For as long as CD reissues have been a thing, Robert Palmer's catalogue has been crying out for some real respect. The late blue-eyed soul singer, only 54 when a heart attack ended his life in 2003, has been in real need of rediscovery - and efforts to rebuild his discography for the modern age are few and far between. Next year, U.K. label Edsel will throw their hat in the ring (again) with a deluxe box set of his most famous work. The Island Records Years is an in-depth look at the first
Dream Starts: Grapefruit Collects Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera on New Anthology
The Five Proud Walkers weren't the only British blues 'n soul band to go psychedelic, but they were certainly one of the finest. As Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera and then just plain Velvet Opera, the group recorded two well-received albums in the late 1960s before splintering. Cherry Red's Grapefruit imprint has recently collected and expanded those LPs on 3 CDs as Long Nights of Summer: The Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera Anthology. Lead singer Dave Terry - who took the name of Elmer Gantry, the
Snap Shot: Iconoclassic Expands Slave's Funk Classic "Show Time," Steve Arrington's "Dancin' in the Key of Life"
Dayton, Ohio-based funk band Slave achieved success right out of the gate when their self-titled 1977 album shot to No. 6 R&B and No. 22 Pop, earning a Gold certification from the RIAA. Slave was off and running, producing eight consecutive chart albums for Atlantic Records' Cotillion imprint through 1983. (A ninth, in 1984, would do less well and precipitate a change of labels.) Slave weathered changes in the musical landscape, spinning off more than a dozen hit singles in that period.
Sending You Forget-Me-Nots: Patrice Rushen's Elektra Discography Gets Its Own Box Set
Jazz-turned R&B singer Patrice Rushen met with commercial and artistic success when she signed with Elektra Records. Now, Strut Records has revisited all five of her albums for the label plus an array of bonus tracks on the new 5-CD box set Feels So Real: The Complete Elektra Recordings 1978-1984. After a trio of acclaimed (but modest-selling) fusion-influenced albums for Prestige Records in the mid-1970s, Rushen, an accomplished pianist/vocalist, joined the Elektra roster in 1978.
The Weekend Stream: November 12, 2022
Welcome to The Weekend Stream, a relaxing weekly review of notable digital-only catalogue titles. There may be no CD or vinyl, but there's plenty of great new/old music to usher you into the weekend. This week features a new version of a pop legend's most recent compilation, great proto-Motown soul, an expanded version of Robert Glasper's breakout album, Bon Jovi in Spanish(?) and a heap of early Christmas gifts. Check it out! Elton John, Diamonds (Deluxe) (Virgin/EMI) (iTunes /
Release Round-Up: Week of November 11
Welcome to this week's Release Round-Up, featuring a selection of the new titles in stores today. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, That Holiday Feeling! (Real Gone Music) (Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada / Real Gone Music) Real Gone Music presents a newly-remastered and expanded edition of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme's 1964 Christmas classic That Holiday Feeling! This new edition adds eight bonus tracks including all three of Steve and Eydie's songs from the 1969 RCA
Women, Wives and Everything in Between: Paul McCartney Announces Massive 7" Singles Box
At 80 years old - hell, at many ages younger than that - Paul McCartney has little to prove. Fans may blanch at his catalogue choices of late (whither the Archive Collection? why box up all the self-titled albums? we've heard and seen it all), but it's hard to claim all of his reissue products as uninteresting. Take The 7" Singles Box - a rather massive trove of vinyl featuring 80 single releases personally curated by the former Beatle. With 163 tracks across its sides, The 7" Singles Box
Seven Bridges Road: Real Gone's November Slate Features Pat Martino, Herb Ellis, Remo Palmier, Less Than Jake, and Steve Young
We've already told you about Real Gone Music's pair of Christmas albums coming out this Friday, November 11: a vinyl version of Lea Michele's Christmas in the City and an expanded CD reissue of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme's That Holiday Feeling! featuring liner notes by our very own Joe Marchese. (Unfortunately, the expanded CD reissue of B.J. Thomas' Christmas Is Coming Home has been canceled for this year due to an unforeseen issue relating to the bonus material. Hopefully it will be
