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CD: $14.98
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The Bluetones
Self-Titled
2006 album produced by Hugh Jones (Echo & The Bunnymen, Icicle Works, etc), it is a release that sees them bounce back from the threat of obscurity with an album that fizzes with reinvigoration and teeming with superlative tunes about everything from environmental apathy to cross-dressing cross-Channel swimmers and includes the single 'My Neighbours House'. -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Cooking Vinyl
Genre/Style: Pop
MP3 Myspace
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CD:$14.98$9.98
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Field Music
Tones of Town
ield Music covered a lot of ground in 2006. The trio from Sunderland, England (songwriters Peter and David Brewis and keyboard manipulator Andrew Moore) toured the continent, playing with Belle and Sebastian, Architecture in Helsinki and UK compadres Maximo Park and The Futureheads, performed at both the Reading and Leeds Festivals, and traveled to the US where they were the surprise hit of SXSW. They also invented a dance craze (according to English tabloid The News of the World); etched one side of a 7-inch with a list of things you shouldn't do but probably already have; released a B-sides collection featuring a brief and inaccurate history of pre-Field Music experiments; and somehow found time to record their second album proper.
Whereas their eponymous debut was played and executed with care -- dryly produced, ambitiously skewed, multilayered, and engineered to gradually reveal intricacies over repeated listens-- Tones of Town pushes and scratches at the boundaries of their debut, moving in several directions at once, and taking big risks.
The band stretches and surprises itself on the cut-and-paste beat boxing of "Sit Tight," the Day At The Races harmonies of "Closer At Hand," the overlapped marimba and undiluted rock guitar of "Give It Lose It Take It," and the spiraling modular structures of the title track. On "A House Is Not A Home" and the album's first single "In Context," they might even be described as "funky" (albeit in a singular avant-mackem way.) -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Memphis Industries
Genre/Style: Pop
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CD: $14.98
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Seafood
Paper Crown King
Paper Crown King, is one of the best alt rock epics youll hear this year. Anyone who marveled at previous Seafood albums couldn’t help being stunned by their intelligence and emotionally scaling sound. -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Cooking Vinyl
Genre/Style: Rock
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CD:$15.98
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Softlightes
Say No To Being Cool
On their debut they blend joyful pop experiments with a dizzying array of instruments, sounds and textures. It's on Modular so automatically, Jamie likes them. -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Modular
Genre/Style: Pop / Dance
MP3 The Prayer
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CD:$17.98
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Triosk
The Headlight Serenade
This apparently harmless phrase masking something altogether darker could also describe Australian trio Triosk's second full-length release The Headlight Serenade. The album's crystal clarity sounds like it's floating on air and yet there's a looming undertow that threatens to pull you under if you let it. This balance of light and dark is the key to The Headlight Serenade's heady attractions. The title was inspired by the transitory play of headlights as they pass across objects in the night, creating moments frozen in time. Each piece on the album also captures a glimpse of a particular moment, memory or feeling, be it a past-life romance or the sensation of lying in a boat, looking at the stars. -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Leaf
Genre/Style: Electronic / Experimental / Jazz
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CD: $18.98
LP: $17.98
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Various Artists
Ain't It Hard!Garage & Psych from Viva Records
The short-lived Viva Records label was one wildly eclectic outfit. Helmed by hitmaker Snuff Garrett, this Los Angeles-based imprint targeted the teen marketplace with a series of extraordinary garage/psych/pop singles. The label's command of popular styles prevailed across these Top 40 hopefuls, ranging from the stomping beat of the Shindogs to the psych-fuzz nirvana of the Sound Sandwich. And there's Class of '66 garage-grunge from the Wailers and the Second Helping (yes, that's a teenage Kenny Loggins howling at the moon on the positively snarling 'Let Me In,' among other selections). With a supporting cast led by Leon Russell and J.J. Cale and bolstered with choice Snuff Garrett Productions like Gypsy Trips and Sunday Servants, Ain't It Hard! stands as an essential anthology of Sunset Strip sixties sounds! -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Sundazed
