As another September speeds toward the rear-view — and Billie Joe Armstrong grits his teeth while being endlessly told to wake up — a bazillion new albums arrive to help you get ready for Rocktober. Let’s run the voodoo down:
Björk
Fossora
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “each album always starts with a feeling
that i try to shape into a sound
this time around the feeling was landing on the earth
and digging my feet into the ground
how i experience the “now” is also woven into how it is written
this time around 7 billion of us did it together
nesting in our homes quarantining
our mutual “now” is being so long in one place
that we shot deep roots down
my new album “fossora” is about that
it is a word i made up
it is the feminine of fossore ( digger, delver, ditcher.)
so in short it means “she who digs” ( into the ground )
therefore when i was describing the sound to the musicians on it ,
i would call it my mushroom album.”
Dead Kennedys
Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables 2022 Mix
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys arrived onto the post punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s with something to say and an urgent, razor sharp sound. After two early singles they delivered the classic Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables in 1980. In the intervening decades the album has never failed to inspire and challenge everybody who came across it. This new mix, produced by Chris Lord-Alge gives incredible new sonic clarity to those songs, accompanied by sleevenotes from Amy Linden and East Bay Ray, alongside contributions from Dave Grohl, Duff McKagan and many other artists inspired by the record over the years. Overseen by the band, this new 2022 Mix demonstrates the enduring power of this music, and the relevance of its message today. A revolutionary, must-hear experience for everybody familiar with the original!”
Dropkick Murphys
This Machine Still Kills Fascists
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In the 10 songs that make up this album, Dropkick Murphys bring Woody Guthrie’s perennial jabs at life — many of which are from the 1940s and ‘50s — into the time of their lives. The resulting music is eerily relevant to today’s world. And they’ve done it all without their usual arsenal of electric guitars. In fact, not a single amplifier was used to animate Woody’s words in these songs. But make no mistake: this is NOT your grandfather’s folk album. DKM harnessed all of their trademark power to craft these songs and bring Woody’s lyrics to life. As Woody once said: “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is, or who’s out of work and where the job is, or who’s broke and where the money is, or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.” In both song and deed, Dropkick Murphys have always held true to this same view. That’s no coincidence, explains Dropkick Murphys founder Ken Casey: “Woody Guthrie, he’s the original punk. He went against the grain, he fought the good fight, he spoke up and sang about his beliefs. I’m motivated by reading what he wrote and am inspired by his courage. One man and a guitar — it’s powerful stuff.”
Rory Gallagher
Deuce 50th Anniversary Edition
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Released in November 1971, just six months after his eponymous solo debut, Rory Gallagher’s second album Deuce was the summation of all that he’d promised in the wake of Taste’s collapse. Rory wanted to capture the feeling of a live performance, so he would look to record immediately after live concerts while keeping production to a minimum. He chose Tangerine Studios, a small reggae studio in East London, due to its history with legendary producer Joe Meek. With Gerry McAvoy on bass guitar and Wilgar Campbell on drums, the album was engineered by Robin Sylvester and produced by Rory. Deuce features many Rory highlights, from the blistering Crest Of A Wave to the Celtic-infused I’m Not Awake Yet. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Deuce, a deluxe CD boxset offers a new mix of the original album, 28 previously unreleased alternate takes, a six-song 1972 BBC Radio In Concert performance, and seven Radio Bremen session tracks.”
Get The Fuck Outta Dodge
Mammoth
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “This LP is Dodge being live Dodge, out of breath, out of time, in time, speeded up, slowed down. It’s Dodge when nobody’s looking. An unintentional record, a byproduct of shit practice rooms and recording opportunities. It’s not thought through, it’s rushed, it’s not even thought about. It’s not Kiss Alive III, Iron Maiden‘s A Real Live One or Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokan, it’s that Nirvana Outcesticide album, it’s every VHS taped concert, it’s that cassette of that gig you taped off the radio. It’s about doing something, just because you can and because, why the fuck not. It’s about not giving a shit because there’s nothing to hide. It’s laughing off that fuck up in the 1st bar of that song you’ve played 50 times before. It’s forgetting the words because you just hit that roll and yr smiling instead. It’s just bass & drums with DIY phone mic shouts No pomp no ceremony, it is what it is. It’s Get The Fuck Outta Dodge and it’s Mammoth.”
