What’s that festive sound you’re hearing? If it’s fun, fresh, and a little off the beaten path, it might just be coming from Omnivore Recordings’ recent reissue of The dB’s and Friends’ now-classic holiday party Christmas Time Again! (OVCD-152). Christmas Time first arrived as a holiday vinyl EP from the Chris Stamey Group in 1986. Seven years later, in 1993, the collection was expanded for a new CD release, with the track count jumping from seven to sixteen tunes. In 2006, Collectors Choice Music revived the album once more as Christmas Time…
WE HAVE OUR WINNERS! “CRUISING” SOUNDTRACK SACD FROM AUDIO FIDELITY!
CONGRATULATIONS! The following 5 entrants have won a copy of Audio Fidelity’s brand-new SACD of Cruising: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack! If you entered our contest via Facebook and your name is on the list below, please drop us a line at theseconddisc-at-gmail-dot-com or a Private Message on Facebook with your name and mailing address! If you entered via email, you don’t have to do anything – your SACD will be in the mail soon! Watch this space soon for more exciting giveaways! ROGER GRODSKY DEAN HARRIS VANCE PHILIP HEDDEREL ROBERT MINICHINI…
Review: “The Classic Christmas Album” Series 2015
Since 2011, Sony’s Legacy Recordings has offered a crop of ideal stocking stuffers with the Classic Christmas Album series. This year’s quartet of releases has a decidedly more modern bent, featuring artists associated with the ’70s (Earth, Wind & Fire), ’80s (a various artists compilation), ’90s (Sarah McLachlan) and 2000s (Celtic Thunder). Three of these titles are actually expanded editions of previously released albums. Earth, Wind and Fire‘s Classic Christmas entry reprises last year’s new studio album Holiday with five added bonus tracks. Then as now, Holiday is an enjoyable assortment of…
Wonderful Crazy Night: Deluxe Edition
Elton John returns to his unmistakable brand of uptempo piano pop-rock with this new studio album featuring his longtime band, co-produced by T Bone Burnett and co-written, of course, by Bernie Taupin.
Blackstar
David Bowie continues to push the envelope with this new studio album scheduled for his 69th birthday. Blackstar features the epic title track, music from his current New York stage production Lazarus, the single “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” and more!
Release Round-Up: Week of December 4
Well, this is it – the final big release week of the year! While next week will see releases slow to a trickle, this week is packed with exciting box sets and much more! Bruce Springsteen, The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (Columbia) 4-CD/3-DVD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon Canada 4-CD/2-BD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon Canada This 4-CD/3-DVD or 4-CD/2-BD set celebrating The Boss’ seminal album The River features a treasure trove of previously unreleased material across its 53 audio tracks plus four hours of never-before-seen video footage. Read the full track…
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Audio Fidelity Brings “Cruising” with Hiatt, DeVille, Germs to SACD – And YOU CAN WIN!
Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) was never one to shy away from controversy. And so was the case with his 1980 film Cruising. Al Pacino starred as NYPD Officer Steve Burns, tasked with tracking down a serial killer targeting gay men. Inspired by the novel of the same name by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker, Cruising earned largely negative reviews and protests upon its initial release, criticized both for its depiction of the gay community and for lackluster storytelling and character development. As so often happens, Cruising has…
Avonmore [Deluxe Edition Box Set]
Bryan Ferry expands his most recent album, 2014’s Avonmore, to epic proportions on this new box set. The Deluxe Edition, limited to 1,500 units, features the original album on both vinyl and CD plus one vinyl LP and 2 CDs of remixes, as well as a DVD with three music videos. It’s all housed in a hardbound book-style set.
THE SECOND DISC’S 2015 HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE IS HERE!
