Monthly Archives: January 2022

VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Soul Queen of New Orleans” Irma Thomas enjoyed a run of national success in the U.S. in the mid-’60s with classics like “Wish Someone Would Care,” “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” along with the original vocal version of “Time Is on My Side” (later a massive hit for the Rolling Stones), recorded for Imperial Records.

Following a short stint at Chess Records, Irma recorded for Canyon before being signed to Atlantic Records by the label’s much renowned executive, Jerry Wexler. A first session in 1971 yielded one single, “Full Time Woman” which failed to chart but was singled out by Wexler in a 2007 interview as one of his all-time favorite recordings.

Undaunted, Atlantic arranged further sessions for Irma in Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia throughout 1972 – yet none of the material was ever issued until a 2014 CD collection. Now, some 50 years after they were originally recorded, Full Time Woman: The Lost Cotillion Album brings all of Irma’s recordings for Atlantic (under its Cotillion imprint) to LP for the first time.

Irma puts her own distinctive, ever-soulful stamp on such tunes as the standard “Time After Time,” Bobbie Gentry’s 1969 hit, “Fancy,” and Billy Walker’s country hit, “Tell Me Again,” alongside the funky “She’s Taken My Part,” (the flipside of “Full Time Woman”), and R&B-flavored original material including the highlights “Waiting For Someone,” “Our Love Don’t Come Easy,” and two early ‘70s Philly soul cuts, “No Name” and “Adam And Eve.”

All told, 13 of the 15 tracks on Irma Thomas: Full Time Woman—The Lost Cotillion Album make their vinyl debut (on light blue vinyl, to be exact); it goes without saying that this release represents a major addition to the Irma Thomas discography.

That essential jolt of rock ’n’ roll—timeless, freewheeling, hard charging—comes to you courtesy of Urge Overkill, the outfit out of Chicago, resurfacing in 2022 with new stuff. The Vinyl District is proud to premiere the bracing “Forgiven” here from their upcoming album Oui, due in stores February 11 via Omnivore Recordings.

It will be the first new release in more than a decade from the band that earned its name backing Nirvana on its Nevermind tour, Pearl Jam on the Vs. tour, and especially with their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” that became a sensation in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

The vibrant, almost offhand “Forgiven”—one of 11 new originals on an album that also includes a cover of Wham’s “Freedom,” came with some specific inspirations from some classic rockers, Eddie “King” Roeser says. “Little Richard. The Killer, Jerry Lee. Gang of Four, Some Girls, Television. Unwittingly these were the sounds swimming through my brain the day I started working on ‘Forgiven.’”

His only goal, he says, was to “return with something that rocked.” Turned out it was simple. “I had been messing around working on high volume riffs,” Roeser tells us. “You don’t need lyrics, all kinds of songs just repeat one word for a while—just go over there and kick some fucking ass!” As such, the words come secondarily—and spontaneously. Working with longtime band partner Nash Kato, “I freeform sang most of the ideas you hear on the track,” Rouser says.

Forgive him if the words seem just right for a world trying to crawl out from the pandemic, with refrains like “When the world comes down around you, you gotta believe,” and ultimately: ”I’m going to be among the living / I don’t want to hear your opinion.”

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On 1992’s Automatic for the People—one of the finest LPs released that year or any other year for that matter—Michael Stipe and R.E.M. play Risk. The goal of the board game is to conquer the world, and that’s exactly what Automatic for the People did. Sure, the LP had its detractors and haters, but they were holed up in Yakutsk and things weren’t looking good.

R.E.M. arose from the burgeoning Athens, Georgia indie rock scene with 1982 EP “Chronic Town,” a record that bore an element of mystery that had as much to do with Stipe’s indecipherable vocals as it did the fact that nothing else sounded quite like it. I spent significant amounts of time trying to figure out what Stipe was saying in “Gardening at Night,” but he may as well have been speaking Quechua. Stipe kept mumbling on 1983’s aptly titled Murmur, but indecipherable lyrics notwithstanding “Radio Free Europe” was one of that year’s best songs.

