CDs + Vinyl:

Lauren Alaina – Road Less Traveled CD (Mercury Nashville)

New album from the country star. The title track is a triumphant anthem written with Meghan Trainor and Jesse Frasure, Lauren’s empowering message of embracing your own individuality is made even more poignant by her impressive vocals.

ALO – Love Songs CDEP (Brushfire)

In honor of Tour D’Amour XI, a fresh four-song studio-recorded EP featuring covers of some of ALO’s favorite love songs.

Annihilator – Triple Threat 2xCD/2xCD+DVD/2xCD+Blu-ray (UDR)

A double and triple-disc collection of Annihilator’s music presented in a variety of scenarios: The main CD comprises a set of Annihilator’s classics performed acoustically; the second CD features the band’s vicious set from the 2016 Bang Your Head Festival; while the Blu-ray and DVD adds hi-res audio and visual content featuring a mini documentary and more.

Au Champ Des Morts – Dans La Joie CD (Debumur Morti)

Au Champ Des Morts unveils an extremely assertive personality, forged in analog sound and integrity, deeply rooted solid musical foundations including post black metal, old school black metal, early hard rock and cold wave. “The music surges with driving strength, trailing fire and black smoke, propelled by piston-like percussion and a penetrating, emotionally affecting melody that’s dark as night — with a bleak aura that’s made even more desperate by the scalding intensity of the vocals.” — No Clean Singing

Beheaded – Beast Incarnate CD/LP (Unique Leader)

Death metal from Fgura, Malta.

Belle Biv DeVoe – Three Stripes CD (E1)

New album from the R&B group. Includes the single “One More Try” featuring Boyz II Men.

Betraying The Martyrs – Resiliant CD (Sumerian)

French deathcore.

Debashish Bhattacharya – Hawaii To Calcutta: A Tribute To Tau Moe CD (Riverboat)

The story of the Hawaiian slide guitar’s arrival in India is every historian’s dream – a twisting tale of great wonder and subtle mystery. Hawaii To Calcutta: A Tribute To Tau Moe is Pandit Debashish Bhattcharya’s dedication to Tau Moe, veritable musical folk legend and one of the first to introduce the instrument to India’s enthusiastic shores.

Theo Bleckmann – Elegy CD (ECM)

The German-born New Yorker, after appearing on two ECM albums by Meredith Monk and another by Julia Hülsmann, makes his striking label debut as a leader with Elegy. This album showcases Bleckmann as a composer as much as a singer, with several instrumental pieces voiced by what he calls his ambient band of kindred-spirit guitarist Ben Monder, keyboardist Shai Maestro and the subtle rhythm team of Chris Tordini and John Hollenbeck.

Deni Bonet – Bright Shiny Objects CD (Zip)

Quirky, melodic, violin-based pop-rock.

Julie Byrne – Not Even Happiness CD/LP (Ba Da Bing)

New release from the singer/songwriter. Sometimes it can take years to find your calling. Not so for Julie Byrne, whose power of lyrical expression and musical nous seems inborn. Her second album, Not Even Happiness, has evolved at its own pace. It spans recollections of bustling roadside diners, the stars over the high desert, the aching weariness of change, the wildflowers of the California coast, and the irresolvable mysteries of love.

[Read more…] about New Releases for January 27, 2017

CDs + Vinyl:

AFI – AFI (The Blood Album) CD/LP (Concord)

“Eclectic punk godfathers AFI are the kings of keeping going, progressing over more than twenty-five years from outsiders to insiders to chart-topping legends. At this point, they have little to prove – but AFI are not yet ready to settle back on their laurels and fossilize into a nostalgia act. They still have plenty left to give – and more than a few fans hungry for more music. AFI – also known as “The Blood Album” – is precision-engineered to satisfy AFI fans old and new. As a whole, it feels like a relay race started off by AFI’s slicker, more commercially oriented side (the pace set by ‘Dark Snow,’ ‘Still A Stranger,’ ‘Aurelia,’ ‘Hidden Knives,’ ‘Get Hurt,’ and ‘Above The Bridge’) and continued with raw, aggressive style that proves AFI haven’t forgotten their roots (‘Dumb Kids,’ ‘Pink Eyes,’ ‘Feed From The Floor,’ ‘White Offerings,’ and ‘She Speaks The Language’) before finally finishing with a self-stretching, end-of-the-line blues dirge (‘The Wind That Carries Me Away’). In the middle, there’s also an anticipation-building changeover as ‘So Beneath You’ bursts out as AFI’s old-school punky herald, gives way to accessible sing-along ‘Snow Cats,’ and the aforementioned aggression really gets going from ‘Dumb Kids’ onwards” – TheMusicalMeltingPot. [Limited color vinyl pressing also available.]

