Comprised of Peter Gulch, Tom Gulch, and Dave Lunt, Philadelphia’s electronic specialists The Nightcrawlers existed throughout the ’80s and released three albums. However, the new retrospective collection The Biophonic Boombox Recordings taps into the group’s considerable cassette catalog, which grew to over 35 entries. Deeply impacted by German kosmische and emboldened by their own city’s street-level support for edgy, avant-garde art, the results offer a celestial trip of unusual potency; the set is out now on 2LP, 2CD, and digital through Anthology Recordings.

In his notes for this set, D. Strauss (who also curated and produced the album) offers up substantial info and insights into the lifespan of this unsung outfit, in particular highlighting the impact of avant-garde classical (Lunt professing love for Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage), Brian Eno and the Krautrock-affiliated Berliner Schule (which included Cluster, Klaus Schulze, and Tangerine Dream), but one observation from Peter Gulch stuck out; that if the electronic material he and his future bandmates (and local associates) loved wasn’t forthcoming, they’d just make their own.

For musicians who came of age during the 1970s, this is a familiar scenario. Having been given a taste of life-sustaining but finite stuff, there was a need to fill the void, and the only remedy was to do it themselves, a circumstance interweaving quite nicely with how avant-garde art thrived in a city with a crumbling economy; it was a place Strauss describes as “weird, dangerous and beautiful.”

This background regularly gets attached to the punk of late ’70s-early ’80s New York City, but The Nightcrawlers lack a sense of surliness and desperation; instead, they are depicted as three well-adjusted guys, with Peter working as a chemist and his brother an Air Force vet who paid the bills as a postman. Although the younger Lunt was keen to tour, due to the settled lifestyles of his counterparts (along with the formidable task of hauling a massive amount of electronic equipment), that never happened.

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | From Schubert to Strauss, Bach to Brahms, Mozart to…Billy Joel, Itzhak Perlman’s violin playing transcends mere performance to evoke the celebrations and struggles of real life; “praying with the violin,” says renowned Tel Aviv violinmaker Amnon Weinstein.

Alison Chernick’s enchanting documentary looks beyond the sublime musician to see the polio survivor whose parents emigrated from Poland to Israel, and the young man who struggled to be taken seriously as a music student when schools saw only his disability. Itzhak himself is funny, irreverent and self-deprecating, and here his life story unspools in conversations with masterful musicians, family and friends, and most endearingly his devoted wife of 50 years, Toby. Itzhak and Toby’s lives are dedicated to their large, loving, Jewish family in NYC and their continual support of young musicians.

As charming and entrancing as the famous violinist himself, Itzhak is a portrait of musical virtuosity seamlessly enclosed in warmth, humor, and above all, love.

“I’m a survivor of the CD generation.”

“When I first started listening to music on my own, music was still tied to an object and that object was a compact disc, preferably via Discman on a solitary bike ride around the small Swiss town where I grew up. Before any of that, though, long before owning my first bike or CD, I heard vinyl. One of my earliest memories is an image of the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan spinning on my parents’ turntable, snow falling outside (obviously I couldn’t read the label yet, but I was intrigued by Dylan’s raspy wail on “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”).

They’d also play Dire Straits and Bob Seger (dad), Bill Evans and The Pointer Sisters (mom), artists I still associate with their portraits on the creased and torn record sleeves they lived in, like well-loved paperback novels. Years before speaking English, I heard it sung on vinyl. Naturally, this being my parents’ record collection, I soon rejected it with all the prepubescent rebellion I could muster; vinyl was for sentimental old fools who made me get up before noon.

It didn’t last. For birthdays and holidays, my parents, ever mindful of preteen temptations, used to give me these coupons in lieu of cash. You could only use them at select local stores, one of which happened to sell vinyl. Not knowing what else to do with all those pieces of paper, I dragged my mom in there one afternoon shortly after my eleventh birthday and asked to listen to the one band I recognized from a poster in my cool older cousin’s bedroom – Nirvana.