Freddie Gibbs
$oul $old $eparately
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Freddie Gibbs has become one of hip-hop’s most important, inimitable, and influential voices via his quotable wordplay, versatile songs, and unflinching honesty. Since 2004, the uncompromising Indiana-raised rapper has built a diehard global fan base and regularly attracted tastemaker adoration. His discography includes 20-plus mixtapes, eight EPs, four official solo albums, and four top-billed collaborative records. A lot of people don’t realize that he has actually been in the game for over a decade and came in on the same Freshman XXL cover as Meek Mill, Nipsey Hussle, etc… Yet he was the only one with no major label backing or artist affiliation and his partnership with Warner is his very first solo major label deal. With that being said, he feels as if he has made it thus far in his career without compromising his morals, creative integrity and principles as a man all while resisting temptations ….Hence the title $oul $old $eparately or $$$,
Buddy Guy
The Blues Don’t Lie
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Blues Don’t Lie is the amazing new album from Buddy Guy, and is the legend’s 34th studio album, and the follow up to 2018’s Grammy-winning album The Blues Is Alive and Well. Produced by songwriter/drummer Tom Hambridge, The Blues Don’t Lie features guests including Mavis Staples, Elvis Costello, James Taylor, Jason Isbell and more. The album will be released exactly 65 years to the day that Guy arrived in Chicago on a train from Baton Rouge in September of 1957, with just the clothes on his back an his guitar. His life would never be the same, and he was born again in the blues. The Blues Don’t Lie tells the story of his lifelong journey. Reflecting on this body of work, Buddy says ‘I promised them all — B.B., Muddy, Sonny Boy — as long as I’m alive I’m going to keep the blues alive.’ He has indeed proven that again.”
Sammy Hagar & The Circle
Crazy Times
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Just shy of his 75th birthday, Sammy Hagar is somehow as energized by and committed to the pure power of rock ’n’ roll as he was fronting Montrose in the 1970s and Van Halen from 1985-1996. Indeed, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer and entrepreneur has conjured the very best of his legendary career on his 27th studio album Crazy Times, which finds him backed by his longtime band The Circle: bassist, former Van Halen bandmate and fellow Rock Hall member Michael Anthony, guitarist Vic Johnson and drummer Jason Bonham, all of whom remain at the peak of their collective games. It would be easy for Hagar to rest on his considerable laurels at this stage of his life or just kick up his feet on the beach. But try as he might, he still can’t resist making music with the guys he loves. Enter producer Dave Cobb, who has won eight Grammys working with artists such as Chris Stapleton and Brandi Carlile, and grew up obsessively listening to Hagar in all his many projects. After being introduced a couple years ago, the pair initially discussed making more of an Americana-leaning album with acoustic instruments, but Cobb instead suggested bringing The Circle to Nashville’s RCA Studio A to make what he hoped would turn into “the definitive Sammy Hagar record” — one that rattles the speakers and encourages fist-pumping of the highest order.”
Lambchop
The Bible
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “I’m not a religious person, but I do believe that there’s a spirituality to a lot of people and they’re not religious. You don’t have to be religious to be a spiritual person, right? You just don’t have to. There should be an acceptance, or a way of recognizing spirituality without it being overtly religious.” The only prophets worth a shit are the reluctant ones, and so it was that right before he started working on what would become his new album The Bible, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner found himself at the proverbial crossroads. Nearing the end of Lambchop’s third decade as a recording artist, Wagner felt musically isolated. He questioned whether continuing to make music even made sense. “I feel weird because I’m going to be 64, dude,” he says on the phone in between drags of a cigarette. “What the fuck am I doing?” The Bible is the sound of Wagner asking big questions, like that one, and all the other ones.”
