Celebrating Aidan Moffat in advance of his birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

It’s Monday afternoon here at the Hug & Pint in lovely Falkirk, Scotland, not that you’d know it because management 86’d the sun a long time ago because it was annoying the customers, and that blootered bampot at the end of the bar is Arab Strap’s Adrian Moffat, and aren’t you curious what he’s havering on about?

Well I can tell you, because along with bandmate Malcolm Middleton he’s laid it all out for you in lovingly lugubrious detail on 2003’s Monday at the Hug & Pint. And as it turns out Moffat is one articulate, if very down in the mouth, fellow, one whose life is shite because, well, he has problems. Women problems, a rat-arsed-every-night-of-the-week problem, self-esteem problems.

And if that kind of bleak doesn’t sound like your idea of listening pleasure there’s this: Arab Strap’s music—often gloomy, yet just as often achingly lovely—makes for the perfect backdrop for Moffat’s often self-lacerating lyrics, and together they can be downright revelatory.

The only real question you’re left with after listening to Monday at the Hug & Pint—Arab Strap’s fifth studio outing and their next to last before going on a very long hiatus—is why you’ll want to play it again rather than go drown yourself in the nearest bog. Like Arab Strap’s other albums, this one is an epic bummer.

But here’s the explanation—depression can be surprisingly cathartic. It doesn’t hurt that Moffat is a lyricist of uncommon talent, and that Arab Strap seem incapable of writing of a bad song. Enter the Hug & Pint on a Monday night and you’ll wind up with more than just a bad case of sexual frustration and a wicked jackhammer of a hangover—you will partake of the divinely morose.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Porterhouse is humbled to announce the 30th Anniversary reissue of Exit The Dragon from Urge Overkill.

Dark, brooding, and laden with tension, the double LP set is being brought back to life in a newly re-mastered custom vinyl configuration featuring Pink and Purple 12” slabs and completely re-designed center labels. Production of this variant will be limited to 1,000 copies pressed.

Originally released on Geffen Records in 1995, the sprawling work is regarded by fans as a “criminally underrated” collection of compositions that never received the credit it so richly deserved.

History has a way of separating wheat from the chaff and the three decades that have passed since its original release have only cemented this recording’s epic status with both fans and critics such as Chicago’s Jim DeRogatis, who at the time insisted the band was “having the time of their lives” while “illuminating signposts to Big Star III and Exile on Mainstreet.”

Produced by the Butcher Bothers Joe and Phil Nicolo, Exit The Dragon shifts gears from the slick tone of its predecessor Saturation and embraces a low-fi approach that balances perfectly with the album’s stark song selection. Addressing emotional upheaval, isolation and personal struggle, the result is a masterwork and it’s returning for your listening enjoyment. Pre-orders are now open.

Remembering Carl Perkins, born on this date in 1932. —Ed.

Carl Perkins was one of the major shakers in the peak period of Sun Records, and these days he gets his due mostly as an architect of classic rockabilly. In that regard, one of his many hits compilations will provide an accurate if not comprehensive analysis. To get a taste of the full-blown ‘50s Perkins experience however, one will need to dig a little deeper, and seeking out the 1988 LP Honky Tonk Gal is an excellent choice.

Many outstanding recordings were made in the USA in the decade immediately following the Second World War, but at the top of the heap are a few truly indispensable documents. Amongst them can be found Charlie Parker’s master takes for Dial and Savoy, the high lonesome sound of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys as captured by Columbia and Decca, Muddy Waters’ electrification of the Delta in Chess Studios, and perhaps inappropriately since it compiled 6 LPs worth of material from prewar 78s, the Anthology of American Folk Music as issued by Folkways.

But if an outlier, I’ll stump passionately for that Harry Smith-compiled doozy. On top of being one of the few multi-disc sets that can be listened to in its entirety without a hint of exhaustion, it just as importantly established a disparate songbook that’s continued to influence music right up to this very minute. And the icing on the cake is how the inspired assemblage of a bohemian painter (and record collector!) integrated American folksong two years before the Supreme Court handed down their unanimous blow to the ugliness of segregation with the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

And that relates pretty well to Samuel Cornelius Phillips and his Memphis Recording Service, later known more famously as Sun Records, a small business concern that was really on a creative mission in loose disguise. It was also the cradle of some extremely essential postwar music. For instance, Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” considered by some to be the first rock ‘n’ roll song. Or that behemoth of the blues The Howlin’ Wolf, who delivered his first sides there. And by the mid-‘50s it was where a bunch of poor white cats, to borrow a phrase from the mouth of Presley, got real real gone for a change.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A new official Pink Floyd compilation project titled 8-Tracks, featuring eight essential classics selected from the band’s 1971–1979 era, will be released on 5th June via Sony Music. The album is available to pre-order on vinyl, CD and digitally here.

