Welcome to a very special edition of Back Tracks! For this week's Friday Feature, Mike took a look back at the music of Psycho. One of the few films still retaining the power to shock and thrill after some 50 years, the repercussions of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece are still felt today. And its musical legacy, enhanced via some very controversial sequels and remakes, encompasses some of the greats, with Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman and Carter Burwell all having built on the foundation laid by
Reissue! Repackage! Repackage! Volume #3: Ke$ha's "Cannibal" Instincts
Figures: try to start a new feature and it seems to be all that happens. Yet another reissue of an incredibly recent record is coming your way this holiday season - the debut by firebrand pop star Ke$ha. Kesha Sebert is one of those love-her-or-hate-her musicians on the scene today. Her debut album, Animal, is packed with inescapable pop hooks, thanks mostly to the production and songwriting talents of Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, a one-time Saturday Night Live band member who's produced hits
Friday Feature: "Psycho" Sequels
Back in May, The Second Disc did a Friday Feature on the chilling, iconic and somehow commercially unreleased score to Alfred Hitchock's Pyscho, written by Bernard Hermann. With Halloween approaching (and a killer screening of Psycho planned tonight at New York's Film Forum), what else is there to write about? Those of you with particularly steel-trap-like memories may recall a set of sequels - sequels! - to the film, released in the 1980s. If that weren't inexplicable enough for you, they
Reissue Theory: New Radicals, "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too"
Welcome to another installment of Reissue Theory, where we reflect on well-known albums of the past and the reissues they could someday see. A wave of '90s nostalgia leads this column to look back at one of the best one-hit wonders of the latter part of the decade. The presence of The New Radicals on that NOW '90s compilation brought some memories flooding back. Remember the first time you heard "You Get What You Give"? It was insanely poppy, it sounded kind of like a U2 outtake from an era U2
A Heatwave in November
This week has been unseasonably warm around The Second Disc HQ, and while that's not particularly fun, there is news of some heat of another kind - particularly, expanded reissues of the Heatwave catalogue coming your way from Cherry Red next month. The immortal disco band, which had a string of classic dance/soul cuts in the late '70s from the pen of member Rod Temperton (who also of course wrote some instant classics for Michael Jackson in the Off the Wall and Thriller days), will see no less
Reissue! Repackage! Repackage! Volume #2: Shinedown Double Their "Madness"
Another relatively recent reissue coming down the pipeline: alt-metal band Shinedown will reissue their most recent album, 2008's The Sound of Madness, in a new CD/DVD package that's actually quite heavy on bonus material. The album, which spawned several rock hits including the surprise crossover single "Second Chance," a Top 10 hit in the winter of 2009, will be expanded with nine bonus cuts and a DVD of music videos and live performances. The bonus tracks come from a variety of sources,
Now That's What I Call Aging
It's the most inevitable irony: the people behind NOW That's What I Call Music! have finally compiled a set devoted to the 1990s - the very decade U.S. buyers started getting their own versions of the long-running pop compilation series. The first NOW volume hit stores in England in 1983, but it didn't catch on until 1998 in the States. Three dozen standard volumes later (NOW 36 is due November 9), the latest special title in the series is NOW That's What I Call the 1990s, to be released the
The Cream of Keith's Crop
As if his new memoir wasn't exciting enough, Keith Richards has also got a compilation of his greatest solo material due out next week. Vintage Vinos (or Winos - Amazon and Keith's official site say Vinos but that just seems odd) compiles tracks from Richards' two solo albums for Virgin Records as well as a live album recorded with backing band The X-Pensive Winos (which included session luminaries Waddy Wachtel and Steve Jordan). It adds one rare track, an acoustic song called "Hurricane." The
Reissue! Repackage! Repackage! Volume #1: Another Trip to "San Francisco"
Here's another new feature for your consideration at The Second Disc: reissues of classic albums are the core of our coverage, but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the other, odder batches of reissues. You know, the ones that come out after a record does alright on its own, to squeeze some more juice from the rinds. It's easier to be more cynical about these sets, but everything deserves its own place. Train, much like Ken Jeong's character on the show Community, is a band that can never
The Second Disc Interview #3: What's Happening "Now" with Steve Stanley!