OFF!
Free LSD
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Brevity adds up. In less than three minutes, in one song, the new OFF! album, Free LSD flashes AAA batteries around an abandoned world to gather up scraps of Chamber Brothers limbs, Albert Ayler marching bands and ghost nods to KISS goin’ blind. OFF!’s first new record in eight years translates the work of an alien race attempting to rebuild the remains of your destroyed record collection. It has so much of everything that it melds into one thing without playing a spot the reference of the hard funk at times or the weird Hawkwind departures or pop of The Sweet or The Boxtops. Free LSD hits reset like The Beatles conjuring Revolver, The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights’ refusal to be a reunion album, The Everly Brothers’ roots digging into the core of the planet, or that record by Baby Huey where every influence merges so effortlessly and seamlessly that it is simply one sound unified. They have no time for fucking around. Here, now, sublingual, on the tongue. Like the first three records, the raging two-minute bonfires that make up Free LSD were written by the core of the band, Keith Morris and Dimitri Coats. But this time, there’s no time for song separation or palette cleansing as OFF! push their punk rock pedigree into the cherry red.”
Steven Page
Excelsior
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Excelsior is Steven Page‘s first solo album since 2018. The album’s 11 tracks were composed and produced entirely by Page, who co-founded the band Barenaked Ladies before departing on a solo career in 2009. The lion’s share of material on Excelsior was “workshopped” for audiences on his wildly popular virtual concert series Live From Home that Page has been conducting via Zoom since April of 2020 from his home near Syracuse, N.Y. While Page played most of the instruments heard on Excelsior, other musicians participating include Craig Northey (guitar, vocals) and Kevin Fox (cello, vocals), members of the Steven Page Trio, his touring ensemble who are well known to Live From Home viewers for their ability to accompany Page from remote locations. Also heard on Excelsior are Doug Elliott of The Odds (bass), as well as Joe Pisapia (pedal steel), who had been a member of Guster and has both backed and produced k.d. lang. Steven’s brother Matthew Page guests on drums.” Seven of the 11 tracks comprise a thematically linked song cycle that Page characterizes as “a suite of songs tied into what we’ve been involved with over the last 10 years.”
Pixies
Doggerel
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The iconic Pixies forged an influential path for alt-rock during their first era, while their post 2004 reunion has seen them alchemize more sophisticated dark arts — a return which has them add another three U.K. Top 10 albums to the three they achieved on their first run. Now as fired up as ever before, Pixies will release their eighth studio album Doggerel, a mature yet visceral record of gruesome folk, ballroom pop and brutal rock, haunted by the ghosts of affairs and indulgences, driven wild by cosmic forces and envisioning digital afterlives where no God has provided one. And all the while, right there on the news, another distant storm approaches. Guitarist Joey Santiago says, “This time around we have grown. We no longer have under two-minute songs. We have little breaks, more conventional arrangements but still our twists in there.” Singer-guitarist Black Francis adds, “We’re trying to do things that are very big and bold and orchestrated. The punky stuff, I really like playing it but you just cannot artificially create that shit. There’s another way to do this, there’s other things we can do with this extra special energy that we’re encountering.”
Slipknot
The End, So Far
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Legendary Iowan icons Slipknot have announced details of their widely anticipated new album, The End, So Far. Produced by the band and Joe Barresi, The End, So Far includes the band’s 2021 surprise single The Chapeltown Rag and follows their widely celebrated 2019 album We Are Not Your Kind, which marked Slipknot’s third consecutive No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and debuted at #1 on the U.K. Album Chart.”
