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“He did sit down and then one song at a time he worked the record in order to tell this story,” Maginn said. “Sequencing the record in advance is fairly terrifying, to be honest. We’ve labored over sequences so much in the past,” but added later that he was happy with how the sequence turned out.

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… sound more fresh-faced and excitable than a lot of bands just starting out. From the first notes of caffeine-buzzed album opener “Runaway,” we hear the sound of a band that never left the scene more than one vying for a comeback. Continuing their tradition of power pop-informed melodies and precise musicianship, the 11 songs make slight nods to the influence of Electric Light Orchestra’s over-the-top productions without actually going for an overblown orchestration. The distant feel and contained instrumentation of “Hanging About” comes closer to the clean-to-the-point-of-sterility production style of spacy Weezer side-project the Rentals. Almost every song meets somewhere between these two frameworks, with the drum-machine click of “No Matter What You Say” eventually succumbing to pristine vocal harmonies, or the pocket symphony lilt of “All the Same” rushing by in colorful waves. These highlights are glowing with sugary hooks that don’t just hold up to repeat listening, but almost demand it. The rush of hyper pop crashes a little bit on the record’s second half, and the background vocals that supported the songs perfectly earlier on start to feel overbearing. The omnipresent “ba ba ba” choruses on “Don’t Know How You Do It” and “Out from Inside” threaten to push the tunes’ summery, top-down vibes into partially finished filler territory. Even these numbers are salvaged by subtle production touches that crystallize their best moments. Understated strings volley counter melodies back and forth with the overdriven guitar of “It’s You,” the orchestration never sitting still long enough to lose the listener’s interest. When even the less memorable moments steer clear of becoming innocuous, it may suggest they’re more growers than immediate pop captivators, and further listens may reveal deeper merit. The wealth of hook-heavy pop wonders alone makes Feel the Sound a fantastic record, but the sure-footed air of confidence and self-assurance that carries the record is what truly cements Imperial Teen as more of an institution than a band. As they carve out their nook at whatever pace they choose, at this point we can rest easy knowing it’s quite likely going to be great.

1. Runaway

2. No Matter What You Say

3. Last To Know

4. Over His Head

5. Hanging About

6. All The Same

7. Don’t Know How You Do It

8. Out From Inside

9. The Hibernates

10. It’s You

11. Overtaken

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…song on The Sailor’s Revenge.

The album opens with a beautiful Irish folk song called Shimnavale which was written in a village of the same name that sits in the shadow of mountains while still looking out to the sea and it sounds like a man knowing he’s made the right decision to come home.

An early contender for ‘best song’ is Jimmy Sanchez, which is about the youngest of the Chilean miners and will leave you with a nice warm glow.

The jaunty tune, Please Return to Jesus will resonate with many Catholics or indeed any lapsed Christian who has questioned their own midlife lack of Faith as they grow older. The narrator informs us that he’s had Please Return to Jesus tattooed above his heart – just to be on the safe side.

As always Kennedy inhabits a Blue Collar Working Man like only the great songwriters can, and he tells the tale of an old man looking back on his life and the choices that he had to make to feed his family with great sincerity and gravitas.

The album draws to a close with one of the sweetest Irish love songs I think I’ve ever heard – The Beauty of You. I’m not going to spoil it by describing it in minute detail – buy it, find it, download it – then smile and cry in equal measures.

The Sailor’s Revenge comes to an end with yet another beautiful song and tune, Celtic Sea which wraps everything up in a nice emerald green bow.

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…with The Hooves Of Destiny will know that this isn’t folk in the serious sense of the word – you’re as likely to see child tap dancing or a burping contest on stage as you are to hear a plaintive acoustic lament. If you haven’t seen her live, then that album title alone should also give you a sign that Houghton isn’t too caught up in being the next Florence.

If you were going to do a very, very rough comparison for someone who’s never heard Beth Jeans Houghton, you might briefly mention Florence Welch, if only for a certain flightly, theatrical nature that the two share, but you’d also have to add the likes of Devendra Banhart, Bill Callaghan or even Neutral Milk Hotel to the mix to give her songs the justice it deserves.