The music may be then, but the place to be is undoubtedly Now. By that, of course, I mean Now Sounds. Launched in 2007 by Steve Stanley, the producer of over 50 titles for the Rev-Ola label, Now Sounds celebrates the rich and varied melodies created between 1964 and 1972, though the label isn't limited to that period. A labor of love for its founder, Now Sounds has established itself as the go-to label for fans of this golden era of both songwriting and record production. We've seen a career
Release Round-Up: Week of October 26
And now, here it is: the catalogue titles coming to your local stores this week. Various Artists including James Taylor, Billy Preston and Badfinger, The Apple Records remasters (Apple/EMI) This year's Beatles remasters are remasters of albums on The Beatles' short-lived Apple label. There's a lot of great, varied stuff to be hand across many genres. There's 14 individual remasters plus a new compilation with some other hard-to-find tunes (Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records), not to
Intrada Releases Two Classic '60s Scores from the Vault
Intrada's latest batch of titles may be on the shorter side when it comes to pure musical recognition, but they have three scores released for the first time anywhere - two of which are from two classic adapted film works of the early '60s. Those scores are to 1961's Raisin in the Sun and 1962's Requiem for a Heavyweight, both penned by Laurence Rosenthal. Requiem is an adaptation of the famous Playhouse 90 teleplay penned by Rod Serling (this adaptation stars Anthony Quinn as the boxer and
Stooges Live Show, Out-of-Print Box Set Unearthed (UPDATED 10/25)
For a band that nobody seemed to care about when they were together, The Stooges have really done alright for themselves. All three of their major studio albums have been reissued multiple times to varying degrees of acclaim. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year for their contributions to the early punk rock scene before anyone knew exactly what punk was. And Rhino is planning a few Stooges-oriented holiday gift ideas to close out a banner year that saw
Tell Us About It: Analyzing the Potential Billy Joel Slate for 2011
It's no surprise that Legacy's intention to reissue the Billy Joel catalogue in 2011 has been met with a lot of enthusiasm and expectation. For better or worse, Joel has been one of the most intriguing artists in the American rock canon: he found success writing deceptively traditional pop songs in an AOR era, he performed them from behind a piano, he used that talent to springboard a relationship with one of the hottest supermodels in recorded history and - unlike nearly all of his
Let There Be No Doubt About It
Another bit of excitement first reported by Slicing Up Eyeballs: in his latest update to fans, Peter Gabriel has revealed some plans to give his extensive back catalogue the deluxe treatment. The singer, who recently reissued several of his latter-day albums on his own Real World label, mentioned in his latest Full Moon Club update that his catalogue would be revisited, notably his biggest pop smash, 1986's So. With 25 years since its initial release, Gabriel has had his team searching through
Coming Tomorrow: Now That's What We Call Now Sounds!
