VIA PRESS RELEASE | Van Halen’s Balance turns 30 this year, and Rhino is celebrating with an expanded edition of the band’s multi-platinum tenth studio album. It follows last year’s successful reissue of For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (Expanded Edition) and concludes Rhino’s spotlight on the band’s classic albums from the Hagar era.

Arriving August 15, Balance (Expanded Edition) will be available as a 2LP/2CD/Blu-ray deluxe set including the original album, remastered for 2023’s The Collection II, along with a selection of audio and video rarities. Pre-order HERE. The collection also contains several unreleased live recordings from the Balance Tour, including “The Seventh Seal,” which is available today digitally.

Standalone versions of Balance will also be available the same day, including a 2CD set with the album and rarities, and a 2LP black vinyl and 2LP orange vinyl pressing that presents the full album on vinyl for the first time in 30 years. Here, the complete album spans three sides, for optimal audio quality, with a Balance-era etching on the fourth.

Balance (Expanded Edition) collects non-album tracks from the period, including the B-side “Crossing Over,” along with “Humans Being” and “Respect the Wind” from the Twister soundtrack. Eight standout performances from the band’s 1995 Wembley Stadium appearance, which the BBC broadcast, are also featured. The recordings offer rare live versions of Balance tracks like “Feelin’” and “The Seventh Seal.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Motown’s L.A.-based Mowest label lasted less than two years, but managed in that short time to release some of the most adventurous music the company ever put out.

And probably the most intrepid—and nowadays, adored—Mowest release of them all was the 1972 self-titled release from Odyssey. This one-off brought elite West Coast sessionmen like Wrecking Crew mainstay Don Peake, one-time Chicago member Donnie Dacus, and arranger/orchestrator extraordinaire Gene Page together with a bunch of West Coast hippie rockers (as Peake says, “We were invited to lunch, introduced to some nice people and told we were going to form a band”).

The happy result was a record that has appeared on more deejay turntables than you can count, a one-of-a-kind blend of funky Motown bottom with a spacy sensibility and sound that fits right in next to, say, the latest Khruangbin album on your psychedelic chill playlist even as it activates your 5th Dimension sunshine pop endorphins. The single “Our Lives Are Shaped by What We Love” is probably the pick to click, but the whole album is a total vibe.

Real Gone Music is reissuing Odyssey for the first time ever in the US (the Japanese have long been all over this album) on blue-green “ocean spray” vinyl, complete with original album art, including the lyric insert. Remastered for the format by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, and pressed at Gotta Groove Records for superior sound. A must!

The music world lost two pioneering artists in the past few weeks: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. While stylistically they were worlds apart, they both hailed from the West Coast, were troubled and sometimes tortured souls, and created singular music as writers, producers, and songwriters that began with simple genres, surf music for Wilson and R&B for Stone.

While Wilson has received his due, Stone has not. His career peak was short-lived. However, when one hears the music of Prince and that of some of Stone’s contemporaries such as Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Miles, and even George Clinton, Stone’s was clearly an unparalleled career, primarily in how he created an almost undefinable sound and a music that simply didn’t exist before he fully matured and which was also very popular.

It’s ironic that at the same time as his passing, we got a previously unreleased live album that comes full circle back to the earliest live beginnings of Sly and the Family Stone. This raw, intimate live album was recorded in March of 1967 at the California venue Winchester Cathedral in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, only a few months before the group’s debut on Epic Records, A Whole New Thing.

The almost lo-fi release sounds like a hot R&B soul band playing for a Saturday night group of people who just wanted to party and dance. While one can hear faint echoes of riffs that would go on to be a part of one of the group’s biggest songs, “I Want to Take You Higher,” the rest of the set is more gritty bar band soul. Jimi Hendrix also cut his teeth as a guitarist with groups like this, although that was much earlier in time.

