KAINA’s Next to the Sun was one of the VMP team’s favorite releases in 2019, as we loved the album’s dedications to KAINA’s native Chicago, and her family and the communities that raised her. Dripping in bright production and buoyed by her brighter voice, Next to the Sun is an album about soldiering on despite it all, and remembering to love who you are and where you came from.
For a limited time, you can obtain the Vinyl Me Please version of this album (pressed at Gotta Groove) on opaque blue vinyl.
Over the last half a dozen years or so, John Moreland’s honesty has stunned us––and stung. As he put hurts we didn’t even realize we had or shared into his songs, we sang along. And we felt better. But there has always been far more to Moreland than sad songs. Today, his earthbound poetry remains potent, but in addition to his world-weary candor, Moreland’s music smolders with gentle wisdom, flashes of wit and joy, and compassion. And once again, as we listen, we feel better.
“I can’t dress myself up and be some folk singer character that I’m not really,” Moreland says. “I figured, I can’t dress up these songs and try to sell them that way. All I can do is be me.”
Out February 2020, his latest album LP5 proves John Moreland has gotten really good at being John Moreland––thank God. A masterful display of songwriting by one of today’s best young practitioners of the art form, LP5 is Moreland’s finest record to date. The album’s experimentations with instrumentation and sounds capture an artist whose confidence has grown, all without abandoning the hardy roots rock bed and the lyrics-first approach Moreland’s work demands. “I feel like just this year, in the past few months, I’ve reached a point where I feel like I know what I’m doing here now,” he says. “And I feel comfortable with it.”
When pressed about the hard-won wisdom and peace that seem to define LP5, Moreland is characteristically both direct and humble. “I definitely am wiser than I was five years ago––I guess anybody would hope to be wiser than they were five years ago,” he says with a laugh. “But I do feel more mellow. Settled. I don’t feel as antsy or think I’ve got to prove myself anymore. I feel really comfortable and free to just do what I want to do.”
Whiskey Basterds’ debut album Redemption on Main St., is now available! Written over the course of three years in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Ojai, CA, it was produced by Ken Eros and April Theriault, recorded and mixed at Eros Creative and Sound, and mastered by Eric Boulanger at The Bakery.
If this 1972 record for the Paula label was the sum total of Dallas, Texas soul man Bobby Patterson’s career output, then he’d still be reckoned a cult figure among R&B fans. In fact, it’s so good that the fact that he went on to cut five other albums and produce artists ranging from Fontella Bass to Chuck Jackson to Little Johnny Taylor almost seems besides the point.
This is a stone soul masterpiece, full of grit and groove, with a breathtaking stylistic breadth stretching from funky soul (“If You Took a Survey”; “How Do You Spell Love”) to romantic soul balladery (“I Get My Groove from You”) to James Brown-style workouts (“Make Sure You Can Handle It”) to socially-conscious, wah wah-drenched commentary (“The Whole Funky World Is a Ghetto”) and all points in between. But what really makes this record mind-blowing is that Patterson wrote all but one song (the one he didn’t write, “Right On Jody,” is an answer song to Johnnie Taylor’s big hit “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone”). Every soul searcher needs this one!
The Wood Brothers have announced the release of a new studio album ‘Kingdom In My Mind’ due January 24 via Honey Jar/Thirty Tigers. The 11-song collection represents a reckoning of sorts, examining circumstance, mortality and human nature. Finding strength in accepting what lies beyond our control, the material on ‘Kingdom In My Mind’ hones in on the bittersweet beauty that underlies doubt and pain and sadness with vivid character studies and unflinching self-examination. While the lyrics dig deep, the trio draws from across a broad sonic spectrum to create a set of songs that although thoughtful and inward looking is ultimately transportive and effervescent.