Overall, she’s incredibly difficult to pin down. ‘Atlas’ is a pretty straightforward track in BJH’s world, but it still manages to rollick down three different avenues before careering into a spoken word section and building to a crashing crescendo. It’s followed by ‘Night Swimmer’, which would be an aching ballad in other hands, but here starts as a terrifying lullaby before falling into something resembling a sea-shanty. There’s a spoken word bit in that one as well, which perhaps means you can also shoehorn Boys II Men in as an unlikely influence.

On initial listens, the only slight disappointment with Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose is that the tracks that stand out are the ones you might already be familiar with – singles ‘Dodecahedron’ and ‘Lilliputt’. They both still sound fantastic, building from gentle, acoustic beginnings to stomping pop heights, all swooping strings and hollered vocals. However, a few listens reveals the strength of the other tracks hidden underneath all the piles of musical dressing. ‘Veins’ is perhaps the best example, revealing a soulful, serious side to BJH that hasn’t been seen too often before. That it then veers down that same rollicking corridor that all her other best tracks follow can be forgiven, because in the world of Beth Jeans Houghton, it seems the most natural thing to do.

All the changes in directions, the bells and whistles are held together by Houghton’s most impressive weapon, her voice. It’s not a voice with what idiots might call ‘the wow factor’, with no Adele-isms or Beyonce mimicry. Instead it sits in a curious place between ethereal and earthy, one moment gently lapping against the backing track, the next swooping into richer, lusty territory. It helps that Houghton knows how to play with what she’s got, adding extra layers of harmony and counter vocals to take the tracks in all sorts of unexpected directions.

Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose is a success, in that it captures what Beth Jeans Houghton has been doing in her live shows for the past couple of years, without diluting or rushing it for the sake of a time-specific tag. At just 33 minutes long, it’s chaotic, cluttered and certainly not straightforward enough to cast her as the ‘next Laura Marling’. All I can say is, thank goodness for that.

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…movies by Elio Petri and Carlo Lizzani, and namely all of those directors who gave their personal interpretation of the detective film genre from the very beginning, when it got little attention from the film critics’ reviews, but a massive and enthusiastic popular feedback. Maurizio Merli, Tomas Milian and Luc Merenda become the icons of a kind of cinema that breaks the box office.

Gunfights and cracking pace chasings are supported by the overwhelming and all-involving soundtracks by Franco Micalizzi and the De Angelis brothers and by the most famous Stelvio Cipriani, Luis Bacalov, Armando Trovajoli and Ennio Morricone, who, ranging from jazz to funky, from psychedelic to progressive rock, signed off the Italian film production sheet music that reached the top and stood out in the world as an example of Italian excellence.

The Italian detective film genre or, as it was soon called “poliziottesco” in order to underline the fact that the key role character was the protagonist policeman ready to revenge and take the law into his own hands, was snubbed and was very unpopular amongst the critics and therefore at the end of the ‘70’s and in the ‘80’s run out completely after some titles that became a real parody of the genre with comic and grotesque features.

In the ‘90’s the music phenomenon born and grown up under the fertile star of the so-called “lounge music” brings back to fashion, amongst many other things, the soundtracks of italian’s movies. The police films end up in this big pot only in occasional events, maybe because of the fact that its soundtracks have got just a little “lounge” feeling.

Only due to the fact that Quentin Tarantino got off to Venice Film Festival in 2004, the interest for this fervid production has been revived: as a matter of fact, our police films got a much better appreciation in the States than in Italy. From this time on, DVD editions and TV screenings of these detective films followed one after the other and consequently even one part of the record market got interested in them by re-publishing their soundtracks, bringing to light a relevant share of our production of high quality movies’ themes, which has been left unpublished until then.

The interest has been extended to several musicians and DJs who paid extensive tributes to our soundtracks with covers and the usage of samplers.

