November Needle by Gary Hammerschlag

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LIGHTS Siberia

Siberia’s beats skitter and thwack, the retro electronics and analog synths dirty up Lights’ trademark pretty melodies, propelling her emotion-soaked but still-cute croon into her imperfect new sound. Lights’ up-for-anything collaborations with indie electric outfit Holy F*ck have produced an eclectic album that belies its snow white title. Siberia’s diversity leapfrogs from the hip-shaking dance-pop of “Toes,” to the gritty and crunchy “Everybody Breaks A Glass,” feat. fellow Juno winner, Shad.

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FLORENCE & THE MACHINE Ceremonials

Florence & The Machine returns with her triumphant second album. Ceremonials is a stunningly accomplished record by an artist teetering on the wind-blown top of her game. Recorded with her full band over five weeks this summer in Abbey Road’s legendary Studio 3, Ceremonials is another product of her long-running collaboration with producer Paul Epworth. Includes the first singles “What The Water Gave Me” & “Shake It Out.”

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RIHANNA

Talk That Talk Just one year ago Rihanna released LOUD to critical acclaim and nearly 8 million in global album sales. The #1 female artist on facebook with over 46 million likes, Rihanna recently became the fastest solo artist to have 20 top10 Billboard Hot 100 singles further establishing her as a force in pop music. Get ready for TALK THAT TALK her sixth studio album where Rihanna once again pushes all boundaries! Includes the brand new song “We Found Love.” Deluxe edition features 2 bonus songs, 2 remixes and special photo booklet.

AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 21, 2011

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DOWN WITH WEBSTER

Time To Win, Vol. II The six-sided genre-bending musical juggernaut that is Down With Webster return with their sophomore release Time To Win, Vol. II. The new album includes a variety of collaborators, new and old. Two tracks, “Professional” and “I Want It All” are produced by fellow Toronto native and worldwide producing sensation Boi-1da, who produced Eminem’s worldwide #1 smash “Not Afraid” and has worked with many others including Drake. This second volume marks DWW’s first full-length release, and includes the singles, “She’s Dope” and “Big Wheels.”

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BLINK 182

ARKELLS

BLINK-182 are back with their first studio album in 8 years! NEIGHBORHOODS features, “Up All Night” and is a return to their unmistakable & energized, pop-savvy sound. Deluxe version includes 3 bonus tracks! Check out: “GHOST ON THE DANCE FLOOR,” “KALEIDOSCOPE” & “HEARTS ALL GONE.”

Hamilton natives, Arkells (Max Kerman, Mike DeAngelis, Dan Griffin, Nick Dika, Tim Oxford) formed five years ago and have since become one of Canada’s most acclaimed rock outfits. Having spent the last few years writing new material while on the road, this past spring Arkells retreated to Bath, Ontario to record Michigan Left, living and recording in a converted house on the shores of Lake Ontario. New album includes the songs “Whistleblower,” “Kiss Cam,” and title track “Michigan Left.”

Neighborhoods

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Michigan Left

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Mr. Anonymous 57 is the new 21 for living punk legend John Doe “John Doe.” The toe tag used by a morgue

for an unidentified male corpse was the perfect stage name for the punk-rock era of the late ’70s. In addition to being a cursory nod to Meet John Doe, the 1941 Frank Capra-directed movie starring Gary Cooper, the name had just the right blend of anonymity and “don’t give a shit.” The singer and bassist for X chose John Doe as his alias for its nondescript nature. “I was thinking of this William Burroughs character in a gray suit, blending into the background,” he says. “Crazy, but still going for it.” Paired with Exene Cervenka as X’s hairraising boy/girl vocal tandem, Doe has turned what was supposed to be a brief musical fling into a career. Still firing on all four cylinders, X also includes original members Billy Zoom on guitar and D.J. Bonebrake on drums. Scratching another itch, Doe has parlayed his musical notoriety into a lengthy film résumé, as well. When John Duchac, an ardent Lou Reed/Velvet Underground fan, left Baltimore in the mid’70s, he first checked out the music prospects in New York City. “I saw Talking Heads and the Heartbreakers at CBGB and said, ‘Oh well, this scene is pretty much sewed-up. I think I’ll go to L.A,’” says Doe, who had thoroughly digested sordid, tell-all volume Hollywood Babylon. Hoping to find the remnants of the Kerouac/Ginsberg Beat scene that had vanished 20 years earlier, he met Cervenka, instead, at the Poetry Center in Venice. She had changed her name from Christine to Exene—à la shortening Christmas to Xmas—and had the band name ready to go. The astringent vocal blend the pair cooked up for X was totally unplanned. “She wasn’t aware of how to sing traditional harmony,” says Doe. “As a band, X had a real attraction to doing things differently: backward and wrong.”

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After his group appeared in 1981 punk documentary The Decline Of Western Civilization, Doe landed a starring role in Border Radio, a noirish 1987 indie directed by Allison Anders. He’s kept the acting flame fanned over the years with parts in Boogie Nights, Great Balls Of Fire and TV series Roswell. With the recent release of his ninth solo album, Keeper (Yep Roc), and an occasional movie role, Doe has positioned himself to do pretty much what he likes these days, including X’s upcoming tour of South America with Pearl Jam. “We’ve survived,” he says. “We still have the same band members in X, and I still have enough creative juice to make a solo record every two or three years.” As a welcome by-product of keeping busy at age 57, Doe seems happy with life these days. “I think it’s important once you get over 40 to have some satisfaction,” he says. “You no longer have to maintain this angry young man thing. That life isn’t fair.” But getting old has its challenges, too. As his personal life improved and he moved to Northern California, Doe found his creative spark had been extinguished. “For two years after things began to change for me, I didn’t give a shit about writing songs,” he says. “‘What? I’m happy’. Then I realized, ‘Wait a minute. I do this for a living. I need to find out how to write songs where people are loved, without it being this lightweight, la-de-da stuff.’ What’s somebody gonna do, call me a sissy?” Cervenka, recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, is also dealing with the downside of middle age. From her dynamic appearance at the annual “Xmas With X” show at Slim’s in San Francisco in December 2010, however, you would never know she was ill. “The short version is that she’s stronger than ever,” says

Doe. “At this point, there’s still the question of what form of the disease she has.” Singing alongside a woman is something Doe embraces heartily. Keeper features Patty Griffin, Jill Sobule and Cindy Wasserman following in the footsteps of Cervenka. “I think it complements my voice,” he says of the duo setting. “I’ve got a good voice, but not one that’s quirky with a strange tone, like Macy Gray or Bob Dylan. Or a not-so-good voice with an appealing aspect to it, like Serge Gainsbourg or Lou Reed.” The extra vocal layer a woman provides, says Doe, adds dimension to the lyrics: “Not to get too intellectual about it—it just sounds good, it feels good and it’s fun.” Making movies is still a kick, too, Doe insists, although he got tired of the auditioning and the heated competition. In 2010, he appeared in an indie film called Hated. “I played the shitty, lying, cheating manager of an upand-coming rock band,” he says. “It was really fun. I had a nasty little ponytail.” In the can is Doe’s first encounter with the zombie genre. Directed by Jesse Dayton, Zombex is about a drug manufacturer distributing a Prozac-like substance to victims of Hurricane Katrina. “It turns them into flesh-eating zombies—not just your average pharmaceutical kind of zombie,” says Doe. Following the recent film trend of more mobile zombies seen in 2009’s Zombieland, Zombex uses both the traditional, staggering ghouls alongside the more dangerous, speedy variety. “I didn’t really get to see too many zombies, though,” says Doe. “I was the guy telling the lead character, ‘Better be careful. Shit’s coming down the pipe.’” With its groundbreaking 1983 album More Fun In The New World, X broadened its crash ‘n’ burn concept to include a more populist sound

photo by autumn de wilde

influenced by ’50s honky-tonk, though Doe says he didn’t listen to country music at home. “My parents didn’t play it,” he says. “They liked classical.” But when he heard country songs from the early ’60s—like LeRoy Van Dyke’s “Walk On By” or “From A Jack To A King” by Ned Miller—crossing over into the pop charts, the appeal was immediate. “It just kind of clicked,” he says. “You gravitate to what you can do, and I couldn’t sing like Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding.” Tired of dipping an occasional toe into the pond, Doe took the plunge in 2009 when he fronted Toronto combo the Sadies on Country Club, an album of country classics. “We picked the ones everybody knows, not the obscurities,” says Doe of a set list that included down-home chestnuts like Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City,” Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night.” When Doe and Cervenka feel the urge to make more traditional music, they can wheel the Knitters out of the garage with Bonebrake, former Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin and standup bassist Dave Bartel. “We do the Knitters for fun,” says Doe. “It was only supposed to last a few months.” More ordeal than fun was the making of Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls Of Fire in 1989. “We spent 10 weeks drinking like monsters in Memphis,” says Doe. “Dennis Quaid thought he could be Jerry Lee himself and lived the role. It almost killed us.” Doe has survived the bumps in the road with a newfound appreciation of his life’s work. “That’s the advantage of not overdosing and sticking around,” he says. “You become the voice of authority, and you get to do cool shit.” —Jud Cost

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/music

The New Blood Rush

Coldplay take their fans on an exciting and enthralling musical adventure with new album Mylo Xyloto by Stephen Jones

ements that were the same exactly that—their last—producer Brian Eno had other ideas. but it feels like a completely different page.” Guitarist Jonny Buckland explains, “Brian’s a very inspiraChatting at their Bakery Studio in Hampstead—having just tional character. He wrote us a letter actually after we finished finalised the tracklisting over lunch—the band appear relaxed the last album saying ‘that was good, but I think we can go fur- although admittedly nervous how the world will respond to a ther, we can do more,...’ and so, in a way he got the ball rolling record which began life as a “quiet acoustic record”, at one point for, for this, you know?” was intended to be a soundtrack to a “Yellow Submarine-style” Drummer Will Champion adds, “Chris always has a knack animated film (abandoned because it would take five years to of saying that this could be our last album but at the time, after make) and then now sees life as an progressive synth-infused we’ve just finished an album, it genuinely does feel like there’s pop “concept album” that still rocks; Buckland’s guitar is argunothing left in the tank - there’s no more ideas, so the idea of ably more prominent than on previous outings. Bassist Guy Berryman explains, “It was going to be a kind of recording another record is terrifying.” It’s to Eno’s credit that he has eked more mileage from the a soundtrack album to a film we were writing which had a story Coldplay juggernaut as Mylo Xyloto, the band’s fifth studio al- through it and we got quite far down the line with designing bum is arguably their most exciting, best flowing and enthralling characters and then we abandoned that idea and moved into listen since 2002’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head. a different direction, retaining elements of the acoustic album Production was entrusted to their established team: Markus and from the soundtrack album with us, so what we’ve ended up Dravs, Daniel Green, Rik Simpson and Eno who is credited with is an album that we arrived at quite an unusual sort of way, with “enoxification and additional composition” with former so it’s kind of a hotchpotch of all those different phases.” Frontman Chris Martin doesn’t baulk at the idea of describmanager Phil Harvey - the band’s unofficial “fifth member”—in a crucial creative director role. Berryman adds, “There were el- ing Mylo Xyloto as a concept album; indeed against a climate

When

NEEDLE

Chris Martin hinted the last Coldplay album might just be

Mylo Xyloto

Track-By-Track with Chris Martin

Mylo Xyloto  It means whatever you want it to mean. (To me) it means a freedom of expression and you can think up new words if you want to. Nothing’s,... there’s still things that you can invent and words beginning with X are few and far between so we thought we might try and add one. Hurts like Heaven  That’s the opening track, really. That’s kind of our call to arms to each other. I think it’s sort of like, calisthenics, musically for us. It warms you up. Paradise  If we ever won the X Factor that’s the song we might sing. We never will, of course, but that’s what we would do. I think, if truth be told, we’re not really handsome enough to go on it. Charlie Brown  Is the only song we ever wrote in a doll’s house. I was staying in a place with like a Wendy House and I turned it into a studio ‘cos my daughter didn’t like it. And I came back from a Bruce Springsteen show in Los Angeles and I was like ‘okay - let’s see if anything came out of that day.’ Us Against The World  The whole thing is supposed to be a kind of story so they all fit together and that is the two characters from the previous two songs when they meet each other. It’s about meeting someone you love and feeling powerful,... when you meet someone and suddenly everything feels alright again. M.M.I.X.  It doesn’t stand for 2009. It came from (long-serving guitar tech) ‘Mat McGinn is awesome’ so I don’t know why the fuck it got called that! It has nothing to do with anything that… it stands for nothing, it’s just a collection of letters. Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall  So the central theme of the record, about trying to turn—Paradise is kind of about this as well—trying to turn bad things into good things somehow. We as a band have been through some funny incidents in terms of people being aggressive towards us or whatever. And, a lot of the record is fuelled by a kind of fire which comes from turning that negativity into positivity. And I think everyone in their life has something like that.

of downloading individual tracks he says they deliberately set out to make a body of work which fans would want to listen to in its entirety. Martin agrees, “I think if you wanted to use that word you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s about people who are lost in a big scary environment and find each other as a form of getting through it. It’s a love story basically. But it hasn’t got many dragons or mountains which I think is what people associate concept albums with! “But we really felt like the album is so under threat as a format that we should really make an effort to really tie it all together. And even if they don’t want to own it all makes sense as one thing, should anyone be interested in that. So if you want to find a narrative through it you can, which is something that we just enjoyed doing.”

Major Minus  That’s like a Bond villain of a song. A bad cousin of the album. It’s the nasty one. UFO  That’s the acoustic… that was the first song written for the album actually and the chord sequence in it pops up a few times. And that’s a kind of prayer ‘times’ kind of song. There’s a lot of feeling lost on the album but also being found as well and that’s very much a bit of both. Princess of China (feat. Rihanna)  I actually sort of wrote it for Rihanna and then I liked it too much. And then it became clear it was like a sort of back and forth between a couple. It took about a year to pluck up the courage but eventually I asked her and she was not unwilling. I played it for her on piano in Los Angeles. That was quite nerve-wracking, I’ve gotta to say. And so she said, ‘Oh okay... Yeah!’ Mylo Xyloto is available now from Emi Music Canada.

Up In Flames  We recorded it in five countries in seven days. That was fun. That was when we knew we could finish the record because Will—who’s the hardest to please of the band—when he heard that he said ‘Okay, we can finish now’—because I think he liked the space on it. A Hopeful Transmission/Don’t Let It Break Your Heart  Well I think we wanted to do an album this time with a happy ending and I think we’ve actually done it, which we never thought we’d do. For whatever reason it is, it’s happened and... that was very late in the day and it’s nice that song ‘cos you just hit everything as hard as possible, which for a band like Coldplay is a very pleasurable thing. Up With The Birds  That was when we were sort of thinking about a story that seemed like the end of a movie type thing.

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THE BEST MUSIC FROM THE MOST LEGENDARY ARTISTS

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MANY MORE TITLES AVAILABLE AT SUNRISE RECORDS The Essential Billy Joel | The Essential Nina Simone | The Essential Carole King The Essential Meatloaf | The Essential ELO | The Essential Santana Quantities limited. Sale in effect until Dec. 24, 2011.

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Class Action

It only took three decades for Social Climbers to fulfill their namesake’s destiny

The music industry never ceases to con-

found. The purchasing of less and less physical product coupled with the disintegration of the old model of publicity has caused much grief, hemorrhaged boatloads of cash and ignited countless layoffs. Still, each week, the availability of reissues upon reissues of old and notso-old albums runs amok. Oftentimes, you’ll stumble across a reissue of something that has no business being reissued. Or reissues of reissues. From the Reissue That Actually Deserves To Be Reissued department comes Social Climbers’ self-titled 1980 full-length. Social Climbers were a trio of forward-thinking NYC musicians who, back then, were playing with the likes of Glenn Branca and working with choreographer Charles Moulton. “(Keyboardist) Dick (Connette) and I were both participating in a lot of music that would be referred to as ‘downtown,’” says guitarist/ vocalist Mark Bingham. “We put this band together for whatever reason and called it Social Climbers, which is the worst name in the history of the world. It was like a bad joke

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to play one gig, a benefit at the Mud Club, and make fun of the scene at the time, which was a bunch of rich kids in black clothes, socialclimbing. We all hated the idea so much that it was like, ‘Let’s do it!’” The trio—rounded out by bassist Jean Seaton Shaw—recorded three angular, drum machine-driven seven-inches that crossed the new wave of Talking Heads, the Cars and Blondie with the no wave of Suicide and Static, though the pressing of each of these singles was apparently done with all the care of an orangutan ripping into a mango. The deeply flawed records were compiled into a fulllength, after which, laughs Bingham, “They were all supposed to die, but the guy from Gulcher Records hung on to a few.” When asked about why this 31-year-old album is being reissued now, he responds, “I don’t know. I think it was Drag City finding and liking it. The rest of us hadn’t thought about it in 30 years. We broke up in 1982 … It’s a pretty cool record, and it always got a certain amount of juice from the fans. One of the things that

held it back 30 years ago was that it was really different from a lot of the stuff that was going on then. We knew where we going with the use of the drum machines. There were a few other drum-machine bands around at the time, but we would sometimes use three at a time and do some crazy stuff with them. And we created some pretty cool music, considering we were using these non-human elements. But it was still fun to listen to because the songs were simple.” With the reissue officially out of the way, the obvious question that follows is whether reunion shows are too far behind, a query at which Bingham laughs. “I mean, I’ve produced over 200 records since then, and when I listen to Social Climbers, it’s not like I’m embarrassed,” he says. “But I doubt there will be shows. Dick works with Loudon Wainwright and is in a whole other universe of the music industry. Plus, do you really want to see 60-year-olds jumping around onstage to rhythm machines?” —Kevin Stewart-Panko

photo by Patti Perret

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The Who

Quadrophenia Director’s Cut • 2CD Deluxe – original album remastered w/ unreleased tracks • Super Deluxe – 4CD + 1 DVD + 7" vinyl + book • Vinyl A stunning ‘Director’s Cut’ of the landmark 1973 album produced, authorised and overseen by Pete Townshend who describes the release as “the Who album I’m most proud of.” A limited edition 5 disc box set featuring the original studio album, now remastered, 2 discs of previously unreleased demos and a disc of 5.1 surround-sound mixes. It contains rare and unseen memorabilia including handwritten lyrics, unseen photos, a poster, a 7" of 5.15, a unique studio diary as well as an extensive essay and track by track guide to the demo recordings all written by Pete. Also available as 2CD, 2LP and digital versions.

The Rolling Stones Some Girls

• Standard 1CD album • 2CD Deluxe Edition original album remastered w/ 12 unreleased tracks • Super Deluxe Boxset 2CD + DVD + 7" + book • Vinyl Rightly considered one of the finest works by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood, Some Girls topped the charts over three decades ago and remains the best selling album of the Stones’ career. Deluxe & Super Deluxe Editions include 12 unreleased tracks, a coffee table book featuring a stunning and previously unseen Helmut Newton photo session from 1978, and a 7" single of Beast Of Burden/When The Whip Comes Down in its original banned sleeve.

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photo by justin evans

Using Protection Eric Bachmann balances life in Archers Of Loaf and Crooked Fingers with aplomb Eric Bachmann doesn’t like staying put.