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Hailing from New Jersey, the indie pop outfit Lightheaded has a new LP, Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming hitting stores on June 27. The same day finds Massachusetts-based indie pop act Jeanines unveiling a fresh LP of their own, How Long Can It Last, and don’tcha just know it, the Lightheaded and Jeanines albums are being released by Slumberland in North America and by Skep Wax in the UK and EU. Both records are a delight. There is a tandem record release show in Brooklyn, NY at Trans-Pecos on June 27 and then the groups vault the big pond as tourmates for a run of UK shows in the second half of July.

There are photos of Lightheaded that include three, four, and five people, but the core of the group is founders Cynthia Rittenbach on bass and vocals and Stephen Stec on guitar. Active since 2017, the drummers, additional guitarists, and backing singers have spun through a revolving door as they debuted with the cassette Cowboys and Constellations in 2019.

Next came the 5-song cassette EP “Good Good Great!” in 2023, followed quickly with the full-length Combustible Gems, their first on vinyl, last year. Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming offers five new songs on side one and adds the five songs from the “Good Good Great!” tape on the flip. The new stuff was cut with either Gary Olson (of The Ladybug Transistor) or Alicia Vanden Heuvel (of The Aislers Set and Poundsign) in the studio, and with Fred Thomas (of Saturday Looks Good to Me) mixing the songs for release.

Knowledge of Olson’s, Vanden Heuvel’s, and Thomas’ work should give Lightheaded newbies more than a hint into what’s happening on Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming. The songs are lush but not too polished, with rich depth of instrumentation, as opener “Same Drop” includes keyboards, strings, and bursts of trumpet.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Today, UMe announces details of a forthcoming 40th anniversary cut-down format of the 2016 original Super Deluxe celebration of Simple Minds’ multi-platinum album Once Upon A Time, out on October 17th.

Originally released in October 1985, Once Upon A Time became Simple Minds’ most successful album to date, shifting two million copies in two months, hitting the top spot in the UK, and making the top ten in America. It spawned four top-twenty singles and launched a fifteen-month-long world tour. And with Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain providing a production dream team, and Anton Corbijn contributing to its instantly recognizable artwork, Once Upon A Time has all the attributes of a classic 1980s LP.

Coming hot on the heels of the global smash single “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (which recently joined the Billions Club on Spotify), Once Upon a Time was to prove the album that propelled Simple Minds to stratospheric heights of artistic and commercial success. The album contains the classic hit singles “Alive and Kicking,” “All the Things She Said,” “Sanctify Yourself,” and “Ghost Dancing.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Chicago IX was the band’s first greatest hits collection, topping the album chart in 1975 and selling more than five million copies to become one of their best-selling albums. To mark its 50th anniversary, Rhino will release Chicago IX: Greatest Hits Expanded Edition on August 8 as a 2LP Black vinyl set and single CD. Pre-order HERE. The new edition expands the original 11-track lineup into a 21-track collection that now includes songs from every studio album the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers released between 1969 and 1980.

New additions like “Street Player,” “Thunder and Lightning,” and “Baby, What A Big Surprise” extend the timeline through the ’70s and up to the dawn of the ’80s, while early cuts like “Questions 67 and 68” and “Free” help round out the band’s formative years. Signature tracks from the original release—such as “25 or 6 to 4,” “Saturday in the Park,” and “If You Leave Me Now”—remain central to the collection. Several songs from Chicago (1970) appear in their Steven Wilson remix/edit versions, first issued in 2017. The updated selection reflects a broader retrospective of Chicago’s first decade, with the cover artwork subtly revised from its original white background to a new gold backdrop in honor of the album’s anniversary.

Chicago launched the year with an incredible appearance and live performance of two songs on NBC’s The Kelly Clarkson Show, and will be bringing their legendary, unmatched catalogue of beloved hits to fans across the states for the rest of 2025.

The band kicked off their summer tour this weekend in Waite Park, MN and just announced additional shows to go on sale this Friday. Upcoming shows include stops in Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Chicago, Virginia Beach, Newark, Bangor and Boston ahead of New York’s iconic Beacon Theater. They head west in August to play Denver, Boise, and Bend before traversing California ahead of three nights at Los Angeles’s historic Hollywood Bowl. Full dates are below. For ticket information visit www.chicagotheband.com.