But Calibro 35 ventured into a wider and more interesting project: a project that begins in the studio and ends in a sort of ‘concept’ album, covering the themes and the atmospheres of the detective films’ soundtracks with a personal interpretation, extremely precise and heading for improvisation, with a special care to noises, in particular in tracks such as “Trafelato” and “Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto” (“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspiciuos”), which have been both signed off by Ennio Morricone, a true master in terms of adding “noise’ to the music.

Tommaso Colliva, with his enthusiasm, succeeds in involving his friend Massimo Martellotta, who has always been fond of film music too. In this way, Calibro 35 begins to take shape with the latest addition of eclectic Enrico Gabrielli, Luca Cavina, who looks after the most violent tracks and Fabio Rondanini, thanks to who the band can easily move along funk, rock and improvisation.

It turns out an original project having its strengths in the very successful attempt of actualizing some of the best tracks, such as the unpublished shake of “Milano Calibro 9” and the opening credits of “La mala ordina”, keeping alive its original spirit, that kind of spirit which has often been lost because they usually prefer to use existing music for films, despite what happened in the ‘70’s when the composer started to write his tracks after watching the filming or even before, after reading the screenplay and sometimes getting to the point to influence the director.

With this precise attitude Calibro 35 ventures into two original musical pieces such as “Notte in Bovisa” and “La polizia s’incazza”, restoring that peculiar mark of the Italian detective films, which differentiates them from the American ones, even if they have often been influenced by them.

Calibro 35 is a delicious album for all the lovers of this genre (listening to it all in one go can bring you to review all the best films or you can imagine a new film with new scenes never seen before) but not only this: it is an album talking to a wider audience, provided that you like that kind of music played in an intense and passionate way.

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improvised music has brought her appearances on recordings with John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Randy Weston, and an Icelandic pop superstar by the name of Björk. Thus, it might have been destiny that she’d join musical forces with Smith. Pheeroan akLaff, Smith’s drummer from Organic, completes this most uncommon trio.Consisting of only five original compositions, all by Smith, they’re not so much songs as they are articulations, and the mutuality between the three is where all the action is occurring. Min even sings some lyrics that Smith had written for the title cut and sung in a drawn out manner, effectively adding a fourth instrument that blends in with the contemplative vibe of the band. Most songs, like this one, progress through extended phases of calm and release, and the “release” parts are a little like Coltrane’s Interstellar Space with Rashied Ali, with Min’s sometimes hyperactive pipa thrown in the mix. Maybe that’s why I enjoy “Blues:Cosmic Beauty” the most of these tracks, since it’s the most energetic, and akLaff is at his best. Smith’s role is for the most part more subdued than normal; he’s picking and choosing his spots more carefully and largely as a result, there’s a lot of barren space in the overall sound. All of which makes Dark Lady Of The Sonnets an intriguing date with some truly original ideas, but demands more patience from the listener than usual from the ever-exploring, probing Wadada Leo Smith.

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…would both go on to cover tracks from their Feel the Darkness masterpiece) to legions of basement-bound hardcore acts who’d toast the band’s on-again-off-again existence with cans of warm beer while trying to recreate the blitzed-out brilliance of the late Pig Champion’s furious guitar work.

This first installation of a comprehensive reissue series showcases the band as they crawled up from hardcore’s primordial soup, acknowledging Black Flag and the Germs while putting their own stamp on a genre that had yet to be formalised, codified and over-analysed. Proceedings start with six unreleased cuts from the Boner’s Kitchen demo, a blur of all-consuming fuzz and buzz overseen by Jerry A’s sneering vocals. The demo’s final track, Give It Up, segues into a beefed-up and infinitely more bellicose rendition of the same song that appeared later on the Darby Crash Rides Again demo, an eye-watering dose of fury whose raw materials would later resurface on the seminal Pick Your King 7″. The rest of the CD comprises an audience-baiting KBOO live set and two offcuts from 1984’s Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes 12″, wherein the band’s next iteration was already starting to take hideously lumpen shape.

