New vinyl pressing! Juliana Hatfield – Sings ELO. Available from American Laundromat Records.

“ELO songs were always coming on the radio when I was growing up. They were a reliable source of pleasure and fascination (except for “Fire On High” which scared the heck out of me). With this album of covers I wanted to get my hands deep into some of the massive ‘70’s hits but I am also shining a light on some of the later work (“Ordinary Dream” from 2001’s “Zoom” album, “Secret Messages” and “’From The End Of The World”, both from the ‘80’s).

Thematically, I identify with the loneliness and alienation and the outerspace-iness in the songs I chose. (I have always felt like I am part alien, not fully belonging to or in this Earth world.) Sonically, ELO recordings are like an amusement park packed with fun musical games with layers and layers of varied, meticulous parts for your ears to explore; production curiosities; huge, gorgeous stacks of awe-inspiring vocal harmony puzzles. My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.

Overall, I stuck pretty close to the originals’ structures while figuring out new ways to express or reference the unique and beloved ELO string arrangements. An orchestra would have been difficult or impossible for me to manage to record, nor did I think there was any point in trying to copy those parts as they originally were. Why not try to reimagine them within my zone of limitations? In some cases, I transposed string parts onto guitars, or keyboards, and I even sung some of them (as in “Showdown” and “Bluebird Is Dead”).

Recording the album was a kind of complicated and drawn-out process since I was doing all of my tracks at home in my bedroom (drums and bass were done by Chris Anzalone and Ed Valauskas, respectively [in their own recording spaces]), and I kept running into technology problems that would frustrate me and slow me up. But eventually I got it all done. A labor of love.” -Juliana

New vinyl pressing – Falcon Jane – The Legacy:

Some of you out there may know the name Falcon Jane. Seen it on a glowing marquee at the club downtown. Heard it on a warm afternoon through a gently humming radio.

Some of you may even consider yourselves to be quite familiar with Falcon Jane—know the songs, the style, the “plez rock” they play.

So some of you have heard the silence of these long last few years. As the world closed up, Falcon Jane went dark.

Shelburne, Ontario. Population: 9,000. A town you drove through, not to.

Amongst the farmers’ fields, deep rivers, and roaring highway, we found Falcon Jane. And things are looking a little different now.

There’s something about living out in the sticks with your mama and your dog, missing the road, with a broken heart and broke down car.

Country music starts making a lot more sense. Available soon from Darling Recordings.

An award-winning singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, film composer, producer, and solo artist, Abby Posner is a multi-tasker at heart. She shines a light on the full spread of her creative abilities with Second Chances, an album that uses modern American roots music as a springboard for a bigger, bolder sound. Influenced by everything from punk/rock to electronic music, Second Chances is every bit as diverse as the artist who made it. Inspired by a life-changing breakup and the introspective soul-searching that followed, the album deals with themes like resilience, patience, acceptance, self-awareness, and rebuilding. Posner calls it “a queer love story,” but she clarifies that Second Chances is more about self-love than the affection we receive from others.

“I wrote the songs about my own journey,” she explains. “It’s less about the one who got away, and more about discovering there’s something better awaiting you. That’s why I called it Second Chances. I’m getting into the second act of my life, chasing down something new.” Something new, indeed. Second Chances carves out it’s own genre-fluid identity, funneling Posner’s influences into a sound that’s entirely her own. “Quiet on Sunset” begins as an acoustic folk ballad before moving into electronic territory. “If You Wanna Love” bridges the gap between Posner’s punk/rock past and Americana present. “Darkest Hours”-one of three songs to feature contributions from a full band-is a late-night soul song punctuated by bluesy fretwork. The indie-pop textures of “We’ve Come So Far” nod to modern influences like Phoebe Bridgers, while the hushed vocal harmonies in “Moving Back to Denver” evoke Elliot Smith’s iconic bedroom recordings.

Like Smith, Posner recorded the bulk of Second Chances at home, playing all of the instruments herself while pulling triple-duty as songwriter, performer, and producer. She also pieced together a band to perform three songs-“Darkest Hours,” “Night Train,” and “Simple Life”-during a short live-in-the-studio session. “I wanted to revisit the old-school mentality of capturing a song with one take, without any bells and whistles,” she says of the songs that feature other musicians. “Then I paired those full-band recordings with the rest of the record, where I’m exploring plug-ins, production techniques, and a wider canvas of sound by myself.” The eclectic career of Posner is reflected throughout Second Chances and Posner has never sounded so resolute. Dynamic, melodic, virtuosic, and proudly idiosyncratic, Second Chances reintroduces Abby Posner as a music industry veteran who’s still chasing down new horizons.

Available from Blackbird Records on vinyl soon!

John William Polidori’s The Vampyre is the first English-language story written about the vampire as we know it, preceding Bram Stoker’s Dracula by nearly 80 years. Emanating from the same storytelling game at Lake Geneva which also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  Polidori’s tale bears the Romantic hallmarks of its Byronic influences, but stands wholly on its own despite drawing from Lord Byron’s own “Fragment of a Novel.”

Read here by Laurence R. Harvey and scored by Chris Bozzone, Cadabra Records‘s adaptation leans strongly into the modernity of this very British tale. While Stoker’s Dracula is wholly original in its epistolary form and construction, the elements extant in this early 19^th century tale set the form for what would become the foundation of nearly every vampire story for the next two centuries. Lord Ruthven walks among the elite as one of them, not a mysterious figure in the shadows. None but the villagers suspect what’s going on. The vampire stalks young and lovely women, acting as much as a seducer as a monster, but a creature of the night no matter how you might perceive him.

Order now in time for Halloween…..

New vinyl pressing – on Halloween 1971 night—captured on this three-sided double-LP—the Grateful Dead played the most ethereal, dreamy, and, yes, spooky version of “Dark Star” ever recorded; it’s almost as if Jerry Garcia was communing with his ancestors  (and maybe John Coltrane) for the first seven minutes of his beautifully structured, contemplative and yearning solo. Then, after the vocal verse, Garcia, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, and bassist Phil Lesh take turns suggesting a new improvisational theme before the band telepathically picks up on a two-note theme  and Garcia launches into some of the most ecstatic guitar playing ever captured on tape anywhere (labeled by some the “Tighten Up” jam after the Archie Bell & the Drells song; others hear an embryonic “Eyes of the World”). The rest of the show keeps flying high; the whole band is on fire during “Sugar Magnolia,” a rare, early-‘70s performance of “St. Stephen” (the final live version until 1976) swaggers like it should, and a great “Not Fade Away”/ “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”/ “Not Fade Away” medley rounds out the show…a “hallowed” performance indeed.

Available from Real Gone Music.

New Vinyl Pressing! Pat Van Dyke – Falls To Pieces. Elegant and effortless, dreamy and dusty. Falls To Pieces is a natural progression emerging from the organic textures explored on Pat Van Dyke’s stellar 2018 LP Hello, Summer–which received heavy praise from Pitchfork, Flea Market Funk, and more. The new LP broadcasts a more concise, deliberate, and refined sound that combines elements of jazz and golden era hip-hop with today’s electronic music.

New vinyl pressing! Years in the making – Battleship Potemkin was composed for a live scoring of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 cinematic landmark silent film of Soviet military mutiny and Odessa civilian slaughter, first performed live at Flux Factory in Astoria, Queens on June 14, 2015 and recorded from 2016 to 2020.

Pre-order now!