With their new release, I Am Very Far, Okkervil River has made a musical slow-burner. Unlike some of their previous work, there is no immediate song that blasts out and catches the ear
If you’re like us you wore out your copies of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall and other Pink Floyd albums in high school. On September 26 there will finally be a reason to pick up new copies of Floyd’s 14 original studio LPs as a feature-loaded set of remasters will come out that day on CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, an array of digital formats, viral marketing and iPhone Apps.
The new remasters come in four different varieties – Discovery, Experience, Immersion and Vinyl. The Discovery series are for newcomers to the music of Pink Floyd as they will feature all 14 albums “painstakingly digitally remastered” by The Wall co-producer James Guthrie in “newly crafted packaging and booklets created by the band’s long-time artwork collaborator Storm Thorgerson.” You can buy all 14 albums together in the Discovery Box Set or individually.
Unreleased material starts flying in the Experience series which features the remastered versions of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, each with a bonus disc of additional material and expanded liner notes. The Dark Side set includes a previously unreleased recording of the album performed at Wembley Stadium in 1974, Wish You Were Here features outtakes and live material from that era, while The Wall’s bonus material is still to be determined.
READ ON for more on the new Pink Floyd remasters…
I was watching Allen Toussaint’s recording of Austin City Limits and before playing Get Out My Life Woman, Toussaint says,
“This song coming up is a song that I wrote for brother Lee Dorsey many years ago but it was really made popular by another great person, but it’s my most covered song of all songs I’ve written – I’m not sure why…..because ten minutes after I wrote it, I was quite confused.”
And I…I just don’t know what cover he is referring to. It’s been covered by so many major artists, as you’re about to see. I normally like to cap Cover Wars at ten renditions but somehow we ended up with 12 this time around, and that was excluding some legendary takes from the likes of Joe Williams and Jimi Hendrix.
The Contestants:
Artist: Ant Trip Ceremony
Album: 24 Hours
The Skinny: Chances are, if you aren’t familiar with a lot of random psychedelic bands from the 1960’s, you may not have heard of Ant Trip Ceremony, a band formed at Oberlin College with just this one album. In addition to the originals on their 1968 release are this cover and one of Hey Joe.
READ ON for more covers of Allen Toussaint’s Get Out My Life Woman…
Back in December, Grateful Dead/Furthur guitarist Bob Weir sat in with the house band at a TEDxAlcatraz event in San Francisco for stirring versions of Dylan’s Masters of War and
We keep our eyes peeled for new tour dates announcements each week and compile them on Tuesdays for this handy column… I seem to say this every week, but 2011
Todd Kerns is having fun. The 6 foot, 4 inch bass player is running from one end of the stage to the other like there was nothing else in the world but rock & roll. And how could you blame him. He’s on a stage in Jacksonville, Florida, playing in Slash’s band, just tearing it up on the last night of their stint opening for Ozzy Osbourne. Tomorrow, they will leave for Australia, Asia and South America. But tonight, they are rocking out, feeling the high of a show that is kicking ass. And Todd Kerns is loving every minute of it.
For this year’s moe.down, the upstate NY-based indie jammers have announced the first round of artists piecemeal through the moe.down Facebook page. Today’s “leaks” have just wrapped up with the
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker sure love the Beacon Theatre as the pair have made the Manhattan venue a regular stop on each of their recent tours. Steely Dan returns
To say that Emmylou Harris has had a profound impact on roots music may be a bit of an understatement. Over the last 40 years Harris has put out 20
To say the Felice Brothers marched off the edge of the map on their latest album Celebration, Florida would be a stretch, but the band definitely veered away from their well-worn path. Foregoing the straightforward folk romps for which they have become known, the Felice Brothers took their core acoustic song structures and morphed them into ambient, sonic departures. The distinction relative to band’s previous albums is dramatic, however, the reliance on elements like organs, drum machines, synthesizers, ambient sounds and found objects for percussion did not drive the material, but rather gave the band opportunities to learn, and ultimately build on their abilities as studio musicians.
[Photo by Nolan Conway]
“The skeletons of the songs themselves were written outside of that kind of influence,” lead singer and songwriter Ian Felice explains. “I wrote them with just an acoustic guitar or piano and a voice. When we moved into the space, we had a vision to depart and experiment with different kinds of instrumentation and sounds, so we got a couple different organs and beat making machines, and it was a big learning process, because we actually had to learn to play a lot of these things. It didn’t really inform the record or the songs that much, A lot of it has to do with keeping ourselves interested in the music.”
A “reinvention album” so-to-speak like this will probably take fans by surprise, but to the band, it just felt like growth. They didn’t want to make another album like Yonder is the Clock or the previous self-titled album. The Felice Brothers succeeded, as this time around they are more likely to hear references to Brian Eno than The Band. The process was intentional; they wanted it to sound different.
READ ON for more of our chat with Ian Felice of The Felice Brothers…