The results – despite the estimable remastering job – ain’t pretty, and if you’re looking for some sort of sugar-coated punk rock joyride then this certainly won’t be for you. If, on the other hand, you aren’t afraid to get a little grubby and grapple with a band who fought dirty while they merged a quiet yet fierce intelligence with black humour and foul-mouthed, untrammelled aggression then, hell, step right up and try your luck with the self-proclaimed Kings of Punk.

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throughout Europe by France s Jazzman, Britain s Jazzwise and the annual German Record Critics Award. Jens Thomas came up with just the right sound for his not entirely risk-free encounter with AC/DC. His versions go fully against the grain hard rock becomes lyrical chamber music dimmed down to impressionist ballads which are fully improvised right down to their framework. The rip roaring rock anthem Highway To Hell almost becomes a fragile, sad lament and the older rock numbers like The Jack are, to a certain extent, freed from any stylistic burden and given a totally new, minimalist form. This also shows that AC/DC s music is often underestimated.

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…their qualities little by little.

Ally’s partner in Red Hook Rapids, Donald Forbes, contributes some fine guitar and harmony vocals (in an inversion of the usual male/female vocal thing, it’s Donalds voice that provides the sweetness), Allan Leckie plays keyboards, Carol Thompson is on bass guitar and Penny Costa plays the drums. Everybody plays their part without ever taking the focus from Ally’s singing, and that is just as it should be. The little details of what all these fine players do make themselves known over time, and are a large part of the pleasure of listening to this record over and again, but really, this is mostly about Ally MacLeod’s voice.

Sometimes you discover an artist at a point in their career when there’s a large back catalogue for you to dive into. Astor Place, however, is “the debut album”, so I’ll have to be patient and hope that she gets the chance to record lots (and lots) more music.

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24, 1955, in Terre Haute, IN, and began studying classical cello at age ten; he also experimented with trombone, guitar, and piano in high school. At 19, Roberts attended the Berklee School of Music, where he began to develop an improvisational style that incorporated jazz, blues, folk, and classical music, and often featured double-stops and chord voicings.

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… the songs which delve into the American south with the Muscle Shoals sound appearing to be an influence typified by the slow burning keyboards and guitar playing of Connor Brady. Mercy Moon has an earthy feel with churning guitar and even a hint of Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie. Hollow the Breeze is less successful in its attempt to capture that southern feel but all is redeemed by Sweet Breath On A Lonesome Flame. Here Sidine succeeds admirably in marrying her folk side to a southern groove, a beautiful song.

1. Riding Home (1:00)

2. Take Me Down (4:28)

3. The Road (2:36)

4. Sweet Breath On A Lonesome Flame (4:35)

5. The Arms Of Summer (3:48)

6. Mercy Moon (3:18)

7. Hollow The Breeze (3:51)

8. Quicksand (4:22)

9. Constellations High (Duet Version) (4:09)

10. To Be With You (3:44)

11. Only You (4:20)

12. Sleepy Eyes (2:00)

13. Constellations High (Solo Version) (4:09)

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slightly modern The Knack sound. It’s a “Love Me Do” feel at just the right moment.

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Berry, via the music produced at his labels, was responsible in large part for the 1960s’ soul music explosion and its crossover to white audiences, with artists like Smoky Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, The Supremes, and one of the most successful of the crossovers, Stevie Wonder, who put out dozens of charting singles and several classic albums, including Talking Book (Motown, 1972) and Songs in the Key of Life (Motown, 1976).

A Hammond B3 organ, guitar and drums is a pared-down way to express music, especially Wonder’s often highly produced sounds. But it is a refreshing way to listen to Wonder’s songs, a way that emphasizes the purity of his catchy melodies. On “Jesus Children of America,” from one of Wonder’s handful of masterpieces, Innervisons (Motown, 1973), organist Chris Foreman drives the tune forward on a cold gusty wind, with drummer Greg Rockingham supplying an undercurrent of cymbal splashes, punctuated by snare drum pops. Guitarist Bobby Broom’s lines are sharp and piquant, slicing through the wash of the B3.

