When is a lost album not a lost album? In the case of Lonely and Blue: The Deepest Soul of Otis Redding, the answer is, “when the album has been created in 2013 to look, sound and feel like a Stax/Volt release from almost five decades prior!” On March 5, Stax and Concord Records will […]
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Nearly 35 years after the unceremonious release of The Lewis Conection, a local Minneapolis band's sole funk LP, The Numero Group is resurrecting the disc, giving it a premiere release next month. (It's part of an forthcoming phase at Numero to unearth significant and rare recordings from the early days of the Minneapolis sound.) What makes […]
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The upbeat dance-pop/R&B of Destiny’s Child successfully updated the girl group sound for the late 1990s and early 2000s, and launched the careers of Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams and Beyoncé Knowles. In late 2012, Legacy Recordings marked the fifteenth anniversary of the group’s No. 1 debut single with the release of Playlist: The Very Best […]
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Jack White's Third Man Records label, not merely content to issue unique offerings of the ex-White Stripe's music on a variety of formats, is now getting into the historical catalogue business with three forthcoming LPs of vintage blues masters. The new venture, Document Records, will present "the building blocks and DNA of American culture," as […]
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The Temptations had sunshine on a rainy day, John Denver had it on his shoulders, and the O'Jays took their cue from an old standard to address a loved one as "my sunshine." But Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, forming Miami's KC and the Sunshine Band, had sunshine both in the band name and in […]
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As previously reported, TV Mania - the short-lived, little-heard side project of Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes and former guitarist Warren Cuccurullo - is finally getting a release after years in the vault. The concept sounds surprisingly relevant: a musical treatise on an overly media-saturated couple, culled from snippets of original studio creations and found sound. […]
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We're just a few weeks from the 55th Annual Grammy Awards - or as I like to call it, "how many times can my music geek friends and I make cutting jokes on the Internet?" - and, as is customary, next week will see the release of a compilation of Grammy-nominated songs for your perusal. […]
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The third major Mary Wells release in recent months has arrived courtesy Ace Records’ Kent label. The One Who Really Loves You/Two Lovers combines Wells’ second and third Motown long-players on one remastered CD, with every track taken from the original mono masters for the first time in the compact disc era. Though Wells’ time […]
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What do a beloved Broadway musical and an iconic sci-fi epic have to do with dance music pioneer Boris Midney? Plenty, as it turns out. Midney, a producer and arranger who came to prominence in the disco era with his expansive 48-track productions, recorded under a number of guises: Caress, Beautiful Bend, Masquerade, Double Discovery, […]
Continue ReadingNew Order, The Lost Sirens (Rhino) (Amazon U.S./Amazon U.K.) A cadre of outtakes from the Waiting for the Siren's Call sessions, this marks the last New Order material with original bassist Peter Hook. Johnny Mathis, A Special Part of Me: Expanded Edition (Amazon U.S./Amazon U.K.) (Funkytowngrooves) FTG's latest R&B expansion has a Michael Jackson connection: the future King of Pop co-wrote for Mathis […]
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