Snarky Puppy
Empire Central
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Recorded over the course of eight nights in front of a live-in-studio audience at Dallas’s Deep Ellum Art Company, Empire Central consists of 16 all-new tracks heavily influenced by and paying homage to the city that gave birth to Snarky Puppy, who formed while studying in the renowned jazz program at the University of North Texas. The record also features the last recorded performance of ’80s funk pioneer and Snarky Puppy’s musical godfather Bernard Wright, who passed away tragically at age 58 shortly after the Empire Central recording sessions. With a lineup consisting of three guitarists, four keyboardists, two brass, two reeds, a violinist, multiple percussionists and drummers and bandleader Michael League on bass, Empire Central expands upon the collective’s wide array of influences including blues, hard rock, classic soul, modern gospel, funk, new tech, fusion and jazz.”
Titus Andronicus
The Will To Live
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Will To Live was produced by Titus Andronicus singer-songwriter Patrick Stickles and Canadian icon Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen) at the latter’s Hotel 2 Tango studio in Montreal. Drawing on maximalist rock epics from Who’s Next to Hysteria, Bilerman and Stickles have crafted the richest, densest, and hardest hitting sound for Titus Andronicus yet. All at once, the record matches the sprawl and scope of the band’s most celebrated work, while also honing their ambitious attack to greater effect than ever before. “It may strike some as ironic we had to go to Canada to record our equivalent to Born in the USA,” quips Stickles, “but the pursuit of Ultimate Rock knows no borders.” For his recent stretch of personal stability, he credits a newfound domestic bliss and steadfast mental health regimen (“Lamictal is a hell of a drug”) as well as the endurance of what has become the longest-running consistent lineup of Titus Andronicus — Liam Betson on guitar, R.J. Gordon on bass, and Chris Wilson on drums. On the crueler side of the coin, however, The Will To Live was created in large part as an attempt to process the untimely 2021 death of Matt “Money” Miller, the founding keyboardist of the band and Stickles’ closest cousin. Stickles explains: “The passing of my dearest friend forced me to recognize not only the precious and fragile nature of life, but also the interconnectivity of all life. Loved ones we have lost are really not lost at all, as they, and we still living, are all component pieces of a far larger continuous organism, which both precedes and succeeds our illusory individual selves, united through time by (you guessed it) the will to live.”
Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Super Deluxe Edition
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Wilco’s landmark 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released commercially on April 23, 2002, after a circuitous and storied gestation, including a period of streaming for free on the band’s website. It was the first Wilco release on Nonesuch Records following the band’s infamous split with Reprise (both labels are part of Warner Music Group). It was also the first release featuring the lineup of drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach joining founding members Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt. The 2002 Sam Jones film I Am Trying to Break Your Heart documented the fraught recording and mixing process, personnel changes, and label issues. The now-classic record has been remastered for a Super Deluxe version comprises 11 vinyl LPs and one CD, including demos, drafts, and instrumentals charting the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — plus a live 2002 concert recording and a September 2001 radio performance and interview. That box set includes 82 previously unreleased music tracks as well as a new book featuring an interview with Tweedy, drummer Kotche, and Jim O’Rourke, who mixed the acclaimed 2002 album; an in-depth essay; and previously unseen photos of the band making the album in their Chicago studio The Loft.”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Cool It Down
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like Maps or Zero or the latest addition to their canon, Spitting Off The Edge Of The World ft. Perfume Genius, an epic shot-to-the- heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on Cool It Down, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalog, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely. “To all who have waited, our dear fans, thank you, our fever to tell has returned, and writing these songs came with its fair share of chills, tears, and euphoria when the pain lifts and truth is revealed. Don’t have to tell you how much we’ve been going through in the last nine years since our last record, because you’ve been going through it too, and we love you and we see you, and we hope you feel the feels from the music we’ve made. No shying away from the feels, or backing down from what’s been gripping all of us these days. So yes we’ve taken our time, happy to report when it’s ready it really does just flow out,” says Karen O.”
