AIMS Marketing Program/ Featured Titles Promoted This Week:

Bad Bad Hats – Bad Bad Hats CD/LP (Don Giovanni)

Bad Bad Hats traffic in playful concepts and warm scenes of youth, celebrated for crispy, lived-in melodies, big choruses that stick for days, and an easy musicianship that carries across their eclectic, wide-ranging releases. The new album Bad Bad Hats – filled with their trademark freewheeling songs, pristine tones, and several unexpectedly funky turns – suggests a band still having deep fun creating and playing, inviting listeners new and old to live life to their heartfelt tunes. [A pink color vinyl pressing is available.]

Mark Knopfler – One Deep River CD/LP/2xLP/Cassette/2xCD+3xLP (Blue Note)

Mark Knopfler’s tenth solo studio album, One Deep River, features 12 unhurriedly elegant new songs, with his warm Geordie vocal tone, poetic storytelling lyrics and deft, richly melodic guitar playing all present and dazzling as ever. One Deep River offers an unstoppable flow of future Knopfler classics, with their customarily learned lyrics and refined guitar textures. They draw on a lifetime of genre-crossing ingredients and influences in blues, folk, rock and beyond. [The double-LP version is cut at 45 rpm for maximum fidelity. An indie store exclusive blue color vinyl pressing and a deluxe box set featuring four bonus tracks on vinyl and five bonus tracks on CD, a litho print, guitar pick, and enamel pin are available.]

Linkin Park – Papercuts CD/2xLP/Cassette (WB)

Papercuts is the first singles collection from innovative musical force Linkin Park. The career-spanning 20-track album compiles 18 essential anthems, plus the never-before-released track “Friendly Fire” recorded during the 2017 sessions for their seventh album One More Light and fan-favorite rarity “QWERTY”. Linkin Park was inspired to thoughtfully curate Papercuts by their fans’ passionate reception of the 20th Anniversary Editions of Hybrid Theory in 2020 and Meteora last year. That enthusiasm led to this comprehensive retrospective of the band’s journey so far in the span of one album. [An indie store exclusive black & red splatter color vinyl pressing is available.]

[Read more…] about New Releases for April 12, 2024

AIMS Marketing Program/ Featured Titles Promoted This Week:

The Black Keys – Ohio Players CD/LP (Nonesuch)

Ohio Players is the multiple-Grammy Award-winning, Akron, OH native band’s twelfth studio album. Written by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney with longtime friends Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and Beck, the celebratory, joyful “Beautiful People (Stay High)” is one of several songs on the album that feature collaborations between the band and various additional friends and colleagues, including Noel Gallagher, Greg Kurstin, and others. Speaking on the collaborative nature of the album, Carney shares, “We had this epiphany: ‘We can call our friends to help us make music.’ It’s funny because we both write songs with other people – Dan all the time [as a solo artist and producer], me when I’m producing a record. That’s what we do.” Auerbach adds, “No matter who we work with, it never feels like we’re sacrificing who we are. It only feels like it adds some special flavor.” [An indie store exclusive red color vinyl pressing is available.]

Cedric Burnside – Hill Country Love CD/LP (Provogue)

Hill Country Love is the latest studio album from Grammy-Award Winning Bluesman, Cedric Burnside. To Cedric, it is a culmination of a career that’s already seen astonishing accomplishments and only keeps growing. When Cedric prepared to record Hill Country Love, the follow-up to his 2021 Grammy-winning album I Be Trying, he set up shop in a former legal office located in a row of structures in the seat of Tippah County, a town with 5,000 residents that’s known as the birthplace of the Hill Country Blues style. The fourteen songs on the record were finished in two days, but in addition to being satisfied with the sound, Burnside believes that his eleventh album represents real creative progress.

Grace Cummings – Ramona CD/LP (ATO)

Ramona is a work of raw truth rendered in its most beautiful form. Melbourne-based Grace Cummings traveled to Los Angeles to work with producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) and dreamed up a lavishly orchestrated sound that fully accommodates the depth and scope of her vocal prowess. With its visceral reflection on grief and self-destruction and emotional violence, Ramona brings a stunning new grandeur to Cummings’ music while refusing to soften or temper its humanity. [A gold color vinyl pressing is available.]

[Read more…] about New Releases for April 5, 2024

AIMS Marketing Program/ Featured Titles Promoted This Week:

Chicano Batman – Notebook Fantasy CD/LP (ATO)

Since forming in 2008, Chicano Batman has followed their own visionary impulses to tremendous heights—a journey that began at local dive bars and recently saw them co-headlining the legendary Hollywood Bowl. In the making of Notebook Fantasy, Chicano Batman worked with producer John Congleton (Erykah Badu, Death Cab For Cutie, St. Vincent) to double down on their hyper-creative tendencies, discovering new dimensions of their prismatic music while infusing the lyrics with an unflinching honesty. [A limited-edition clear vinyl pressing is available.]

Friko – Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here CD/LP (ATO)

Adding to Chicago’s long lineage of forward-thinking indie rock, Friko transform each song into a moment of collective catharsis. On their full-length debut, vocalist/guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger sustain the combustible energy of their break-out single “Crimson To Chrome”, merging elements of post-punk, chamber-pop and experimental rock, magnifying their music’s exhilarating power with a barrage of spirited ensemble vocals. Poetic, explosive, and sublimely raw in feeling.

Ride – Interplay CD/2xLP/Cassette (Wichita Recordings)

Everything feels like it has been leading to Interplay, Ride’s seventh album, the third since their 2015 reunion. It’s the sound of the group connecting all the dots, taking the frenzied guitar attacks, hypnotic grooves, and dreamy melodic hooks of their early work, and setting it to a more expansive sonic template, one that takes in synth flourishes, psychedelic folk, electronic beats, and noir-pop soundscapes. Interplay flows from start to finish, at times urgent and formidable, at others wistful and melancholic. It’s the sound of a great British band hitting a second peak. It’s a record about perseverance, about sticking together, about finding a way forward. Nine years after coming back together, Ride keeps rewriting their story. [An indie store exclusive blue color vinyl pressing is available.]

[Read more…] about New Releases for March 29, 2024