In the three years since his band Crooked Fingers released Forfeit/Fortune, he’s moved from Colorado to Taiwan and back to the American south, where his music career began more than two decades ago. “I get bored if I stay in one place too long,” he says. “I want to settle down or at least find a place to live, but I don’t know where that would be.” It’s fitting that Bachmann’s travels have brought him full circle, since the year began with the surprise reunion of Archers Of Loaf, whose 1990s albums were touchstones for a generation of aggro indie rockers. If there were any questions about whether the Archers’ music still resonated 13 years after their breakup, the speed with which recordings of their unannounced set at Carrboro, N.C.’s Cat’s Cradle circulated confirmed that they had not been forgotten. Over the years, Bachmann has been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of getting his former band back together, but his attitudes are as changeable as his forwarding address. “When the Archers broke up in ’98, that was the worst-sounding shit to me,” he says. “I didn’t want to hear it. But I don’t feel guilty about changing my mind.” As it turned out, the band’s three other members—Matt Gentling, Eric Johnson and Mark Price, who’ve all moved on to full-time day jobs—were all on board for a reunion, although Bachmann was unaware a consensus had formed in his absence. “I was the holdout,” he says, “but I did not know I was the holdout. When I said, ‘Yeah, I’d be into that,’ the floodgates opened.” The impetus for the Archers’ re-up is Merge Records’ ongoing reissue of their four studio albums, beginning with 1993’s Icky Mettle, a double-disc set that also includes several single releases and the follow-up Vs. The Greatest Of All Time EP. Their summer tour, a weekendwarrior string of Friday and Saturday nights, was a packed and sweaty affair, with crowds in their 30s and 40s screaming every word to “Audiowhore” and “Web In Front.” While his bandmates go back to their

lives, Bachmann has time to kill, so the Archers’ frontman has also been acting as their equipment manager. “Matt, Mark and Eric are adults, and they work,” he says. “My childlike ass is still doing music for whatever reason. So, I can drive the gear to a different city, do a Crooked Fingers gig between shows and let my voice rest.” It’s a schizophrenic existence, screaming angst-ridden anthems to sellout crowds on the weekends and playing Crooked Fingers’ droning, melodic folk rock in small clubs during the week, but for Bachmann, it’s worked out perfectly. “Bouncing back and forth keeps me entertained,” he says. “If I did Archers shows 10 in a row, I’d get bored. If I do Crooked Fingers shows a month in a row, I want to do something else.” For the moment, though, Bachmann’s focus has shifted to Crooked Fingers and sixth album Breaks In The Armor (Merge). Since Forfeit/Fortune was composed of previously discarded songs Bachmann re-recorded to give a consistent feel, Breaks is the first new album of Crooked Fingers material in six years and Bachmann’s first since 2006 solo album To The Races. In characteristically seesaw fashion, Bachmann’s busy 2011 follows a period in which he considered giving up music altogether. While he was in Taiwan, where he moved to teach English, Bachmann recalls thinking, “‘I’ll always work on songs or make music, but I don’t necessarily give a shit if nobody hears it.’ That’s where I was.” Fortunately, circumstances conspired to reacquaint Bachmann with his muse. First, he discovered that he was a terrible teacher, or at least that he lacks the disciplinarian streak that a schoolteacher needs. (“I’d be in a situation where I maybe should have said, ‘Don’t do that,’ but my thought instead was, ‘This could be interesting.’”) Then, he moved back to the U.S. to work on Azure Ray’s 2010 album Drawing Down The Moon and found himself spending a lot of time in the Archers’ erstwhile home base of Asheville, N.C., visiting both his father and the collection of instruments he’d stored

at Gentling’s house. Although the Crooked Fingers album was recorded as the Archers were plotting their comeback, Bachmann says the only possible relationship between the two overlapping projects is an inverse one: As he got ready to crank up the noise with the Archers, Crooked Fingers got quieter and more stripped-down. Past albums have featured strings and horn sections, but Breaks In The Armor is a spartan affair, right down to the rhythm track. On those songs that have percussion, the principal instrument is a floor tom played standing up, Moe Tucker-style. “Typhoon,” which opens the album, builds on a quarter-note drum pulse and a two-note guitar riff, an elemental pattern that gathers strength as it swirls round again and again. “I wanted it to have a Sasquatch feel, very heavy-handed,” says Bachmann. Rather than gild the songs with rhythmic accents, he eschewed them almost entirely. “There’s only 20 cymbal hits on the record, if that,” he says. “I have a friend who plays drums in a very popular band, and I won’t name-drop, but he was talking about how if you only hit the cymbals once every three songs, it really means something when you do it.” Bachmann’s trying to take that advice to heart in life as well. He draws an example from the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, who describes shyly keeping mum at political meetings only to find that when he did speak up, his words carried added weight. “People talk too much,” says Bachmann. “Sometimes I wish I said six things a day, because that’s really all the meaningful stuff I’m saying.” At the moment, Bachmann isn’t doing a great job of keeping quiet: Crooked Fingers are touring through the fall, and the Archers are planning more dates next year to coincide with future reissues. (Fans who lamented the dearth of late-period material in the summer’s shows can be reassured that set lists will shift to favor recent rereleases.) But chances are Bachmann will change his mind again some time soon, and maybe this time, it’ll stick. —Sam Adams

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WE ARE THE IN CROWD Best Intentions

JASON BLAINE Life So Far

SKELETONWITCH Forever Abomination

ANIMALS AS LEADERS Weightless

DEATH Individual Thought Patterns

BROKENCYDE Guilty Pleasure

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THE BOXER REBELLION The Cold Still

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YELLOWCARD When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes

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KITTIE I’ve Failed You

STALLEY Lincoln Way Nights

JORDAN KNIGHT Unfinished Business

PHONTE Charity Starts At Home

9TH WONDER The Wonder Years

VARIOUS Strictly The Best Vol. 45

THE STAMPEDERS Live At The Mae Wilson

ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND Live at SUNY Stonybrook 1969

MEGADETH Holy Wars Live DVD

BACHMAN & TURNER Live At Roseland DVD

METALLICA Broken Beat & Scarred DVD

Marketed & Distributed in Canada by Entertainment One Canada.

CHICKENFOOT III

VARIOUS Reggae Gold 2011

VARIOUS Strictly The Best Vol. 44

THE POLICE Live In Japan 2008 DVD

PINK FLOYD

WISH YOU WERE HERE IMMERSION

EDITION

16 CLASSIC TRACKS ON 1 CD

2xCD / 2xDVD / BLU-RAY BOOKLETS / ART PRINT MEMORABILIA / MERCHANDISE

Includes: Money, Another Brick In The Wall Pt.2, Comfortably Numb, Wish You Were Here, See Emily Play, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, High Hopes, The Great Gig In The Sky, Time and more…

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"The most famous unfinished album in rock & roll histor y…” – Rolling Stone

THE BEACH BOYS’ LEGENDARY ‘SMiLE’ ALBUM SESSIONS Never-Before-Released Original 1966-’67 Album Sessions! With the full participation of original Beach Boys Al Jardine, Mike Love, and Brian Wilson, Capitol/EMI has, for the first time, collected and compiled the band’s legendary 1966-’67 sessions for the nevercompleted SMiLE album. The SMiLE Sessions’ 2CD lift-top box & double vinyl LP feature an approximation of what was intended to be the completed SMiLE album, compiled from The Beach Boys’ original session masters. Limited edition expanded edition of The SMiLE Sessions features the main SMiLE album tracks, plus four CDs of additional audio from the legendary sessions, a double vinyl LP set, and two 7” vinyl singles! Box Set Content: 5 CDs + 2 Gatefold LP’s + 2 7” vinyl singles + 60 page case bound book + 24” x 36” poster 2CD Edition: Lift top box with 2 CD’s, Poster, Button + 36 page booklet Vinyl - 2LP 12” x 12” gatefold packaging + Inner sleeve art, lyrics + 12” x 12” booklet

2CD 2xLP

Box Set

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Funny Games Rachael Yamagata says goodbye to the dark side, kind of Sultry is an apt description of Rachael Yamagata’s vocals. She

often sounds half-asleep, wavering between contentment and indecision, balanced between struggle and surrender. Her poetic lyrics explore the darker side of unrequited love with a vulnerability that makes her songs resonate with anyone who has ever had a broken heart. She still sounds troubled on Chesapeake (Frankenfish), but her buoyant melodies and the music’s bright pop sheen keep things from getting too grim. “I’ve actually lightened up a little bit this time,” says Yamagata. “I’ve discovered how to let go, especially in the studio. This record has a few songs that are almost positive. That’s a new thing for me.” Yamagata made the album at the home of producer John Alagia. He turned his house into a studio, and Yamagata invited along a group of musicians she’d worked with in the past. “It was a spontaneous, seatof-the-pants recording session,” she says. “Most of it was done live, in seven days. We didn’t have the ability to separate things, so we’d rehearse, play it through over and over and use the best take. The only [things] done after the fact were a few keyboard and xylophone tracks Zac Rae did in L.A.” Heartache is still the overarching theme, but Yamagata includes songs of reconciliation and even humorous numbers like “I Don’t Want To Be Your Mother” and “The Way It Seems To Go,” a talking blues track with a jazzy hip-hop arrangement. “I used to scare the people working with me by saying I was going to do a rap song, but I think my humor comes through on this album and that song,” she says. “I am dark and like dark songs, which allows me to be happier in my everyday life.” Yamagata stretches a bit on “Deal Breaker,” the closing track. It has a muted, late-night feel and describes the comfort a familiar track can bring to a troubled soul. Writing a song about a song is risky, but “Deal Breaker” has one of Yamagata’s strongest melodies and a wrenching vocal performance. “I wanted to convey the heartache of a failed relationship, and this song has a sadness and a maturity and some consciousness and guts,” she says. “Live, it’s always been successful, so I made a choice to put it at the end of the album. I still think of my songs as albums. People say the world is changing and track-by-track is the way to go, but to me, every album is a section of my life that was a full emotional experience. I want to present all of the flavors.” While Yamagata has lightened up a bit on Chesapeake, the tunes still reflect a woman having trouble navigating the choppy waters of romance. Are her real-life relationships as grim as those she tends to write songs about? “I’m fascinated by how people interact when they’re in love,” she says. “There is a level of emotion we feel every day, but it’s in high gear during a relationship. When I see Facebook comments guessing that I’m being dramatic about what I’m going through, I have to laugh. If we went out for drinks and I told you the truth about my relationships, you’d think I was underplaying the drama.” —j. poet

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photo by laura crosta

the smashing pumpkins

first two groundbreaking albums ‘gish’ and ‘siamese dream’ get the fully remastered treatment

Gish

2CD + DVD Deluxe edition includes:

• Original Album Remastered With Reimagined Cover Art • 15 Previously Unreleased or Alternative Versions of Gish Era Songs • Previously Unreleased, Full Length DVD From The Metro 1990 • 6 Postcards Featuring Never-Before-Seen Band Photos • 24-page Booklet Featuring Complete Lyrics, Liner Notes by David Wild, and Track-by-track Annotations by Billy Corgan

Siamese Dream

2CD + DVD Deluxe edition includes:

• Original Album Remastered With Reimagined Cover Art • 17 Previously Unreleased or Alternative Versions of Siamese Dream Era Songs • Previously Unreleased, Full Length DVD From The Metro 1993 • 13 Postcards Featuring Original Album Collages • 24 Page Booklet Featuring Complete Lyrics, Unpublished Personal Photos, Liner Notes by David Wild, and Track-by-Track Annotations by Billy Corgan

Available November 29

Also available, standard editions include full original album re-mastered & re-issued for the First Time! Vinyl remastered editions pressed on 180 gram vinyl and both packaged in gatefold sleeves

Kate Bush 50 Words For Snow The brand new studio album and poised to be one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2011! The album comprises all new material and was recorded during the same period that Kate worked on her album “Director’s Cut”, which was released in May. “50 Words For Snow” features seven brand new tracks set against a background of falling snow including the first single “Wildman.”

Available November 21 ALSO AVAILABLE The Director’s Cut | The Whole Story

www.katebush.com

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Winging It

Pterodactyl broadens its horizons without losing the psychedelic plot

In writing Spills Out (Brah), Pterodactyl

found inspiration in the ends of things: relationships, jobs, even lives. But the Brooklyn trio’s third and best album refuses to dwell on the past. Instead it represents a new approach and, not coincidentally, the band’s best work. Unlike previous efforts, where individual members would present their own songs to the group, Pterodactyl created Spills Out as a band. “We wrote almost all of it together, in the room together,” says bassist Jesse Hodges. “Even the lyrics. It was definitely weird, but weird in a good way. It’s not like there’s one person making an executive decision; we had to struggle.” The struggle was worth it. Hodges is joined in Pterodactyl by guitarist Joe Kremer and drummer Matt Marlin. All three sing. And on Spills Out, all three sing a lot, their voices fanning out in pristine harmony or crisscrossing in counter-melodic tangles. Against the busy and kinetic swirls of melody Pterodactyl stacks into its loft-party psych rock, these more confident multi-part vocal arrangements enhance the momentum of

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songs like first single “School Glue.” Spills Out finds the band broadening its instrumental palette as well. “The Hole Night” is a relatively spare arrangement, with harmonic coos and a falsetto lead suggesting an early Beach Boys nugget as interpreted by Parts & Labor. Marlin’s drumming is as active as ever, but it never overpowers the warm breeze of classic pop that glazes the song. It’s a bold move, but it’s still unmistakably Pterodactyl. “No matter what, it’s ultimately going to sound like us,” says Hodges. “It doesn’t matter if I’m listening to ‘Everyday’ by Buddy Holly over and over and over again and want to write my version of ‘Everyday’; it’s not going to sound like that.” So, when “The Break” dips into the Pixies catalog for the distant, ethereal backup harmonies at its conclusion, or when “Thorn” leans toward Earth-ly mantra metal at its outset, there’s nothing to lose. The character of Pterodactyl is too well-defined to be swayed so easily. Hodges compares his relationship with his bandmates to family. “You hang out as much as you can, but it can be a kind of heavy, serious relationship, so we don’t always get along

either,” he says. “But, like family, I know those guys have my back and vice versa.” It’s the type of relationship that enables the sort of close collaboration and pull-no-punches editing that made Spills Out so clear and consistent in its results. Pterodactyl recorded the album at Hodges’ home and the band’s practice space, surrounding itself with friendly, trusted collaborators. But while the comforts of familiar spaces and faces contribute to Spills Out’s ascendant momentum and depth of sound, it’s not the multitude of guests that gives the album its voice. Spills Out is the product of overcoming challenges both personal and creative. Its sound is triumphant, and it deserves to be. The necessary obstructions of a new approach asked a lot of Pterodactyl’s principles, but in the end, it was just the dare the band needed. “Those moments where you’re maybe a little bit afraid—like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know if I should do this’—for me, that’s the perfect moment,” says Hodges. “That’s exactly what I want to do. I want to scare myself. I want to push myself to the point that I’m nervous about it, because that’s when I know what I’m doing is real.” — Bryan C. Reed

photo by sabine rogers

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Bright And Blue Kathryn Calder tests out new textures

When something bad is heading straight

at you, time slows and every thought seems worth examining. When the moment of impact comes at last, you lose even basic plot points, like where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. You can hear the difference in Kathryn Calder’s first album, recorded while her mom was dying, and her second, made while she was absorbing the loss. The arrangements on 2010’s Are You My Mother? were largely sparse, the edges crisp; when Calder sang through fuzz on “A Day Long Past Its Prime,” she was bracing for a blow and armed with a rare blast of rock. That song, placed toward the end of the record, served as an omen of things to come. Her new album, Bright And Vivid (File Under: Music), is shrouded in layers of keyboards, guitars and strings. Opener “One, Two, Three” all but buries Calder’s vocals beneath swirling distortion, leaving the listener to grasp only a few phrases, like “When you were younger/Did you think that your mother/Was all you could belong to?” and “When you were older/And you didn’t have a mother/You found yourself

photo by caleb beyers

under that bridge.” That was intentional for Calder, who has also made four records with Immaculate Machine and three with the New Pornographers. “I picked that song to go first because I kind of wanted to make a bit of a particular statement that it wasn’t gonna be exactly like the last record,” she says. Another standout, “Right Book,” pivots between Calder’s fluttery vocals and doomy piano before the drums take flight. “That song was incredibly difficult to get right,” she says. “We just spent a long time with different structures and different sounds and trying to build it right.” It’s fitting that Bright And Vivid isn’t so accessible, because Calder herself hasn’t really wrapped her head around it. She knows she was lost in the fog after her mother’s death and trying to make sense of her new reality. But that’s not out of character for her; it often takes time to process her thoughts through her work. “The way I write songs, I’ll write the song and then only later I’ll really know what it’s

about,” she says. “And so I haven’t quite figured out what some of the songs are about yet. I haven’t lived with them long enough. But I will. I’ll know. If you ask me in a year, then I’ll know.” By then, she may have another batch of songs. Or not. “Appearances make it seem like I’m prolific, but I’m not really,” she says. Not everyone can release two very different albums in under a year and a half, but Calder doesn’t have anything in reserve if writer’s block hits. “I used every song,” she says. “I just made them work.” Still, if Bright And Vivid’s last track, “Younger Than We’ve Ever Been,” is any indication, she’ll find a way to reconcile her tendency for airy melodies and organic percussion with her thirst for unusual textures. It’ll take some work, Calder concedes, but she’s used to it. “I don’t really find inspiration if I don’t sit down and write,” she says. “I generally find tasks to do, like laundry. Laundry happens, instead of songwriting. So, if I don’t put in the time to sit down and actually write, I’ll never, ever get anything done.” — M.J. Fine

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Down On the Upside

Dan Mangan is lucky to have so many options at his fingertips

“When I first started out, I was very much

doing guy-with-a-guitar, singer/songwriter stuff,” says Dan Mangan on the eve of the release of Oh Fortune (Arts & Crafts). “As soon as I started touring and putting out records, I felt totally boxed in by what that was. By the time I made this record, I’d spent a couple years on the road with an amazing band. The way they talk about music has helped me figure out what I want to do.” What he wants to do is everything. When Mangan cites indie rock, folk and jazz as components of his sound, he’s barely chipping the tip of a very large iceberg. To top it off, everything is tied together for maximum coherence. It’s not just that the guitar solo at the end of “How Darwinian” could easily find a place on any Muse record; the rock part of the blackened pop epic’s aesthetic bleeds into Broadway disco march “Post-War Blues” as soon as Mangan stops crooning.

