April 2022
Love & Algorhythms is an interstellar synthesis of astral Soul, R&B, and sci-fi Funk. Working with producer Paul Butler (The Bees, Micheal Kiwanuka, Caroline Rose, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Seratones have taken the invitation to knock at the door of the cosmos. A.J. Haynes’s voice dances with soul-stirring devotion at the altar of Black Feminisms: weaving the words Toni Cade Bambara, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis multiverse, echoes of bell hooks, and Audre Lorde’s Power of the Erotic. With drummer Jesse Gabriel’s machine-like precision and the transcendental touches from guitarist Travis Stewart, the album oscillates between Alice Coltrane-inspired bliss & Giorgio Moroder’s ecstatic release. Each song hovers and pulsates in the wide, dark matter—constellations guiding a journey through the subtle body, the vast fullness of the human experience and the irresistible potential of liberation.
Scheduled for release in April 2022, the 10-song sophomore full-length album showcases Kirke’s unselfconscious, country-twinged vocals alongside a brightly colored candy shop of glam-twang guitar riffs, department store tv commercial synth stylings, and swooping, lilting, unabashedly feminine background vocals. Lady For Sale channels a high-spirited insouciance that feels invigorating and familiar, decidedly more easy-going and fun-loving than what we’ve come to expect from its genre (and the world in general) in recent years. This is a party you’ll want to attend.
Trombone Shorty returns with Lifted, his first album in 5 years and the follow-up to his Blue Note debut Parking Lot Symphony, featuring special guests including vocalist Lauren Daigle & guitarist Gary Clark Jr. An album that captures the energy of his legendary live shows, Lifted combines classic New Orleans sounds (funk, gospel, street rhythms, Mardi Gras Indian chants & second lines) with modern lyrics, melody & beats to create something fresh & unique. Part Jimi Hendrix, part James Brown and all New Orleans, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews is the bandleader and frontman of Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, a hard-edged funk band that employs brass-band beats, rock dynamics & improvisation in a jazz tradition.
Gifts From The Holy Ghost, Dorothy Martin’s third studio album as frontwoman for the pseudonymous rock band Dorothy, is the album she’s always wanted to make. Born from a sense of diving urgency, it’s their most bombastic rock n’ roll work yet. While their debut album was made on a combination of whiskey and heartbreak, Gifts was built on sobriety, health, and spiritualism, in a way that reverses the clichéd “good girl gone bad” narrative. It features the Top 40 Rock track, “Rest in Peace.”
Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE.
With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo-joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass-the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee, who they both first heard as teenagers in California.
TAJ MAHAL & RY COODER - GET ON BOARD
Joshua Hedley is “a singing professor of country & western,” he declares on his raucous and witty new album, Neon Blue. It might sound like a punchline, but it’s not. An ace fiddle player, a sharp guitarist, and a singer with a granite twang, he’s devoted his entire life to the study of this genre. Ask him about it and he’ll explain: “When all my friends went off to college, I went to Nashville. I was 19 years old playing honkytonks and getting an education.” His 2018 debut, Mr. Jukebox, showcased his deep knowledge of country’s history, in particular the beery ballads of the 1950s and ‘60s. His mentors were George Jones, Ray Price, and Glen Campbell, but his most remarkable accomplishment was putting his own spin on their style.
Neon Blue, on the other hand, examines a very different, often forsaken era: the early 1990s. “The last bastion of country music,” says the professor, “was the early 1990s, roughly 1989 and 1996. You could turn on the radio and immediately know you’re hearing a country song. You could still hear steel guitar and fiddle. But there was a hard fork around 1996 or ’97, when country veered off into pop territory. Neon Blue asks, What if that fork had never happened? What if country kept on sounding like country?”
That era may have been dismissed by traditionalists at the time as slick or overproduced, but Hedley finds something exciting in that old hat-act sound, and Neon Blue plays up the excitement of bigger-than-life choruses, the relatable emotions of those sad-eyed ballads, and the inventiveness of the lively production. “The sound is modern,” he says, “but it’s still discernibly country.”
On his first album in partnership with Verve Records, Kurt Vile pulls his talents as a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in unexpected directions — and the result is a vibrant, yet meditative record propelled by laid-back charm and curious spirit.