Bill Anschell – Rumbler CD (Origin)

After a decade of recording mostly unscripted, improvised albums focused on his deep musical relationships with a few key players, pianist Bill Anschell returns to recording his own compositions and arrangements on Rumbler, his fifteenth as a leader or co-leader. Anschell penned eight of the eleven tracks as well as arrangements of Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” and Paul McCartney’s “For No One.”

As It Is – okay. CD/LP (Fearless)

New album from the British pop/punk band. [Limited color vinyl pressing also available.]

As Lions – Selfish Age CD/LP (Better Noise)

New release from the British hard rock quintet.

Austra – Future Politics CD/LP+MP3 (Domino)

“The notion of Utopia doesn’t have a lot of currency these days, but that hasn’t stopped Katie Stelmanis. The creative force behind the Canadian electronic outfit Austra, she’s used the project’s new album, Future Politics, to foment a kind of radicalism in an age of doom and gloom: making music that questions, confronts and uplifts without scaremongering or sugarcoating. She’s also not being shy. ‘Utopia,’ the album’s lead single, telegraphs her intent with unabashed optimism. Amid sculpted beats and soaring melodies, Stelmanis sings of urban life and alienation in an era of social division and injustice. But she’s militant about lining those dark clouds with silver — or, as she puts it, ‘I can picture a place where everybody feels it, too / It might be fiction, but I see it ahead.’ Whether cloaking itself in code, dipping into metaphor or flying proclamations up the flagpole, these 11 songs offer a bracing, coolly tuneful vision of tomorrow that refuses to submit to inertia. In an era when simply resisting dystopia can seem idealistic, Future Politics dares to hope big.” – NPR

Avec le Soleil Sortant de sa Bouche – Pas Pire Pop, I Love You So Much CD/LP (Constellation)

Psychedelic rock, krautrock, desert rock, punk rock, noise rock, Afrobeat, experimental pop, post-rock, electronic; all are touchstones for Avec le Soleil Sortant de sa Bouche. Their multi-movement durational music arguably combines trance rock and audio collage above all — a diced and spliced approach to longform multi-movement groove music played by a stripped down quartet of two guitars, bass and drums, synched to pre-recorded electronics and musique concrète.

Aversions Crown – Xenocide CD (Nuclear Blast)

“Aversions Crown are keeping up the time-honored tradition of Australian metal bands doing what they do best: playing stupidly heavy music that makes you want to commit heinous acts of violence in the mosh pit.” – Heavy Blog Is Heavy

[Read more…] about New Releases for January 20, 2017

CDs + Vinyl:

Chasing Safety – Nomad CD (Cooking Vinyl)

Hailing from Cherry Hill, NJ, Chasing Safety is a captivating band best known for delivering a barrage of ferociously intricate guitar riffs, explosive choruses, and hauntingly cinematic flares.

Dropkick Murphys – 11 Short Stories Of Pain & Glory CD/LP+MP3 (Dropkick Murphys)

The Dropkick Murphys’ new album contains moments of ass-kicking Celtic punk attitude, ball-busting wisecracks, tear-jerking confessions, and upbeat words of wisdom.

Brian Eno – Reflection CD/2xLP+MP3 (Warp)

“Reflection is the latest work in a long series. It started (as far as record releases are concerned) with Discreet Music in 1975… The pedigree of this piece includes Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (whose subtitle is Thinking Music IV) and LUX. I’ve made a lot of thinking music, but most of it I’ve kept for myself. Now I notice that people are using some of those earlier records in the way that I use them — as provocative spaces for thinking — so I feel more inclined to make them public. Pieces like this have another name: they’re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I’m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic (often taking the form perform operation x, y percent of the time) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings.”

Janeane Garofalo – If I May CD (Comedy Dynamics)

Janeane Garofalo’s If I May, her first special in five years, takes on society’s intolerance of gluten and House Hunters International. With her unapologetic attitude, Janeane proudly states her AARP membership, her love for Febreze but the disdain for their commercials, and her disinterest in doctors.

Gone Is Gone – Echolocation CD/LP+MP3 (Rise)

Gone Is Gone is a “supergroup” featuring members of Mastodon, Queens Of The Stone Age, and At The Drive-In. [Limited edition white color vinyl pressing also available.]

[Read more…] about New Releases for January 6, 2017