As Stipe began to enunciate the band lost some of its luster—1984’s Reckoning, 1985’s Fables of the Reconstruction, and 1986’s Life’s Rich Pageant all had their moments, but none broke new musical ground, and R.E.M. seemed a band going nowhere. Then came 1987’s Document and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” and suddenly R.E.M. found itself with a mass audience. They cemented their place as a commercial pop contender with the playful “Stand” on 1988’s Green and “Shiny Happy People”on 1991’s Out of Time. Both showed the band had a lighter sound, while “Losing My Religion” on the latter LP proved R.E.M. could produce a commercial blockbuster.

On 1992’s Automatic for the People all of the pieces fell into place. It’s the only R.E.M. album I’m inclined to listen to from beginning to end, and all but one of its twelve songs (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1,” which I’d have replaced with a song with more meat on its bones) will catch your breath. And it just so happens that one of the LP’s themes is breathlessness.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | now the day is over, the innocence mission’s most popular album in nearly two decades will now be available for the first time on vinyl.

It’s being released on 12″ vinyl LP on January 28 by Badman Recording Co. Jazz-tinged and dreamy, this offering from Lancaster, PA’s the innocence mission collects standards and traditional songs that singer Karen Peris has sung to her children as lullabies since they were born. The album features new album art (created by Karen Peris) and a new version of the song “Edelweiss” that is available only on this LP.

Among the covers featured from movies are “Stay Awake” from Mary Poppins, “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. The record features one original song, “My Love Goes With You.”

Australian radio station Kinderling Kids Radio described the album as “delightful” and “full of sweet sounds to send you off to sleep.” AllMusic called the record “an absolutely beguiling collection of standards,” describing it as “a benefit collection of cover songs that are all centered reverie akin to dreaming. Calling them all lullabies would be stretching a little bit, but the presentations are such that they might as well be.”

They described “My Love Goes With You” as “perhaps the most beautiful and tender song on the outing,” before summarizing that the album “could have been merely a curiosity piece, a curious addition to a mysterious catalog by a singular group. Instead, it is nothing less than a wondrous little gem.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | A Bowie Celebration, featuring Noel Gallagher, Gary Oldman, Ricky Gervais, Def Leppard, Duran Duran, Living Colour, Rob Thomas, WALK THE MOON, Jake Wesley Rogers and others, will take place Saturday 8th January, on what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday. The event will be available on RollingLiveStudios.com to enjoy worldwide for 24 hours.

This year’s A Bowie Celebration will also celebrate the 35th anniversary of Labyrinth, the classic fantasy film and Jim Henson/David Bowie collaboration, with a special performance from actress Evan Rachel Wood, and an appearance by Brian Henson. The show will be dedicated to frequent Bowie photographer Mick Rock and will include new interview footage.

The band will be comprised of former Bowie alumni band members from throughout his legendary career, led by Mike Garson, who was the rock icon’s longest-running and most frequently used band member. Other band members will include Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, David Sanborn, Alan Childs, Steve Elson, Mark Guiliana, Omar Hakim, Stan Harrison, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard, and Carmine Rojas.

A portion of the ticket sales will go to the Save The Children organisation, a charity important to Bowie and the beneficiary of funds raised from his 50th Birthday Concert held in 1997 at Madison Square Garden.

Additional guest vocalists set to perform Bowie favourites include Gail Ann Dorsey, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Gaby Moreno, Gretchen Parlato, Joe Sumner and more to be announced. Kitten Kuroi, Maiya Sykes and Jules Galli are also singing with the band. Line-up subject to change.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Left Banke arrived in 1966 with their hit singles “Walk Away Renee” (ranked #222 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list in 2004) and “Pretty Ballerina,” which put them on the forefront of the genre now known as Baroque Pop. Founder Michael Brown left the band before their second album (The Left Banke Too — featuring “There’s Gonna Be a Storm,” the title of the long out-of-print and collectible anthology of their Smash Records repertoire), going on to involvement in other influential groups including Montage, Stories, and the Beckies.

In 1978, original members Steve Martin Caro, Tom Finn, and George Cameron reunited to record tracks for Finn’s new publishing deal. The tracks would emerge in 1986 in the US as Strangers on a Train, and in the UK under the title Voices Calling.

Flash forward to 2001. Brown, who’d remained an active songwriter, invited Caro to lay down vocals on new material he had written in hopes of sparking a Left Banke resurgence. The tracks were circulated to industry insiders, but were not heard by the public at large. Six bonus tracks from the 2001 sessions now augment the Strangers on a Train reissue, making it a cohesive document of not only the last Left Banke album, but what exists of what could have been another.

