Album Reviews

Few Manchester groups configured the late-’80s shift toward dance-leaning guitar music as naturally as Happy Mondays. Rising out of Salford’s post-punk sprawl, they fused guitar music with club culture at a moment when those worlds rarely overlapped. Factory Records gave them a platform, but it was the band’s chemistry of Shaun Ryder’s conversational vocals, Paul […]

Motion II is the second batch of tracks from the session that produced last year’s highly acclaimed Motion I (covered here). In 2024, Blue Note celebrated its 85th birthday with a touring quintet of its leading contemporary musicians. At some point during the grueling tour, the members found time to enter a Hollywood studio to […]

 The legacy of Brent Mydland continues to grow with this latest edition of the ongoing Grateful Dead archive series. The departure of Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux in 1979 opened up an opportunity for the iconic band to reconfigure its chemistry dramatically and, as evidenced by the two nearly-complete shows comprising Rainbow Theatre, London, England […]

The newest archival release from the estate of Dr. John is a double disc of live New Orleans R&B. Directly titled Live at the Village Gate, it is a previously unissued performance of the good doctor fronting an eight-piece band that played the historic NYC venue on March 5, 1988.   The 80s were not a […]

Singer-songwriter Tommy Womack is at heart a rock ‘n roller. Accordingly, it makes sense that he teams with Eric “Roscoe” Ambel for his latest release, his ninth, Live a Little. Ambel collaborations have worked for Steve Earle, Jerry Joseph, Sarah Borges, Freedy Johnston, and more. Combine Ambel’s rocking edge with Womack’s tunes, which run from […]

Live at Smoke is the last of the living birthday celebrations for the late, great drummer, Al Foster. These celebrations had been ongoing for more than a decade, and fortunately, the 2025 session was recorded on January 18 and 19, 2025. Foster passed away on May 28, 2025,  before the music could be released, but […]

Their first release in over 14 years, Forever, I’ve Been Being Born, finds Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter dealing with life, death, change, and renewal as the Seattle-based outfit’s fragile cosmic folk music drifts into the ether.  The band’s core, vocalist Sykes and guitarist Phil Wandscher, needed time to regroup and find inspiration after losing […]

For this year’s Record Store Day Black Friday lineup, Rhino puts The Doors front and center with Live in Copenhagen, a previously unreleased 1968 performance finally pulled from the vault. Pressed on crystal-clear vinyl and limited to 5,300 copies, the 2-LP set captures the band’s full early show from September 17th at the Falkoner Centret […]

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2025, Matchbox Twenty digs into their archive for a release that longtime fans probably didn’t expect but will immediately appreciate. Mad Season (Live 2001) arrives as a 2LP set pressed on opaque Flavors Truffle–colored vinyl and limited to 3,500 copies. More importantly, it marks the band’s first full-length live […]

Fifteen years on, What Separates Me From You feels like the moment A Day To Remember redrew the boundaries of what their hybrid of metalcore and pop-punk could hold. For the anniversary pressing, Craft Recordings has repressed the album on a Transparent Sea Glass variant with metallic album artwork. What Separates Me From You finds […]

Flowers in the Afternoon: Late-1960s Sunshine arrives as the third entry in Craft Recording’s psych/garage RSD trilogy. Where Poppies leaned into fuzzed-out oddities and Double Whammy played in Nuggets-style garage grit, this new installment zeroes in on that brief cultural moment when harmony, melody, and AM-radio optimism collided. Framed around producer and archivist Alec Palao’s […]

Creed’s rise at the turn of the millennium was fast, loud, and massive, and Live in San Antonio captures the band right in the middle of that unavoidable ascent. Recorded on November 14, 1999 at the Freeman Coliseum, the show falls squarely in their Human Clay breakout period, when the band was headlining arenas and […]

The music world has never seen anyone like Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The blind multi-instrumentalist could play three horns at once through his amazing circular breathing technique. He was a master of every woodwind instrument, and used unusual instruments like the manzello, the strich (a straight Eb alto saxophone to which he added a French horn […]

Singer-songwriter Afton Wolfe is arguably the most conceptually artful troubadour that we have heard since Tom Waits. The reference to Waits is rather obvious in Wolfe’s deep, gravelly voice and in his off-the-beaten-track concepts. Yet, Wolfe also possesses the fearlessness of Bruce Cockburn, the intellectualism of Leonard Cohen, the deep woods poetry of the late […]

Available on vinyl, digital and compact disc formats for successive late 2025 Record Store Days, Warren Zevon’s final live performance, recorded Live At The Edmonton Folk Music Festival, joins 1980’s Stand In The Fire (issued in expanded form twice) and 1993’s Learning To Flinch, as sterling examples of how the late singer/songwriter so artfully transposed […]

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2025, Rhino digs into Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required-era with a focused, six-track reissue of 12″ers, long tucked away in CD history and finally granted a proper vinyl release. Issued in a limited run of 3,500 copies to mark the album’s 40th anniversary, this set pulls together extended mixes […]

Few bands feel as tied to their hometown mythology as The Flaming Lips, so it makes perfect sense that their full-album performance of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots would eventually circle back to Oklahoma City. Recorded on August 30, 2024 at the Zoo Amphitheater and issued as a 2LP, 45rpm neon-yellow RSD Black Friday exclusive, […]

Fleetwood Mac Live 1975 captures the band at a pivotal turning point, months after Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined and just before the group became one of the biggest acts in the world. Recorded at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ and Jorgensen Auditorium in Storrs, CT, this set documents the early chemistry of […]

Hüsker Dü: The Miracle Year documents a band on the brink of jumping from the independent label SST to signing with major label Warner. By 1985, Hüsker Dü had already started bending hardcore into something more melodic and unpredictable, but these recordings capture the moment when their songwriting and their sonic ambition fused into a […]

Originally released on CD in 1991, The Very Best of Deee-Lite arrives on vinyl for the first time, giving a focused recap of a group that treated dance music as a place to experiment. Issued as a Black Friday 2025 Record Store Day exclusive, the Rhino release compiles twenty tracks from their 1990–1994 run on […]