We wouldn’t want you to be left out in the cold for Cyber Monday, so we’re proud to present our annual Holiday Gift Guide featuring nearly 75 essential selections for the music enthusiast in your life! We’ve filled the guide with box sets (such as the popular Bob Dylan title to your left!), archival releases and holiday music favorites. So Just click here to access this year’s picks! You’ll notice that the Gift Guide is in the same easy-to-use format as our Release Calendar, so you can search for a title by a favorite…
Release Round-Up: Week of November 27
To our U.S. readers, today is the day of shopping known as Black Friday – but happily, the diverse slate of releases due in stores today should lift your spirits – no matter where you’re located! Love, Reel to Real: Expanded Edition (High Moon Records) (Amazon U.S.) High Moon Records has the premiere reissue of Arthur Lee and Love’s 1974 album Reel to Real as a newly-expanded Deluxe Edition boasting a color, 32-page booklet. A vinyl edition will follow early next year. Read more here! America, Archives Volume One (America Records) (Amazon…
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Say, Say, Say! The Second Disc’s Essential RSD Black Friday 2015 Release Guide
From all of us here at Second Disc HQ to all of you, we hope you’re enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving in the company of family and friends. Of course, from this day which conjures nostalgic and warm feelings comes a celebration of a different kind with this year’s annual Black Friday – the day for consumers to start off the holiday shopping season on a mad, frenetic note. But 2015 is just in the latest year in which numerous retailers in the U.S. have made headlines by blackening Thursday, or Thanksgiving Day…
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Release Round-Up: Week of November 20
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up which continues this autumn’s tradition of having each week packed with box sets from heavy hitters – in this case, The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, The Who, Queen, Grateful Dead, Frank Sinatra, and they’re still not all! Plus: CD and vinyl reissues, anthologies, and much more! The Beach Boys, Beach Boys’ Party: Uncovered and Unplugged (Capitol) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.) The first disc of this 2-CD, 81-track set features the original 1965 Beach Boys Party! album as remixed in original, pre-overdubbed form and then…
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Esoteric Offers Up Live Barclay James Harvest, Rarities From Tea and Symphony, Third World War
With a trio of recent releases, Cherry Red Group’s Esoteric Recordings imprint continues to dig through the archives to reissue some of the most intriguing offerings from the prog-rock era and beyond. John Lees founded Barclay James Harvest in 1966 with Les Holroyd, Mel Pritchard and Stuart “Wooly” Wolstenholme. After one single for EMI’s Parlophone imprint in 1968, the progressive four-piece was moved over to the Harvest imprint. Barclay James Harvest remained on Harvest for four LPs, but didn’t score their commercial breakthrough until a move to Polydor. The 1974 release of…
Sweetness and Light: Lush Prepare Career Box Set
Part shoegaze, part Britpop, Lush were one of the most interesting bands to come out of England in the 1990s–and with a reunion imminent, they’ve readied the definitive box set of their discography. The five-disc Chorus, available December 4, gathers all of Lush’s studio output in one set. The EP collection Gala (1990); studio albums Spooky (1992), Split (1994) and Lovelife (1996); and B-sides compilation Topolino (1996) will all be appended with additional material, including 16 unreleased tracks and countless uncollected rarities. The hardbound book package is designed by Chris Bigg, who helped…
Dreams Will Not Be Thwarted: New Springsteen Live Archive Release Arrives From 2013 Wrecking Ball Tour
A little over a month since the last release, a new installment in Bruce Springsteen’s live archive series has been released: Ippodromo Delle Capannelle, Rome, Italy, 2013. This concert from July 13, 2013 comes at the tail end of the Wrecking Ball Tour which had begun over a year earlier in March of 2012. A concert from right before this tour began, from March 9, 2012 at the Apollo Theater in New York, has been previously released by the Springsteen archive. Also previously released are numerous concerts from the High Hopes Tour which…
Review: Alanis Morissette, “Jagged Little Pill: Collector’s Edition”
As time marches on, nostalgia of course goes along with it. So, with the passage of time, we’ve arrived at an era of nostalgia for the 1990s. Hard as it may be for some to believe, 20th and 25th anniversaries for major releases in the ’90s keep occurring – and items are released in commemoration. Thus, Rhino has recently reissued Alanis Morissette’s 1995 smash album Jagged Little Pill in a variety of iterations including a 2-CD version and a 4-CD Collector’s Edition. When Morissette traveled to Los Angeles in the early ’90s…
Graceful: Legacy Premieres Lost Recordings By Jeff Buckley On “You and I”
The countdown to 2016 has already begun! Legacy Recordings is one of the first out of the gate with big news for the New Year! On March 11, 2016, the label will release You and I, the very first studio recordings made by the late Jeff Buckley (1966-1997) for Columbia Records. This new compilation will be available on CD, DD, and LP. The recordings on this new 10-track collection (primarily recorded in Steve Addabbo’s Shelter Island Sound studio in February 1993) were discovered during the label’s research for the 20th anniversary edition of Buckley’s seminal…
