Indie-rock and power-pop. Metal and punk. Alt-country and Afrobeat. Reissues and classic artists. There’s a little something for everybody in today’s Short List. It’s nice when things work out like that, isn’t it?
Tony Allen
There Is No End
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Revered jazz drummer and Afrobeat figurehead Tony Allen’s final album There Is No End features guest appearances by Damon Albarn, Ben Okri, Skepta, Sampa The Great, Lava La Rue, Danny Brown, and more. At the beginning of the album, Allen is heard saying: “I play yours, you play mine. The music never ends.” Hugely respected for his peerless playing, live performances, and collaborations with Fela Kuti and Ginger Baker some 50 years ago and with such as Albarn and Bernard Purdie in later years, Allen’s last work will provide fresh inspiration to current and future generations of musicians, artists and fans. Allen’s central premise for There Is No End was to work with younger artists, notably the new generation of rappers, to amplify their voice at a time of global turmoil. As he said in explaining the concept: “I want to make something very much in the present but also bring the young rappers back home.”
The Coral
Coral Island
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The wheels rattle into the thrilling unknown on The Coral’s first new music since 2018, finding the unsurpassed, metamorphic gonzo-pop five-piece in the company of crooks, sell-by-date candyfloss and plastic skeletons on their 10th release and first double album Coral Island. Squinting into the neon-lit penny arcades and draining an after hours glass with the displaced and dispossessed once the power is pulled, The Coral’s latest caper concerns listeners with the light, shade, thrills and profound melancholy of coastal palaces packed with fun and fright. Both now and then, or perhaps never as fiction encroaches on reality, the feverous anticipation of a night amongst the screams, fights and romance of the fair become part of life on the newly-built Coral Island.”
The Dropkick Murphys
Turn Up That Dial
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With the 11 tracks on Turn Up That Dial, Dropkick Murphys celebrate the simple pleasure of music, the relief and release from worry that comes when you “turn up that dial” and blast your troubles away. “On this record, the overall theme is the importance of music, and the bands that made us who we are,” explains DKM founder and co-lead vocalist Ken Casey. “We just hope [the album] takes people’s minds off their troubles. We’re so fortunate and grateful to be in the position to share a little happiness in our own way. Our gratitude levels are off the chart. 25 years ago, somebody bet me 30 bucks I couldn’t form a band with three weeks’ notice to open for his band. As kids, we’d never been out of New England and here we are — we’ve made 10 records and have been all over the globe. If there’s a message to this album, it’s ‘put your fist up and play it loud.” Volume cranked, heads held high, smiles wide, eyes on the prize, Dropkick Murphys charge forward with the same spirit that brought them here in the first place…yet with a new determination and exuberance that brings both the live show and this album to the next level.”
Gojira
Fortitude
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Gojira tend to operate in polar extremes. “I can’t help but see humanity as a parasite,” co-founding guitarist and principal songwriter Joe Duplantier explains, “and yet the most beautiful things come out of humans.” To that end, the French quartet — Duplantier and his brother Mario [drums], Christian Andreu [guitar] and Jean-Michel Labadie [bass] — have spent 15 years translating this duality into a distinctive sound: dark, crushing metal brightened by triumphant arena-rock melodies, contrast-heavy and emotionally charged. For album number seven, Fortitude, they decided to have some damn fun. In late 2019, the brothers Duplantier returned to Silver Cord Studio, their Ridgewood, Queens, headquarters, to begin work on new, self-produced material, culled from ideas they’d developed over the past two years. “With this album, we wanted to come back with more joy, more power, and more positivity about life in general,” Joe explains. “We’re so lucky to do what we love; it’s not like we were depressed or anything, but we had something in our system to express — Magma — and we felt like it was time for something else — something that is all about strength.”
Guided by Voices
Earth Man Blues
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Is it really a musical?! The 33rd Guided By Voices album Earth Man Blues is a magical cinematic rock album, full of dramatic and surreal twists and turns. Lyrics and liner notes trace the growth of young Harold Admore Harold through a coming of age and a reckoning with darkness. Vivid scenes appear: snapshots of youth, fantastical nightmares, unknown worlds. The music hasn’t softened a bit. One will hear the impossibly perfect melodies and word play that you expect from Robert Pollard, with the band playing at peak-heavy. Doug Gillard’s brilliant guitar playing explodes out of the speakers. The rhythm section of Kevin March and Mark Shue, always strong and reliable, has grown into a breathing composite organism. Along with Bobby Bare Jr. on rhythm guitar, they drive the songs and make one’s head shake. Producer Travis Harrison ties the talents of the band together, once again recorded remotely and individually, pandemic-style. This group
bring to life the sounds in Pollard’s technicolour imagination.”
