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Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 June 2018

Geffen B0028266
Format: CD

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“At the end of the tour, in early April [1968], the Who recorded their show at the Fillmore East,” Dave Marsh writes in Before I Get Old, still the definitive history of the band. “The tape of the Fillmore East concert is extraordinary,” he continued; “a remarkable burst of sustained energy.” Unfortunately, when the Who listened to the tapes, enough flaws jumped out that they decided not to release them. Nonetheless, over the years, bootlegs of those New York City concerts of April 5 and 6, 1968, enhanced the band’s reputation as a powerful live act.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 May 2018

Matador OLE-1123-2 LC 11552
Format: CD

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The 15 tracks of Belle and Sebastian’s latest release were originally issued on three five-song EPs titled How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pts. 1-3. Does that make this latest edition a coherent album or a compilation? After the first listen, I found that the music made sense either way, though on repeated hearing I found myself pausing after each quintet of songs. At 70 minutes, How to Solve Our Human Problems is a lot to absorb; listening to these songs in three groups of five each gives this listener more space and time in which to digest them, and has let some tracks that at first sounded like filler come into their own.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 May 2018

4AD LTD 4AD0035CD
Format: CD

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The Breeders reunited in 2013 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their second and best-known album, Last Splash, and soon decided to record music for a new album, their fifth. All Nerve took a few more years to complete, but the same lineup that appeared on Last Splash has produced a record that embodies the qualities that made them unique. The strangely likeable, almost hummable melodies and hooks are slight reminders of Kim Deal’s other band, the Pixies, but the Breeders use dissonance and buzz-saw guitars in ways that set them apart from everyone else.

Read more: MGMT: "Little Dark Age"

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 April 2018

Yep Roc YEP-2556
Format: CD

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Songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Grant-Lee Phillips’s ninth solo LP is a reaction to the current climate of American politics and culture, but it’s not shrill or hysterical. Even at its angriest, Widdershins is full of wit and a sense of shared responsibility, both for our current predicament and for what we might need to do about it. It’s also tuneful and skillfully played.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 March 2018

March 2018

Daptone DAP-051
Format: monaural CD

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James Hunter made some albums and EPs as Howlin’ Wilf in the late 1980s before making . . . believe what I say, his first recording under his own name, in 1996. Whatever It Takes is his seventh album with the James Hunter Six, and his second for Daptone Records, a label founded to handle just such a devoted carrier of the soul-music torch. The English singer has a natural feel for the music, and sings it in the sophisticated manner of a Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye. He’s also a formidable guitarist and bandleader whose sextet plays his songs with understated skill.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 March 2018

Blue Note B002780402
Format: CD

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Organist Dr. Lonnie Smith returned to Blue Note Records in 2016 with Evolution, an entertaining and intelligent slice of soul jazz that was one of my favorite discs of that year. He’s back again on Blue Note, and this time producer Don Was recorded him live with his trio at the Jazz Standard, in New York. The show was a celebration of Smith’s 75th birthday, and this seven-song set illustrates the organist’s versatility and the timelessness -- the freshness, even -- of the kind of music he’s been playing for so long.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 February 2018

Columbia/Legacy 88985454672
Format: 2 CDs

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Of all the many phases of Bob Dylan’s career, his turn to charismatic Christianity in the late 1970s was the most puzzling and controversial, to fans and music critics alike. Dave Marsh, in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (1983), wrote of Slow Train Coming (1979), the first album professing Dylan’s new faith, that the singer-songwriter “seemed to be using religion to front some new found right-wing political views.”

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 February 2018

Mercury Nashville B0027408-02
Format: CD

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Chris Stapleton has written six No.1 hits for other singers, and more than 150 of his songs have appeared on albums by musicians as diverse as Adele, George Strait, and Tim McGraw. Stapleton is no Music City hack but a skilled singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose knowledge and command of Southern music idioms runs deep. Last year’s From a Room: Volume 1 owed as much to Gregg Allman as to George Jones, and was well played and refreshingly unslick. The Country Music Association awarded it Album of the Year.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 January 2018

Sour Mash/Caroline JDNCCD27-2567067405
Format: CD

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Given that he was the principal songwriter for Oasis, it’s not surprising that the first two albums from Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds were well crafted and tuneful. The group’s eponymous 2011 debut and its 2015 follow-up, Chasing Yesterday, were accessible and filled with hooks, while sounding different enough from Oasis to stand on their own. At times, Gallagher’s solo albums have felt somewhat reserved, as if he wanted to explore other facets of pop without returning to ground he’d already covered with Oasis.