Genre/Style: Garage / Psychedelic
MP3 The Sound Sanwich - Apothecary Dream
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CD: $18.98
LP: $23.98
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Varous Artist
Studio One Rub-A-Dub
Latest Soul Jazz/Studio One Records release featuring classic '70s tracks from the foundation label of reggae. In the 1970s, Clement Dodd's legendary Studio One Records went through an amazing period of re-birth working with new artists such as Willie Williams, Lone Ranger, Michigan and Smiley, Horace Andy, as well as continuing to work with classic artists such as Alton Ellis, Freddie McGregor, etc. Re-versioning classic Studio One rhythms became the order of the day in the 1970s, not just with Studio One boss Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd, but with every Jamaican producer of note employing their own in-house musicians to copy the music emanating from Brentford Road. The music on Studio One Rub-A-Dub features classic and rare tracks from this amazing period, from the likes of Cornel Campbell, The Heptones, Johnny Osbourne and many other legendary artists. Sleeve-notes are by Chris Salewicz, the acclaimed writer who has written books on Joe Strummer, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones and many more.-CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Soul Jazz
Genre/Style: Reggae / Dub
MP3 Cornell Campbell — My Conversation
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CD: $17.98
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Volcano the Bear
Classic Erasmus Fusion
VTB have crafted a strange geometry in their musique concrete between celestial duck honks and what sounds like a flood in the living room, there are more than a few occasions of heads cocked at the speaker in mundus caninus. Of course, this bodes well for humans, too. Augmented by all the dog friendly moments is a double album of sprawling musical invention. Record one births gently into a lo-fi-adelic Comus-like saline that even might even win over the Devendra crowd, if the Devendra crowd had ingested just a little too much mushroom tea on that day and left their ironic trucker hats at the door. Song becomes fever dream and then pitches into a barren place of low estate and low chanting whose Residents might well be Eskimos. With typical minimalist pageantry, VTB mutate from piece to piece, punctuating along the way with surprise sounds that the aforementioned dogs love so well; the kinds of quirks that make Nurse With Wound and P16.D4 records such fun listens. VTB spin some very melodious tales, which are subliminally hooky, after a fashion. Spiritual and surreal are sisters. Quiet ritualism queues with dadaistic and with progressive harmonies, together on the same fractured, out world, sing-along journey. And that's just record one. Record two crawls slowly from the echoey ooze, grows legs and then presents as a different and, in many ways, more dramatic creature. A long, shifting organ drone becomes a deeply psychedelic statement that bleats loud and strong like an acid bleached Spiral Insana or a sneaky This Heat.-CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records
Genre/Style: Rock / Experimental
MP3 Classic Erasmus Fusion
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CD: $15.98
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Lucinda Williams
West
It’s long been said that the blues -- in all its forms -- is one of the most potent means to transform pain into beauty. Lucinda Williams has known that since she began devouring music as a youngster growing up in Louisiana, and she’s been finding new ways to perform that alchemical reaction ever since.
With West, a disc that may well be Williams’ most personal work to date, the singer-songwriter channels both her emotion and restive creative energy into a startling set of songs that touch on both darkness and redemption. At turns strikingly spare and compellingly muscular, the album’s 13 cuts attest to her willingness to stretch as a musician -- and to put herself on the line as a chronicler of life.
“The songs deal with a chapter in my life and they definitely tell a story,” says Williams. “It’s probably been the most prolific time in my life as a writer. I’d been through so many changes -- my mother’s death and a very tumultuous relationship that ended badly-- so obviously there’s a lot of pain and struggling, but it ends with a look towards the future.”
There’s no disputing the sense of struggle that imbues songs like “Fancy Funeral” -- a ballad with a gentle lilt that can’t mask the disillusionment of a narrator trying to make a case for the meaninglessness of such an affair. Nor can one miss the ache in “Mama You Sweet,” a raw-but-right rumination on what remains after the loss of a loved one. -CP
Release Date: 02/13/07
Label: Lost highway
Genre/Style: Country
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