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“With Oh Fortune, for the first time ever, I had the luxury of spending a lot of time on an album,” he says. “Even though there are so many great people on this record doing so many great things, I feel that the record is more honestly me than anything else I’ve done in the past.” Being honestly himself allows for surprises, too, like closing both “Jeopardy” and the album with trumpeter J.P. Carter’s rollicking, New Orleans-informed solo. “All these other players who’ve been on the record in a supporting role, finally, during this last two minutes, get to step up for this great instrumental ending,” he says. “In part, because I’m no longer in the picture, it’s actually probably my favorite part of the record.” Mangan’s aptitude for fashioning unusual juxtapositions also often helps shape his lyrics. “I lit up like a match,” he sings nonchalantly on “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being

Any Help At All” over accompaniment perfect for a formal ball on a buccaneer’s frigate. “And I bled gasoline/Made a torch of myself ’til the moon was mine/And the stars made of me/ How I lit that skyuhyyyyuy!” As if turning into a winged bear, the singer lets his last note break up into a triumphantly ascending growl as the string section spirals urgently upward. “Even though the record has its share of sadness and death, I don’t see it as a sad record,” he says. “It has a subtext of hopefulness and joy. To me, lighting yourself on fire isn’t so much giving up as letting go. The fact that the world is so chaotic, so troubling and full of hypocrisy can really get you down. But if you can let go of all that, you can experience joy and really appreciate it. I think that’s something human beings walk away from all too easily. Sure, things are pretty screwed up. But man, doesn’t it feel good when you put on a fresh pair of socks!” —Rod Smith

photo by jonathan taggert

on the record a conversation with

ben lee Ben Lee had barely cracked the puberty code when he fronted renowned Aussie alt-rock combo Noise Addict, and as a wellweathered 16-year-old, he began his debut solo album, the astonishingly mature yet still appropriately naïve Grandpaw Would. Lee’s third album, Breathing Tornados, garnered best male artist and album of the year nominations in Australia. After 2002’s big-selling hey you. yes you., Lee started his own label and released the most upbeat LP in his increasingly dark catalog, 2005’s Awake Is The New Sleep, requiring him to compose acceptance speeches for best male artist, best independent release and single of the year wins at home. Lee’s impressive string of successes continued with 2007’s Ripe, featuring cameos by Mandy Moore, Benji Madden and the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench, among others, but the streak abruptly stopped with 2009’s The Rebirth Of Venus. The quasi-concept album of Lee’s ruminations on women was almost universally derided as half-baked philosophical twaddle set to a weirdly diverse pop soundtrack. Ironically, Lee subsequently experienced the transformative effect of women, marrying actress Ione Skye in 2008 and welcoming daughter Goldie the next year. Simultaneously, he was also examining the inherent power of dreams with Dr. Jan Lloyd, who led him through the labyrinth of his brain’s nocturnal creations. Sadly, Lloyd’s death last year forced Lee to balance the joy of his daughter’s first year with the agonizing loss of his good friend and trusted therapist, all of which inspired Lee to again brave the concept-album waters with Deeper Into Dream (Dangerbird), a loosely threaded set about the mind movies our brains script, direct and discard every single night. From his Laurel Canyon home, Lee discussed his inspirations for Deeper Into Dream and, in the spirit of his ephemeral subject matter, what it all means. What was Deeper Into Dream’s creative evolution? I felt my greatest record artistically was Awake Is The New Sleep, which taught me that my records are most satisfying when I explore something that’s really important to me, no matter how idiosyncratic. I’d made two records in a row, Ripe and Rebirth Of Venus, sort of consciously exploring the rock mill of touring/records/touring/records, because I’d never really done that. And I’d just had a baby, and I decided I was next going to make a record when I really had something I wanted

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to explore, because I was in no rush to get out on the road or spend a minute away from the baby. I was letting this sense percolate of when I really wanted to have something to share. The other thing was I started doing this really amazing dream analysis. When I was first telling my management and label about this, they were like, “Huh?” Like talking about therapy is the least rock ‘n’ roll thing you could possibly do, unless it came after being a drug addict. So, being a dad and doing this work with my dreams led me into a different relationship with my creativity. Then the amazing therapist I was working with died, and suddenly all of this music and these ideas started coming out. I wanted to make a record to tribute the new way he’d shown me to look at the world and dreams and the imagination and to make sense of his death and becoming a dad. There’s been so much radical change in the last few years, and it suddenly felt like the big pot was starting to boil. How did Dr. Lloyd’s revelations about your dreams come out in this record? Jan’s way of looking at dreams was, very simply, they reveal what’s going on with you that day, which is such a basic idea. But what’s concerning you in your dream life, what you’re afraid of or what you desire, is often radically different from the persona we walk around with in our daily life. That’s when it starts getting really interesting. There’s a huge chasm between what I felt, who I am and the self that I’ve been, not just in public to my fans, but to my family, my friends, my pets. [Laughs] I really started appreciating what’s going on inside me and each of us, who are infinitely more complex than we say when people ask how we’re doing. It led me to this appreciation of complexity, ambiguity and conflicting feelings.

How did you start recording people recounting their dreams? I would ask friends how they were, and they’d answer, then I’d say, “Did you have any dreams recently?” They’d share a dream and actually be more honest when they were sharing dreams, and it would amuse them how honest they were being. I have this home studio, and I got into this thing of “Can I record your dream?” I didn’t know how I’d use it exactly, but I started building this big file of all these dreams. It continues to be an exploration that raises more questions than answers, but that feels real to me. Did you begin by writing songs that grew into the concept, or did you begin with the concept? That first line on the record—“Have you ever woken from a dream and convinced yourself you’ll remember it in the morning?”—really hit me. That’s where I started exploring. It hasn’t worked well in the past when I’ve put the concept before the music, and in a lot of songs on the record, it’s a loose connection. Like “Indian Myna” and “Church Of Everybody Else,” they’re just songs, but because they were all written in a few months’ period and I was trying to tap into what was going on inside me, they’re all kind of connected. I was just trying to write songs. The Rebirth Of Venus was raked over the coals critically. Did that make you hesitant about doing another concept album? Not really. I never judge by whether people like it or not. With this record, I have quite a deep feeling of satisfaction creatively, so it could be unanimously panned and rejected and it’s not going to change my perception of it. It’s such a fun moment when you have a record that people connect with on some kind of scale; it just doesn’t happen every time. There’s no logic to it as far as I can see. Did you have to adjust your writing process to write about something so intangible? It happened naturally. I wasn’t interested in the process mirroring the subject matter. And I had it at home, and it wasn’t a studio where I was on a few hundred dollars a day. Most days, I didn’t do more than two or three hours work, but it took a longer time to make, so it had a more emotional thread to it. —Brian Baker

photo by ione skye

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Justin BieBer

under the Mistletoe Includes the new single “Mistletoe” + “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (SuperFestive!) duet with Mariah Carey & “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”. Deluxe Edition includes 4 extra songs & bonus DVD.

in stores now A portion of proceeds from this album will go to charity.

Keep up with NeW MUSIC. FRee SAMPLeR and SALe PRICeS on these titles ALL MONTH LONG! FRee CD SAMPLeR while supplies last at participating stores

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Choose Your Own Adventure

M83’s Anthony Gonzalez goes wherever his childlike muse suggests story by K. Ross Hoffman • photos by Anouck Bertin

in 1781, French astronomer Charles Messier published the final version

of his magnum opus: a catalog listing more than 100 “deep sky objects”— nebulae, star clusters, galaxies—that he had discovered. Two hundred years later, his equally starry-eyed countryman Anthony Gonzalez was born in the sleepy Côte d’Azur resort town of Antibes—incidentally, not a bad spot for gazing at stars, of either the celestial or (at least during the annual film festival in nearby Cannes) celluloid variety. Sort of like a dream, isn’t it? “Yeah, the south of France is a perfect place for a kid to grow up,” says Gonzalez. “The weather is perfect, there’s the beach, the mountains, there’s tons of stuff to do as a kid.” Gonzalez is in Los Angeles, where he moved in early 2010 after 29 years in France. “I just needed a change,” he says. “Antibes was great—very sunny and close to the beach. L.A. feels like kind of the same place, except it’s a little bit less boring.” Over the past 10 years—which is to say, throughout his 20s—Gonzalez has built up a pretty stellar catalog of his own: six albums, plus a smattering of soundtrack work and remixes, with the heavily atmospheric electronic outfit he named after object number 83 in

The idea to make a double album was also to do something not too much, not too long, so that people can still listen to the whole thing. Just listen to one disc, then the next day listen to the other one.

Messier’s catalog, a particularly classic-looking formation popularly known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy. From the tremendously dense, largely instrumental synthesized shoegaze of 2003 breakthrough Dead Cities, Red Seas And Lost Ghosts to the plush, pillowy dream pop of 2008’s Saturdays=Youth, M83 (initially a duo with Nicolas Fromageau, but effectively a one-man operation since 2004) has charted a musical course rife with analog lushness, earnest sentimentality, epic bombast and a well-documented penchant for the cinematic. That’s one reason Gonzalez’s arrival in Los Angeles feels particularly apropos, almost predestined. While he’s still stimulated by the splendor of the natural world—five or six of the songs from his newest album were written away from the city (“I would just take my laptop and go on a road trip by myself,” he says, “just to clear my head and compose music in the desert, or up along the coast toward San Francisco”)—movies are at least as significant an inspiration. “When I’m making music in my studio, I always like to have a small TV,” he says. “I like to put a DVD and watch a movie while I’m composing, just for the pictures.” (So, what’s he been screening lately? “A lot of old movies,” he says. “I was playing Live At Pompeii from Pink Floyd, Aguirre by Werner Herzog, Peau d’Âne by Jacques Demy, a lot of old Japanese anime from the ’70s.”) The title of M83’s latest, grandest opus, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (Mute), neatly conveys both the visceral, emotional urgency and the vividly hallucinatory fantasy that have marked the band’s music all along, both elements

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that—in typical M83 fashion—are intensified even further on this album. (If recent outings marked a minor retreat from the monumental melodrama of 2005’s Before The Dawn Heals Us, Gonzalez is certainly making up for lost time here.) An incremental trend toward augmentation and expansion is evident in terms of length alone: After a string of albums clocking in at 57, 61 and 62 minutes, respectively, Dreaming would be pushing the limits of a single CD at 73. Instead, Gonzalez has made it double album, something he’s always wanted to do.

“Since I was a teenager, I was in love with the Smashing Pumpkins’ double album, and I always dreamed about making one myself,” he says. “I just thought it was the right time for it—it’s my sixth album, and I feel more confident about myself than ever. And I had so many songs, and I wanted to use most of them.” But it wasn’t just about excess. “The idea to make a double album was also to do something not too much, not too long, so that people can still listen to the whole thing,” he says. “Just listen to one disc, then the next day listen to

the other one.” Gonzalez describes the double album variously as a “journey” and a “rollercoaster,” but says its two parts are more like companion pieces than contrasting sections or halves of a conceptual sequence. “The concept is to have two discs very close to each other—almost the same kind of disc twice,” he says. “Every track has kind of a sibling on the other side. It’s a brother-and-sister kind of thing.” He calls my attention to the two young children on the album’s cover art, always a significant consider-

I think it’s the most wonderful thing on earth, sleeping and dreaming. It’s a great source of inspiration to me. For me, this album is like a collection of dreams. ation for such a visually oriented artist. “The little boy for disc one, the girl for disc two,” he says. “Or vice versa.” If Saturdays, with its soft-focus cover shot of playfully costumed teenage misfits, has been firmly established as Gonzalez’s loving aural tribute to the ‘80s teen comedies of John Hughes (and to teen-dom in general), Dreaming’s adorable, vaguely sinister image (by Anouck Bertin) of siblings basking in the purple glow of a TV screen, one cradling a grotesque monster mask, suggests a shift in focus to earlier in childhood (and perhaps some inspiration from the youth-oriented fantasy and kiddie-horror films of the same era: Labyrinth, Legend, Gremlins, The NeverEnding Story.) “When I first started to work on this album, I was by myself in L.A.,” says Gonzalez. “I was kind of feeling a little bit lonely—you know when you’re moving to a new city and you don’t know a lot of people—and I was by myself in my studio working on the songs, and I had this nostalgia about my childhood. And all of a sudden I started to remember stories of me being a kid. This album is definitely a tribute to my childhood more than anything else. It’s also kind of a retrospective of my 30 years of being a human being.” Dreaming’s fascination with childhood— and specifically with storytelling and imagination—is apparent right from the first lines of narration on the grandiose, mythictoned “Intro,” which features a tale about a very tiny, very special, reality-altering magic frog, but it’s most evident on “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire” (“Tell Me A Story”), as told by Zelly, the daughter of album producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen. (“She’s five,” says Gonzalez. “And she’s such a character.”) “The title of the track is actually the name of a French kids’ magazine I used to read when I was a kid,” says Gonzalez. “Every month you had this magazine with a small cassette where you could look at the pictures and listen to the stories; my mom used to buy it for me and I was totally in love with it. The stories were totally creative and crazy, and so with the song I wanted to recreate the same kind of feeling. We wanted to have something very, very childish, but also very meaningful and very dreamy

at the end.” Speaking of dreams (Zelly apparently told Anthony all about hers immediately upon their first meeting at his apartment), they of course go hand in hand with storytelling, fantasy movies, the generally surreal, fanciful, image-rich experience of childhood. And, obviously, they’re right there in the album’s title. Gonzalez, one would suspect, must have some pretty incredible dreams. “Well, unfortunately, I don’t remember my dreams anymore, because I think I smoked too much pot when I was a teenager and I can’t remember anything anymore,” he says. “But I just love the idea of being lost in a dream and how the dreams are different every night, a different story, a different adventure. I think it’s the most wonderful thing on earth, sleeping and dreaming. It’s a great source of inspiration to me. For me, this album is like a collection of dreams.” Wait, no dream memories whatsoever? Gonzalez concedes one: “It’s weird; when I first moved to L.A. and started to work on this album, I started to remember some of my dreams from when I was a kid. In France, we had a lot of crazy anime from Japan when we were kids, a lot of which took place in space, like space adventures. So, I had dreams where I was kind of a space pirate or something, and I was going from planet to planet and going on adventures with my little pet monkey.” Hence, perhaps, such songs as “Train To Pluton” and “Year One, One UFO” and lyrics like “A slide on the starlight/Watch out!/A new planet right on my trail!” from one of Dreaming’s most infectious cuts, the vaguely Policelike “Claudia Lewis.” The track’s namesake, according to Gonzalez, is “this girl who writes space poems; I found her online. She writes the cheesiest space poems ever.” Actually, it turns out that Claudia Lewis is a reasonably well-respected children’s poet and author (of, among other things, 1967’s Poems Of Earth And Space)—at least, respected enough to have a poetry prize named in her honor. But, eh, let’s not tell Gonzalez that. (He didn’t want to get in trouble if I wrote that she was a terrible writer.) Better just to let him dream. M

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Working-class hero Robert Pollard and his fellow “classic-era” Guided By Voices bandmates clock in with Let’s Go Eat The Factory , their first album in more than 15 years.

Twenty years ago, I interviewed Guided

By Voices for a different magazine. It was in an RV belonging to Ed Deal—Kim and Kelley’s dad—parked in back of a club in Columbus, Ohio, after a Breeders show. The whole band was there, crowded around my enormous early-‘90s vintage cassette recorder: Robert Pollard, Jimmy Pollard, Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell and Dan Toohey, who would soon become an ex-member due to his propensity for leaving long notes to Bob about various dissatisfactions with certain band practices. Bob did most of the talking, which will come as a great surprise to exactly no one who has ever met, seen, heard or read about him. According to Ed Deal, who has a better memory than me, after every answer, Bob would ask, “Was that OK? Was that a good answer?” In other words, Bob was nervous, and in retrospect, sure: It was one of his first “real” interviews (even though the piece I was writing was very short). Anyone would be nervous in that situation. He had not yet released Bee Thousand, the album that would come to define, for better and worse, the public perception of Guided By Voices as masters of short bursts of melodic lo-fi rock with mostly incomprehensible lyrics. He had spent the previous seven years nursing grudges and making records that he wouldn’t let anyone hear, because he was worried they weren’t good enough. Was that OK? Was that a good record? Twenty years later, sitting in a bar in the Oregon District of his hometown, Dayton, Ohio, Bob is anything but nervous. He orders two buckets of Miller Lite in bottles (a bucket is really just a six-pack on ice, so it’s not as much as it sounds) and slides onto a chair in the back room of the bar next to Mitch Mitchell, who Bob has known longer than he’s been in the

band, which means he and Mitch have known each other for about 45 years. “I have some conditions,” he announces, before I turn on the tiny little machine I brought to record our conversation. I don’t know how it works. It’s digital. Maybe it doesn’t work. I hope it works. (Update: It works.) “I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about,” he continues. “I’m going to tell you exactly what happened during the making of this record. But you can’t use anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings.” Turns out over the course of the next four or five hours and several buckets of Miller Lite, augmented by shots of tequila so big they come in tumblers (and should be illegal), Bob doesn’t say anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings. And now that I have fulfilled the requirement to mention how much Guided By Voices and/or Robert Pollard drinks, we can get down to the business of discussing Let’s Go Eat The Factory, the first album of new material by the “classic lineup,” featuring everybody who sat in Ed Deal’s RV that night minus Dan Toohey and plus Greg Demos, who brought his striped

100 Colors ( 1 ) Smothered In Hugs ( 2 ) Game Of Pricks ( 3 ) Over The Neptune/ Mesh Gear Fox ( 4 ) Tractor Rape Chain ( 5 ) Motor Away ( 6 ) I Am A Scientist

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( 7 ) I f We Wait ( 8 ) My Impression Now ( 9 ) Unleashed! The Large-Hearted Boy ( 10 ) Gold Star For Robot Boy ( 11 ) The Official

white pants and dervish intensity to the touring band for about six months before deciding to take a job offer with a law firm, where he’s now a senior partner. The new album represents a deliberate effort to return to the spontaneity of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, but advances in technology and in Bob’s songwriting make drawing straight lines from here to there impossible. Songs were recorded at Toby’s house. Songs were made up in Mitch’s garage and Greg’s basement. Sometimes Bob played drums and Jimmy played bass. Sometimes Toby played everything, as he often used to do on his own songs. The result is recognizably “classic” Guided By Voices, but in some unexpected ways (more prevalent use of keyboards and samples, for one thing), the 21st century can’t help but poke its nose into the resulting music. MAGNET: At what point during the reunion tour did you guys decide to make a new Guided By Voices record?

First of all, Kevin wanted to make one the whole time. Mitchell: I secretly was wishing for one, too. Pollard: But I was like, “I don’t know, man. Let’s just do the reunion tour.” Then, the tour was what, 11 months? And about three-quarters of the way into it I started thinking, “You know, the chemistry’s good. Maybe we deserve to make an album as a reward to ourselves. Let’s make a fucking record and see how it goes.” It still took until a couple months later before we finally decided definitely to do it. Toby and I were in Chicago in a bar with our wives and some other people, and we saw this really cool picture on the wall we thought would look great for our album cover. We ended up not using it. But it worked perfectly with Let’s Go Eat The Factory, because I already had the title. Pollard:

Was that a previously existing title you had planned to use for something of your own?

MAGNET’s resident GBV nerd Reuben Frank ranks the 100 best songs from the band’s classic years

Ironmen Rally Song ( 12 ) Redmen And Their Wives ( 13 ) Hardcore UFOs ( 14 ) Echos Myron ( 15 ) The Goldheart Mountaintop

Queen Directory ( 16 ) My Valuable Hunting Knife ( 17 ) Bright Paper Werewolves ( 18 ) Don’t Stop Now ( 19 ) A Salty Salute

( 20 ) Queen Of Cans And Jars ( 21 ) Wondering Boy Poet ( 22 ) Dusted ( 23 ) Dayton, Ohio, 19-Something-And-5 ( 24 ) Quality Of Armor

photo by daniel coston

Pollard: No, it was just spur of the moment. As soon as we decided to do the album, I thought up the title, and I thought it worked well for the album. It kind of implies that we’re our own industry now, our own factory, and instead of the factory eating us, we’ll eat the factory. Chock full of vitamins.

How did you approach the recording process itself?

You know how they say you can’t go back again? I realized you can go back again. ” —Bob Pollard

Pollard: You know how they say you can’t go back

again? I realized you can go back again. Actually do it the way we used to, where … I mean, it’s not a complete democracy. It’s not a collegium. It’s still a semi-dictatorship. I make the calls, but everybody had a little bit more control back then. I took input. We co-wrote some songs, Toby wrote some songs, people would do different things. We’d switch instruments. Whereas, in later-period Guided By Voices, I decided I was going to be the only songwriter.