Remembering Mick Ralphs. —Ed.

The ballad of Mott the Hoople—the English glam band that gave us one of the most ecstatic moments in rock history with Ian Hunter’s “I’ve wanted to do this for years!” in “All the Young Dudes”—begins not in 1969, when the band was formed, but 3 years earlier, when one Willard Manus wrote a novel called Mott the Hoople, which rock visionary and total madman Guy “There Are Only Two Phil Spectors in the World and I Am One of Them” Stevens happened to pick up and read while in gaol for drug offenses.

We will never know what Stevens, a kind of manager, producer, and talent scout famed for his prodigious intake of mind-altering substances and eccentric behavior—his favorite method of inspiring a band in the studio was to destroy every piece of equipment in sight, or in the case of The Clash, pour beer on the piano—thought of Manus’ novel. But we do know Stevens loved its title, so much so that he saved it as a name for a truly special band. That band turned out to be Silence, which had been fecklessly wandering to and fro across the earth in search of a record contract. That is until Stevens, who worked for Island Records, saw something in them that no one else did.

That said, Stevens knew they needed molding, and he wasted no time doing it. The first thing he did after changing their name to Mott the Hoople—which nobody in Silence particularly liked—was dismiss vocalist Stan Tippins, and put out an advertisement for a new singer. The ad was answered by one Ian Hunter, a wild-haired punter who couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Bob Dylan or Sonny Bono (seriously). He auditioned by performing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which made him just the person Stevens was looking for, because it was the crazed producer’s goal to create a band that fused the sounds of Dylan and the Rolling Stones.

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Hailing from Washington, DC, the trio Motherfuckers JMB & Co. specialize in contemporary psychedelia with an equal emphasis on atmosphere and rhythmic drive. The members are Jim Thomson (the J) on drums, Marc Minsker (the M) on harmonium, bass, and guitar, and Brian Weitz, aka Geologist (the B), on hurdy gurdy. All three have extensive experience on the scene, but this is no shallow supergroup gesture. The lack of vocals reflects an absence of overabundant egos in favor of focused tandem attention to the titular elements of their debut album, Music Excitement Action Beauty, which is out on vinyl July 4 through the label Via Parigi.

The roots of Motherfuckers JMB & Co. reach back to the fertile soil of the 1980s underground. Jim Thomson played drums in Alter-Natives, a Richmond, VA band that landed on the roster of SST Records for three albums as part of that label’s quest to quash punk/hardcore genericism by signing a certified metric fuckton of bands, all with a common expansionist trait. More famously perhaps, Thomson was an early member of Gwar, and was later in the outfits Hotel X, Bio Ritmo, Tulsa Drone, CSC Funk Band, Chain & the Gang, and Time Is Fire, along with running Electric Cowbell Records.

Marc Minsker was in Third Eye Lounge, a band that carries the distinction of backing the great avant-folk-C&W-jazz-rock-psych guitarist Eugene Chadbourne. Although videos of Third Eye Lounge exist online, the group is fairly obscure. Decidedly not obscure is Brian Weitz’s work in Animal Collective, where he sported the handle Geologist.

Animal Collective dished out a particularly robust and quickly identifiable strain of boundary-pushing contemporary psychedelia, but Motherfuckers JMB & Co. are onto a sound with stronger connections to established psych forms such as space rock, motorik, and even post-Syd pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd. Music Excitement Action Beauty begins with a “classic” Eastern-tinged drone, “Rise,” that quickly bleeds into the spacy groove of drum showcase “Breakers Part 1.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | After Leeds alt-rock band The Lost Pandas disintegrated around them in the early 1980s, singer/guitarist David Gedge and bassist Keith Gregory decided to form a new group. In 1985, beguiled by pop radio, punk brashness, The Velvet Underground and David’s erstwhile schoolmates, The Chameleons, they launched The Wedding Present.

That band was—and remains—uncompromising and unwaveringly authentic in every way, and, as a result, Gedge, without intention, has become a legendary figure in alternative music. He has become one of the chief architects and originators of modern guitar rock and the mastermind behind one of the richest, catchiest, and most consistently enthralling catalogues in pop history.