An Interview with Scott Davies, Rubellan Remasters' One-Man Band
Scott Davies has learned a lot on the job. Once toiling in the business of IT, music fans now know him as the singular creative force behind Rubellan Remasters - the sole curator, engineer, designer and distributor of a handful of CDs covering respected catalogues by New Wave/alternative acts including Visage, Missing Persons, Divinyls and most recently Oingo Boingo, the alt-rock band led in the '80s and '90s by future film composer Danny Elfman. From 2021 to the present Rubellan remastered
It's Only a Paper Moon: Cherry Red's El Imprint Celebrates Director Peter Bogdanovich on New Anthology
Writer-director Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022) rose to fame as part of the "New Hollywood" movement of cinematic auteurs. While these maverick filmmakers shattered conventions and reshaped film to modern sensibilities, many had a deep and abiding love of the medium - and perhaps none more so than Bogdanovich. The onetime film critic and Museum of Modern Art programmer wrote extensively about Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Howard Hawks; shot The Last Picture Show in black-and-white; and
The Weekend Stream: November 5, 2022
Welcome to The Weekend Stream, a relaxing weekly review of notable digital-only catalogue titles. There may be no CD or vinyl, but there's plenty of great new/old music to usher you into the weekend. The latest features new and old soundtracks, EPs and holiday favorites and much more! "Weird Al" Yankovic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - Original Soundtrack (Ear Booker/Roku/Legacy) (iTunes / Amazon) This weekend sees the release of "Weird Al" Yankovic's second foray into feature film: a
Rubellan Puts Flesh N' Blood Into Next Wave of Oingo Boingo Reissues on CD, Vinyl (UPDATED PRE-ORDER LINKS)
All of Rubellan Remasters' titles are a labor of love, but special care was taken when the label expanded a section of the Oingo Boingo catalogue in 2021. The seminal California alt-punk band, which first catapulted film composer Danny Elfman to the national stage, never got their due in peak reissue eras - but Rubellan corrected that record with expanded CDs (and colored vinyl reissues) of the band's first four albums, issued on the I.R.S. and MCA labels. With the Day of the Dead just
Release Round-Up: Week of November 4
Welcome to this week's Release Round-Up, featuring a selection of the new titles in stores today! Billy Joel, Live at Yankee Stadium (Columbia/Legacy) 2CD/Blu-ray: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 3LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada Billy Joel's Live at Yankee Stadium, originally released on video, is getting a major makeover. The concert film, shot on June 22 and 23, 1990, has been restored and remixed from original audio and video elements for a 2CD/Blu-ray
This Girl's in Love: Mercury Studios Premieres Ella Fitzgerald's "Montreux 1969" on CD and LP
Following in the footsteps of such titles as Ella at the Hollywood Bowl: The Irving Berlin Songbook (2022), The Lost Berlin Tapes (2020), Ella at the Shrine (2018), and Ella at Zardi's (2017), the team at Mercury Studios has unveiled another previously unreleased concert from the late Ms. Fitzgerald. On January 20, 2023, the label will release Live at Montreux 1969. While the performance from the early years of the Montreux Jazz Festival (founded in 1967) was seen on DVD in 2005, the upcoming
Just For You: Peter Green's "In the Skies" Returns in Expanded Edition from Iconoclassic Records
As a co-founder of Fleetwood Mac, Peter Green (1946-2020) expanded the boundaries of blues-rock and forged a powerful sound on such remarkable compositions as "Black Magic Woman," "Man of the World," "Albatross," and "Oh Well." Despite well-publicized challenges throughout his life and career, Green persevered and made music until the new millennium. Two years ago, Cherry Red's Esoteric Records returned his 1970 Reprise Records solo debut The End of the Game to CD. That album wasn't the end
You Just May Be The One: The Monkees Revisit "Headquarters" With 55th Anniversary Box Set
55 years ago, The Monkees took part in what TV Guide deemed to be "the Great Revolt of '67." Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork demanded creative control from impresario Don Kirshner - and won it. The group might have been brought together as actors portraying a band, but they were ready to build upon their phenomenal success and become that band in reality, too. The Headquarters album, The Monkees' third, was the startling result. It became their third consecutive No.