Marianne Faithfull and Warren Ellis
She Walks In Beauty
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Marianne Faithfull and composer / multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis release one of the most distinctive albums of Faithfull’s long, extraordinary life and career. Recorded around the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown — during which the singer herself became infected and almost died of the disease — She Walks in Beauty fulfills Faithfull’s long-held ambition to record a full album of poetry with music, and features musical friends Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head (PJ Harvey, Thom Yorke). She Walks in Beauty finds Faithfull drawing deep on the works of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Thomas. Her vocal performances, set to Ellis’ subtle collages of sound, draw out the vibrant living matter in these great poems, renewing them with the complex, lived-in timbres of her voice. It’s both a radical departure and a return to her original inspirations as an artist and performer. Says Faithfull: “I’ve been thinking about it for so long, this album, it’s been in my head for so long, I think I really knew exactly what I wanted. I just picked the poems I really loved, and I can’t help but say I think I was very lucky. We got it.”
Ashley Monroe
Rosegold
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The world looks a little different through rose gold sunglasses. At least, that’s what Ashley Monroe has found. “Everything’s a bit more magical when I put them on,” she says, “a bit more miraculous. It’s a beautiful way to go through life.” It makes sense, then, that Monroe’s spectacular new album Rosegold is her most joyous, blissed-out collection yet. Written and recorded over the past two years, the record finds the Grammy-nominated Nashville star pushing her sound in bold new directions, drawing on everything from Kanye West and Kid Cudi to Beck and The Beach Boys as she layers lush vocal harmonies atop dreamy, synthesized soundscapes and sensual, intoxicating beats. Monroe worked with a variety of producers on the album, letting the tracks dictate her direction rather than any arbitrary adherence to genre or tradition, and the result is a record as daring as it is rewarding, an ecstatic, revelatory meditation on happiness and gratitude that tosses expectation to the wind as it celebrates our endless capacity to love, and to be loved, even in the midst of chaos and tragedy.”
Royal Blood
Typhoons
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher sat down to talk about making a new Royal Blood album, they knew what they wanted to achieve with it, and what they were determined to avoid. The former involved a conscious return to their musical roots, when, in their first band Flavour Country, they had made music that was deeply influenced by artists such as Daft Punk, Justice, and Philippe Zdar of Cassius. They had to relocate the purity, innocence and joy of their early days as Royal Blood, to go back to the basics of chemistry, telepathy, hunger and drive that had made their 2014 self-titled debut album, with its brutal and utterly novel sound bed of bass played like a lead guitar and thunderous drums, so thrilling, visceral and original. Kerr uses an arresting analogy to describe the experience of going stratospheric as a band, releasing one of the fastest selling British debut albums this century, topping the U.K. charts and being showered with indigenous awards and platinum discs – and then realizing you’re expected to repeat the magic formula. “It’s a bit like telling the same joke twice,” says Royal Blood’s frontman and bassist, “and trying to get the audience to laugh as hard the second time.” “He’s not wrong,” laughs drummer Thatcher. “It was like: ‘You’re the saviours of rock ’n’ roll, here are a ton of awards.’ And then suddenly: ‘Do it again. But better.’”
Teenage Fanclub
Endless Arcade
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. The new record is quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heartwarming and heart-aching; guitars chime and distort; keyboard lines mesh and spiral; harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day. Such is life. But the title track suggests: Don’t be afraid of this endless arcade that is life. “I think of an endless arcade as a city that you can wander through, with a sense of mystery, an imaginary one that goes on forever,” says Raymond McGinley, one half of the band’s songwriters for this album alongside Norman Blake. “When it came to choosing an album title, it seemed to have something for this collection of songs.”
The White Stripes
White Blood Cells XX
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In February 2001, Jack and Meg White hopped into their trusty Dodge van and made their way down south to Easley-McCain Recording in Memphis. Inspired and electrified by their recent overseas touring and the increasingly rabid reaction to their live performances, The White Stripes would, for the first time, record an album outside of their hometown Detroit. Interviews at the time had Jack postulating that the record might stretch to a double LP length and while that didn’t happen, the fruit born from the sessions proved markedly unique in the band’s canon. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of White Blood Cells, Third Man Records is privileged to release White Blood Cells XX, the companion to The White Stripes’ universally acknowledged 2001 album. Disc one contains 13 tracks previously unreleased demos, outtakes, alternate takes and unheard work-in-progress nuggets. Disc two is a previously unreleased live recording from Headliner’s in Louisville, Kentucky on Sept. 6, 2001.”