( 25 ) Drag Days ( 26 ) Shocker In Gloomtown ( 27 ) Sensational Gravity Boy

And you stopped playing guitar yourself in later iterations.

I delegated. On this record, I wanted to get back to doing more stuff. Playing guitar. Playing drums. There’s a lot of people switching up and doing different kinds of things. Like Mitch plays guitar and drums and keyboard and bass. Everybody is playing all the instruments. Pollard:

( 28 ) Watch Me Jumpstart ( 29 ) Your Name Is Wild ( 30 ) Closer You Are ( 31 ) Lord Of Overstock ( 32 ) My Son Cool ( 33 ) Heavy Metal Country ( 34 ) You’re Not An Airplane

propeller

Rockathon (1992)

( 35 ) Jane Of The Waking Universe ( 36 ) As We Go Up, We Go Down

Is this the album you guys would have made if you’d stayed together after Under The Bushes Under The Stars?

No, because we were headed into a slicker, more polished studio sound. We were headed in that direction anyway. That’s another good thing about this one is that we broke it all down to where we recorded everything in our houses and shit. Jimmy and Mitch and I did a Pollard:

( 37 ) Crunch Pillow ( 38 ) Exit Flagger ( 39 ) Gleemer ( 40 ) Underwater Explosions ( 41 ) Red Gas Circle ( 42 ) A Good Flying Bird

vampire on titus Scat (1993)

( 43 ) On The Tundra ( 44 ) Back To Saturn X ( 45 ) Buzzards And Dreadful Crows ( 46 ) Little Whirl ( 47 ) Man Called Aerodynamics

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session at Mitch’s house. We did an acoustic session at Greg’s. The stuff Mitch recorded sounds live.

It mostly was. I just used a couple of overhead room mics. Pollard: That’s part of the reason everything sounds different, which is what we wanted. Because we recorded in different places at different times, with different people. Like the first song, “Laundry And Lasers,” just totally didn’t turn out the way that it should have. It should have had more clarity and separation in the instruments, but still big-sounding. But the thing is, after I listened to it for a while, I started to think it sounded like it was recorded live. Which I thought was kind of an interesting effect for the first song. From a band that hasn’t done an album in 15 years, you have this muddy, murky, but still powerful live-sounding song to start the record. Kind of confusing. The two heaviest songs on the album are the first two songs. Mitchell:

( 48 ) Ex-Supermodel ( 49 ) Rhine Jive Click ( 50 ) Blimps Go 90 ( 51 ) Indian Was An Angel ( 52 ) Wished I Was A Giant ( 53 ) Matter Eater Lad ( 54 ) To Remake The

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Young Flyer ( 55 ) Pantherz ( 56 ) 14 Cheerleader Coldfront

We try not to try. That should be our motto.” —Bob Pollard That and “The Head.” It’s completely misleading to come out with those two songs. You think it’s going to be a really heavy record and then “Doughnut For A Snowman” comes on and you’re like, “Oh, man. What is that?” It doesn’t fit. It’s jarring. But I like that. I wanted that. Let’s talk about that song. Pollard: I’ve had that title around forever, I just

could not think of how to use it. “She starts off her day with a Krispy Kreme doughnut.” But now the lyric makes sense, because, like, her boyfriend is the Good Humor man, and

( 57 ) Big Boring Wedding ( 58 ) Acorns & Orioles ( 59 ) Why Did You Land ( 60 ) No Sky ( 61 ) Yours To Keep ( 62 ) Uncle Dave ( 63 ) Atom Eyes

Bee Thousand Scat (1994)

he says, “They don’t call us that.” She runs through the street and hands a doughnut to her snowman—he’s the snowman, because he’s the Good Humor man. It comes from a jingle that I wrote for Krispy Kreme donuts. I talked to (GBV manager) David Newgarden a few times about maybe sending it to them, but in the end I thought, “No, it’s too goofy.” So now I’ve taken the back way around. Instead of “Here’s a goofy Krispy Kreme doughnut jingle,” it’s on the record. It’s a legitimate Guided By Voices song. Now we can go to them with a little bit of integrity. [Laughs]

( 64 ) Dodging Invisible Rays ( 65 ) The Key Losers ( 66 ) Sot ( 67 ) Non-Absorbing

( 68 ) Cocksoldiers And Their Postwar Stubble ( 69 ) Expecting Brainchild ( 70 ) Planet’s Own Brand ( 71 ) Gelatin, Ice Cream, Plum ( 72 ) Always Crush Me

Alien lanes

Matador (1995)

Somehow it fits on the album, though.

It adds to the diversity of not only the songs, but the sound of each song on the album, and how it’s all over the place. It gives it staying power. You can keep listening to it. It’s a weird record. We actually set out with the intent of making it sound better than it does. But because of what we had to do to fix things, and fuck things up that were too creamy, it makes it more interesting. Pollard:

I understand there were problems with some of the songs you originally recorded with Toby.

We probably didn’t give him enough time. We went in there for a couple of days, and I expected to come out with a finished product. So, he had to redo a lot of things and had trouble mixing some of it. I don’t think he’s used to recording with two Marshalls and a full band at that volume. Some stuff needed work on the guitars, some needed even drums. The song “Hang Mr. Kite” originally kind of rocked. Now it’s just basically chamber music. An “Eleanor Rigby”-type song. It’s completely different. But I like it better. Pollard:

a full song that goes with that; it’s only about 50 seconds long. Maybe it’ll be a b-side or something. It’s called “So High.” The recorder is not easy to play. The secret to playing woodwinds is you have to have a real light touch. The blowing of the pipes and the touching of the holes. [Laughs] But I came up with that little recorder part, which is basically “Hang Fire” by the Stones. And then I came up with the rest of the song, and I got really scared that I would never be able to play that recorder part properly again, so I had to record it immediately. I haven’t seen the cover of Let’s Go Eat The Factory yet, but I’m guessing you did a collage.

The cover reaches a new standard of what-the-fuck-is-that. Collages of photographs I’ve taken and other stuff, really intangible. Abstruse would be the word I would use. It’s difficult to figure out what’s even going on. Pollard:

Right, because a lot of your collages are visual puns. Pollard: This is not directly connected to anything

on the record. Very oblique. It’s ridiculous. You’re famous for working quickly. Start to finish, how long did this album take to record?

Way longer than it should have. Because we had to fix and fuck things up. Sometimes if you record a song cleanly, it becomes too obvious. But if you fuck it up, put some weird noises in or a layer of static over it, then you’re like, “There’s something cool under there.” So, we had to do that a little bit, go through that process. Toby works a little bit more deliberately than I do. Pollard:

There’s a lot more samples on this record that in the old days. Of course, even one would be more than there used to be. Pollard: I like the samples. They sound like the

real thing, so why not? What are we gonna do, have an orchestra come in? But we still did stuff ourselves. The recorder at the beginning of “Doughnut For A Snowman” is me. There’s

( 73 ) Ester’s Day ( 74 ) Big School ( 75 ) Striped White Jets ( 76 ) Supermarket The Moon ( 77 ) Straw Dogs ( 78 ) Lethargy

photos by daniel coston

Everybody works a little more deliberately than you do.

So, we probably took … I think we started in late May, and the cover’s just being finished now. So, that’s what, four months? Pollard:

That’s like a Queen album or something. Pollard: When we made Do The Collapse with Ric

Ocasek—because the Cars had recorded with

( 79 ) Cut-Out Witch ( 80 ) Marchers In Orange ( 81 ) King And Caroline ( 82 ) Melted Pat ( 83 ) Kicker Of Elves ( 84 ) Dusty Bushworms ( 85 ) Hey Aardvark

( 86 ) Awful Bliss ( 87 ) It’s Like Soul Man ( 88 ) Perhaps Now The Vultures

Are you gonna make up studio names for every place you recorded like on Alien Lanes? For the credits.

No. We decided to keep it simple with no specific credits for who recorded what or who played what. Because it could get really complicated. And because I like preserving a certain sense of mystery. Pollard:

Clearly your songwriting has evolved over the last 15 years, but you still write songs that are immediately identifiable as “classic” Guided By Voices songs. “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” “Chocolate Boy,” “Doughnut For A Snowman,” on this album, for instance. That’s not always the case with songwriters—to somehow retain the ability to write songs that are as good as the ones they wrote when just starting out. Why do you think that is?

One loses one’s innocence because of public acceptance. You become cognizant that the whole world is listening, and you’re not just writing for yourself. You have to maintain the attitude of a child. Pollard:

You become self-conscious.

You’re trying to please everyone and end up pleasing no one. You have to be able to throw your own record against the wall, like we did with (1986 debut) Forever Since Breakfast. You have to make records for yourself. That sounds selfish, but it’s a paradox. By making records for yourself, you’re being not selfish. It means you’re not trying to make records for the whole world, and the record will be better because of that. I see people to this day complaining about how they keep sending stuff out and banging their heads against the wall and not getting anywhere, and it’s because they’re trying too hard. We don’t try too hard. Mitchell: We don’t even try. Pollard: We try not to try. That should be our motto. M Pollard:

( 89 ) Do The Earth ( 90 ) Jar Of Cardinals ( 91 ) Weed King ( 92 ) Sheetkickers ( 93 ) Scissors ( 94 ) Deathtrot And Warlock Riding A Rooster

( 95 ) Postal Blowfish ( 96 ) Run ( 97 ) Break Even ( 98 ) Peep-Hole ( 99 ) Hot Freaks ( 100 ) Colossus Crawls West M

under the bushes under the stars Matador (1996)

Roy Thomas Baker, who did a lot of the Queen albums— I told him, “We have to have one song with those harmonies.” He goes, “You got like three months? For one song?”

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82 reviews |

Bonnie Prince Billy p. 60 DJ Shadow p. 62 Noel Gallagher p. 63 SUPERCHUNK p. 65 SIGUR ROS p. 66

What We Want

At long last, a definitive Smiths retrospective—the hard way

he Smiths remain easy to love largely because

“Hand In Glove” hit the shelves in ’83, but what emerges from Complete (listening in chronological order generates the best results first time out) is a guitarist equal to the likes of Ry Cooder and Mark Ribot: a master musician capable of The Smiths creating new worlds as easily as he inhabited and recombined old ones without ever hogging the spotlight. rhino He did the same as a comyour neighborhood bar’s kaposer. Sure, Marr had habits, raoke night earlier this week as did his songwriting partner. already knows how fucking But Marr’s often inspired Morgood they were. rissey, per “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard Not that the anthology doesn’t yield inThis One Before.” Because Morrissey always recorded vocal tracks after the rest of the band sights, especially where Marr is concerned. Sure, he’s been a respected instrumentalist had finished, his tendency to revisit the same since a couple seconds after debut single moods and themes could sometimes produce

they never wore out their welcome. Unlike so many of their contemporaries—R.E.M., U2 and the like—Steven Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce kept the door open for succeeding generations by denying early-adapter fans the opportunity to grow old with them and make excuses for their fading creative powers. By opting to implode in 1987, with four studio albums, three singles collections and one live album to its credit, the band remain, ahem, forever young. Thanks to the Smiths’ refusal to go stale, Complete—which features all the above in our choice of formats (digital, CD, vinyl and, uh, deluxe collector’s)—affords less an opportunity for reassessment than a cause for celebration. Everybody from converted firstwave haters to that noise kid who pulled off a serviceable rendition of “How Soon Is Now?” at photo by stephen wright

Complete

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reviews less-than-optimum results, as with the lugubrious “Girlfriend In A Coma.” Missteps notwithstanding, he was meal ticket number one—a fact Marr and engineer Frank Arkwright apparently never lost sight of while remastering the band’s catalog for Complete. Morrissey’s vocals are more front-and-center than ever, albeit often strangely suspended in the mix. It’s as if Marr was thinking, “I’m going to put you exactly where you think you should be, but I’m going to turn you into a friendly ghost.” That he does this least on Strangeways, Here We Come suggests that the strategy

might hinge more on musical standards than on enduring bad blood between the two. All four members of the band have long argued that their last album was their best by far. Hearing it in context makes it impossible not to agree. For those of us who care, that revelation alone justifies the price of admission. —Rod Smith

Tori Amos

Night Of Hunters Deutsche Grammophon

Classical sass

Ol’ Miss Side Saddle returns, after falling out with Epic and vowing to eschew majors altogether, on a classical label part of the

Universal family. Tori Amos’ workaday contradiction—never forget Y Kant Tori Read—parallels the constant give-and-take of her music. Night Of Hunters is a concept album inspired by the tradition of variation on a theme. Here, familiar sections from classical masters Bach, Stravinsky, Chopin and Schubert are used as jumping-off points for Amos’ own compositions. She delivers everything from dark, Uta Lemper-esque cabaret with a fiery approach (“Shattering Sea”) to alt-rock touched by Danny Elfman-like playfulness (“Star Whisperer”) and coquettish moroseness on “Job’s Coffin.” She left her band out of the studio, preferring to work with members of the Berlin Philharmonic; despite certain songs dragging on longer than

Spiritual Warfare

Will Oldham’s annual BPB installment ponders The Man Upstairs

Bonnie Prince Billy

Wolfroy Goes To Town Drag city

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lot of years are busy years for Will

Oldham, and 2011 is no different. In these past few months, the singer/songwriter released a series of 10-inch singles benefiting a number of charities, and he performed on the audiobook recording of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Slow Fade. While Oldham’s convoluted catalog bears a number of different monikers, a new Bonnie Prince Billy album from the songwriter has become a near yearly occurrence. Add another to that list. Wolfroy Goes To Town is a meditative and sparse collection, and much of it continues the same train of thought at work on the “There Is No God” b/w “God Is Love” single. That a-side stated that there is no God “but that which puts mouth on cock and vagina,” while

the other said that God is, well, love. I guess that’s really two ways of saying the same thing. On Wolfroy’s lead single, “Quail And Dumplings,” God has minions on our side. Over the country lilt of opening track “No Match,” Oldham sings, “I’m no match for those who love the Lord, and they are no match for me.” On “Time To Be Clear,” his attitude is “God isn’t here or else it’s too late.” It’s the whole I’m-spiritual-but-notreligious thing, which could easily teeter into cliché, but Oldham saves it. He explores these conflicts in a confessional way, yet he never lets go of the ambiguity. But while Oldham’s worldview has evolved over the course of his 20-year career, on tracks like “We Are Unhappy,” he still sees a darkness. —Matt Sullivan

photo by dirk knibbe

need be, Night combines classical and flighty pop quite masterfully. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Ape Machine

War To Head

Ape Machine Music

Hair today, more hair tomorrow

When bands do covers, it’s either out of reverence to their influences or because they’re having a laugh. Metallica has positioned itself as the Greatest Cover Band Ever with careerspanning nods to its punk and new-wave-ofBritish-heavy-metal inspirations. Modern metal bands Children Of Bodom and August Burns Red are both guilty of making themselves out to be fools by covering Britney Spears. Chalk Portland, Ore.’s Ape Machine alongside Metallica with its devotional cover of Deep Purple’s “Black Night.” However, embarking upon said path is about as obvious as it gets. The only thing this quartet could have done to make where it’s coming from more blatant is cover Blue Cheer from the back of a garish, airbrushed, ’70s-era shaggin’ wagon. That wispy beard you’ve been working on all year will be nipple-length and luxurious after you make it through War To Head’s nine tracks. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Scott H. Biram

Bad Ingredients Bloodshot

Hard luck/ traveling music

Scott H. Biram’s music has been called a lot of things: punk, metal, country, blues, folk, outlaw, psychobilly, hellbilly, you name it. And it is all those things and more, cranked out by one guy with a tangled mess of vintage microphones duct-taped together, a beat-up old guitar, a stompbox and a burning desire to get people off their asses. Biram has always tapped into the darker roots of American music, primarily old country, blues and hillbilly tracks, but on his new album, his sound is harder than ever. Most of the songs are originals (his tunes have been covered by Nashville Pussy and Hank Williams III), and they’ve got that trademark blue-collar roughneck vibe that Biram does so well. His guitar solos are more electrified than usual, and they sound like burning juke-joint riffs. Bottom line is that Scott H. Biram is a true American original. —Devon Leger

Comet Gain

Howl Of The Lonely Crowd What’s Your Rupture?

Unified theory

Though Comet Gain is a British indie-pop band, there’s always been something incredibly hardcore-punk about the group. Since ’92, this now-seven-piece, led by David Feck, has been writing some of

the most affecting songs for directionless, discouraged kids, and Howl Of The Lonely Crowd keeps it coming. Powered by garage-rock swing and a dapper, mod mojo, the band’s sixth album packs a handful of positive-mental-attitude tracks with lyrics that you just want to shout at the top of your lungs. From the teeth-gnashing fuzz of “Working Circle Explosive!” to the bright, steely “Clash Of The Concrete Swans,” Comet Gain straps on some shit-kickers and implores the kids to “let their howling hearts be heard.” It’s a bummer that the second half of the LP aims for poignancy via softer songs; it feels like a contribution to the It Gets Better campaign. Howl works best when Feck and Co. marry their frustrated empathy with hopeful jubilation, letting the kids know that although they’re lonely, they’re certainly not alone. —Jeanne Fury

Correatown

Pleiades

Cumulus Of Dream Pop

The label doubles as description

Everything you need to know about L.A.’s Correatown is encapsulated in “Further,” the second song on the band’s sophomore album. “We have so much love,” sings Angela Correa, “but we need so much more.” Her voice is sweet, but firm—four parts resolve and one part neediness. Drums and handclaps underscore the mood, strings shimmer, and a simple piano tattoo drifts in and out. It’s the song that’ll stand out on first listen and the one that sticks. The rest of Pleiades isn’t so memorable, but it’s never less than pleasant and frequently pleasurable. Correa’s companions drape tunes like “Sunset & Echo” and “The Point” in gauzy textures, giving the singer a safe spot to acknowledge the cost of guarding her heart. Waiting for what you want is rarely as calm a condition as Correatown makes it sound, but its soothing touch may make it a touch more bearable. —M.J. Fine

Crooked Fingers

Breaks In The Armor Merge

Following the crooked and narrow

Just as Paul Westerberg’s punk roots bore sweet Americana fruit, Eric Bachmann’s tenure with ‘90s noise-rock avatars Archers Of Loaf ultimately gave way to the forceful roots/folk of Crooked Fingers. After 2008’s aggressively produced Forfeit/Fortune, a burned-out Bachmann abandoned music for a Taiwanese teaching post, until songs came of their own volition. On the sixth Crooked Fingers album, Bachmann maintains a spartan atmosphere—he and longtime member Liz Durrett are the album’s only players—as evidenced by the haunting Dylan/Springsteen textural, ambient folk of “The Hatchet” and “Heavy Hours,” but

the pair makes a righteous tumult on the dusty swagger of “Bad Blood,” the insistent worksong menace of “Black Candles” and the Eno-appointed racket of “Went To The City.” There’s a noisy undercurrent on Breaks In The Armor, which may become even more prevalent with the return of and cross-pollination with Archers Of Loaf, but the album’s stripped-back, still powerful songs might be indicating Crooked Fingers’ path from here. —Brian Baker