All of it is available on CD for the first time worldwide from Omnivore Recordings, due out February 25, 2022. The new issue is produced for release by Daniel Coston, Scott Schinder, and Grammy® Award-winner Cheryl Pawelski, with new liner notes by Schinder and restoration and mastering by Grammy® Award-winning engineer Michael Graves at Osiris Studio. Strangers on a Train presents the culmination of this groundbreaking band, whose influence is not only still felt, but heard.

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28 years ago this September, Nashville’s Lambchop released their full-length debut, a sprawling affair not unusual for its era except that it was utterly devoid of filler. As intriguing as it is consistent, I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips is simultaneously loose but well-ordered, and with an irreverent but never dismissive relationship to the country music of their home city. While in no way embryonic, the contents are also distinct from any Lambchop album that followed, and it’s been long overdue for a vinyl reissue. Merge Records has remedied this lack with a peak vinyl red and pink swirl edition, along with standard black wax. Both are available now. Considerations and recollections are found below.

As is the case with many debuts, Lambchop’s dual-titled first record was the byproduct of a long period of gestation, reportedly spanning back to the mid-’80s, with a prior name in the narrative (Posterchild) and a series of three cassettes (one shared with the bands Crop Circle Hoax and Spent) that date back to 1990, some of their contents collected in 2011 by Grapefruit Records on the Turd Goes Back LP.

There was also a handful of pre-LP 7-inches, one of them issued as Posterchild (a split with Crop Circle Hoax), with much of this material, along with live and unreleased stuff, later compiled by Merge on the 2001 CD Tools in the Dryer. While playing the side stage of the Lollapalooza Festival earlier in the summer of I Hope You’re Sitting Down / Jack’s Tulips’ release (1994), the band’s merch included those 45s, along with packs of cigarettes personalized with a fancy cursive capital L (similar to the lettering found on the sweaters of Laverne DeFazio).

Lambchop’s show at the Charles Town, WV Lollapalooza tour stop was pleasant but hard to pinpoint as their music blended with the sound of Parliament-Funkadelic wafting over from the larger stage. Seated in a rocking chair with his guitar, Kurt Wagner remarked upon the mingling and seemed amused. Back home afterward, those 7-inches sharpened the focus somewhat, but it wasn’t until the release of Sitting Down / Tulips that the full extent of Lambchop’s eccentricity was revealed.

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Celebrating John McLaughlin on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

I don’t know what you do when you want to set your ears free to grokk nakedly in the Universal Aether, but I know what I do–turn on the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It’s like Miles Davis, circa Bitches Brew, minus all the annoying edge. Yes, the MO has filtered out all that nasty street that Miles insisted upon blurting all over his newfangled fusion, and left us with nothing but pure unsexed cosmos to explore.

Theirs was a carefully controlled experiment in defunkification, and it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest (er, make that tamest) expectations. While John McLaughlin’s guitar occasionally wanders into pure freakout territory, it’s always a freakout of the mind, rather than the balls. The Mahavishnu Orchestra threw the balls in the trash, then took up yoga. And hired a Frenchman to play violin. And an opera singer. It’s a wonder, really, that more people didn’t get hurt.

Of course, plenty of people like the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s interstellar hoo-hah, because the truth is, you never know what anybody’s going to like. Where some people hear pleasing chakra-massaging neo-jazz with an edge, I hear too little rock and too much spacy New Age hoodoo. The guy can play guitar like a God, as he proved on Miles Davis’ landmarks Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, just as Jan Luc Ponty, the French violinist I mentioned above, can play like blazes, as he demonstrated on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. But on Visions of the Emerald Beyond, whose title speaks volumes, they don’t want to rock your balls off—they want to transport you to a higher spiritual plane, or Indra’s Net, or wherever it is Gary Wright and the Buddha hang out, playing dueling keytars.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra of Visions of the Emerald Beyond is a completely different outfit from the one that recorded three LPs for Columbia from 1971-73. The original band included the likes of Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer, and there are plenty of fans who sneer at the Orchestra Mark II, which in addition to Ponty included bassist Ralphe Armstrong, Gayle Moran on keyboards and vocals, and Narada Michael Walden on drums.

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