Celebrating Chris Mars in advance of his birthdate tomorrow. —Ed.

Minneapolis indie rock heroes The Replacements went from snot-nosed “let’s get drunk and puke on the ceiling then fall down on stage” punks to power pop legends on the strength of the deceptively effortless songcraft of Paul Westerberg, and Westerberg reached his peak on 1984’s audaciously titled Let It Be. Taking on the Beatles takes cojones, especially from a guy who once sang, “I hate music/It’s got too many notes.”

Let It Be hardly marked the end of their “too shitfaced to play” ethos, but it was, as Westerberg would note, “the first time I had songs that we arranged, rather than just banging out riffs and giving them titles.” “I Will Dare” is a bona fide slice of pop genius; “Unsatisfied” is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” with more heart and more soul than the jaded Mick Jagger could summon up if you tossed him into a pile of cocaine and supermodels and let him stew until unhappy. But Westerberg hadn’t lost touch with his inner punk; songs like “Gary’s Got a Boner” and “We’re Comin’ Out” would have been right at home on 1982’s puke punk classic Stink.

Let It Be is the sound of a punk growing up just to learn that growing up isn’t all that much fun. But grow up you must, as John Mellencamp could have told Paul Westerberg if he’d been willing to listen. “Everything drags and drags,” sings Westerberg on the doleful coming of age tune “Sixteen Blue”; “It’s a boring state/A boring wait, I know.” You try to call your girl and all you get is her answering machine and what does that mean? It can’t be good. And what can you really expect from the future? “Everything you dream of/Is right in front of you,” sings Westerberg, “And everything is a lie.”

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I recently spoke with Berlin based artist Annika Henderson about her wonderful new album Abyss, her early years in Bristol, a little bit about Tricky, and her process.

From the press release: British-born, Berlin-based musician Annika Henderson, better known as Anika, has created her new, third album Abyss out of the frustration, anger, and confusion she feels from existing in our contemporary world. Notably heavier than her previous releases, the 10-track Abyss feels raw, urgent, and fuelled by strong emotions.

“There’s so much going on in the world, and you have to sit there and watch it through a screen that you’ve allowed into your home, like a vampire who had been preying at your door, then immediately digest it, have an opinion, and publicly comment on it,” Anika says.

“The state of the world just feels like an abyss right now.” With this new album, she wants to create a place where people can feel safe to be themselves, and to unite in their diversity. “Abyss is like a call to action,” she says. “To come and figure it out together.”

Abyss was recorded live to tape at the legendary Hansa Studios in Berlin (where the likes of Depeche Mode and David Bowie also recorded) in just a few days. Recording live and with minimal overdubs was an important decision, Anika stresses, in order to capture the raw immediacy of the album.

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Children of the Damned, heed my warning: Iron Maiden offers terrifying proof of why it’s a bad idea to mess with the Dark One. No, bassist and chief songwriter Steve Harris didn’t find himself scuttling around the studio ceiling during Iron Maiden’s recording of 1982’s landmark The Number of the Beast, nor did lead singer Bruce Dickinson get raped by a succubus with the body of Scarlett Johansson and the face of Gene Simmons. And no one in the band was fatally impaled by a flying mic stand while they were laying down “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”

It was worse! Lights reportedly turned themselves on and off in the studio! Equipment, which fails all the time, inexplicably failed! And what was producer Martin Birch’s punishment for meddling in the dark arts? He was involved in a traffic accident involving a mini-bus sardined with real live nuns. Papal penguin punishers! Who probably had to be restrained from ruler-whipping him to death! And the cost of repairs? £666! And he didn’t have collision insurance!

That’s some scary shit, and totally true, but it was worth it—The Number of the Beast is revered as a classic in the heavy metal genre, and no doubt there are lots of fifty-somethings out there who owe their very survival to it because how else would they have gotten through their awful teen years? Their parents sucked, school sucked, the pot was shitty, they were never going to get laid (it was a mathematical impossibility), but at least they had “Hallowed Be Thy Name”!

And it’s still saving lives today. The joke was on Satan! The album is a lifeline, and not a one-way ticket to suicide and the Pit, no matter how many little Christian idiots saw fit to burn it or beat it to death with hammers (they were afraid the fumes would drive them insane!).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | While the Grateful Dead recently broke the record for the most Top 40 albums on the Billboard 200, the band will release for the first time an official greatest hits compilation.