Rob Crow

He Thinks He’s People Temporary Residence

Not among the heavier vegetables

As a founding member of Pinback and a member of side projects like the Ladies, Thingy, Goblin Cock and a million others, Rob Crow keeps busy. Those projects dabble in mathy indie rock to metal to goofy rap songs, and not surprisingly, his solo output is eclectic. He Thinks He’s People is Crow’s fourth solo record, and like the rest of that portion of Crow’s catalog, his latest finds him shifting gears from noodly indie pop (“Prepare To Be Mined”) and spazzy freakouts (“Build”) to donning his Elliott Smith mask (“This Thread,” “Purpose,” “Unstable,” etc.). Crow’s sense of humor still peeks through an otherwise melancholy baker’s dozen of tracks. On “I’d Like To Be There,” he wants to be present when the person talking on the phone in the movie theater is zipped in a body bag. The late frontman of infamous grindcore shit-stirrers Anal Cunt (“Recycling Is Gay,” “The Internet Is Gay,” “You’re Gay,” et al) is name-checked on “Locking Seth Putnam In Hot Topic,” a jaunty and playful number that Putnam would have called gay. —Matt Sullivan

Kimya Dawson

Thunder Thighs

Great Crap Factory

Overdue and fine

“You see, I have changed, and I’ll keep on changing, and maybe my songwriting will suffer/But it’s OK if at the end of the day, all I can do next is be a good mother,” Kimya Dawson murmurs at Thunder Thighs’ outset. She needn’t have worried. From this inauspicious beginning—a temporal zigzag swaddled in frumpy, folk-chord twinkles called “All I Could Do”—Thighs explodes into Dawson’s most expansive, daring collection of forget-me-nots yet. Certainly, her trad core principles are on raspy display—love your friends, revere the Golden Rule, potlucks are awesome—but these tunes feel huge, enhanced by a newfound confidence, choirs literal and adhoc, and the snapbracelet rhyme schemes of pal Aesop Rock. Folk ditties like AA sing-along “Year 10” feel infinitely more motivational and lived-in than their predecessors, and while epic tattoo backstory “Walk Like Thunder” might be the heaviest

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reviews track she’s ever cut in several senses, Thighs brightens the mood with preschool silliness like “The Mare And The Bear.” The shock here is how well Dawson is built for hip hop, laying into up-with-libraries synth rap (“The Library”) and eff-Twitter jeremiad “Miami Advice” with a gofor-broke vehemence that’s as refreshing as it is unexpected. —Raymond Cummings

Deer Tick

Divine Providence Partisan

No need for an intervention

With its title alluding to the band’s Rhode Island home, Divine Providence is Deer Tick’s fourth album and bears a much stronger, more unified character than anything the group has done before. Gravel-throated singer John McCauley’s rollicking battle cry of “Let’s All Go To The Bar” and gritty start/stop blues on opener “The Bump” recall a time when alt-country lived up to both parts of the designation. Guitarist Ian O’Neil gives exceptional counterpoint with the jangly “Walkin’ Out That Door” and the soaring “Now It’s Your Turn.” Though Deer Tick has moonlighted as a Nirvana tribute band, it’s the group’s love for the Replacements that shines on Divine Providence, particularly on Westerberg-penned bonus cut “Mr. Cigarette.” That hidden treasure places Deer Tick firmly on an exalted timeline of bands that don’t just exist between genres, but effortlessly transcend them by simply having fun. —Eric Schuman

Dominant Legs

Invitation Lefse

Everybody talk about pop muzik

The current San Francisco music scene is largely defined by fuzzbox-smashing, lowerthan-lo-fi garage punk. But like any thriving community, there are outsiders making sounds that are alternative to the alternative. Dominant Legs is the creative outlet for Ryan William Lynch (who also plays with emotionally taxing outfit Girls), and debut album Invitation combines many familiar elements into a glittery and effervescent package. Generally speaking, Dominant Legs’ music fuses bouncy ’60s bubblegum with dreamy ’80s synthpop. There’s a particularly excellent triptych toward the album’s middle that includes the shimmering “Darling Girls,” the loopy “Hoop Of Love” and the dance-floorready “Lady Is Sleek And So Petite.” The romantic lyrics complement melodies that sound like they could fit alongside the Psychedelic Furs or OMD on a John Hughes soundtrack. Invitation is at once retro and modern, a dichotomy that isn’t easy to nail. —Eric Schuman

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Diminishing Returns The solution has become the problem on DJ Shadow’s latest disappointment

ood news first: In listening to The Less You

Know, The Better, you’re not going to encounter any hyphy or crunk rap. That alone will be cause célèbre The Less You for DJ Shadow diehards after 2006’s dire The Outsider, regardKnow, The Better less of whether his fourth LP lives up to the instrumental hiphop highs of his earlier work. Verve It doesn’t, of course, and that’s in large part thanks to a permanent shift in the way Shadow works. What made Endtroducing… so compelling was the way he took countless wax shards of forgotten music history— samples few could hope to recognize—and wove them into a dark tapestry all his own. Nowadays, Shadow prefers to keep it separated, creating two-dimensional tributes to obvious sounds and styles instead. So, where his earlier work felt dense and all-inclusive, new albums like The Less You Know inevitably feel sparse and non-cohesive, a scattershot of genres that fail to cohere when combined in a track or on a tracklist. This time around, we get a misguided mash-up of Led Zep riffs and breakbeat in the form of “Border Crossing” and a straight rehash of wiry, early-’00s post-punk with “Warning Call,” for which Shadow recruits Tom Vek to help counterfeit a Franz Ferdinand dud. Worst of all is the maximalist barf of “I’m Excited,” a tribute to grime that can hang with the saddest lows of The Outsider. Some of Less You Know is fit for salvage— “Tedium” coolly channels DJ Krush’s ’90s work, the piano balladry of “Sad And Lonely” is hard to deny, and “Enemy Lines” even hints at what an update of Endtroducing… might sound like—but it just isn’t enough. DJ Shadow first made his name by delving deep into the world’s bottomless pile of vinyl debris to redeem the wannabe hits and halfformed artistic statements of our musical past. Now, he contributes to it. —Jakob Dorof DJ Shadow

photo by dirk lindner

The Field

Looping State Of Mind Kompakt

Truth in advertising

Axel Willner brought this all on himself. The Swedish loopster’s early singles and 2007 debut were so ineffably sublime, so where does he go from there? Commendably enough, his answer hasn’t been toward simple recursion (much as he adores it), but expansion: Album two broadened his original approach, and the inanely literalistic Looping State Of Mind magnifies that trend, offering seven mutations of his trademark sound, in a newly expansive array of tempos. Though, interestingly, there’s nothing quite as quick as his consistently zippy early work. So: “Is This Power” feels like a From Here We Go Sublime track pitched down and smeared, to somewhat nauseous effect; the misnamed “Arpeggiated Love” glides along harmlessly, while “Sweet Slow Baby” is utterly numbing. Yeah, there’s more going on: more live instrumentation, more vocals drifting in and out of the mix. It’s all so much gum in the works,

mussing Willner’s pearly, ultra-glide smoothness for the sake of some vague, psychedelic interest-added. And yet, the feeling remains. —K. Ross Hoffman

Future Islands

On The Water

ist/bassist William Cashion outdoes him in restraint, consistently leaving the spotlight open for Samuel T. Herring. While the singer’s Bowie-esque delivery might seem a little too sincere to souls raised on Har Mar Superstar, actually making lines like “the dancing bear, the bouncing ball” (“Grease”) seem heartfelt would be no mean feat in any decade. —Rod Smith

Thrill Jockey

The Jigsaw Seen

Electropop scholars chart a forward-facing course

The biggest difference between ’80s-informed music now and 10 years ago (remember electroclash?) is seriousness. Like labelmate Nicholas Bindeman (Tunnels), Future Islands care about as much about ironic distance as, say, My Morning Jacket. Though it reveals apparent influences ranging from Eyeless In Gaza to Simple Minds, the Baltimore trio’s nautically themed third album finds the band updating rather than simply recreating from the moment its opening seaside field recordings fade into the title track’s deeply textured synths. Electronics whiz Gerrit Welmers deploys a palette big enough to serve a dozen bands without ever getting heavy-handed. Guitar-

Winterland

Vibro-phonic

Like Saw’s Jigsaw, except actually compelling

“The orange and palm trees sway/There’s never been such a day in old L.A./But it’s December 24/And I’m longing to be up north.” Not since Darlene Love spoke those melancholy words in her Phil Spector-produced version of “White Christmas” almost 50 years ago has anyone so well expressed the unusual flavor of the Yuletide season in the land of eternal sunshine. And now the Jigsaw Seen, whose core members Dennis Davison and Jonathan Lea are 25-year veterans of swimming upstream in Tinseltown’s music

All Over But The Wibbling

Noel Gallagher’s up in the sky, learning to fly without Liam

t’s been two years since the battling Gallagher broth-

ers called an end to Oasis, their sprawling, brawling musical partnership that spawned seven consecutive (U.K.) numNoel Gallagher’s ber-one studio albums, worldwide sales of 70 million units and a High Flying Birds thousand dead-even fistfights. Given the very tangible gifts that Noel Gallagher’s Liam and Noel Gallagher brought to Oasis, there was a very real High Flying Birds danger that their split and division of labor would find them each Sour Mash/Mercury taking something away that the other desperately needed, from Noel’s songwriting and production genius to Liam’s charismatic presence at the front of the stage. Both Gallaghers reference the Walrusy/Peppery Beatles in their post-Oasis outings, Liam in Beady Eye and Noel in his High Flying Birds collective. On his solo debut, Noel shows off his acclaimed songwriting skills on the Kinks-like dancehall swing/’60s spy theme of “Soldier Boys,” the carnival/vaudeville pop of “The Death Of You And Me,” the anthemic church-ofrock hymn of “Stop The Clocks” and the horn-drenched, melancholic sunshine melodicism of “Dream On.” It’s all very appealing and completely listenable, if sometimes slightly overreliant on mid-tempo rhythms with occasional surges in passion and pacing, like the slow-burning, swaggering “The Wrong Beach” and the towering prog touches of “Everybody’s On The Run” and “Record Machine.” Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds will certainly tweak the pleasure centers of Oasis fans everywhere, but more than a few of them may find themselves with a subconscious yearning for a little unhinged brotherly argy bargy sprinkled judiciously throughout it all. —Brian Baker

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reviews scene, have cut Winterland, an ornately detailed dark side of the moon to Spector’s 1964 album A Christmas Gift To You. Santa Claus, sleigh rides and Frosty The Snowman have been replaced here by loneliness, isolation and depression. “What about promises?/What about you and me?” trills Davison forlornly on “What About Christmas?” over a bountiful backing track hauntingly reminiscent of Love’s classic 1968 album Forever Changes. —Jud Cost

Joker

The Vision 4AD

Dubstep heavy-hitter plays it too safe

After three-odd years of riding the U.K. underground as an enthusiastically name-checked DJ and producer, Joker unwittingly set the bar high for his debut full-length. Unsurprisingly, it falls short. The Vision comes within months of 4AD releasing Dedication, the latest offering from one of his dubstep peers, Zomby. Whereas that album took an adventurous, abstract approach, reimagining the style as a softer and more sensual listening experience, Joker’s collection coolly plays it safe, delivering bass-heavy breakdowns and turbo-charged anthems that ultimately dissolve into the background. Opening stroke “Slaughter House” features Turboweekend’s Silias delivering a thrilling hook over fuzzy, pumping low-end synth notes; sweet, but very trad. The same instrumental pattern plays into “Tron” and “My Trance Girl,” but without vocals, nothing distinguishes them. Elsewhere, “Milky Way” is a generic chilloutroom cut circa 2001. If this collection were meant solely for club play, it’d work, but releasing it commercially demands more inventiveness. —John Vettese

Justice

Audio, Video, Disco Ed Banger

Multimedia frenzy

Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay of Justice created a new electro-rock language with a glossy, stuttering handful of this decade’s worthy, wonky “D.A.N.C.E.”-related material. They rewrote the script penned by Daft Punk that turned electronica into rawk and rawk into a daring wall of sound as formidable as My Bloody Valentine or Phil Spector. There was—and is—a sense of cool kitsch that infiltrates all that Justice does, the sheen of arena grandeur. Yet on Audio, Video, Disco, the duo (which plays most of the instruments on the home-recorded creature) temper the torpor of the brashly epic (“Civilization”) with the sonorousness of quiet. It’s not ’70s soft rock (luckily) that infil-

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Shake It Up

Two Olivia Tremor Control reissues capture the Elephant 6 offshoot at its most inscrutable

f the Apples In Stereo were the Elephant 6 col-

lective’s pop purists and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum its wounded prophet, the Olivia Tremor Control’s Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart were its mad scientists, incessant basement tinkerers welding white noise and the White Album into towering sculptures that sometimes crashed noisily to earth. The Olivia Tremor Control Chunklet’s vinyl reissues of the Olivias’ two LPs come Music From The with slews of download-only bonus tracks (two hours plus Unrealized Film Dusk for Cubist Castle alone, another album’s worth with Black At Cubist Castle Foliage), but the records are sprawling enough themselves. Chunklet Vinyl listening eases the transitions, but it’s still hard to square the lysergic pop of Cubist Castle sides one, two and Black Foliage: four with the shamble and splatter of the side-long “Green Animation Music Typewriters” montage. At its best, the album is a dizzying ferment of styles, a pitch and roll between harmony and disChunklet sonance; the horns on “No Growing (Exegesis)” gradually wander in and out of tune like a painting seen through a constantly shifting lens. (The fitful shards of “unrealized film” story function along similar lines.) Black Foliage confines most of the abstract excursions to between-song “animations,” making for a more harmonious whole, although the 11-minute “The Bark And Below It” is still an amorphous drag. “A Peculiar Noise Called Train Director” and “I Have Been Floated” cram an album’s worth of ideas into three-minute packages, staying just this side of the line between excess and overkill—and sounding like the Olivias already knew their time was running short. Based on the recently released “The Game You Play Is In Your Head, Parts 1, 2, & 3,” the decade off filled up the band’s store of ideas, and Doss, Hart and Co. are ready to recombine them again. —Sam Adams

photo by lawrence watson

Split Imperative Superchunk’s break-up masterpiece remains a must-own 17 years later

Superchunk

here do you begin talking about a great

band’s best record? How about that it’s high time Superchunk’s 1994 full-length finally joins the ranks of blue-chip indie staples with a long-warranted, deluxe, remastered makeover. Written and recorded in the wake of frontman Mac McCaughan’s nonconsensual break-up with bassist Laura Ballance, Foolish is ’90s indie rock’s Rumors or Tragic Kingdom (if you prefer a more, uh, contemporary example)—emotional indictments, bloodletting, golden pop hooks galore and all. As legend has it, Ballance, who stayed on despite McCaughan painting her as an

Foolish merge

trates the sweeter moments of Audio, Video, Disco. Yet, there is a peculiar spaciousness to the proceedings that allows the likes of guest vocalists—Morgan Phalen (Diamond Nights), Vincenzi Vendetta (Midnight Juggernauts), Ali Love—to breathe. But make no mistake: This is dense, metallic and gorgeous. —A.D. Amorosi

Kerretta

Saansilo

Golden Antenna

Russian Circles

Empros

Sargent House

Damn, dude, shut up already!

Words: wicked overrated. If we had a nickel for every dipshit who derailed an otherwise good song with inane mumbling

and illiterate screeching, we’d pay just about all of them to take a long walk off a short pier. Not that we’re against singing or lyrics; it’s just that singing and lyrics tend to blow. A lot. Like “goats for quarters around the corner” blow, and an entire continent of Leonard Cohens couldn’t change the tide with all of their Canadian superpowers set to full blast. Jibberjabber bullshit, through and through. (For the most part.) On the other hand, there’s this month’s onetwo punch of heavy, wordless power prog from Kerretta and Russian Circles, which is practically bullshit-free. The sophomore album from New Zealand’s Kerretta is an overdriven, illtempered space-rock opus, while the fourth LP from Chicago’s Russian Circles finds the band leaving a bit of the motorik behind for more melodic and dynamic territory. Both albums can be bludgeoning at times, beautiful at others, often more emotive than any whiny dipshit could ever be. —Sean L. Maloney

unblinking heartbreaker, would strike the vocals from her monitors live to avoiding a nightly 50-minute pummeling of high-pitched howls about what a succubus she was. But McCaughan is nowhere close to picking up the pieces. Instead he leads the band—lost lover in tow—through a dozen tracks that revel in the total emotional blowback of a broken man. But such heartache was his muse: The record boasts the quartet’s most focused, slickly produced, dynamic set of songs to date, from slow-burning, for-slackers torch ballads (“Drive To Driveway,” “Like A Fool,” “Kicked In”) to pogo-ready, frenetic scorchers (“Water Wings,” “The First Part,” “Saving My Ticket”). Now for the specs: This golden-era indie-rawk classic comes complete with a remaster of the original LP, liner notes by drummer-turned-WFMU funnyman Jon Wurster, a sixth installment of the band’s Clambakes live series (capturing a complete, Purple Rain-trumping ’94 performance at Minneapolis’ famed First Avenue club) and an odds-and-ends disc of b-sides and demos. —Adam Gold

Korallreven

An Album By Korallreven Acephale

Adrift in memory-wiped bliss

Swedish duo Korallreven makes vaguely ethereal electronic-pop music for bouts of snowblindness, for whiteouts. So intense is the radiance An Album By Korallreven generates that one almost requires Stunna Shades to emerge with sight intact. The album’s first gurgling strains appears to quote “Lord Of The Dance”; this seems fitting, given that Album’s default mode seems to be one of unblinking bliss, of ecstatic felicitousness. Synthesizer scarves twirl and spiral; spectral ingénues confide in vocal filters; majestic keyboard figures dare you to forget the 1980s; sweet, sweet polyrhythms help upend the sense of passing out in a Klonopin bottle. Sometimes, as on “Loved-Up,” echo-

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reviews drenched guitars amble into the mix; “Sa Sa Samoa” deals Lion King tribal harmonics into the equation. Yet as mesmerizingly Zen as Korallreven’s dreamy, glazed gaze is, it’s hard not to long for the band to shake itself free of its googly-eyed trance, if only for a moment or two. —Raymond Cummings

Jens Lekman

An Argument With Myself Secretly Canadian

Small talk

If there’s one word that encapsulates Swedish troubadour Jens Lekman, it’s “charming.” The silken-voiced singer has a rare blend of playfulness and grace, along with an ear for silly details and stylish nods to heartache. His latest EP pushes his glossy pop inclinations even further; the five tracks are quick and sweet, gussied up with quirky instrumentation (trumpets, strings, bongos) and pop-culture references (including an entire song about stalking Kirsten Dunst). The rollicking title track is a perfect example: punchy, clever to the point of laughter and carried by Lekman’s charm. It’s all good listening, but if there’s an argument to be leveled against the sprightly An Argument With Myself, it’s that Lekman might have overindulged his precious impulses. The songs seem to rush by in a sugary haze—pleasant, but not necessarily all that memorable. —Lee Stabert

The Louvin Brothers

Satan Is Real

Light In The Attic

They so horn-y

No one made damnation as appealing as Ira and Charlie Louvin. On the cover of their 1960 album, lovingly reissued by Light In The Attic, they stand amid the flames of hell, gesturing with open arms as a plywood devil looms over their shoulders. “There’s A Higher Power” and “The Christian Life” tread a devout, even unforgiving line, but there’s no malice in the way they sing the latter’s “Others find pleasure in things I despise.” Satan’s bonus disc, which features songs picked from the Louvins’ catalogue by such luminaries as Emmylou Harris and Will Oldham, ups the ambivalence with the chilling “Knoxville Girl,” whose account of a brutal murder is far more detailed than its fire-and-brimstone consequences. Perhaps the Louvins’ flawless close harmonies are like the stained-glass windows that lured illiterate peasants into medieval churches, but the conviction in songs like “The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea” suggests they’re engaged in the battle for their own souls as well. —Sam Adams

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In-Demand Translators Sigur Rós may speak our language sonically, but we’re not the focus of this live extravaganza

igur Rós may actually translate to “victory rose” in its native tongue, but for the most Sigur Rós part, the angelic Icelandic art-rock group remains Inni synonymous with inscrutability. This is the band whose back XL catalogue is teeming with songs that vocalist Jon Thor Birgisson sings in a language of made-up gibberish. This is the band that recorded an EP featuring a fisherman reciting poetry. This is also the band that somehow managed to record segments of two albums (or maybe two whole albums; who knows?) and play shows while supposedly being on “indefinite hiatus.” The crow don’t fly straight in Sigur Rós’ land, and while the 100-minute-plus live half of Inni takes the listener on a walk through 15 or so years of a robustly lush and sumptuously luxurious ethereal-pop weirdness clashing with colossal waves of noise rock, the DVD is the centerpiece of this release.