Surrender: Cherry Red Collects Swing Out Sister Albums, Bonus Tracks on New Box
Swing Out Sister burst onto the scene in 1986 with "Breakout." The first song on the group's first album, the sleek admonition reached the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic as well as the top of the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart. With Corrine Drewery's lead vocal soaring over a fizzy cocktail of funky bass, brash horns, bubbly synths, a sweet string arrangement, and a driving snare drum, "Breakout" bridged the gap between contemporary and retro. It launched Swing Out Sister to
The Weekend Stream: October 29, 2022
Welcome to The Weekend Stream, a relaxing weekly review of notable digital-only catalogue titles. There may be no CD or vinyl, but there's plenty of great new/old music to usher you into the weekend. This week, it's a stuffed Halloween sack full of sweet rarities from INXS and Madonna, remixes of Frank Zappa and Bing Crosby, two completely unreleased 50-year-old albums and a brand-new spin on a Stephen Sondheim classic - and that's only half of it! INXS, Shabooh Shoobah (40th Anniversary
In Memoriam: Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022)
To the uninitiated, the biography of Jerry Lee Lewis in 2022 read like a list of rock tropes so basic you can't believe they all happened to one man. Born to a poor Louisiana family that included a lot of famous Southerners (including cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart), Jerry Lee's parents mortgaged their farm to buy him a piano and hoped he would honor the Lord in song. What they got instead was a firebrand, whose boogie-woogie sensibilities galvanized and scandalized the
Review: The Beatles, "Revolver" (2022)
I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there... George Harrison's snarling takedown of the "Taxman" opened The Beatles' Revolver with a powerful sting. The so-called Quiet Beatle took on the first-person role with the relish of (and a musical nod to) a Batman villain. Though 1965's folk-rock-influenced Rubber Soul had seen the Fab Four's songwriting grow by leaps and bounds, Revolver matched the songwriting strides with revelatory studio processes including ADT (Artificial Double
Release Round-Up: Week of October 28
Welcome to this week's Release Round-Up, featuring a selection of the new titles available today! The Beatles, Revolver [Various Editions] (Apple/Capitol/UMe) 5CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 4LP + 7": Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 2CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 1CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada 1LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada / Official Store (Picture Disc) The Beatles' seventh studio album - and the bridge
Fare Thee Well: Sony Music, Analogue Productions Reissue Two Harry Belafonte Classics
On March 1, 2022, Harry Belafonte turned 95 years old. Though the actor, singer, and humanitarian largely retired from performing in the early years of the twenty-first century, he's remained active with the causes near and dear to his heart. On November 5, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will honor this American legend with its Early Influence Award, a recognition previously bestowed on such musical heroes as Louis Armstrong, Nat "King" Cole, Woody Guthrie, Mahalia Jackson, and Hank Williams.
Try to Remember: Stage Door Brings Rare "The Fantasticks" Mexico City Cast Album to CD
On May 3, 1960, The Fantasticks opened at the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village. The intimate, eight-actor, two-musician musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt continued to light up the Sullivan Street stage until January 13, 2002 by which time it had earned the moniker "The World's Longest-Running Musical." Appropriately enough, the Playhouse closed along with the show- its 19th century Greek revival rowhouse home turned into glass-windowed luxury condominiums -
Do You Realize?? The Flaming Lips' 'Yoshimi' Turns 20 with Expansive Box Set
The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was the band's tenth album and perhaps their most successful, earning their only U.S. Gold record to date as well as a Platinum certification from the U.K.'s BPI. A loose concept album incorporating electronica, rock, pop, and hip-hop textures, Yoshimi saw the band continuing its inventive path while embracing accessibility. The album even inspired a stage musical in 2012, and now, its 20th anniversary is being celebrated with a deluxe box
Tired of Toein' the Line: Iconoclassic Premieres Rocky Burnette's "The Son of Rock and Roll" on CD
Jonathan "Rocky" Burnette made quite an impression in the family business. His father, Johnny Burnette, was the rockabilly hitmaker who notched such international hits as "You're Sixteen (You're Beautiful, and You're Mine)" and "Dreamin'" before tragically perishing in a boating accident in 1964; his uncle, Dorsey, was a member with Johnny of The Rock and Roll Trio and a recording artist in his own right on such labels as Imperial, Dot, Reprise, Motown, and Capitol before his own sad death at
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