The tracklist includes the instantly recognisable songs “Money,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” “Time,” and “Comfortably Numb,” alongside earlier cuts in “One Of These Days” and “Wot’s… Uh The Deal,” as well as an exclusive full version of “Pigs On The Wing,” previously available on the 1977 Animals 8-track cartridge release. The track sequence has been edited by Steven Wilson using sound effects sourced from the original multitracks to make for a continuous listening experience in classic Floydian style.

8-Tracks documents the full measure of Pink Floyd’s transition into their breakthrough era, propelled into superstardom throughout the 1970s. The eight-year period this special release celebrates encompasses music from some of the band’s most successful and celebrated records ever.

1971’s Meddle, 1972’s Obscured by Clouds, 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, 1975’s Wish You Were Here, 1977’s Animals, and 1979’s The Wall. Six monumental, classic albums in their own right. Collectively, it’s a body of work that sees Pink Floyd shifting far beyond the early psychedelic pop Syd Barrett era and their post-experimental output, cementing their global status as one of the greatest rock bands of all time.

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The name Robin Trower may not resonate with today’s young pop streamers, but throughout roughly the mid-1960s through the late 1970s, he went from one successful musical life to another.

From before the group’s debut album in 1967 and through their fifth album in 1971, Trower was the guitarist with Procol Harum. Along with the group’s 1973 album Grand Hotel (which Trower was not part of), the five albums he was on with Procol Harum constituted their peak as one of the most inventive pop/prog groups from England in that period.

If that wasn’t enough, after leaving the group, Trower embarked on a highly successful solo career, in a trio format, beginning with Twice Removed from Yesterday in 1973. His next album, Bridge of Sighs, was an FM staple, has achieved classic rock immortality, and was the first of four best-selling albums, with his next three albums also charting. Chrysalis released all of these albums.

Trower left behind the near-classical, pop/art-prog of Procol Harum and formed a blues-rock power trio, clearly rooted in both the heavier and dreamier sides of Jimi Hendrix’s music. In many respects, even though he was British, his music became a natural bridge between the music of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Beginning with the reissue of Twice Removed from Yesterday, issued in a 2-LP or 2-CD edition, Bridge of Sighs and For Earth Below have also been released in remastered, bespoke 2-LP vinyl editions and in an expansive CD/Blu-ray set and a 4-CD box set, respectively, that should not be missed. The latest 50th-anniversary reissue is Robert Trower Live!, originally released in 1976 after For Earth Below.

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PHOTOS: MATTHEW BELTER | I’ll be honest with you—my roots are in rock and roll. That’s where I live, that’s where I was raised musically, and that’s the lens I’ve always brought to this work. But one thing this job has taught me, over and over again, is that great artistry doesn’t care about genre. It doesn’t care about your background, your assumptions, or the box you built for yourself before you knew better. It just grabs you. Tech N9ne grabbed me.

I reached out cold to his team, not because I had an angle or a hook, but because I kept bumping into his name in places I didn’t expect—in conversations about independent business, in discussions about vinyl culture, in rooms full of people who don’t agree on much but agree on him. Thirty-plus years in, over twenty studio albums, a label he built from nothing into the most successful independent hip-hop operation on the planet, and a fan base—the Technicians—who don’t just follow the man, they memorize him. Word for word. Breath for breath. That kind of devotion doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the art is real.

What I found on the other end of that phone call was a man who has never once confused success with permission to stop working, never confused longevity with legacy, and never let anyone else decide what his music was allowed to be. He talks about freedom the way some people talk about survival—because for him, they’re the same thing.

This is a conversation about a Kansas City kid who turned a Slick Rick record into a chopping style the world had never heard. About parachute pants and patent leather shoes and a dance crew that went to audition for MC Hammer while he stayed back and wrote rhymes. About what it costs to build something real from nothing, and what it feels like when it works. And about vinyl—the heartbeat, as he calls it—and why a man who has earned every digital platform still looks across the room at a record and feels something no stream has ever replicated.

I think you’ll feel it too.