Filmed in black-and-white monochrome, with extreme close-ups being the central technique, Inni views more like a long-lost art-house film than concert DVD. The massive crowd at London’s Alexandria Palace rarely factors into the equation, as extreme tight shots of feet on pedals, hands on strings, cymbals being pummelled and fingers twinkling ivories drive the visual narrative alongside off-center frame shots obviously inspired by surrealist cinema. Ultimately, it’s another stylistic method of experiencing the band’s dynamic music, and it meshes with the off-beat unclassifiable noise Sigur Rós has been caressing our ears with over the course of five albums. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Madlib

Medicine Show #12— Raw Medicine (Madlib Remixes) Stones Throw

Just what the doctor ordered

For the past 12-odd months—odd being the operative word—Madlib has complied and defiled an astounding découpage of beats, rhymes and life from his vinyl collection through his Medicine Show series. For the project’s final installation, Madlib has dispensed with the specific musical focus on specific genres, geographic locations or time periods (Jamaican reggae, Brazil or psych rock) that shaped previous releases in favor of a scattershot approach. Similar to Prefuse 73’s Extinguished, which soldered together outtakes from One Word Extinguisher, Madlib lets his ADD take control: one minute (and many of these tracks are rarely longer), you’re hearing Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes; the next, you’re hearing a tongue-incheek ad for the Beverly Hills Blues Festival. Each listen throws up yet another discovery, from once-forgotten disco grooves to sound advice for aspiring MCs, and while disconcerting, there’s never a dull moment. So, listen up; you might learn something. —Justin Hampton

Roots Manuva

4Everevolution Big Dada

No need to watch this throne

For years, you could count the number of credible U.K. rappers on one finger, that dubious accolade being afforded to Roots Manuva. Indeed, up until the advent of the Streets, Dizzee Rascal (who both owe him big time) and the rest of the British grime wonder kids, Manuva pretty much was the face of U.K. hip hop. He’s the missing link between the blunted ’90s trip hop of Massive Attack and Tricky and the latter-day heroics by the likes of Plan B and Tinie Tempah. And it’s business as usual on this, his seventh album. And that’s a good thing. We’re talking intelligence, wit and panache, anchored by bowelquaking bass lines, burbling synths and samples that refuse to take the obvious route, all underpinned by Manuva’s instantly recognizable deep, warm, avuncular tones. Converts to the cause will find much to love here, and for curious newcomers and Anglophiles, it’s as good a place as any to start. —Neil Ferguson

My Brightest Diamond

All Things Will Unwind Asthmatic Kitty

Freak out!

Shara Worden returns with a very Björk-like album cover and an even more Björk-like approach: a series of genrebending compositions written with New York chamber-music ensemble yMusic that puts

her full vocal range on display. As with previous My Brightest Diamond efforts, Worden is most comfortable with melancholic and downtempo notes. Her wispy vocals on “In The Beginning” are a familiar discomfort, a fine example of her ability to evoke complex moods with deceptively simple arrangements. Worden has always ignored current trends in pop music, and her pairing with the equally outsider approach of yMusic pays off on All Things Will Unwind. She injects a little bit of Edith Piaf’s brassiness into her lilting soprano on “We Added It Up,” then lets yMusic take the reins on sublimely weird vaudeville number “High Low Middle.” A little give and take, and a really powerful synergy. —Nick Green

Nurses

Dracula

Dead Oceans

They vant to rock your blood

If there’s only room for one more freaky pop group from Portland, Ore., let Nurses lock the door behind them. The trio’s second album is an expansion on their previous work in just about every way. Rather than the click-anddrag post-production that led to 2009 debut, Apple’s Acre, Aaron Chapman, John Bowers and James Mitchell tackled the songs on Dracula with a more organic approach. Rotating instruments and sharing production credits, the trio delivers a set of psychedelic pop imbued with an ear for worldly polyrhythms. Opening track “Fever Dreams” sets the scene with Chapman’s idiosyncratic vocals (they’re kind of like Prince meets Panda Bear). Mitchell’s percussion loops shine on “Extra Fast,” which moves between programmed blips and clattering rhythm sticks. Dracula gurgles with slower, more experimental moments at times, but the brief drags are balanced out by funky hip-swingers (“Trying To Reach You”) and modern nuggets (“Wouldn’t Tell”). —Eric Schuman

Oneohtrix Point Never

Replica

Mexican Summer

Stuck in Neverland

Fresh off of the blogospheric success story of retro-synth pop project Ford & Lopatin, Brooklyn-based avant-synth composer Daniel Lopatin returns once again to the foundational atmospherics of his Oneohtrix Point Never persona with Replica. Those just tuning in to OPN need to know going in that these formless, melancholy soundscapes are the rule rather than the exception; matter of fact, Lopatin has this time eschewed the vocals that occasionally emerged from the ether of 2010’s Returnal, thusly removing any signs of life from this lonely, barren terrain. That’s not to say it’s all textures and space here. Lopatin has obviously taken a cue from

obvious ambient architects like Brian Eno and Manuel Göttsching, alongside early Boards Of Canada. And he knows how to integrate plangent tones with somber piano chords to give the title track a plaintive, wistful quality, making sure to throw enough glitch in so that it doesn’t get stranded on Windham Hill. —Justin Hampton

Pterodactyl

Spills Out Brah

It’s in your head

Ordinarily, I try to avoid comparing one band to others, but the imitations/ references on Pterodactyl’s third album, Spills Out, well, spill out. On opening track “School Glue,” the LP sounds like a new release by Akron/Family or Parts & Labor. (P&L’s Dan Friel makes an appearance on the album.) Pterodactyl found its vocals in ’60s harmonies, bassist/vocalist Jesse Hodges citing the Beatles in particular. I hear the Beach Boys on “Zombies” and Doug Martsch reverb on “Hold Still.” Then, the Brooklyn (by way of Ohio) outfit strips down to its garage undergarments on “Searchers” and “Allergy Shots.” Here, Pterodactyl tries on—without committing to—the frenetic layering that’s earned the trio the noise-rock label. This is where the band excels: garage rock, subtly layered by noise and vocal harmonies. But Spills Out is considerably less interesting, and more cerebral, when Pterodactyl sounds like other bands. —Matthew Irwin

Real Estate

Days

Domino

Pretty, not vacant

The Garden State blog darlings in Real Estate were already onto a pretty good thing with their 2009 self-titled debut: melding melodic, twangy, earthy, surfy jangle pop with spot-on schoolboy-slacker delivery and shot-on-Super-8 production. While they haven’t really changed up that formula on this second LP, they have gotten exponentially better at brewing it up. So, dreaded sophomore slump averted. And that’s a good thing, because seeing a band so rich with potential command its blemished haze of gliding harmonies, wistful refrains and borrowed Peter Buck-isms is really quite a pleasure, especially when song titles like “Younger Than Yesterday” and “Out Of Tune” advertise falsely to the contrary. Leadoff single “It’s Real” (easily the band’s most immediate toe-tapper to date and Days’ finest hour) shows the group excitedly milking a shimmering, descending guitar riff with so much self-assured mirth that an opening cadence of couplets rhyming “wheel” with “feel,” “deal,” a second “feel” and “real” is completely forgiven by a rousing, wordless chorus of “whoa-oh-ohhh”s. Feel it, for real. —Adam Gold

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reviews Samiam

Trips

Hopeless

Sameiam

Some bands never change. Slayer and AC/DC have both been playing the same handful of riffs for years, but that hasn’t muted the frenzied reaction of their fan bases. In fact, as times have become more chaotic, the insane devotion of fans of the aforementioned has grown. While you’ll probably never see a bunch of checker-shirted and horn-rimmed types drunkenly screaming “Saammiamm!” in a Tuscaloosa parking lot like Slayer supporters, know that the Berkeley, Calif., quintet has barely changed since its 1990 debut, and “80 West,” “Clean Up,” “September” and “How Would You Know” still exhibit the driving uptempo, alt-punk able to generate sing-alongs and genteel mosh pits. There are a couple of sections on Trips that flirt with soft-rock territory, but in these uncertain times, Samiam’s consistency provides one more thing—along with drunks screaming “Slaaayeeer”—you can rely on. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Spank Rock

Everything Is Boring And Everyone Is A Fucking Liar Bad Blood

Groangroangroangroan

Lies! Not everything is boring—just watching Spank Rock open up for Ke$ha in a mid-sized arena in a second-tier market. Seriously, the best part of the set we saw was the part where we stood in line for beer behind a blackoutdrunk Bible-college dropout who wanted to tell us about some band named the Beatles. Maybe it’s just detached hipsterism run amok—on his side, on ours—but man, we can just not muster the energy to give a shit about the new Spank Rock tunes. We bet you saw this coming, as we really liked his first album, Yoyoyoyoyo. “Nasty” (featuring New Orleans’ Big Freedia) and “Car Song” (featuring Santigold) are fun, but for the most part, we’re just not feeling Everything. Of course, maybe hearing these tunes for the first time while surrounded by glitter-crusted cretins wasn’t the hippest decision on our part. —Sean L. Maloney

Matthew Sweet

Modern Art

Missing Piece

How sweet he still is

In the 20 years after his captivating 1991 breakthrough, Matthew Sweet has turned out a consistently satisfying string of excellent guitar-pop albums that all seemed to come a close but clear second to the dazzling emotional highs and lows of

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Girlfriend. Sweet’s latest is slightly off his standard beam, which might be the key to its nomination as the worthiest successor to his two-decade-old masterpiece. Modern Art bristles with the purer essences of Sweet’s ’60s influences, from the Byrdsian jangle of “She Walks The Night” to the Beatlesque history lesson of “When Love Lets Go I’m Falling” to the psych-pop frosting of “Late Night In The Power Pop” and the similarly delightful chaos of “Ivory Tower” (featuring drums by Saturday Night Live’s Fred Armisen). Maybe Sweet’s recent cover collaborations with Susanna Hoffs as Sid ‘n’ Susie have brought his deeper pop influences into clearer focus; whatever has touched Sweet’s creative core, Modern Art is the better for it. —Brian Baker

VHS Or Beta

Diamonds And Death Krian Music Group/ Chromosome

Hey DJ! The brainchild of Craig Pfunder and Mark Palgy often gets overlooked by those whose cranks are turned by more organic brands of music, primarily because of their backgrounds as DJs, remixers and turntablists. Obviously, all manner of computerized, electronic and digital clips abound in Diamonds And Death’s sonic landscape, but there’s also a soulful funky groove to the rhythm patterns, choral vocal strains, tastefully appropriate guitars and layers of sounds seemingly taken straight from the floor of Studio 54, all buffering the mechanization nicely. There are times when the results knock boots with chintzy dubstep and AOR radio (“All Summer In A Day”), but mostly Diamonds And Death is post-dancepunk as seen through the hip-shaken eyes of those who know what resonates enough with crowds to get them on the dance floor. —Kevin Stewart-Panko

Ben von Wildenhaus

Great Melodies From Around Riot Bear

Sonic poems dissolving into ancient radio static

“My biggest hope for these tapes is that someday someone will ﬁnd one at a Goodwill in a random town,” says Ben von Wildenhaus about 2010’s Great Melodies From Around, which is getting the vinyl-reissue treatment, “put it in their car stereo and be honestly confused as to the decade, country-of-origin and intended target audience of the music.” The 13-track LP opens with “[Sine Waves (Falter Sky)],” a luscious, Earth-rumbling drone reminiscent of minimal composer Terry Riley’s early flirtations with the thin line between noise and meditation. Von Wildenhaus’ melancholic electric guitar makes its first appearance on “[Cumberland Winter],” where, after accompanied by a drunken piano phrase, the sonic poem

dissolves into the distant crackle of ancient radio static. From country twang and psych-rock whirls to Eastern modes and pondering tones, there’s a delightfully fluid, dreamlike quality to this bizarre book of tunes. —Elliott Sharp

Wavves

Life Sux

Ghost Ramp

Nevvermind

As a big fan of Guided By Voices, Pavement and Daniel Johnston, it feels weird for me to praise someone for dropping the lo-fi shtick. Or at least some of it. Nathan Williams’ first two albums as Wavves sounded tossed-off, a ham-fisted approximation of surf rock soaked in digital distortion. The artificially low fidelity was neither endearing nor challenging, and it sounded more like a mask that Williams was hiding behind. On King Of The Beach, he learned that you didn’t have to fuzz up the whole mix at once, and it made a world of difference. The Life Sux EP is another jump in fidelity. Tracks like “Bug” and the Best Coast-guesting “Nodding Off” aren’t big departures, but elsewhere Williams pits his angst-y tendencies against grunge’s proven, angst-coddling backdrop. “I Want To Meet Dave Grohl” is an indicator, but it still keeps King’s breeziness. “Poor Lenore” apes Nirvana aping the Pixies, while the best track, “Destroy,” is almost completely taken over by Fucked Up. —Matt Sullivan

WU LYF

Go Tell Fire To The Mountain LYF

Lukewarm stuff British quartet World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation—amusingly tempting to confuse with its rather distant stateside counterparts World/Inferno Friendship Society (both bands are, at least, similarly fervent, unruly and rabblerousing)—crafts music that’s every bit as elemental, emphatic and willfully enigmatic as this album’s title. On its own terms, stripped of the hyped-to-hell/anti-hype vortex of its appealingly mythic but all-too-familiar backstory, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain offers both considerable beauty and ugliness (including some brutish, pounding grooves, but especially Ellery Roberts’ instantly divisive guttural caterwaul, which is potent in chunks, but dreadfully wearisome at unremitting album-length full-throttle), neither of which feel like ends in themselves (nor a purpose-driven juxtaposition) so much as value-neutral vehicles striving, straining, yearning toward pure, pummeling visceral emotion. And, to the (inconsistent) extent that they keep things abstract (read: post-rock-ish) and avoid sounding like any other bunch of dull, drudgy indie-rock also-rans (most of the bits invoking their self-conception as “heavy pop,” a rather sour, chore-like description), it mostly works. —K. Ross Hoffman

/movies

Louche Life

essay by

Brideshead Revisited opens in WWII England where officer Charles Ryder First, about the new Blu-ray (Jeremy Irons) discovers his comtransfer of the 30th anniversary pany billeted in Brideshead, seat edition of Granada Television’s of the aristocratic Anglo-Catholic universally admired 1981 adapMarchmains (family name Flyte). tation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 He drifts back two decades when, bestselling novel, Brideshead as a lonely middle-class Oxford Revisited. undergraduate, he is befriended In a nutshell, a vast improveby Sebastian Flyte (Anthony Anment over the grainy, bleached drews), Lord Marchmain’s handout prints marring previous Brideshead some, fun-loving, dissolute second Revisited will releases (stemming from limi- be available on son. Ryder, invited to Brideshead, tations of the 16 mm Eastman DVD and Blu-ray soon falls in love with the entire November 1 from Color Negative with which Entertainment family (in Waugh’s words), and once entangled, turns witness or Brideshead was shot). The One participant in Sebastian’s eveninteriors are crisp and rich, and the exteriors (the North African se- tual descent into drink, disgrace and death; quences especially) not so much bleached Lord Marchmain’s (Laurence Olivier) as dusted by the sun. (As they should be: own disgraceful exile—he lives in Venice the story is told in flashback, and the nar- with his exotic mistress—and deathbed rator’s remembrance of his lost youth at redemption; a doomed romance with the times obscured by a golden haze.) beautiful Julia Flyte (Diana Quick). Supplementing the 3-disc collection: a Although superlatives for Brideshead generous offering of photo galleries, com- Revisited have long been exhausted, it’s mentaries and reminiscences by, among useful to be reminded of what a magnifiothers, Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, cent corps of actors (including John GielDiana Quick and the series’ two direc- gud and Claire Bloom) can accomplish tors—including an explanation of why with what’s really a potboiler romance. there were two directors; and a smartly What gives this story of longing and assembled 20-page companion guide. nostalgia its edge, however, is the unspoken “English habit.” For Brideshead ReWhy the novel and —almost 40 years visited, called the greatest bisexual novel later—television adaptation struck such a ever written, is really about Ryder’s love responsive chord is partially attributable for Sebastian, not Julia. Anyone familiar to the temper of their respective times. with Waugh’s personal history recognizes To war-weary, rationed Britain, Waugh’s in the Marchmains the altered real-life evocation of the 1920s as a sunny decade story of the 7th Earl of Beauchamp and of Empire, promise and plenty (even if the Lygon family: of Waugh’s homosexual remain beneficiaries were the upper classes) lationship with second son Hugh; of the provided a welcome distraction. The onceEarl’s exile due to an exuberant fondness ferocious satirist of Scoop and Vile Bodies for footmen (not exotic mistresses); of the also played the mystical, Anglo-Catholic Oxford years and membership in clubs despiritual angle, tempting an even broader voted to Scotch and sodomy; and finally, of spectrum of readers. Hugh’s tragic demise. For some of the same reasons the teleLeaving so much unsaid—repressed vision adaptation proved wildly popular emotions churning beneath tranquil faon both sides of the Atlantic: in Britain, çades—is what truly makes this story so where Margaret Thatcher tried to get the powerful. Regret is a bitter teacher, but in sun to rise on the Empire once more; and the right hands always makes for gripping in America, where Ronald Reagan transdrama. formed the “beacon of democracy” into an Imperial presidency. (Both proving that Questions or comments? Email stan@sunriserecords.com nostalgia is never harmless.) Stan Michna

Pandora’s Box NEGLECTED

CRITERION

1929 / Director

G.W. Pabst

Why It’s Neglected: A German silent film made two years after the advent of sound. Directed by an Austrian/German who (unlike Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder) didn’t find later fame in Hollywood (and was a bit too cozy with the Nazis). Starring a rebellious actress blackballed by Hollywood. The Theme: Based on a pair of plays by Weimar bad boy Frank Wedekind, Pandora’s Box is a cautionary tale about the wrack and ruin wrought by bourgeois society’s hypocritical repression of human sexuality. His agent is Lulu (luminous, über-sexy Louise Brooks), prototype of every two- and three-timing, femme fatale-ish dame upon which the entire film noir genre was built. Dripping of sex, irresistible to men and women alike, she’s as oblivious as she is sexually uninhibited. A sexual free spirit who expresses herself only by violating social convention, Lulu blazes a trail of death and destruction that will eventually circle back to her. The Story: A synopsis reads like a Victorian bodicebuster. Mistress of a middle-aged publisher who tries to dump her, Lulu gets involved with an old friend/pimp and the publisher’s son; marries the publisher who catches her in bed with two men—one of whom she claims is her father! A gun is fired, the old man is dead… and Lulu gets five years in the slammer. And that’s just the first third. The rest? Daring escape; lesbian love; an Egyptian brothel; card-cheating; blackmail and murder—until the denouement. Now working the streets of London as a prostitute, Lulu invites to her room a john she finds kind of cute: Jack the Ripper. What You Get: A cornucopia: A two-disc edition that includes a pristine print; four different scores; commentary track; interview with Louise Brooks; 90-page booklet that includes Kenneth Tynan’s famous “Girl In The Black Helmet” piece; and a startling 60-minute documentary on Brooks, in real life as much Lulu as Louise.