“My Cheri Amour,” the title track of Wonder’s 1969 album, and one of his most popular and recognizable tunes, get a ruminative treatment, laidback and relaxed, with Broom comping beautifully behind Foreman. “Golden Lady,” another huge Wonder hit from Innervisions, has a feeling of yearning, with Broom and Foreman trading the lead in front of turbulent drums.

Wonder’s music has always been well-crafted and tightly-arranged. The Deep Blue Organ Trio works with the same tight, flawless, soulful approach to music making, and they have crafted a fittingly Wonderful! tribute to living legend.

1. Tell Me Something Good

2. If You Really Love Me

3. Jesus Children Of America

4. My Cheri Amour

5. Golden Lady

6. You Havent Done Nnothin

7. It Aint No Use

8. As

9. You’ve Got It Bad Girl

mp3 320 kbps | 150 MB | UL | DF

… also get rocked to sleep, and there’ll be poetry in there, too.”

Chubby, whose real name is Ted Horowitz, is just as adept at the searing electrified Texas shuffle of “She Loves Everybody But Me” (a nod, it seems, to Stevie Ray Vaughan) as he is the pleading album-rock wail of “A Love That Will Not Die,” as apt to tear into a wall-shaking groover like “Warrior Gods” (a nod, it seems, to Motorhead) as he is a slow-cooked take on Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Stevie Ray and Bach? Throw in punk rock, too. A fan of the late-1970s CBGB scenesters, Chubby eventually worked as a sideman with Richard Hell—whose band the Voidoids, along with contemporaries like the Ramones and the Cramps, added an element of danger that had been missing in rock music for some time. Chubby aims to do the same with the blues, and he’s been largely successful at that, notably on 1995′s Booty and the Beast, the Tom Dowd-produced gem that included the radio hit “Sweet Goddess of Love and Beer”; and (after an ill-advised detour involving pop and hip hop) during a burst of activity a decade later that included the three-disc Jimi Hendrix-tribute Electric Chubbyland set and tour.

Along the way, Chubby also saw his writing mature, a progression which made a huge step after the attacks of 9/11 on his hometown, sparking the memorable 9/11 commentary “Somebody Let the Devil Out.” That continues with Back To New York City, out today on Provogue Records, as Chubby balances these many disparate musical influences with confidence and grace. More interestingly perhaps, the album connects on a visceral level too, as Chubby makes a number of telling, note-perfect comments on every-day life.

You knew Popa Chubby could throw sparks on the guitar. Back To New York City shows he can turn a phrase, too.

1. Back To New York City 4:38

2. She Loves Everybody But Me 4:26

3. Pound Of Flesh 6:27

4. Warrier God 5:09

5. The Future 7:28

6. It’s About You 4:48

7. A Love That Will Not Die 4:30

8. Keep Your Wood Pile Dry 4:46

9. Stand Before The Sun 6:02

10. She Made Me Beg For It 5:43

11. Jesus Joy Of Man Desire 3:40

mp3 160 kbps | 58 MB | DF | UL

modern jazz horn sounds and a heavy back beat, H.B.O. serves up a powerful and compelling new take on America’s Blues heritage. With an emphasis on musical exploration, Heritage Blues Orchestra digs into innovative musical territory making a unique and exhilarating contribution to the African-American musical canvas.

mp3 320 kbps | 145 MB | DF | UL

…material isn’t immediately memorable, but insinuates itself into the brain after a few hearings, sophisticated and often beautiful. He keeps his soul/blues credentials alive with a version of “Work Song” that allows him to go full-throated against some honking sax. To finish, there’s an a cappella version of “God Bless the Child,” a song forever associated with Billie Holiday. It’s a daring move, and one that works as it showcases the tenderness in his voice, with an almost liquid quality in the singing, the emotions hinted at rather than laid out. It’s a superb climax to a disc that should certainly help Porter’s star rise even further.