Out June 13th, Gratest Hits arrives in celebration of the band’s 60th anniversary, and brings together some of the many songs that continue to unite generations—from “Truckin’” to “Touch of Grey,” “Friend of the Devil” and more. Available via Rhino on 1CD, 1LP black vinyl, digital and a retail exclusive tangerine-colored vinyl variant, Gratest Hits features studio recordings that span the best of such beloved and enduring albums as Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, From The Mars Hotel, Shakedown Street, Terrapin Station, and In The Dark.

Additionally, in honor of the band’s diamond 60th Anniversary, the Grateful Dead will be releasing a sweeping 60-CD collection called Enjoying The Ride on May 30th. Exclusive to Dead.net, and limited to 6,000 individually numbered copies, the boxed set maps an epic cross-country road trip along the “Heady Highway,” with stops at storied venues where the music, the moment and the magic of the Grateful Dead reliably converged.

Traversing 25 years of legendary live performances, the expansive compendium spotlights defining shows from 1969 to 1994, at 20 venues that consistently inspired the band to new heights—Winterland, Frost Amphitheatre, Madison Square Garden, and Hampton Coliseum, among them. Across 450+ tracks, 60+ hours of music and 20+ shows, virtually all of the music is previously unreleased, as Enjoying The Ride journeys through eras of constant evolution, and serves as a thrilling testament to that endlessly adventurous spirit.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | New West Records has partnered with the Clifford Antone Foundation to bring you a four-LP, 41-track box set celebrating the 50th anniversary of the legendary Austin nightclub Antone’s, packed with the rich history and enduring spirit of a club that helped put the live music capital of the world on the map.

Set for release on August 22, Antone’s: 50 Years of the Blues, chronicles the development of Antone’s and its trailblazing music across three full-length albums (each capturing a unique element of the club’s history) and a special bonus 45. The set also features a meticulously updated hardcover edition of Picture the Blues from Susan Antone (the sister and close collaborator of legendary late Antone’s founder Clifford Antone) with rare and unseen photographs, and a new definitive Antone’s history written by revered Texas music historian Joe Nick Patoski with fresh interviews.

Out today are two advance tracks from the set’s opening double LP, The Last Real Texas Blues Album, which includes 18 songs of new material from artists integral to the history of Antone’s —Jimmie Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Charlie Sexton, Ruthie Foster, Doyle Bramhall II, Bobby Rush, Derek O’Brien, C.J. Chenier + Muddy Waters’ guitarist John Primer and son Big Bill Morganfield—as well as its next generation leaders, Kam Franklin, Eve Monsees, McKinley James and more.

Kam Franklin pays homage to a true Texas trailblazer with her interpretation of Barbara Lynn’s “You’ll Lose A Good Thing,” and Antone’s staple Doyle Bramhall II honors the great Eddie Taylor, with “Bad Boy.”

Remembering David Thomas. —Ed.

1896 saw the premier of literary bomb-thrower Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, with its anti-hero Pere Ubu. The play promptly caused a riot, and Jarry—who once said “One can show one’s contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one’s life a poem of incoherence and absurdity” was undoubtably pleased. His goal—to the extent that he had one—was to see the hidebound and the conventional art of his time dead and buried. “Art,” he said, “is a stuffed crocodile.”

No one has ever accused Cleveland’s Pere Ubu of being a stuffed crocodile. The band that would make a virtue of clang and clamor rocketed from the tomb of the Mistake on the Lake’s Rocket from the Tombs, a promising band that collapsed over the usual creative differences.

Tombs’ members split into factions—David “Crocus Behemoth” Thomas and a collection of new players here, Stiv Bator and Company’s Dead Boys (originally Frankenstein) over there. (A third band, Friction, which was fronted by Rocket linchpin Peter Laughner, would collapse without recording an album after he rocketed his way into his own tomb at the ripe old age of 24, the result of booze and drugs.) Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys couldn’t have been more different. The latter band fit comfortably into the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids mold; Pere Ubu followed their namesake straight into the revolutionary absurd.