Read More »

Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, band member, solo artist, and recently, half of Those Pretty Wrongs, Luther Russell is a songwriter in the classic melodic rock ‘n’ roll style, and Selective Memories: An Anthology is a deep inspection into a body of work more people should know about. But folks already hip to the guy need not worry, as scads of unreleased tracks will make the set’s acquisition totally worthwhile. And hey, if the Hanky Panky label’s 2CD isn’t your preferred format, there’s also a 100-copy double cassette edition currently available through those tireless tape hounds at Burger.

With 25 unearthed selections amid a total of 41 that chalk up a running time bypassing two and a half hours, Selective Memories is, if perhaps short of sprawling, then surely a thorough exercise in annotation. Coupled with a booklet offering Russell’s track-by-track commentary, it achieves the stature of musical memoir but without any hyperinflated sense of purpose.

Strict chronological career surveys are too often undercut by the predictability of the linear, but in this case the approach works; exactly why will be addressed further down. To be sure, the tactic aids the aura of autobiography and will inspire user-friendliness for newbies. In an additional liner text, veteran rock scribe Bud Scoppa helpfully breaks down the contents into seven categories, which also correspond with periods, and in so doing establishes a blueprint for synopsizing that’s hard to resist, even as it starts in unsurprising fashion, with recordings of a local band that’re long-belatedly seeing the light of day.

That Russell’s late-teenage endeavor The Bootheels also featured a young Jakob Dylan does add spice to the beginning of this tale; although their two tracks opening Selective Memories portray one of numerous bands smattered across late ‘80s USA who were smitten by The Replacements, the songs were already just a notch above the norm, and the four following solo demos document growing confidence, sharpening tunefulness, and obvious care in presentation (retroactively foreshadowing Russell’s background in production).

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Albert Griffiths founded the Gladiators in 1966 after some success on his own. The group scored their first hit, produced by legendary producer Coxsone Dodd, with “Hello Carol” in 1968. During the ’70s the Gladiators made their way through releases on labels like Studio One, Upsetter, Virgin, and Groovemaster. The year 1980 found them working with producer (and pre-“Electric Avenue” hit-maker) Eddy Grant on the album Gladiators, which also featured members of the band Aswad lending a musical hand.

Omnivore Recordings will re-release two Gladiators albums from the legendary reggae label Nighthawk Records, which Omnivore recently acquired. Remastered and expanded versions of Symbol of Reality and Serious Thing will be available April 20, 2018. On 1982’s Symbol of Reality, their first for Nighthawk, the Gladiators revisited their own catalog of songs, re-recording their classics “Dreadlocks the Time Is Now” (appearing here as “Streets of Gold”), “Watch Out.” and “Big Boo Boo Deh” (returning retitled as “Cheater”) while also paying homage to the Wailers with covers “Small Axe” and “Stand Alone,” both written by Bob Marley.

This newly remastered version of the album features the original ten tracks, the two bonus tracks that were added to the original 1997 Nighthawk CD reissue, “Symbol Version” and “Righteous Man Version,” plus four previously unissued tracks, “Streets of Gold Version,” “Not Afraid To Fight Version,” “Symbol of Reality Instrumental Dub,” and “Streets of Gold Instrumental Dub.”

Read More »

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Eva Cassidy’s SONGBIRD album was initially released by independent label Blix Street Records in April, 1998. The posthumous release, an anthology of recordings by the Washington, DC-based singer who had died in November of 1996, is composed of four tracks from her first solo album, LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY (taken from her January 3, 1996 performance with her band at the Georgetown jazz club and locally released a few months before she died); five tracks from EVA BY HEART, the studio album she was recording at the time of her passing, posthumously released locally a year after she died; and one track (Over The Rainbow) from THE OTHER SIDE, a 1992 collection of jazz and blues duets with Washington’s Chuck Brown.

According to Blix Street’s founder/president Bill Straw, the plan was to introduce the music of the then recently deceased/now legendary singer to the world via an album that would live on with early believers until the inevitable tipping point around the world. The title-SONGBIRD-was taken from Eva’s included cover of the Christine McVie classic that has closed many a Fleetwood Mac concert. LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY and EVA BY HEART were both later released by Blix Street in the summer of 1998, the first national and international exposure for both works.

