Cara Louise presents her debut LP – Wholesome Dread – released via Soul Step Records. Wholesome Dread is a 9-track collection chronicling the emotional depths of ontological anxiety, familial relationships, religion, and self-doubt. Placed on a sonic bed of genre-bending instrumentation, “Wholesome Dread” blurs the lines of Indie-Rock, Shoegaze, Folk and Americana music. Led by Cara’s signature powerful and emotive vocal chops, and hard-hitting lyrical content, this new LP pushes the songwriter to new creative heights. Grab it today!
New vinyl pressing! The Box contains the remastered albums Hypersona, Hollow, and Lithea, in addition to Orphans, which is a curated selection of compilation tracks, most for the first time on vinyl, as well as arrangements exclusive for this boxset. Entire set spans across six vinyl records. The records are housed in a 12.5 x 12.5 white semi gloss heavyweight Tip-On box. Limited and sequentially foil numbered – grab it while it is still available!
New vinyl pressing! Welcome to the world’s first (and only) post-punk-industrial-trance-psychedelic-surf album! The fact that it took so many adjectives to describe Tragic Figures lets you know just how unique of an album it is. Sure, there are echoes of other artists, like krautrock legends Can, post-punkers Public Image Limited (Savage Republic opened for PiL on their 1982 West Coast dates), avant-garde guitar players like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, scrap metal industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten, and Bay Area sludgecore nihilists Flipper—but really, this unlikely product of (mostly) UCLA undergrads sounds like no other record before or since.
For its 40th anniversary edition, Real Gone Music worked with Bruce Licher to preserve and expand on the magical, talismanic quality of the initial release. The original album has been remastered from the original tapes by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, while both the CD and LP editions both boast an extra disc of largely unreleased rehearsal recordings taped in the bowels of UCLA parking garages, where the band used to practice to take advantage of the extended reverb afforded by all the concrete surfaces (imagine being an unwitting undergrad happening upon this unearthly din coming out of nowhere)! Richie Unterberger’s liner notes feature interviews with band members Licher, Philip Drucker, and Jeff Long, and the LP comes with the original cover graphics expanded into a gatefold jacket pressed in heavyweight “chipboard” paper stock. Clear your calendar and set aside a couple of hours to listen to Tragic Figures…you won’t end up where you started.
New Vinyl Pressing: Sam Hall’s new album as Ghost Orchard, Rainbow Music, is a collage of patience and meditation. It’s filled with nuances as quietly imperceptible as the seasons, or the profound movement of time, where one day looking back you realize your whole spirit has shifted. Where 2019’s critically revered Bunny was a love letter to a romantic relationship, Rainbow Music documents the culmination of Hall’s first personal experience with loss in several forms. At the end of 2020, his longterm childhood pet passed away, and with it the last continuing threads of familiarity between being a kid and adulthood. Still based in the Grand Rapids, Michigan town he’d grown up in, the static ease of familiar living seemed to be coming apart at the seams, as friends moved on to bigger cities, relationships shapeshifted and in a short period of time, another kitten he’d adopted passed away prematurely, leaving Hall to question the trajectory in which he himself was headed.
Like “songs in the key of life,” the title ‘rainbow music’ refers to the myriad of colors and qualities within Hall that are refracted throughout. It’s a symbolization of hope and the aftermath, the flickering light at the end of the tunnel (or “when a rainbow shows up after a big storm”). “Wish I could have fun anymore,” Hall ruminates on “dancing”, as well as confessing he “wish he made more upbeat bangers.” But reality packs more of a punch, and this collection of songs sees him finally be at peace with the current state of affairs. Relatable to anyone who has contemplated what it means to settle down, or even just catch your breath in an era where anguish is commonplace, the release of ‘rainbow music’ is a happy ending in its own right, a marker of survival that remains close to the bone.
Produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Alpenglow is the Minnesota-based sextet’s tenth album. The album, named after the optical phenomenon that takes places when the sun casts a reddish glow across the mountains at dawn and dusk, opens with the wistful beauty of “It’s So Hard To Hold On”. The narrator contemplates the passing of time and how imperative it is to savor it while you have it.
10 of the 11 tracks on Alpenglow were written by lead singer Dave Simonett, whose introspective and literate songwriting is the foundation of the unwavering connection the group’s music has with its fervent and ever-growing audience. “On The Highway” expresses a longing to wander but struggles with the value in maintaining roots. “Central Hillside Blues” addresses nostalgia and loss while “Quitting Is Rough” deals with having inner strength to not lose sight of what is real, with its beautiful and inspiring refrain “climb out, climb out, climb out” The Tweedy-penned “A Lifetime To Find” features a simple back-and-forth dialogue with Death, which ends as one might expect.
Coming soon in October from Cincinnati-based Happy Families — Sorry Eric is propelled by blue collar midwestern modernity, Eric turns it all to gold. Beautiful NZ influenced indie rock that’s too lame to be cool.
Dandy is Robert Livingstone Thompson a.k.a. Dandy Livingstone, the Jamaican British songwriter performer producer responsible for the hits Suzanne, Beware of the Devil, Rudy, A Message to You (later covered by The Specials), and Version Girl (later covered by UB40). This 1968 platter is his second solo album, and one of the first long-players issued by the legendary Trojan label (catalog # TRL-2!); it’s a must-have, highly sought-after rocksteady release featuring a host of Dandy originals along with covers of Chad & Jeremy’s Only a Fool Breaks His Own Heart (also notably recorded by Mighty Sparrow at about the same time) and the Beatles Yesterday.
This is the first-ever reissue in any format of this highly collectible classic; Real Gone Records has pressed it up in orange vinyl limited to 1000 copies!
Birthed from Arizona’s regaled Ascetic House collective, Body of Light is a dark synth-pop outfit comprised of young brothers Andrew and Alexander Jarson. What began as a vehicle for their exploration of noise and sound during their early teens has evolved into an established production over the last decade, as Body of Light continues to carve out their own style of complex, structured, and moving dancefloor electronics.
Their music is not only individually personal, but drawn from experiences shared between the two brothers – and calls on elements of new wave, freestyle, goth, and techno to create timeless and singular tracks without fear of trend or passing fashion.
A British rock titan and an acclaimed member of New York’s acting community walk into a recording studio … and produce one of 2017’s strongest and most compelling albums.This odd couple consists of multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, a founding member of both King Crimson and Foreigner, and guitarist and lead vocalist Ted Zurkowski, co-founder of New York’s celebrated Shakespeare ensemble, Frog & Peach, and a long-time member of the world-famous Actors Studio.
Together, this unlikely new songwriting team conjured the album Bad Old World under the banner of their quartet, HONEY WEST.
Bad Old World is filled with memorable melodies and clever and sophisticated lyrics served on a bed of guitar-driven rock ‘n’ roll played by top-shelf musicians, including drummer Steve Holley, whose credits include Paul McCartney & Wings and many others, and McDonald’s son, Maxwell McDonald, on bass. The album also boasts a guest appearance by Graham Maby (Joe Jackson, They Might Be Giants) on bass (“Brand New Car,” “California,” “A Girl Called Life”). While it’s a modern sound stamped by Ian McDonald’s world-class musicianship and production, it also bears an instant familiarity, thanks to a sonic blueprint recalling such Brit-rock titans as The Move and Mott the Hoople.
Available as a limited edition, collectors’ release of the debut album from Honey West (Readout Records), featuring 12 newly-remastered versions of the original tracks on 180 gram audiophile vinyl, with band signatures, as well as liner and production notes from Ian McDonald.
