John Nolan’s new album – Sad, Strange, Beautiful Dream is available now from Collective Confusion Records. For a very limited time, you can also grab an “acoustic bootleg” version of the album. Also, John’s tour starts August 19 in Philadelphia — check with John for a list of dates!
Drummer/producer John Roccesano (Johnny Rock) produced an album written and performed by friends, recorded and mixed on tape, pressed on vinyl.
Johnny has been playing the drums since 1992 and has been recording professionally since 1998. He has served as the drummer, background vocalist, and/or producer for many music acts in NJ, and started releasing his own songs in 2009. Johnny is influenced by several generations of rock and pop acts, jazz artists, percussionists, classical composers, experimental music, and even the sounds of Mother Nature.
The album brings together several amazing, unsigned musicians to record a once-in-a-lifetime album. Calling on writers, musicians, and family, Johnny Rock has formed small ensembles to write and record this special vinyl LP. More than a compilation of songs, For The Record was produced as two cohesive sides of new original music, recorded and mixed on tape; analog all the way to the cutting head. The album packaging also features hand drawn artwork to minimize the 1’s and 0’s between the artists and the audience.
From their adopted, boom-town home of Austin, TX, The Bellfuries are constantly within earshot of the latest catchphrase. New brands are always within their peripheral view.
Well and good, vocalist and chief songwriter Joey Simeone says. “But we’re a rock and roll band. People are obsessed with categories, sub-genres. We check into a hotel, and the guy or girl behind the desk asks what kind of music we play. ‘Rock and roll.’ Then they ask what I mean by that. Well…
“…Let’s see. There’s elements of country music, rhythm and blues. There’s some improvisation on stage that I guess you could say is jazz-inspired. Throw in some gospel…plenty of melodies coming out of older pop tunes. That adds up to rock and roll, last time I checked. If we’re not re-inventing the wheel, I’d rather get to work than worry about renaming it.”
Simeone takes a no-nonsense, workingman’s line, and Workingman’s Bellfuries, (available 8/21 from Hi-Style Records) holds that line firm. No doubt, the armchair taxonomist will find plenty of variety. Lead track and single “Loving Arms,” is foot-stomping rockabilly-pop, a la Hamburg-era John Lennon. “Bad Seed Sown” brings finger-popping jive from the Dion school. “Make the Mystery No More” is Phil Spector 2.0, with some Everly Brothers harmony sitting at the top. And “Why Do You Haunt Me” is a shimmering track that suggests nothing so much as Elvis Presley’s operatic pop approach of the 1960s.
Wolfmen of Mars and The Mangled Dead make music that combines the synth sounds of the 70s-80s and mixing them with heavy grooves. A soundtrack for late night driving or space travel. Includes cover art by Devon Whitehead and back jacket/label art by Kevin Spencer. Available now!
In the depths of a Rochester winter, the beaches of California are a non-reality. The thought of going surfing is more a far off idea than a lifestyle. This leaves a lot of room to interpret what “Surf music” is supposed to be. Enter The Huckleberry Fins — the new album, Pipe Dreams is available everywhere 07/24/15.
The Sun Lions just finished their first full-length album, and it is ready for listening on wax – Whatever’s On Your Mind was recorded at Sonelab Recording and engineered by Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr, Speedy Ortiz, Sonic Youth). Grab it from the band online or at one of their shows!
Silkie’s latest album Fractals on long-time friend and collaborator Distal’s newly minted imprint ” might just be his most forward thinking work to date. Silkie has put together a psychedelically sexy and temperamental record that toys with new ideas, archetypes and bpm’s but still grounds itself in what makes dance music and his music so palpable… repetition.
Raised on-planet, Silkie grew up close to the heart of the people on the streets. At at young age he found a deep hidden connection with music that had been lost in the people for centuries. Leading a musical renaissance Silkie would broadcast his music to the people from a re-apropriated military pod. His pod was his home, his life, his love, and most importantly a platform of hope for the people left on the dying planet. Read on here…..
Punk legend Cheetah Chrome – co-founder of The Dead Boys, and more recently Nashville’s Plowboy Records – released his first ever studio collection of solo material, Solo via Plowboy on October 8, 2013. Solo was a 7-song EP of cuts from a 1996 recording session produced by Genya Ravan (with executive producer Hilly Kristal) which he deemed his “great lost solo album” and a Nashville session in 2010 featuring Sylvain Sylvain (New York Dolls), Lez Warner (The Cult), and Sean Koos (Joan Jett and The Blackhearts).
Available now on vinyl for the first time, with some added bonus tracks, all encased in a chrome jacket.
Midwich Records is a new Chicago record label dedicated to electronic music, ranging from techno, ambient, experimental and noise. The label is releasing music on vinyl only, complimented with digital downloads. The covers are adorned with the retina-burning work of renowned artist Mark Salwowski.
The first two releases from the label are new records from Detroit’s Moon Pool and Dead Band and Chicago’s MAGAS.
Moon Pool and Dead Band’s MEQ (pronounced MEK–futurespeak for ‘mech’) is an album of swinging, dirty, analog techno-funk, created with mountains of old synthesizers. MEQ consists of Moon Pool and Dead Band’s earliest track, reworked by some of Detroit’s (and ex-Detroit) best producers: Patrick Russell, BMG (Brendan M. Gillen of Ectomorph), JTC (Dabrye/Charles Manier aka Tadd Mullinix), Ice Cold Chrissy (Coyote Clean Up), Michael Dykehouse, Erno the Inferno and Nate Young in Wolf Eyes mode. MEQ plays like an album, rather than a collection of remixes.
MAGAS’s Heads Plus is the first proper vinyl release from James Marlon Magas since 2009’s Violent ARP. For the past several years, Magas has been concentrating on instrumental production, eschewing vocal histrionics of previous work, in favor of moodier, more open-ended composition. This focus has resulted in the bombastic and hallucinatory Heads Plus, an all-instrumental wallop that fuses howling ARP Odyssey, capricious Juno funk and fuzzed Rhodes anchored to the ever-present throb of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.
Monk Parker‘s first studio album – How The Spark Loves the Tinder is available now from Bronze Rat Records. Parker serves up an alt-americana so sedating in its pace, that you might actually live a few years longer when you finally come back around from the time-slip it puts you in. Pre-order now.