If you've been enjoying Joe Marchese's very stellar contributions to The Second Disc (and who hasn't, really?) you're going to want to pull up a chair tomorrow. Joe's got what promises to be a great interview with Steve Stanley of the Now Sounds label. The Cherry Red-owned label has got a jam-packed reissue of Paul Williams' Someday Man (1970) due out this week, and they've had a lot of killer product this year, including the great compilation Book a Trip: The Psych Pop Sounds of Capitol
Review: Bob Dylan, "The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos"
Artie Mogull of Music Publishers' Holding Company believed he may have been among the first people in the music business to hear Bob Dylan sing "Blowin' in the Wind." Before his death in 2004, he recounted that he "flipped" upon hearing "How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry?" It's not hard to see why. To a melody adapted from the spiritual "No More Auction Block for Me," Dylan succinctly, eloquently and powerfully gave lyrical voice to a generation of youth struggling
Nine Inch Nails Get "Pretty" Again
Trent Reznor may be considered a music industry maverick among most fans and critics, but even he can't resist a good old-fashioned reissue. The musician best known as the sole brain trust behind Nine Inch Nails, is reissuing his first, frequently out-of-print album under the NIN banner, 1989's Pretty Hate Machine, as a joint venture between The Bicycle Music Company and his former label group at Universal. Reznor was a janitor at Right Track Studios who used unassigned time at the studio to
Short Takes: Apple Indie Sampler, Collins Goes Gold and Stills in Surround
Even with most of the major holiday product announced (and much, though far from all, of it in stores!), a few new catalogue releases have slipped through the cracks with little fanfare. This Tuesday, Beatles completists (you know who you are!) can check their local indie retailer for a swell little compilation entitled 10 Green Apples; it's a sampler disc for the full EMI/Apple Records reissue campaign (all individual releases hit stores Tuesday, as does an import box set with those 15 discs
Friday Feature: "Alien" and "Aliens"
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojhGdRSkiUw] With Halloween almost approaching, there's never been a better time to revisit notable horror film scores than with our ongoing series of Friday Features. This week, we cover the first two, multiply-reissued scores in the infamous Alien franchise. Happily, both of the reissues discussed herein are readily available, so if you're inspired to hear the music of these classic films, you don't have to dig particularly deep. Have a read after the
Reissue Theory: Blind Melon
Welcome to another installment of Reissue Theory, where we reflect on well-known albums of the past and the reissues they could someday see. Today, on the anniversary of the death of a well-known alt-rock vocalist, we reflect on his band's first album, which would "bee" a treat if it were reissued. "All I can say is that my life is pretty plain..." Those immortal opening lines to "No Rain," the biggest hit by alternative rock band Blind Melon, couldn't be any further from the truth. The story
In Which We Continue Bringing Out The Dead
The train keeps on rolling for Grateful Dead fans. The band have prepped another vintage live release in their ongoing Road Trips series and a special reissue of late frontman Jerry Garcia's live acoustic forays in the late 1980s. Volume 4 of Road Trips starts with a three-disc set capturing the band's two nights at The Big Rock Pow Wow, an outdoor festival held on a Seminole reservation in Florida in May 1969. Recorded months after the Fillmore West shows expertly captured on Live Dead, the
A Few Modest Mouse Pieces to Add to Your Collection
For you Modest Mouse collectors out there, we have a few reissues for you to add to the pile. The Portland-based indie rockers will reissue two early works on their own Glacial Pace Recordings on CD, vinyl and digital formats. The two titles, to be reissued November 9, are The Fruit That Ate Itself, the band's third EP released in 1997 and Sad Sappy Sucker, the band's first recordings from 1995 (some of which were released on the band's debut EP, 1995's Blue Cadet-3, Do You Connect?). The
Billy's Back
It's true: that upcoming Billy Joel compilation is indeed the tip of the iceberg. Legacy issued a press release late last night promising to burst open the floodgates of Billy Joel catalogue material in 2011. The Hits, the first single-disc compilation of the Piano Man's music, kicks things off, followed by a dozen songs being made available for download on the upcoming Rock Band 3 video game. But next year? The press release promises a live release of the Shea Stadium concerts documented in
Bad Religion Celebrate 30 Years with a Lot of Vinyl
Longtime punk rockers Bad Religion just celebrated their third decade of existence with a new album, last month's The Dissent of Man. Now, they're giving fans an even bigger present: a massive vinyl box set spanning almost their entire discography. Bad Religion 30th Anniversary Box Set gathers 15 studio albums in one spot, from debut LP How Could Hell Be Any Worse in 1981 to The Dissent of Man. This is significant for a number of reasons - it brings together the band's output on original and
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