SONGBIRD20, set for release by Blix Street in the UK and Australia on March 2, the U.S. on March 9 and Canada on March 30, celebrates the 20th anniversary of the original SONGBIRD, an album ‘heard round the world’…more than five million copies sold. SONGBIRD20 contains the re-mastered original ten tracks (featuring Cassidy’s masterful interpretations of Fields of Gold, Autumn Leaves, Songbird and Over the Rainbow) plus four acoustic bonus tracks (Songbird, Wade in the Water, People Get Ready, and Autumn Leaves) that surfaced long after the release of SONGBIRD. They were first heard on the 2011 SIMPLY EVA album.

Read More »

“My father has always been a lover of music. I was probably around 6 or 7 when I became fascinated by his record collection. I loved the artwork, the smell, the lyrics, and I was always curious about the music trapped in the ridges.”

“By this point, I’m pretty certain he’d gotten rid of his player. It was just the records that remained. There were some incredible salsa albums along with The Mama’s and The Papa’s, The Carpenters, Cuban son, and so much more. I spent hours looking through the song titles, checking out the styles, and wishing there was a way to unlock all that music. I just wanted to transport myself into my father’s youth and absorb every bit of it. He must have noticed my curiosity, because during one of his business trips he returned with an old player and a pristine copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I felt like my little heart was about to explode. Everything about the music sounded so rich. It felt like something truly special and palpable.

We moved to Madrid, Spain when I was 12, and the next vinyl I remember getting my hands on was Luz Casal’s rendition of “Piensa en Mi” which was featured in one of Pedro Almodovar’s most beautiful films, Tacones Lejanos. As a kid, I always had a tough outer shell, but deep inside I was an old soul and hopeless romantic. I felt every bit of pain in her scratchy delivery. I’m forever grateful to vinyl for that much texture, and to my father for giving me the tools to listen and appreciate it.

Read More »

Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Joel Levi – Will We Ever Change?
Parker Longbough – RNC 2000
Jodee Lewis – It Ain’t Killed Me Yet
Deelanz – Snake In The Grass
Mothership – Crown of Lies
Wo Fat – Riffborn
The Watchers – Alien Lust

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Gang of Four – Lucky

Blackwulf – Sinister Sides
Steak – Living Like a Rat
Salem’s Bend – Balshazzar
Mothership – Serpent’s Throne (Live)
Wo Fat – Of Smoke and Fog (Live)
The Watchers – Call the Priest
Blackwulf – Colossus
Steak – Wickerman
Salem’s Bend – Queen of the Desert

So I was sitting around with Herman Melville, author of a well-known how-to manual on whale hunting named after a better known Led Zep song, and I asked him what he’s been listening to. “You know, Mike,” he said, setting down the bong beside the manuscript of his soon-to-be-published Great American Novel on pot farming, “it’s easier to tell you what I’m NOT listening to, and that’s rock’n’roll. And that’s because rock’n’roll is finished. Kids don’t listen to rock’n’roll any more because rock’n’roll is for DEAD PEOPLE.”

The geezer was harshing my buzz, but I had to admit he was right. I have a couple of teenage relatives and they listen to nothing but hip hop, and when I suggested to the little punks that they might wanna check out the Dictators they literally laughed in my face. Kids got no respect today–try to get ‘em to listen to some morally upright music like “Teengenerate” and they just sneer like little Lou Reeds before slapping on their Turtle Beach Stealth 400 headsets and returning to their regularly scheduled video game.

Herman went on. “Hell, I knew rock’n’roll was dead the night I went to a party being thrown by a bunch of sleazoid Johnny Thunders guys and they spent the whole night playing Licensed to Ill over and over again. And that was way back in 1986. That album wasn’t a crossover, it was an autopsy, and anybody who tries to tell you rock’n’roll made some kinda big phoenix from the ashes comeback with Appetite for Destruction is full of shit. And don’t even get me started on what’s come down the pike since cuz it’s horrible. There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke, and by that I’m talking about the first time I heard Arcade Fire.”

“Well ya gotta admit your rad and totally retro beard has Brooklyn or even Portland writ all over it,” I told Herman, “and the folks in those places certainly haven’t bought into the whole “Rock Is Dead” meme. They’re churning out all kinds of new sounds, even if I’m too lazy to listen to any of ‘em and what little I do hear makes me wish I was in an insulin coma. But there has to be some good rock and roll out there SOMEWHERE!”

Read More »