Fear of the Dawn is the fourth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White's Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, pressed to vinyl at Third Man Pressing, and released by Third Man Records. Pressed on limited astronomical blue vinyl, only available at independent record stores
Our only goal is to get lost in the music. We (John, Anthony, Chad and Flea) spent thousands of hours, collectively and individually, honing our craft and showing up for one another, to make the best album we could. Our antennae attuned to the divine cosmos, we were just so damn grateful for the opportunity to be in a room together, and, once again, try to get better. Days, weeks and months spent listening to each other, composing, jamming freely, and arranging the fruit of those jams with great care and purpose. The sounds, rhythms, vibrations, words and melodies had us enrapt.
We yearn to shine a light in the world, to uplift, connect, and bring people together. Each of the songs on our new album UNLIMITED LOVE, is a facet of us, reflecting our view of the universe.This is our life’s mission. We work, focus, and prepare, so that when the biggestwave comes, we are ready to ride it. The ocean has gifted us a mighty wave and this record is theride that is the sum of our lives. Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoy it.
One of the most successful acts in rock history, Red Hot Chili Peppers have sold more than 60 million albums, including five multi-platinum LPs, and won six Grammy Awards, including "Best Rock Album" for Stadium Arcadium, "Best Rock Performance By a Duo or Group" for "Dani California, "Best Rock Song" for "Scar Tissue," and "Best Hard Rock Performance With Vocal" for "Give It Away." The band holds the record for the most No. 1 singles of all time at Alternative radio, a total of 11, and a combined 81 weeks at No. 1.
Set Sail [Indie Exclusive limited Edition Gotham LP - Alternative Packaging + Bonus Tracks]
This is a color LP that features alternative packaging from the standard LP. The LP package also includes a download of the full album that includes two exclusive bonus tracks.
Luther and Cody Dickinson started North Mississippi Allstars in 1996 as a loose collective of like-minded second-generation musicians who shared a local repertoire and regional style. Over the years the lineup shifted by design, and each NMA record offered up a different combination of collaborators. Set Sail finds the brothers working with Jesse Williams on bass and Lamar Williams, Jr. for the first time.
Set Sail, North Mississippi Allstars’s thirteenth album, follows 2019’s Up and Rolling, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for the Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2021. Set Sail continues the band’s tradition of creating roots music that displays remarkable variety. With their latest record, NMA are able to build upon their self-described sound of Primitive Modernism - a melding of the new and the old, traditional and futuristic, crafted lyrics and improvisational music.
Want to get a bead on Paul Cauthen?
Good freakin' luck -- especially on his third album, COUNTRY COMING DOWN.
COUNTRY COMING DOWN has been in motion awhile, actually. The title track, one of several co-writes with good Nashville pal Aaron Raitiere, has been around since before Cauthen's dark sophomore album ROOM 41. Its sense of campfire calm and "damn near off the map" idyll set a bar, for both music and lifestyle, that Cauthen aspired to, while the rest of the new album, recorded at Modern Electric Sound Recorders in Dallas with regular collaborators Beau Bedford (Texas Gentlemen) and Jason Burt (Medicine Man Revival), shows that Cauthen was able to get there without losing any of the playful "hot dog holly golly dagnabit" good-time spirit that rolls off his tongue like a tumbleweed in the west Texas panhandle.
If you want to know what COUNTRY COMING DOWN sounds like, tuck into the album's sonic array, an austere, sinewy attack that puts Cauthen's vocals dead center in the ride. "We've really unleashed Big Velvet in this situation, which I love," he says. Nowhere is that more true than "Country As Fuck," with a taut groove and loping gait tailor made for a 21st century honky tonk. Cauthen, Bedford and Burt play with that template throughout COUNTRY COMING DOWN, punctuating "Caught Me At a Good Time" with a sharp guitar solo, "High Heels" with a tasteful Wurlitzer break and the satiristic "Country Clubbin'" with a disco beat and chorus of female backing vocals.
His muse fully engaged, Cauthen is looking towards doing more of that in the future, with a few conceptual ideas up his sleeve about what he might do next. No matter what direction he takes, however, he won’t be abandoning that cabin in the hills or the "Country Clubbin'" life; Cauthen will just be adding more to the mix he's stirred together.
"It's just about looking at yourself in the mirror and knowing that what you've done to this day has been in good standing, with good morals and a good compass in life, driven the right way," he says. "Legacy is all we have -- that, and try to be a good person as well. If you get all that together, then you can do whatever the fuck you want and it'll be alright."