Thomas’ notion was to create a clamorous and fractured sound, and to do so he enlisted an initially reluctant Alan Ravenstine, whose synthesizers, atonal saxophone, and innovative tape manipulation techniques spelled the difference between Pere Ubu and its contemporaries. The result was the band’s 1978 debut The Modern Dance—arguably the most innovative LP to emerge from the post-punk era.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The dance floor’s never been the same since The B-52’s set out from Athens, Georgia, on its way to becoming the world’s greatest party band. Now, their early run of classic releases, all featuring newly remastered audio, will be collected in The Warner and Reprise Years. Two versions will be available: a 9LP set—pressed on a rainbow of colored vinyl and limited to 2,000 copies, exclusively through Rhino.com—and an 8CD edition. Pre-order HERE.

Arriving June 20 in celebration of Pride Month, the vinyl collection showcases the band’s kaleidoscopic catalog in full color: The B-52’s (yellow), Wild Planet (red), Mesopotamia (blue), Party Mix! (green), Whammy! (smokey), Bouncing Off the Satellites (pink), Cosmic Thing (orange), and Good Stuff (purple), issued as a 2LP.

Spanning 1979 to 1992, the albums collected here chart the creative and commercial evolution of the B-52’s—an era that saw the band sell over 20 million records worldwide. Five of the eight albums in the set have been certified Gold or higher by the RIAA, including Cosmic Thing (4x Platinum), their self-titled debut (Platinum), Wild Planet, Whammy!, and the GRAMMY®-nominated Good Stuff (Gold).

The collection also highlights some of their best-known songs, including “Rock Lobster,” “Private Idaho,” “Mesopotamia,” “Legal Tender,” “Channel Z,” and “Good Stuff.” Cosmic Thing—produced by Don Was and Nile Rodgers—remains the group’s biggest commercial success, powered by the back-to-back hits “Love Shack” (3x Platinum) and “Roam” (Gold). At the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, the band won Best Group Video and Best Art Direction for “Love Shack.” GRAMMY® nods followed for “Love Shack” and “Roam.”

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Based in Brighton and also Croydon, England, indie pop specialists Jetstream Pony have recently released their second full-length on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Spinout Nuggets in the UK and Shelflife Records in the USA. Exuding nary a hint of the tentative, Bowerbirds and Blue Things collects 12 solid songs with occasional bursts of excellence that reflect the member’s prior service in some of the heavier hitters in the whole indie pop shebang.

Named after a retired racing greyhound, Jetstream Pony’s lineup features Beth Arzy (The Luxembourg Signal, Trembling Blue Stars, Aberdeen, The Fireworks, Lightning in a Twilight Hour) on vocals and tambourine, Shaun Charman (The Wedding Present, The Popguns, The Fireworks) on guitars and vocals, Kerry Boettcher (Turbocat) on bass and vocals, Mark Matthews (The Dentists, Coax, The Echo Heights, The Treasures of Mexico) on additional guitar,s and Tom Levesley on drums.

After three 7-inch singles and a 12-inch EP came Jetstream Pony’s self-titled first album in May 2020. The mini-album “Misplaced Words” arrived the following year, with an intermittent sprinkling of activity documented on a few short-players since, including a lathe cut 7-inch issued late last year that paired Bowerbirds and Blue Things track “Captain Palisade” with a non-album flip.

The new record’s opener “Sit and Wonder” is a splendid dose of chime pop with a sturdy foundation as Arzy’s vocal is dream-pop breathy with a hint of melancholy. The following cut “Frustration Can Cause Accidents” hits even harder with Levesley giving the toms a workout as Charman lends backing and Arzy’s singing inspires thoughts of The Primitives.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge, a double-LP set is to be released featuring, for the first time ever on vinyl, Oldfield’s 2010 mix of the album alongside a brand new, half-speed remaster by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios of the 1974 album mix.

To be released on 27 June and available to pre-order now from here, it comes with new artwork approved by Oldfield (including new photographs taken on the Ridge in 2023) alongside a new liner quote from the man himself. It will also be available as a Super Deluxe Edition special Blu Ray Audio that brings together a brand new ATMOS and stereo mix by David Kosten, Mike Oldfield’s 2010 5.1 and stereo mix, the 1976 “Boxed” Quad mix and the 1974 original stereo mix.

Hergest Ridge 50th Anniversary is the next step in the “first three” anniversary reissues of Mike Oldfield’s groundbreaking early work and follows the Top 20 UK chart success of Tubular Bells in 2023.