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/movies/new_releases OCTOBER 1

11/11/11 2012 Anthology 5 Nights in Hollywood 9/11 10th Anniversary Edition After Happily Ever After Alvin and the Chipmunks: Christmas With the Chipmunks Amazon Falls Angel Collection: Angel/Avenging Angel/Angel III: The Final Chapter Animated Christmas Artists: The Best of Kino’s Silent Classics Vol. 1 Behind the Mask Benji Christmas Collection Best of Lidia: Pasta Bikini Time Machine Black Moon Rising Boy Toy Bratz 3-Movie Collection Brideshead Revisited Bunraku California Californication: Fourth Season Cars 2 Chicago: Live in Concert Christmas Carol (1951) Christmas With a Capital C Counterplot Craigslist Killer Crazy, Stupid, Love Darkening Sky Deadliest Catch: Season 7 Dear Santa Decisions Diagnosis Murder Movie Collection Doctor Blood’s Coffin Dragonball Z: Collection One Engineering an Empire Essential British Comedy Collection Essential Civil War Collection Essential Daffy Duck Fashion Model Fort Yuma Fraternity Vacation/Reform School Girls Fugitive: Complete Series Box Set Gakuen Alice: Collection Go Go Crazy Going Places Golden Christmas 2: Second Tail Grateful Dead Movie Great Explorers Grey Owl Gun Street Gunfighters of Abilene Happy Holidays Collection Hell’s Kitchen: Season 6 His Way History Classics: The History of Christmas Hoax for the Holidays Holiday Baggage Holly and Hal Moose: Our Uplifting Christmas Adventure Horror Cinema Collection 1 Hot Coffee How the States Got Their Shapes: Season 1 Invisible Sign Jeff Healey: Full Circle – The Live Anthology Kill a Dragon Kung Fu Joe La Milagrosa Last Mountain Liam Neeson Film Collection Lidia Celebrates America: Holiday Tables & Traditions Life & Planet Earth Lindsey Buckingham: Songs From the Small Machine – Live in L.A. Little Gobie Machete Maidens Unleashed

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Magic Trip Man Who Knew Michael Jackson: The Life of an Icon Michael McDonald: Live/Tribute to Motown Live My Little Assassin & Family of Spies New York Dolls: Live From the Bowery Nutcracker in 3D Philadelphia Experiment Pie in the Sky Complete Collection Planet Earth/The Blue Planet: Seas of Life Prophecy: Uprising & Prophecy: Forsaken Rawhide: Season Four V. 2 Rejoice & Shout Rosie Newman’s Britain at War in Colour Roswell: The Aliens Attack Rulers of the Ancient World: Tyrants, Conquerors, Heroes Santa Incident Secrets of Young Millionaires Sonata Arctica: Live in Finland Steve Winwood Live Strawberry Shortcake: Bright Lights, Big Dreams StringFever: Live From London Tabloid Tappy Toes TCM Greatest Classic Films Coll.: Astaire and Rogers Vol. 2 TCM Greatest Classic Films Coll.: Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: The Thin Man Top Secret America Transformers: Beast Wars – The Complete Series Trespass Uncle Joe Shannon Usher: OMG Tour – Live From London Vampires & Werewolves: Legends & Lore Victorious: Season One V. 2 Voltron: Defender of the Universe – The Final Battle Voyages of Young Doctor Dolittle Warren Miller’s Wintervention Water for Elephants Welcome to L.A. Whale Rider Where the River Runs Black Without a Home WWE: Hell in a Cell 2011 NOVEMBER 8

13 25 Days Until Christmas 7 Nights of Darkness Air Power East vs. West Alleged Allman Brothers Band: Live at Great Woods Amagami SS: Collection 2 Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants Atlas Shrugged Pt. 1 Attack Girls Swim Team vs. the Undead/Zombie Self-Defense Force/Zombie Hunter Rika Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream Babar and Father Christmas Band of Brothers & Pacific Barbie: A Perfect Christmas Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure Best of Hijo De Rey Misterio Best of Sherlock Holmes Collection Better Tomorrow Beverly Hillbillies & Friends Coll. Black Eye Black Sabbath: The Last Supper Black Zoo Born Bad Boy Wonder Carpenter Case Histories

nov 1 Cars 2

Most sane people thought the incorporation of Larry the Cable Guy’s “Mater” would be this series’ Jar Jar Binks-ian death knell. Two hundred million dollars later in the U.S. alone, Pixar, as always, gets the last laugh. [Pixar]

Hysteria I Sold My Soul to Satan Il Divo: At the Coliseum Il Divo: Live at the Greek I’m Alive: Season One Initial D: 2nd and 3rd Stage + Ova Invaders: Genesis It’s a Dog’s Life James Brown: Live in America Joy Road Killer Party King of Cool: The Best of the Dean Martin Variety Show Kung Fu Dragon Collection Last Day of Summer/Wake Law & Order: The Complete Series Leonard Cohen: Live in London Life in a Day Lustful Illusions Man Behind the Mosque Maria’s B Movie Mayhem: Riot on 42nd St/Bad Girls Dormitory Martin: The Complete First Season Martina McBride: Greatest Hits Video Collection Masterpiece Contemporary: Page Eight Measure of Faith Meet Me in St. Louis Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Space Adventure Moon Zero Two Motorcycle Classics Mott the Hoople: The Ballad of … Mr. Magoo: The Television Collection 1960-77 Mushi-Shi: The Complete Collection Music of Your Life w/ Les Brown Jr. & His Band of Renown: Neal McCoy

Celine Dion: Live in Las Vegas… Change-Up Children’s Holiday Movie Collection Child’s Garden of Poetry Christmas in Connecticut Christmas Mail Classic Furious Fists Collection Classic Martial Arts Collection Classic Sonny Chiba Collection Coast Consultation Corner Couch Crowbar: Killings of Wendell Graves Cycling the Frame/The Invisible Frame Damaged by Sunlight Darker Than Black: The Complete Second Season With Ovas Dead or Alive Western Collection Deadly Fists Collection Deadly Kicks Collection Deep Purple With Orchestra: Live at Montreux 2011 Demon Seed Dinky Dog: The Complete Series Dirty Little Trick Dirty Pictures Doctor Who: Colony in Space Doctor Who: Series Six, Part Two Fist of the North Star: Series Vol. 4 From Beyond the Grave From the Earth to the Moon Fulanito: Greatest Video Hits Gallant Bess Gambler, the Girl and the Gunslinger/Mail Order Bride Giant Behemoth Gift Band Live on Tour: Union Chapel Good Sport Great Alfred Hitchcock Movie Box (The Pleasure Garden/The Farmer’s Wife/Easy Virtue) Great Directors Halloween: H2O & Halloween: Resurrection Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II Hideaways Holiday Quad Feature 1 Human Resources Manager

Music(s) Mutiny Pair My Brother Talks to Horses Night of the Lepus Nightbreed Not Another B Movie Outlaw Western Collection Pack Paganini Parasomnia/Psychosis Perfect Age of Rock ‘N’ Roll Phantom of Hollywood Produce Your Own Damn Movie Prof. Layton and the Eternal Diva Puppet Master 5 & Curse of the Puppet Master Putty Hill Que Despelote! Queen of Outer Space Queen: In the 1980s Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin Restitution Rickey Smiley: Open Casket Sharp River Why Romeo X Juliet: Complete Tragedy Rush: Time Machine 2011 – Live in Cleveland Sacred Salvation Boulevard Satan’s Blood Seasons of Adventure Shaft: The TV Movie Collection Shanti Generation Skelton Key 3: The Organ Trail Sleeping Beauty Snow Devils Sonny Chiba: Samurai Collection Sonny Chiba: Street Fighter Coll. Spirit of Bruce Lee Collection Spoils of War Squid Girl Series Part 2 Stagecoach Santa Star Light Star Bright Stevie Ray Vaughan: Pride and Joy Story of Jesus: A Revolutionary Super Cops Sweet Hostage Tim Tebow: Everything In Between Tom Thumb Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls Trial & Heirs: Protect Your Family Fortune

Trog True Crime Series 1: Secrets Sins & Stalkers Twelve Thirty Twisted Sister: From the Bars to the Stars – Three Decades Live UFC 134: Silva cs. Okami UFC: Ultimate Knockouts 9 Urban Wrestling Federation: First Blood Von Erich Story: World Class Championship Wrestling Wild Thornberrys Season 2 NOVEMBER 15

Aaron Copland: Music in the ‘20s Adrenalin: Fear the Rush Al Otro Lado Del Corazon Alta Experience Aspen Assassin’s Creed: Lineage B. Monkey Becoming Chaz Bedlam: Season One Beginners Being Human: Complete 1st Season Bellflower Benefit of the Doubt Best of British War Cinema Best of the Best: Without Warning Bite Marks Blassreiter: The Complete Series Bleach the Movie: Fade to Black Boston Blackie’s Chinese Adventure Caldecott Favorites Featuring the Snowy Day California Raisins Collection Cartel: Season 2 Pt. 2: Guerra Total Centre Place Cher Vol. 1: Film Collection Cher Vol. 2: Film Collection China and Sex Discovering Havana: In the Footsteps of Hemingway Discovering Massachusetts Discovering New Jersey Discovering New York State Dolphin Adventure Dora the Explorer: Dora Celebrates Drummond Will Eatin’ Crabs Chesapeake Style Emerald Cowboy Evil Dead 2 Fading of the Cries Faith & Doubt at Ground Zero Finding a Family Fist 2 Fist Fizzy’s Lunch Lab: Fresh Food 101 Flypaper Futurist Life Redux Girls in Prison Golf in the Kingdom Griff the Invisible Half Pint Brawlers: Season 1 Hart to Hart: Til Death Do Us Hart Harvest Highway Patrolman History Classics: Hero Ships History Classics: History’s Mysteries History Classics: Weapons at War – Brute Force WWII Hollywood Sex Wars Humongous Ice: Complete Collection Irish Rovers: Home in Ireland Jackson Hole Story Jim’s Gift Journey of Dmitry Shostakovich Kimmie’s Kitchen Episode 3 Lady Football Larry Crowne Legacy of Rosina Lhevinne: Portrait of the Legendary Pianist Legend of Billie Jean Lion King Little Mermaid Littlest Angel Longhorns

nov 22 The Birth of a

Nation—Full Uncut Director’s Version

D.W. Griffith’s 1915 landmark is the most controversial and influential movie that you’ve honestly probably never seen. Here’s your chance to appreciate and scrutinize the Civil War epic’s new HD transfer. [KINO ]

Looney Tunes: Platinum Coll. Vol. 1 Lost Everything Love Hina: The Complete Series Lucy Collection Vol. 1 Madrid Before Hanita Main Street Making War Horse Margaret Cho: Cho Dependent Maria’s B Movie Mayhem: Teenage Hitchhikers/Teenage Tramp Medic Mind of the Demon: The Larry Linkogle Story Money Matters National Geographic: The Indestructibles – Season One Nature: Jungle Eagle Neverwhere Ninja She-Devil/I Was a Teenage Ninja/Ninjaken: Naked Sword No Real Reason Odongo Oh Mr. Faulkner Do You Write One in the Gun Open Door Palace of Versailles Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Plebe Chakaloso 2 Por Encima De La Ley Pound of Flesh Quest Reach for the Sky Red vs. Blue: Season 9 Remembering Chicago Righteous & The Wicked Rio Sex Comedy Rules of the Game Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas: A Pilgrimage to Oracle Lake Saint Misbehavin’: Wavy Gravy Movie Santa Claus Santa Mesa Secret Access: The Vatican Shadow of the Hawk Shuffle! The Complete Collection

Shy of Normal Silver Fleet Sleep Furiously Sons of Perdition Spongebob Squarepants: Holidays With Spongebob Steam Team Collection Storm Over the Nile Superheroes Three Colors: Blue, White, Red Tibet in Song Trans-Siberian Muse Treasure Hunter Tree Turtle: The Incredible Journey Vietnam in HD Walk a Mile in My Pradas Warring State Warriors of Virtue: Return to Tao What Women Want When Strangers Click Whitechappel: The Ripper Returns Weird World of Blowfly WWII in HD You Must Be Joking NOVEMBER 22

12 Angry Men 18 Bars, Vol. 4 Adventures of Tintin: Season One Against All Odds Amy Winehouse: Nobody Knows – Unauthorized Andres No Quiere Dormir la Siesta Anthem Aviation Anthology Bakuman: First Issue Beauty and the Beast: An Enchanted Christmas Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical World Birth of a Nation: Full Uncut Director’s Version Bling Ring Body Puzzle Brando Unauthorized Brave Archer 2 Captive Audience Carjacked Charles Bronson: 5 Movies Chuck Norris: 5 Movies Cirque: A Table in Heaven Classic TV Comedy: 72 Episodes Coicent/Five Numbers Commit Conan the Adventurer: Season Two Part 1 Dalai Lama: Message of Peace and Compassion Dalai Lama: The Essence of Mahayana Buddhism Darkroom David Susskind Show “Open End”: Jerry Lewis – A Frank and Candid Conversation Day With Spongebob Squarepants: Unauthorized Mockumentary Devil and Leroy Bassett Devil’s Double Dexter Romweber: Two Headed Cow Doctor Faustus Doctor Who: Complete Sixth Series Duchess of Malfi Edge: Perspectives… Drug Free Culture Family Tree Finding Life Beyond Earth Flying Wild Alaska Friends: Live Comedy Giants of Classic Rock: Led Zeppelin Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Godzilla vs. Megalon Great White Death Green Green Guys Haunted Changi Helldriver Hetalia: Paint It, White! Hollywood Goes to War Hollywood Man Hollywood Patriots: Clark Gable

Hollywood Patriots: Ronald Reagan Home Invasion Hookers in Revolt Irish Verse to Landscape Jack of Spades Jarboe: Live in NYC Jester Till Joe Lovano: Solos – Jazz Sessions Jon Secada: Stage Rio Killer Priest L Word: The Complete Series Law & Order: UK – Season Two Love Begins Making the Boys Malice in Wonderland Marvel Knights: Animation McMillan & Wife: First Season Meet the Browns: Season 3 Metropolis: Special Edition Mexican Gangster Moist Fury My Stepdad’s a Freakin’ Vampire Naked Massacre National Geographic: JFK Assassination Declassified Nature: My Life as a Turkey New York Dolls: Lookin’ Fine Night Crawlers Nirvana: Nevermind – A 20th Anniversary Tribute Nova: The Fabric of the Cosmos Office: Special Edition Pablo Francisco: They Put It Out There Para Volver a Amar Perry Mason: Season 6 Vol. 2 Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl Galactic Battles, Vol. 7 Pokemon: Diamond and Pearl Galactic Battles, Vol. 8 Prep and Landing Railroad Journeys Raymond Did It Red Hot Chili Peppers: With or Without You Reel Injun Residents: Talking Light – Bimbo’s Rumor Mill Saki the Killer Sarah’s Key School for Scandal Sedonas Rule Short History of Ireland Slaughter Claus Slippin’: 10 Years With the Bloods Spy Kids: All the Time in the World Street Battle Los Angeles Street Fighter/Return of the Street Fighter Super 8 Super Hero Squad Show: The Infinity Gauntlet – Season 2, Vol. 2 Tale of Two Cities: In Concert Tavis Smiley Reports: Too Important to Fail Thankskilling These Amazing Shadows They All Must Die This Sceptered Isle: Day Trips in England Through the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman: Season Two Timmy Time: Go Kart Timmy TNA Wrestling: Hardcore Justice 2011/No Surrender 2011 Trigger Trinity’s Last Stand Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas: The Play Unfinished Works of Sean Weathers Venga a Prendere Il Caffe Da Noi Viva La Lucha: Retribution Volpone Where the Dogs Divide Her Whispers: And the Beat Goes On – Live in Concert Who: Can’t Explain Wild Life Window on Your Present Women, War & Peace

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/music/new_releases

U2 Vallenfyre Various Artists Various Artists Various Artists Various Artists The Varukers

NOVEMBER 1

Into Somethin’ Heavenly Vulva The Smile Sessions Under the Mistletoe Someone to Watch Over Me Brite Futures Dark Past Dave Brubeck Quartet Their Last Time Out Lindsey Buckingham Songs From the Small Machine John Coltrane Essential Albums Anthony David Location, Location, Location Miles Davis Quintet Essential Albums Donna D’Cruz Rasa Swank The Dear Hunter The Color Spectrum: The Complete Collection The Decemberists Long Live the Decemberists Dorrough Music Dorrough Music Gangsta Grillz: Silent Assassin The Dreaming Puppet Florence & Machine Ceremonials Vince Guaraldi C. Brown Collection Hawk Nelson Christmas Isaac Hayes Essential Albums Jeff Healey Band Full Circle Idle Warship Habits of Heart Illogicist The Unconsciousness of Living Insane Clown Posse Featuring Freshness Jethro Tull Aqualung 40th Anniversary George Jones Hits Journey Greatest Hits 1 & 2 Journey Greatest Hits Vol. 2 Carole King A Holiday Carole Krisiun The Great Execution Miranda Lambert Four the Record S Langeland Group The Land That Is Not Jadon Lavik Christmas Libera The Christmas Album Lil’ Mo PS I Love Me M.E.D. Classic The Magnificent The Magnificent Maino Day After Tomorrow Nellie McKay Obligatory Villagers Megadeth Th1rt3en Midnight Chaser Rough & Tough Moby Destroyed (3-Disc Deluxe) Nils Petter Molvaer Baboon Moon Orig Broadway Cast Elf: The Musical Pianos Become … Teeth The Lack Long After Enrico Rava Quintet Tribe The Records Rotate Lou Reed & Metallica Lulu Eric Roberson Mr. Nice Guy Santa Ana Players Christmas Party Music Santa Ana Players Holiday Dinner Party Sick of It All Non-Stop Frank Sinatra Sinatra: Best of the Best The Sing-Off Songs of the Season Slipknot Iowa (2CD/DVD Special Edition) Soundtrack Dirty Girl Soundtrack I Don’t Know How She Does it Soundtrack Real Steel Soundtrack The Ides of March Soundtrack Tower heist Spirit Free Plays Starship Steel Panther Balls Out Take Noregs Vaapen Terror Keepers of the Faith (Deluxe CD/DVD) Throne of Katarsis Ved Graven Trillium Alloy Tyrese Open Invitation Beegie Adair Archgoat The Beach Boys Justin Bieber Susan Boyle

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Suzanne Vega Wagon Cookin’ Wale Peter Whitfield Zed Bias

Achtung Baby A Fragile King Certified #1 Country Dance Party Muppets: Green & Red The Best of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame The Damnation of Our Species Close-Up Vol. 3, States of Being Eleven Ambition The History of Western Art Biasonic Hotsauce

