,” with lesser-known gems such as “Exotic Yokogao” and “I Love You Shika Omoitsukanai.” Together they showcase the singer’s versatility, moving effortlessly between syncopated upbeat floorfillers and chilled mid-tempo grooves. While her music earned recognition at home, these releases were never widely available outside Japan and slowly became prized finds among DJs and collectors.

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Los Angeles punk mainstays Fear will be forever defined by the anti-social expressions of their 1982 album The Record. Many thousands cherish that disc, while others evaluate it as the locus of obnoxious fakery. But those who completely dismiss them shouldn’t do so without hearing their 1978 single “I Love Livin’ in the City” b/w “Now Your Dead,” for both musically and in terms of attitude it paints a distinct portrait of the group’s early development.

The general consensus on The Record finds it ranking very high in the punk rock pantheon, but after going back again to recheck, I must admit that I’ve never felt it’s all that great. Actually, I’d rate it as only moderately good, at best. Yes, the LP is loaded to the gills with historical importance and does have enough moments that I’ve kept a copy around, but the only time the thing’s gotten play in this house over the last few decades is when I would periodically feel the need to reassess my evaluation in the face of other’s rampant enthusiasm.

This happened more than just once or twice, and on a few occasions my viewpoint was met with something other than just disagreement. Instead I received stares of deep incomprehension, like I’d just called Michael Jordan an okay shooting-guard or Shakespeare a middling playwright. It was enough to instill some personal doubts. Perhaps it wasn’t The Record; maybe the problem was with me. But each time I pulled it out the same conclusion was drawn, and until just recently it has spent roughly a dozen years tucked away on the shelf.

However, I will agree that a significant part of my reaction does come down to personal considerations. Specifically, I didn’t get to hear it until around 1987 or so. If I’d been a late teenager when The Record kicked up its first clouds of dust, it might’ve been a gripping experience. But in 1982 I was just peaking into the doorway of adolescence, with my musical heroes the predictable suburban standbys Zeppelin and Sabbath. If someone had played The Record for me then, my reaction would’ve naturally held some measure of, well, fear, but it surely would’ve been overtaken by a much greater sense of bafflement.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Gregory Corso—both the youngest and one of the most influential members of the Beat Generation—stood alongside literary icons like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as a defining voice in American poetry. Now, Die On Me, the rare and intimate collection of his final spoken word recordings, is being re-introduced to the world by Shimmy-Disc, the cult-favorite label founded by legendary producer, multi-instrumentalist, and archival visionary Kramer.

Originally released on CD in 2002, Die On Me is now available for the first time ever on vinyl. Newly remastered and edited by Kramer, the collection spans archival recordings from 1959 and culminates in Corso’s final sessions, recorded by the late Hal Willner between January 7–10, 2001—just days before Corso’s death.

Today, Shimmy-Disc shares the project’s second release, “A Bed’s Lament”—a poem that takes Corso less than a minute to read, yet leaves an impact that lingers for a lifetime. In just a few lines, Corso delivers a stark and vulnerable meditation on aging and decline: “Once a long time ago I held the royal couple, I was straight, I was strong,” versus “Now I stand in a dank room with shakey legs and sunken back.”

Kramer shares his thoughts: “What is more sad, more beautiful, more passionate, more filled with all the things that make life worth living, than a bed? Our lives are tied like bootlaces to hundreds upon thousands of beds, but there is often one that stands out, never to be forgotten.

Gregory chose these words with great care, with great love, and with god-like precision as he composed this brief poem many years before the reading you hear on this recording, made just days prior to his death in 2001. Slowly over the years between its birth and this reading, it had taken on new meaning for him. It is difficult not to cry when I listen to it. Corso at his best, as he is here, cannot be matched. As Ginsberg so often said, “He is the greatest of us all.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | This Record Store Day Black Friday (November 28th), Avenue/Rhino celebrates one of the most electrifying collaborations in music history with The Very Best of Eric Burdon and WAR. Issued as a two-disc CD set alongside the 2LP Record Store Day exclusive, the release marks the latest chapter in Avenue/Rhino’s anniversary series honouring 50+ years of WAR’s trailblazing music.