In 1974, Mike Oldfield was coming to terms with the enormous success of his debut album, Tubular Bells, that had been released the previous year. Its success continued to grow stealthily, bolstered by the inclusion of the opening theme in the cinema sensation, The Excorcist. The album became a phenomenon, topping the UK charts, winning a Grammy; giving a green light to Mike Oldfield’s career.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Critic’s Pick! An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga.” —Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

Outspoken, manipulative, independent thinking, and oftentimes controversial, Artie Shaw (1910–2004) was one of the most popular stars of the Swing Era, who famously broke the color barrier by hiring the legendary Billie Holiday, Hot Lips Page, and Roy Eldridge for his bands. His complex love-hate relationship with his own celebrity caused him to walk away from performing almost as many times as he walked away from his marriages.

Winner of the 1986 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got portrays the restless life and five-decade career of the gifted clarinetist/bandleader known as the “King of the Clarinet.” Anchored by an incisive interview recorded when he was 72 years old, this entertaining portrait is much more than a jazz film; it is the insightful story of a brilliant and complex individual.

4K picture restoration by Patrick Duchesne, Frank Biasi, and Jim Fleming at Picture Shop (Toronto). Sound restoration by Daniel Pellerin. 4K and soundtrack restoration generously donated by Donald Hicks (coordinated by Bradly Torreano) and Telefilm Canada, in partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival.

One of the surprise musical hits of the early part of 2025 is this collaboration album between Elton John and Brandi Carlile. John has recently retired from touring and Carlile almost single-handedly brought Joni Mitchell out of retirement.

While Carlile is not a brand-new artist, she is a contemporary artist who has quickly amassed a string of critically acclaimed albums, a myriad of awards, and some mainstream success. Wonderful Crazy Night, released in 2016, was John’s last studio album, but he did do a collaboration album with various artists called The Lockdown Sessions in 2021. Carlile’s last studio album was In These Silent Days, released in 2021. She was also part of The Highwomen album, released in 2019, which was a group that also included Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires.

A collaboration album can be a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes it doesn’t sound like a true collaboration or group effort, but instead for the most part, showcases the writer of a given song. Fortunately, this album truly feels like a group effort. The album has a very unified sound, other than a few instances where John’s unmistakable piano melodies are evident, such as on “The Rose of Laura Nyro” and the title cut.

These two artists clearly conceived and executed this album for all the right reasons and their two styles, songwriting approaches, musicianship, and vocal interplay blend naturally. The album is not really a throwback effort, but the music here does not rely on many of the production and electronic music gimmicks that make a great deal of what’s on the charts these days sound cold and antiseptic and diminish its staying power. These are two artists with truly distinct vocals sounds who know how to write great songs. In the case of John, this collection includes some of the best songs he has written in years and is yet another effort that shows why he is one of the greatest songwriters on the planet.

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As part of the first big gush of punk and new wave in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions attained a level of success that was substantial but fleeting. On April 25, Liberation Hall is reissuing their self-titled debut album on vinyl with one bonus track and the UK cover design. The compact disc and digital download add six more bonus cuts from the period to provide a vivid portrait of a band whose high melodic energies suggest considerable untapped potential.

Like numerous punk-affiliated bands from the original era, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions grew out of a historically notable local act, in this case, Leila and the Snakes, an outfit associated with The Tubes featuring singer Jane Dornacker, guitarist Miles Corbin, bassist Pamela Wood, and drummer Scott Free. After attending a talent audition organized by The Tubes, Pearl E. Gates joined Leila and the Snakes at the urging of Dornacker.

Gates (later known as Pearl Harbor) is credited as a backing singer on Leila and the Snakes only non-archival release, the “Rock & Roll Weirdos” b/w “Pyramid Power” single, which came out in 1978 on Asp Records. An album was recorded (produced by Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers) but left unreleased. After Wood and Free left the band they were replaced by the brothers Stench, Hilary, and John, who in due time followed Gates/Harbor to the exit to form the Explosions.

Their debut LP was released in January 1980 and it stands as a prime example of a band honing their sound for wider acceptance (i.e. mainstream appeal) without alienating their core audience. Of course, by the dawn of the 1980s any concessions to the marketplace on the part of bands that were aligned with the punk scene would be viewed by a segment of the community as a betrayal and be met with hostility.

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