NOVEMBER 8

65Daysofstatic We Were Exploding Anyway Afternoon Gentlemen Pissedog Allman Brothers Band Hittin’ the Note Allman Brothers Band One Way Out Allman Brothers Band SUNY at Stonybrook 9/19/71 And So I Watch You … Gangs Animals as Leaders Weightless Herbie Armstrong Real Real Gone Olof Arnalds Olof Sings P.P. Arnold Angel of the Morning As I Lay Dying Decas Ask Flight 653 Ole Ask Ask Ole Ask Turning Point Atlas Sound Parallax Brian Auger Tiger Featuring Aura Noir Black Thrash Attack Autopsy Mental Funeral (CD/DVD) Autumn Cold Comfort Roy Ayers Everybody Loves the Sunshine Steve Azar Delta Soul Volume One Azymuth Jazz Carnival Baby Dee Baby Dee Goes Down to Amsterdam The Bachata Legends The Bachata Legends Bad Manners Can Can Zuill Bailey & Isabel … The Spanish Masters B Wolfkind AKA Novo … Bain Wolfkind AKA Novo Homo Balzac Deep Blue: Chaos From Darkism Balzac The Birth of Hatred A Band of Bees Every Step’s a Yes Danny Barnes Rocket Bayonet Bayonet The Beatles The Beatles With Tony Sheridan: First Recordings David Bedford Great Equatorial Beneath Oblivion From Man to Dust Beware of Safety Leaves/Scars Blood Axis Ultimacy Bradley Leighton Holiday of Lights Brainstorm On the Spur of the Moment Brighter Death Now Innerwar Brighter Death Now Very Little Fun L Brown Jr. & N McCoy Music of Your Life Michael J Browne The Road Is Dark Teddy Bruckner & … Teddy Bruckner & His All Star Band David Budway A New Kiss Built Like Alaska In Troubled Times Bullfrog High in Spirits Stan Bush & Barrage Stan Bush & Barrage Paul Byrom This Is the Moment C.O.T.A. Marches and Meditations C.O.T.A. Ta’wil Robert Calvert Live in Middlesborough 1986 Candlemass Epicus Doomicus Metallicus Candlemass Nightfall Mariah Carey The Profile Eric Carr Unfinished Business The Cars Candy-O City Lights In It to Win It CO Caspar Pass the Times CO Caspar Reports From This Lunatic Asylum

Lou Reed & Metallica nov 01 Lulu

One of the strangest and most misguided collaborations in recent memory had a chance to finally render Metallica irrelevant, except the riffage beneath Lou’s facepalm rambling is actually pretty solid. [Warner Bros.] Bohemian Technological Shack Job Realms of the Ungodly The Long Way Home Artificial Madness Artificial Heart Lullaby Versions of Songs Recorded by Pink Floyd Cradle Rock Lullaby Versions of Songs Recorded by Taylor Swift Cradle Rock Lullaby Versions of Songs Recorded by U2 Creepersin Creepersin Reanimated Andrew Cronshaw The Great Dark Water Cruelty Campaign Distressed Cruxshadows Ethernaut Cruxshadows Valkyrie David Dallas The Rose Tint Dark Chocolate Box of Dark Chocolate Dark Chocolate Caper Dark Forest Dawn of Infinity Dear and Departed Every Waking Moment Deep Purple & Orch. Live at Montreux 2011 Devil Time to Repent Dieter MH Cari Saluti Disco Inferno The 5 EPs Disturbed The Lost Children Gini Dodds Mellowdrama Ernie K. Doe Here Come the Girls: A History Dogs Divine Size of the Fight DRC Music Kinshasa One Two Dumpstaphunk Everybody Want Sum Dumpstaphunk Listen Hear Hanin Elias No Games No Fun Steve Ellis Ten Commitments Encephalon The Transhuman Condition Brian Eno Panic of Looking ESG Come Away With ESG ESG ESG Factor & Chandeliers Factor & The Chandeliers EP John Fahey The Sunny Side of the Ocean Favourite Songs The Great Deal of Love Shelby Flint The Complete Valiant Singles Four Year Strong In Some Way Shape or Form Brooke Fraser Flags (CD/DVD) Frenzy Nitro Boy Funkadelic Cosmic Funkers Noel Gallagher Noel Gallagher’s High Flyin’ Birds Gazpacho London G Ginn & Royal We We Are Amused Gold Panda DJ Kicks Charlie Gracie For the Love of Charlie J Hall & Pat Metheny Jim Hall & Pat Metheny Harlequin Love Crimes Harlis Harlis Judy Collins Con Demek Condemned Confession Chris Connelly Jonathan Coulton Cradle Rock

Night Meets the Day Weird Tapes Vol. 1 & 2 Hell Is Other People More Than Meets the Eye The Fire of Redemption Reverse Aleph Parabolic Versions Les Hemorragies Nihilistes Wicked Game Remains of a Dream The Original Sin Swung Out in the Cold Raise Your Fist to Metal The Way Sound Leaves The Dreamer Essentials & Rarities Rio Piano Man (Legacy Edition) The Vision The Devil Made me Do It Fire & Ice Dance of December Souls Promise A Moment in Chiros Without You Hidden Stash 5 – Bong Loads & B Sides Lenny Kravitz The Lowdown Lacrimosa The Singles Collection Revisited (2CD/DVD) Sonny Landreth Down in Louisiana Lassie Covered in Flowers Last Dominion Lost The Tyranny of Distance Last Poets On the Subway Lateef … Truth Speaker Firewire Let Us in Nashville Let Us in Nashville Lijadu Sisters Danger Like Moths to Flames When We Don’t Exist Lucisferrato Ingermanland Lunatic Soul Impressions David Lynch Crazy Clown Time M+A Things Yes Makossa & Megablast Soy Como Soy Man Live Adventures of Mandolin Orange Haste Make/Heart Hearted Stranger Martyr Circle of 8 Curtis Mayfield Love to the People Maysa Motions of Love Mazmoneth Music by Mirrors Christian McBride Conversations With Christian Cass McCombs Humor Risk Wain McFarlane That Was Then This Is Now Murray McLauchlan Human Writes John McLaughlin Marbles John Mark McMillan Economy Joe McPhee Trinity Medeski Martin & Wood MSMW Live: In Case the World Changes Its Mind Harlis Hawkwind Heartless Patrick Hemer Hexfire His Divine Grace Hugh Hopper I-C-K Il Divo Inner Glory Iron Lamb Jack Buzzards Jack Frost Jack Frost Sarah Jaffe Etta James Jean Michel Jarred Keith Jarrett Billy Joel Joker Juicehead Kaskade Katatonia Kenotaph Lance King King Midas Sound Kottonmouth Kings

Coliseum nov 15

Parasites EP Louisville’s tough-tocategorize punk/hardcore/ sludge/rock trio follows up last year’s excellent third effort, House With a Curse, with a less focused but infectiously catchy new EP. Short and sweet. [Temporary Residence]

Fiddlersophica The Mekons Story 19771982 Midnight Satanic Royalty Mac Miller Blue Slide Park Miniboone On Miniboone Mountain Mitochondrion Archaeaeon Mojack Hijinks Moonbeam The Secret Morbus Chron Sleepers in the Rift Trevor Morris Immortals Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Neal Morse Testimony Two: Live in Los Angeles Mr. Criminal Presents Gang Bang Symphonies Mr. Death Descending Through Ashes Murder Construct Murder Construct Mureau Rumors and Reputations Mushroom’s Patience Spirit of the Mountain Mushroom’s Patience Water Mythos Superkraut Kenneth Nash Heartcore Praise Necrotic Necrotic Necrovorous Funeral for the Sane Randy Newman Live in London (CD/DVD) Joe Nichols It’s All Good Night in Gales Five Scars No Festival of Light No Festival of Light John O’Leary Band Two for the Show Oneohtrix Point Never Replica Opthalamia Dominion Orchestra of Spheres Nonagonic Now Osaka Popstar Rock ‘Em O-Sock ‘em Live Our God Weeps Unity Owen Ghost Town Pablo Cruise It’s Good to Be Alive Mike Patton The Solitude of Prime Numbers Soundtrack Person L The Positives Pink Floyd A Foot in the Door: Best Of Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here Robert Plant Robert Plant’s Jukebox A Plea for Purging The Life & Death of a Plea for Purging Polinski Labyrinths Ponykiller The Wilderness Pusha T Fear of God II Quilt Quilt Ralfe Band Bunny and the Bull Soundtrack Hart Ramsey My Next Heartbeat Rascal Flatts Best of Live Reutoff Gute Nacht, Berlin Righteous Vendetta Lawless Luke Roberts Big Bells and Dime Songs Edward Rogers Porcelain Caitlin Rose Own Side Now Rush Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland Sal Solaris Outerpretation of Dreams Sanguis Imperem In Glory We March Toward Our Doom Galerie Schallschutz Harp Walter Schreifels An Open Letter to the Scene Score Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Seahaven Winter Forever Secret Garden Winter Poem John Serrie Sunday Morning Peace Seven Witches Passage to the Other Side Sigur Ros Inni Nina Simone Mood Indigo Sinner One Bullet Left Slugs & Bugs A Slugs & Bugs Christmas Slugs & Bugs Slugs & Bugs & Under Where Slugs & Bugs Slugs & Bugs Lullabies Rickey Smiley Open Casket Sharp Soft Machine Live 1970 Joanie Sommers The Complete Warner Bros. Singles J.D. Souther Medicine Head Mekons

You’re Only Lonely Lincoln Way Night The Complete Warner Bros. Singles George Strait Icon Summer Camp Welcome to Condale Svarttjern Towards the Ultimate Keith Sweat Til the Morning Tech N9ne Collabos Welcome to Strangeland Terroritmo Premonitions Theo School of House Thin Lizzy The Boys Are Back This Mortal Coil This Mortal Coil Irma Thomas Soul Queen of New Orleans Thornium Dominions of the Eclipse Ure Thrall Arabian Knightmare Tim – Love Lee Fully Bearded Transfer Future Selves Transit Something Left Behind Unholy Second Ring of Power (CD/ DVD) Various Artists Bachata Roja: Amor Y Amargue Various Artists Decadence Vol. 2 Various Artists Eccentric Soul: Nickel and Penny Labels Various Artists Now 40 Various Artists Sweethearts Various Artists Tale of Two Cities Various Artists The Girls of Petticoat Junction: Sixties Various Artists The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Various Artists Ultra 2012 Various Artists Zu Neuem Ufern In Alter Frisch Varunna Cantos Carl Verheyen Band The Road Laura Viers Tumble Bee Kurt Vile Smoke Ring for My Halo (Deluxe) The Wellingtons In Transit Ronnie Wood Ronnie on the Radio John Wright At Cross Purposes Young Statues Young Statues Zodiac Death Valley Zodiac Death Valley Zun Zun Egui Katang Stalley Connie Stevens

NOVEMBER 15 Alvin & The Chipmunks Chipwrecked: Music From

the Motion Picture Songs of December 777: The Desanctification Johnny Yesno Tago Mago 40th Anniversary Edition Caveman Coco Beware Celts Christmas With the Celts Ray Charles Singular Genius Childish Gambino Camp Coliseum Parasites EP Cross Canadian Rag… Box of Weed Crystal Stilts Radiant Door Cynic Carbon Based Anatomy Mark De Clive-Lowe Renegades The Do Both Ways Open Jaws Esoteric Paragon of Dissonance Goldmund All Will Prosper Grateful Dead Dick’s Picks Vol. 34 Grateful Dead Dick’s Picks Vol. 35 Grateful Dead Dick’s Picks Vol. 36 Gym Class Heroes The Papercut Chronicles II H2O Don’t Forget Your Roots Mary H & J Pavone Departure of Reason Hypocrisy Hell Over Sofia: 20 Years Irish Rovers The Irish Rovers Home in Ireland Javier Javier Javier Left of Center Juvenile Rejuvenation Kalimete Sin Miedo a Nada Korallreven An Album by Korallreven Locksmith Embedded Los Campesinos Hello Sadness Messy Marv Goon Vit Bott 3 David Nail The Sound of a Million Dreams Paul Anka Blut Aus Nord Cabaret Voltaire Can

NEEDLE

/music/new_releases Christmas: A Love Story Anthem Inc. Hollandaze Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1 Toshman Powell Changes The Prezcotts Gossip Pterodactyl Spills Out R.E.M. Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage Run Kid Run Patterns Nathan Salsburg Affirmed Paul Simon So Beautiful Collector’s Edition (CD/DVD) Slash Made in Stoke 24/7/1 Sonata Arctica Live in Finland (2CD/2DVD) Sons of the Pioneers Centennial Collection The Supremes More Hits by the Supremes Carter Tanton Freeclouds Tegan and Sara Get Along (CD/DVD) Tyga Careless World USDA After Party Various Artists Cameo Parkway Holiday Hits Various Artists Chief & Age Blues Various Artists Holiday Love Various Artists Holy Hip Hop Vol. 12 Various Artists Jewel Paula Soul Story Various Artists Strictly the Best 44 Various Artists Strictly the Best 45 Various Artists The Descendants Various Artists This Warm December Vile Metamorphosis Wall of Voodoo Lost Weekend: Best Of Webbie Savage Life 3 White Wizzard Flying Tigers The Who Quadrophenia Wim Wim Daniel Winans First Love Naturally 7 Naughty by Nature Odonis Odonis Olivia Tremor Control

NOVEMBER 22

Arrows We Love Our Enemy Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts Daevid Allen Stroking the Tail of the Bird Bill Anderson The First 10 Years, 19561966 Angel City Face to Face Angel Eyes Midwestern Another Hero Dies Arguments Armored Saint Delirious Nomad Asking Alexandria Stepped Up and Scratched Aura Noir The Merciless Kevin Ayers Rainbow Takeaway/That’s What You Get Babe Michael Bates Acrobat: Music For, and by, Dmitri Shostakovich David Bedford Song of the White Horse Chuck Berry Rocks Beware of Safety Dogs Big Maceo Complete Sides 1941-1950 Black N Blue Rarities Tommy Bolin & Friends Great Gypsy Soul Olivia Broadfield This Beautiful War Broadway Cast Stage Door Canteen Buck Dharma Flat out Cadence Weapon Breaking Kayfabe Calexico Selections From Road Atlas 1998-2011 Candlemass Ancient Dreams Candlemass Chapter VI Candlemass Tales of Creation The Cansecos Juices! The Cansecos The Cansecos Caspian Tertia Caspian The Four Trees Caspian You Are the Conductor Chasma Declarations of the Grand Artificer Wild Billy Childish & Actors & Actresses Actors & Actresses The Adverts

NEEDLE

The Spartan Dregg Forensic R ‘N’ B Stanley Clarke Time Exposure/Find Out/ Hideaway Graham Collier The Day of the Dead/ October Ferry/Symphony of Scorpions Tommy Collins Black Cat Common The Dreamer, the Believer Perry Como It’s Impossible/And I Love You So Constants The Foundation, the Machine, the Ascension Chris Cornell Songbook Elvis Costello The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook (Super Deluxe) Country Gazette Country Gazette Live/ Sunny Side of the Mountain Credence Clear. Revival Live – Royal Albert Hall Rick Danko Live Anthology Dead Skeletons Dead Magick Desertshore Drawing of Threes Al Di Meola Tour de Force/Live/ Scenario Doobie Brothers Cycles/Brotherhood Dave Douglas Greenleaf Portable Series Vol. 1-3 Dr. Hook Makin’ Love and Music/Live in the UK Eksi Ekso Brown Shark Red Lion Electric Angels Electric Angels Evergrey A Decade and a Half (Best Of) First State The Whole Nine Yards Dan Fogelberg Twin Sons of Different Mothers/Phoenix Jim Ford Demolition Expert Connie Francis Lipstick on Your Collar Giant Sand Chore of Enchantment (25th Anniversary Edition) Gifts From Enola From Fathoms Gifts From Enola Gifts From Enola Girlsareshort Early North American Slim Harpo Rocks Ronnie Hawkins Forty Days Herra Terra Quiet Geist Hugh Hopper The Swimmer Alberto Iglesias Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Original Soundtrack Infernal Legion The Spear of Longinus Jefferson Airplane Jefferson Airplane Jewell Black Diamond George Jones Heartbreak Hotel Junius The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist Katatonia The Great Cold Distance Kidz in the Hall Occasion B.B. King Best of RPM & Kent Recordings Krayzie Bone Under the Influence Adam Lambert Beg for Mercy

Junius nov 22

The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist This exceptional “dark rock” quartet just issued a fantastic, emotionally tumultuous LP in Reports From the Threshold of Death. Martyrdom is its less gripping but still impressively ambitious predecessor. [Prospect Park]

Bêtise Larkin All We Have Is Now Janeene Lavelle The Joy of Christmas Lavinia There Is Light Between us Lone Star Firing on All Six Lone Star Lone Star Bob Luman Red Hot M.O.P. Sparta Magazine No Thyself Magnum Evolution (Best Of) Beverly McClellan Beverly McClellan Beverly McClellan Fear Nothing Bill McHenry Ghosts of the Sun Mr. Gasser & Weirdos Hot Rod Hootenanny Mr. Gasser & Weirdos Rods & Ratfinks Mr. Gasser & Weirdos Surfink! Michael Murphey Blue Sky Night Thunder/ Swans Against the Sun Rick Nelson Stay Young Nemesea The Quiet Resistance New Riders of the Best of 1971-1975: Purple Sage Instant Armadillo Blue Pearls Before Swine The Use of Ashes C/W These Things Too J. Period & Blk Thought The Best of the Roots J. Period & Kanye West Good Music: Remixed and Unreleased Pineapple Thief Variations on a Dream Pretty Things The Pretty Things/Get the Picture Riot Immortal Soul Jenni Rivera Joyas Prestadas-Pop Stan Rogers Fogarty’s Cove Rolling Stones Some Girls: Live in Texas Jia Ruhan Time to Grow Rush Sector 3 Russian Futurists Let’s Get Ready to Crumble Russian Futurists Me, Myself & Rye Russian Futurists Our Thickness Russian Futurists The Method of Modern Love Sandstone Cultural Dissonance Satan’s Host Celebration: For the Love of Satan Jon Secada Stage Rio Seven Witches Deadly Sins Seven Witches Xiled to Infinity and One Seven Witches Year of the Witch The Showstoppers The Best Of Smashed Gladys Social Intercourse Sycamore Smith Redux Soundtrack Happy Feet Two Wynn Stewart Come On Sub Signal Touchstones Super Heroines Anthology 1982-1985 Svolk Svolk ‘em All Taylor Swift Speak Now World Tour Tangent Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt/Chasing Shadows Tangent The Studio Sessions/ Shadow Magic Tangent Tributes & Rarities/Live Over England Mel Tillis Sawmill/Stomp Them Grapes… Plus Toh Kay Streetlight Lullabies Ike & Tina Turner Delilah’s Power/Airwaves The Union Line Cernido Sonidos EP Vandenberg Vandenberg Various Artists Beyond the Shadows of Death Various Artists Bill Monroe 100th Year Celebration Various Artists Buddha Lounge Renditions of Metallica Various Artists Dim Lights, Thick Smoke & Hillbilly Music Various Artists Home for the holidays Vol. Two Various Artists Psychobilly Christmas Various Artists Rockabilly & Psychobilly Madness Various Artists Teenage, Teenagers & Youth in Music 1951 Various Artists The World’s Greatest Garth Brooks Tribute Various Artists Ukranian & Lemko String Bands in America Virgin Steele Age of Consent

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