RPM Reissues Lost Album By David Bowie Favorite Tucker Zimmerman, Collects Australian “Dream Babes”
Today, we’re turning the spotlight on two recent releases from Cherry Red’s RPM Records imprint! When David Bowie placed Tucker Zimmerman’s 1969 album Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman on a list of his 25 favorite albums – alongside acknowledged classics by The Velvet Underground, James Brown, Little Richard and even Steve Reich – readers of the 2003 list could have been forgiven for wondering, “Who is Tucker Zimmerman?” It’s taken some time, but the RPM label has finally unearthed Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman – in an expanded edition that could now…
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck [Various Editions]
Brett Morgen’s documentary film about the late Kurt Cobain arrives in a plethora of audio and video formats. The Super Deluxe Edition includes the full-length feature film and 48 minutes of bonus interviews on Blu-ray and DVD, a 31 track deluxe soundtrack on CD and cassette, a 160-page hardbound book with extended interviews and images from the Cobain archive, a puzzle with a collectible storage container, a movie poster, postcards and bookmark. The 31-track deluxe version of the soundtrack CD is exclusively available in the Super Deluxe Edition and showcases tracks from the…
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Slowhand at 70: Live at the Royal Albert Hall
In May 2015, Eric Clapton performed his 200th concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall fifty years after his first performance there with The Yardbirds. Throughout his seven-night run, Clapton played both vintage blues songs and his own rock classics and Eric Clapton classics; this release commemorates these landmark shows. Available on 2-CD/DVD, 2-CD/BD (not available in the U.K.), 3-LP/DVD, standalone DVD and BD (U.K. only), and a deluxe 2-CD/2-DVD book-style edition adding a bonus DVD of Clapton performance highlights at Royal Albert Hall between 1968 and 2010. CD 1: 1) Somebody’s Knockin’ On My Door 2) Key…
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Release Round-Up: Week of November 6
This week’s Release Round-Up brings the year’s most eagerly-anticipated box set, a stunning new collection from the Fab Four, a Christmas feast including two titles from Second Disc Records, and more! Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series: Volume 12 – The Cutting Edge (Columbia/Legacy) The Best of the Cutting Edge 2-CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. The Best of the Cutting Edge 3-LP Vinyl: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. The Cutting Edge 6-CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. The Cutting Edge: Collector’s Edition 18-CD: BobDylan.com Exclusive Whether you’re in for the 2-CD, 6-CD, or 18-CD edition, you…
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Our Big Record Store Day Black Friday Round-Up Featuring McCartney, Bowie, Wilson, Queen, Ronstadt, More
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve told you about the 2015 Black Friday Record Store Day offerings from Legacy, Omnivore and Real Gone Music. Well, the full list of releases which are coming out on November 27 has been announced and we’ve got the details below including new titles from Rhino, Varese Sarabande, Hear Music and more! The entire list is over 125 items long, so we’ve just highlighted some entries below in which you might be interested. The full listing can be seen at recordstoreday.com. As usual, with so many…
Release Round-Up: Week of October 30
Welcome to this week’s Release Round-Up! Packed with over 30 titles including highly-anticipated reissues, a slew of box sets, collections and more, it just may be the mightiest of the year! The Velvet Underground, Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition (Rhino) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.) The Velvet Underground’s 1970 album – and Lou Reed’s swansong with the band – gets the deluxe expanded treatment from Rhino in this new box set featuring the original stereo and mono albums plus a wealth of bonus material, two live concerts and a DVD featuring high…
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Dawn Of Creation: New Box Collects Early Years of Creation Label, with Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream and More
“Our master plan was destroy manufactured bands,” writes Alan McGee in the foreword to Cherry Red Records’ recent box set, Artifact: The Dawn of Creation Records ’83-’85. “We lost,” he adds. “But maybe we won for a while!” Surely the Creation label founded by McGee could be considered a winner, having given a platform in the 1980s and 1990s to bands including The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis. Only the first two of those are represented on this impressive 5-CD box set chronicling Creation’s earliest days…
Don’t Fear the Reaper: “Now!” Series Releases a Halloween Volume
We’ve reported on several Christmas reissues being released in the lead-up the yuletide season. And when it comes to holidays throughout the year, Christmas certainly reigns supreme in terms of the quantity of music devoted to it. However, some other holidays and occasions throughout the year have music devoted to them. One of the more popular ones is Halloween which is coming up this weekend. To provide a soundtrack to your Halloween parties or trick-or-treating, Legacy Recordings, in association with Universal, has recently released Now That’s What I Call Halloween! This 18-track…