You’ve talked about rapping as a child just to remember how to spell your own name—but when did that innocent trick become something burning inside you, something you had to chase? What was the exact moment music stopped being something you did and started being something you were?

What it did for me on the inside—how it moved me—started early on. I was a dancer, man. Music made me want to dance. I thought I was a B-boy; break dance, pop lock, MC Hammer. I had the high-top fade with the Kwame streak, the Hammer pants, the parachute pants with the patent leather shoes with the silver on the toe. I did the whole thing.

When my homeboys in the dance crew, Imperial Prep, went to try out for the Hammer dance, I stayed back—I was the younger one in the crew. I stayed back and worked on my rhymes, and it just took over from dancing. The more I got into rhyme, the cooler I got, and I danced less. Even though I still move a bit on stage—I can’t help it—writing rhymes made me cool in a different way. When I was a dancer I’d be at all the clubs sweating through my silk shirts, but once I became an emcee I was holding up the bar. Rapping pretty much made me stop dancing as much as I did.

Before Strange Music, before the Technician army existed, you were grinding through groups like Black Mafia and Nnutthowze. Most artists erase those chapters. You’ve owned them. What did those early collectives teach you about yourself as an artist that you still carry today?

Without those people who lifted me up in the beginning, there would be no Tech N9ne. All of that was college for me—from Black Mafia with Black Walt and Icy Rock, Frozen Image, to Don Juan and Diamond Shields with Midwest Side Records. Those were the building blocks. You cannot erase your history unless you’re embarrassed of it, and I never was.

My last album, 5816 Forest, I went all the way back—Black Wall Street, 55th and Michigan, 5816 Forest, my block. All the stories are in there. I didn’t leave anything out because those experiences are the foundation of what I am today.

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Record Store Day 2026 is just around the corner, and the Soul Jazz Records compilation Power Pop! American Power Pop for the Now Generation 1977-1981 is among the standouts in this year’s crop. Leaning toward an assemblage of highly sought-after and in many instances very pricey gems that hover on the fringes of the coinciding punk shebang, the selections are raw and loaded with crafty, inspired riffs.

In the five-year stretch covered by this compilation, punk, power pop, and new wave were stylistic impulses that essentially intermingled as they presented an alternative to increasingly stale and often overwrought rock sensibilities. This is not to suggest that harmoniousness was constant or even the norm, but neither was divisiveness an overriding reality amid the competitiveness of regional musical scenes.

The bands collected here are catchy, often rough-edged, and guitar-focused. A few posthumous reputations loom large, but none of the bands included became a national phenomenon. Given a different set of circumstances, a few of these songs could’ve become chart hits, but the majority of the selections are just too punk-informed to have chalked up widespread popularity. Keyboards and synths are largely absent.

Some of these bands, if not these particular songs, have landed on punk compilations, including in the Killed by Death bootleg series and the associated Bloodstains volumes. So it is with West Lafayette, Indiana’s Dow Jones and The Industrials, whose “Let’s Go Steady” is a banquet of gnarled-riff tension and bursts of rocking release.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Guadalajara’s MESS is undeniably one of the heavy hitters of the thriving international Oi! and streetpunk scene today. As a result, their records are highly sought after by fans and collectors alike. The unfortunate and inevitable result is that some of their best work has become almost impossibly rare on vinyl!

Well, fans need worry not, because MESS has teamed up with Pirates Press Records to collect ALL of their rare and out-of-print singles and EPs from 2020–2022 on one glorious slab of vinyl for the very first time…and all re-mastered, to boot! That is their entire recorded output prior to their debut LP Under Attack.

SOMOS MESS is now available from Pirates Press Records. The re-mastered album will be available on Bandcamp on Friday May 1st, and on all major streaming platforms and in retail stores the following week, May 8th!

Between announcing themselves to the world with the release of their first 12” EP “Intercity” and the release of their debut full length Under Attack, MESS had a prolific two years. Now, for the first time ever, all 16 songs released during that period —including the first EP—can be found in one place: together at last and freshly remastered on one glorious slab of wax. Pirates Press Records is proud to present SOMOS MESS (WE ARE MESS), a collection of the band’s much sought-after early work!

Between 2020 and 2022, MESS released two EPs, two 7”’s (including the long sold out split with The Chisel), and appeared on the compilation Stronger Than Before Vol 1 (Longshot / Battle Scarred Records). This flurry of activity quickly captured the attention of the international punk scene, rapidly making MESS a global fan favorite, with fans eagerly awaiting each release.

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