After fronting The Animals and becoming one of the defining voices of the British Invasion, Eric Burdon sought a new musical direction in the late 1960s. In 1969, he teamed up with the Long Beach funk band WAR, a collaboration that produced hits like “Spill the Wine,” included in this release alongside its unedited remix, and earned accolades from fans, fellow musicians, and journalists—including NME’s Richard Green, who called them “the best live band I ever saw”. WAR’s legendary producer Jerry Goldstein adds, “This collection documents one of the great bands of the early ’70s at their best, both live and in the studio.”

Capturing the raw spark of Burdon and WAR’s earliest recording sessions, this collection revisits their first two groundbreaking albums—Eric Burdon Declares “War” (1970) and The Black-Man’s Burdon (1970)—produced by Jerry Goldstein and remastered in stunning detail by the legendary Bernie Grundman. The set also unveils three never-before-heard gems from the Avenue Records vaults, offering fans a deeper glimpse into the formative years that helped shape the band’s signature sound.

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Celebrating La Monte Young on his 90th birthday. —Ed.

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela are absolute titans of the 20th century avant-garde, having broken considerable ground at the intersection of Minimalism and Drone Music during their 1960s heyday. However, the duo’s early work has been persistently difficult to hear. For example, Superior Viaduct’s release of 31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta a.k.a. The Black Record is the first (legit) reissue of this legendary album since it first came out in 1969. Featuring two wildly differing side-long pieces, it is a masterwork of highly disciplined drone logic and experimental abstraction.

Partners in art and life, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela came to prominence (of a decidedly subterranean fashion) in New York City during the waning days of the classic Bohemian era, and that they both still walk among us is a reality to cherish. Young is the more well-known of the two, as Zazeela, a multimedia artist on her own, notably, has contributed to a small number of his recordings as a musician. But as photographer, album designer, performance lighter and producer in general, her impact is felt throughout his discography, as difficult as that body of work has been to hear.

The LP under review here, which for space considerations will be called The Black Record, was already half an archival release upon issue in 1969. Side two, “23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 AM The Volga Delta,” was captured in the New York City studio of Young and Zazeela in 1964 (per the title), the recording a part of a longer composition, Studies in the Bowed Disc; for the piece, a gong is bowed (the instrument a gift to Young and Zazeela from sculptor Robert Morris), with the sound nearer to noise music than to the sustained resonances one might expect to result from a bowed gong.

More typically dronelike prolonged tones are heard via side one’s “31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM,” which was recorded in Munich in 1969 at the gallery belonging to arts impresario Heiner Friedrich. Released on vinyl by Friedrich on his Edition X imprint that very year, “31 VII 69 10:26 – 10:49 PM” is also part of a another longer composition, Map of 49’s Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery; this segment features the voices of Young and Zazeela against a sine wave drone, with the stated influence of Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath easy to absorb.

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Muse Records stands amongst the most esteemed labels in the long history of jazz. Established by producer/executive Joe Fields, Muse thrived during the transitional era of the 1970s by being true to the music as it developed. On October 17, Time Traveler Recordings, yet another label spearheaded by indefatigable producer and archivist Zev Feldman kicks off the Muse Master Edition Series with three 180 gram reissues. Drummer Roy Brooks’ The Free Slave, a 1970 live quintet recording hosted by the Left Bank Jazz Society released in 1972, is the earliest of the three. We give it proper consideration below.

Prior to starting Muse Records in 1972, Joe Fields was an executive at Prestige, a label that had kept abreast of jazz as it had developed throughout the 1960s. In a nutshell, Muse began as a continuation of the Prestige mission after that label was purchased by Fantasy Records in 1971.

The two recordings that coincide with this reissue of The Free Slave are pianist Kenny Barron’s Sunset to Dawn, originally released in 1973, and tenor saxophonist Carlos Garnett’s Cosmos Nucleus, originally released in 1976. With its lack of polish and live performance energy, Brooks’ album stands out. It’s the one to get if you can only get one of the three reissues.

Immediately apparent in The Free Slave’s leadoff title track is the rowdiness of the audience assembled at The Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, MD as organized by the Left Bank Jazz Society. The crowd is ready to get down; the band doesn’t disappoint. Pianist Hugh Lawson taps into a Ramsey Lewis-like groove right out of the gate and rolls with it for just over 12 minutes, as Brooks and bassist Cecil McBee work up a lively foundation from which trumpeter Woody Shaw and tenor saxophonist George Coleman productively launch.

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