Faces of Jade is a tough-to-find Cincinnati-area nugget from 1971. It is one of the most highly sought-after “Beatles-Impact” records among psych, power-pop and Beatles collectors. After a bit of sleuthing we tracked down the members and are proud to give a proper and awesome-sounding vinyl reissue of their sole pop-psych / Revolver-esque classic. The initial press of 500 will be pressed on “Jade Green” wax. The LP will be available from Shake-It Records starting Black Friday Nov. 28th, and we will start shipping the following week.

Brian Laidlaw is a poet and songwriter from San Francisco. He studied Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Stanford, at which point he began setting his own poems to music; after graduating in 2005 he toured and rambled throughout the country for several years as a solo folksinger.

In 2008, Brian moved to Minneapolis to earn an M.F.A. in poetry at the University of Minnesota. In the last year he has received awards and honors from the Loft Literary Center, the Weisman Art Museum, and the Jerome Foundation. His lyrics have been featured in American Songwriter Magazine and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing, FIELD, VOLT, Quarter After Eight, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

His new LP, Amoratorium, shipped out to Hymies Vintage Records, and will be available for sale at his 318 Club performance in Excelsior, MN on 11/23/14.

Alpenglow began in a small Vermont town when founding members Peter Coccoma, Graeme Daubert, Elori Kramer, and Kenneth Root shared songs in an old stone mill. Over the next two years, after adding bassist Colin Weeks, Alpenglow transformed original songs rooted in the folk tradition into a collection of finely crafted arrangements that are sprawling, moody, and wholly their own. Their music has been described as “swooning, harmony-laden stuff… laced with arcing fiddle, shimmering keys and healthy doses of ringing guitar punch.”

After years of walking past a hilltop chapel in the town they lived in, Alpenglow decided to play a show inside. The result was transformative: a chapel brimming with people smiling, swaying, and dancing together under the music’s effortless melodies and grooving rhythms. The spirit that night inspired Alpenglow to return to the chapel to record an album. The result is their appropriately titled new EP, Chapel, which is an effort to capture the spirit of a night, a place, and a time in the band’s life. The new collection of songs acts as a meditation on loss and the modern condition while at the same time stepping out of its reverent tone with moments of excitement and joy that ease the wayward soul.

During the coldest days of January 2014, Brooklyn duo Mark Rogers & Mary Byrne recorded their debut, I Line My Days Along Your Weight, as a true duet: facing each other inches apart, intent upon listening.  They wove together archaic instruments – baritone acoustic, tricone resonator, golden-era flattop, space-age lap steel, upright piano, and hundred-year-old mandolin – into a vibrant new strain. 

All the songs were recorded live to two-inch analog tape, the studio equivalent of tightrope-walking without a net.  Mark and Mary later added minimal touches of lap steel, piano, and electric guitar, but essentially what you hear is what they performed together, start to finish.  With Mark’s deeply expressive, contextual fingerstyle and Mary’s emphatic, unaffected singing, this striking debut invites listeners into a space most intimate, and most human.

On October 14, 2014, Massachusetts-based Important Records (Diane Cluck, Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch, Marisa Anderson, many others) will release I Line My Days Along Your Weight.

Tokyo guitarist/songwriter/singer Suzuki Junzo‘s 7th album, 7, is a masterwork of guitar deconstruction, bleak blues and claustrophobic atmospherics. Known from his work with Miminokoto, 20 Guilders, Overhang Party and more, Junzo unleashes his desolate soul on this new LP. Limited edition – available November 5.

The music of Bain Wolfkind could be described as a Lynchian take on artists like Lee Hazlewood with dark brooding vocals and slow blues,rock,country,psychedelic,cinematic, surf, swamp and electronic overtones.The lyrical content draws heavily from Crime Fiction, Blues, Country and B grade Cinema and Americana.While primarily a solo project, in the singer songwriter vein, Bain Wolfkind involves many guest musicians in the studio and guitarists for live performances.

Bain Wolfkind performs sporadic live shows in Australia, The United States, Europe, Japan and South East Asia.  The You’re Surely Gonna Die 7 inch will be available very soon on the Not Just Religious Music label.