Four decades on, and with 13 studio albums, 20 compilation albums and a whole host of singles, EPs, live albums and radio sessions—with more on the horizon—The Wedding Present : 40 is a commemorative reflection of this complex and fascinating catalogue.

Available as four vinyl and four CD box sets, this is not your usual collection of “most popular” songs, but rather a chronological, aural journey of album tracks, singles, and B-sides. The stunning artwork has been put together by Jonathan Hitchen—who designed many of the band’s original record covers—and there are extensive sleeve notes by David Gedge himself, along with esteemed music writer Mark Beaumont (NME, Guardian, Independent). Gedge’s commentary provides a unique insight into the workings of the band and an absorbing track-by-track guide to the compilation.

Tickets are now on sale for the band’s 40th Anniversary Tour which starts in September and includes support from—amongst others—Mozart Estate and The Loft.

Remembering Alan Vega, born on this day in 1938. —Ed.

Alan Vega has departed this realm, but the music he made in partnership with Martin Rev in a union known as Suicide will long endure as a beacon at the crossroads of defiant individualism and fascinating leftfield imagination. Suicide is a sui generis cornerstone of punk’s grand 1977 convulsion, as alien as it is eventually incendiary, while Alan Vega Martin Rev explores refinement without marketplace capitulation at the dawn of the 1980s.

On September 19, 1981 Alan Vega and Martin Rev played a tenth anniversary concert at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. The show is documented on Ghost Riders, just one of numerous authorized, grey market, and bootleg Suicide live recordings; cult status has since been established, but jump ahead ten years from that night at the Walker Art Center and the jury was still deliberating the pair’s artistic success rate and overall value.

By 1991 all of Suicide’s proto and first wave NYC cohorts were pretty easily categorized. The Dictators were smart-aleck celebrators of trash culture, Patti Smith and Richard Hell rough bohemians mingling rock and poetics, the Heartbreakers glam graduates brandishing Stones-like edge, Talking Heads essentially art-rockers helping to define the parameters of new wave and paving the exit ramp of post-punk, Television expansionist jammers in punk threads, and Blondie and The Ramones swipers and solidifiers of classic pop and rock moves into fresh and groundbreaking territory.

However, two decades after their formation exactly what Suicide was up to was still difficult to parse. Vega surely exuded an abundance of rock attitude, but thanks to Rev’s one man wrangling of his musical rig (the “instrument”) they landed outside of the genre in formal terms; this blend of rock attitude and non-rock execution is at the root of why quite a few (rockist) listeners continue to disdain their work.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | 3x GRAMMY® Award-winner Shooter Jennings has announced the release of Songbird, a completely new, previously unheard album by his legendary father, Waylon Jennings.

The first of three previously unheard albums worth of material by the groundbreaking country music superstar, Songbird collects recordings produced between 1973 and 1984 in various studios by Jennings and his longtime drummer and co-producer Richie Albright, featuring members of his indelible backing band, The Waylors, including Albright and renowned pedal steel guitarist Ralph Mooney, along with such special guests as Tony Joe White, Jessi Colter, and more. Compiled and mixed by Shooter Jennings at Hollywood, CA’s hallowed Sunset Sound Studio 3, Songbird arrives via Son of Jessi/Thirty Tigers on Friday, October 3, 2025. Pre-orders/pre-saves are available now.

Songbird is heralded by the first single and title track, Jennings’ stunning version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Songbird,” available everywhere alongside an official visualizer/music video streaming now at YouTube. Both “Songbird” and the Songbird project were officially unveiled yesterday at a special Waylon Jennings Birthday Party/Father’s Day celebration hosted by Shooter Jennings at The Viper Room in West Hollywood, CA. The surviving members of the Waylors, Waylon Jennings’ backing band, were the house band for performances by Jaime Wyatt, Elizabeth Cook, Ashley Monroe, Charley Crockett, and Shooter Jennings, as they performed songs from Waylon Jennings’ illustrious catalogue.

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