Lion or lamb? That is the question. And honestly, it could go either way, depending on your preference. In terms of sheer numbers, it’s actually a pretty quiet week, with only a lamblike 325 titles coming down the pipe. But when that list includes bigwigs like Bleachers, Kim Gordon, Judas Priest, Libertines, Jesus And Mary Chain, Norah Jones and more, it’s clear we should be in for nothing less than a rip-roaring time. Here are your plays of the week. Ready, set, March!
Bleachers
Bleachers
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There’s a rich depth to the band’s sound on Bleachers, laid out in bright, soulful technicolour. The album is frontman Jack Antonoff’s distinctly New Jersey take on the bizarre sensory contradictions of modern life, on his position in culture, and the things he cares about. Sonically, it’s sad, it’s joyful, it’s music for driving on the highway to, for crying to and for dancing to at weddings. There’s something reassuringly touchable and concrete about its sentiment: exist in crazy times but remember what counts. Since releasing their debut album Strange Desire in 2014, the band have built a huge, passionate following across three studio albums, becoming renowned for their impressive live show and infectious camaraderie. The band’s last album, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, took them to new heights, showcasing Antonoff’s immersive songwriting.”
The Children…
A Sudden Craving
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Principal songwriters for The Children… are Michael Wiener (vocals/lyrics), Jim Coleman (electronics and various instruments) and Phil Puleo (drums, acoustic guitar and various instruments). Other core members, both live and on this recording: John Nowlin (bass), Rock Savage (drums) and Kirsten McCord (cello). Shelley Hirsch has been a memorable collaborator on several live shows. John Andersen was a founding member and important early collaborator. Norman Westberg (guitar) and Johnny Gasper (clarinet) were key contributors to the sessions for A Sudden Craving, which took place over the course of two years in the mid-late 2010s.”
Alice Cooper
Billion Dollar Babies Trillion Dollar Deluxe Edition
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Hello! Hooray! A new version of Billion Dollar Babies is on the way as Alice Cooper’s delightfully subversive sixth album returns in all its snakeskin glory for an extended 50th-anniversary celebration. After hitting No. 1 on the album charts in America and the U.K. in 1973, the record remains a highwater mark for the original lineup, featuring hits like No More Mr. Nice Guy and Elected. Billion Dollar Babies: Trillion Dollar Deluxe Edition features a newly remastered version of the original album, along with bonus material, including studio outtakes, single mixes, and an electrifying 1973 concert recording. The gatefold cover faithfully replicates the original’s textured snakeskin wallet design and comes complete with a $1 billion bill tucked inside. Newly remastered, the platinum-certified album sounds better than ever. The set also features outtakes (Coal Black Model T), single mixes (Mary Ann), and Slick Black Limousine, which originally came out on flexi-disc within an issue of the British rock paper New Musical Express. The Trillion Dollar Deluxe Edition also features a live show recorded in Texas in April of 1973, during the Billion Dollar Babies tour. The powerful performance includes live versions of many of the album’s tracks, highlights including Elected and Hello Hooray, along with several of the band’s earlier hits, including I’m Eighteen and School’s Out.”
Dion
Girl Friends
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The past few years have been some of the most productive over the course of Dion’s storied career that spans multiple eras in music, culture and consciousness. His new album of original penned tracks, Girl Friends, showcases powerful female collaborators. Dion explains, “I’ve noticed that men play a different tune when there are women in the room — and it’s a different kind of jam when women are in the mix. I don’t know why this is so, but it is. Maybe we men, at some primitive level, are competing for their attention. As I said, I don’t know why or how. I do know it makes better music and we’re all better for it. I wanted the best music possible. So, I wrote up a batch of duets for me and my ‘girl friends,’ the women who inhabit my headphones — the women who make me turn up the volume when they drop into my radio. I invited them to join me, one by one, and here they are, wailing on the guitar and into the microphone. You’ll hear the feminine genius in every groove of this record, and you won’t forget any of it.”
Jad Fair
Film Music + 100 Songs (A Master Class In Songwriting)
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Can an indie/punk legend create his most epic work a half century into his career? As productive as Guided By Voices and Buckethead are, neither could match Half Japanese leader Jad Fair’s quest to release100 albums in 2021 during his COVID downtime — he actually topped that goal with a whopping 160 albums. Now he’s whittled them down to a 100-song, double album set that’s a cornucopia of words/songs/sounds. The brief, juicy nuggets of songs were crafted by Jad alone, composing the sounds via the GarageBand program, supplemented by his recitals and booming vocal percussion. Along with his sprawling collection 100 Songs, Fair unleashes yet another 150 songs on Film Music — all brief instruments recorded in 2021 and 2023), with the express purpose of each becoming potential celluloid scores, like Brian Eno’s Music For Films.”
Kim Gordon
The Collective
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There was a space in Kim Gordon’s No Home Record. Boulevards, bedrooms, instruments were played, recorded, the voice and its utterances, straining a way through the rhythms and the chords, threaded in some shared place, we met there, the guitar came too, there fell a peal of cymbals, driving on the music. We listened, we turned our back to the walls, slithered through the city at night. Gordon’s words in our ears, her eyes, she saw, she knew, she remembered, she liked. We were moving somewhere. No home record. Moving. Soon we’ll be listening to The Collective. And thinking, what has been done to this space, how has she treated it, it’s not here the same way, not quite. Not at all. On this evidence, it splintered, glittered, crashed and burned. It’s dark here. Haunted by synthesised voices bodiless. Planes of projections. Mirrors get your gun and the echo of a well-known tune, comes in liminal, yet never not hanging around, part of the atmosphere, fading in and out, like she says — grinding at the edges. Grinding at us all, grinding us away. Hurting, scraping. Sediments, layers, of recorded emissions, mined, twisted, refracted. That makes the music. This shimmering, airless geology, agitated, quarried, cries made in data, bounced down underground tunnels, reaching our ears. We recalled it — but not as a memory, more like how you recall a product, when it’s flawed.”
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Glasgow Eyes
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Marking 40 years of The Jesus And Mary Chain, Glasgow Eyes was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studio in Glasgow, where Jim and William Reid continued the creative process that resulted in their previous album, 2017’s Damage and Joy, becoming their highest-charting album in over 20 years. What emerged is a record that finds one of the UK’s most influential groups embracing a productive second chapter, their maelstrom of melody, feedback and controlled chaos now informed more audibly by their love for Suicide and Kraftwerk and a fresh appreciation of the less disciplined attitudes found in jazz. Jim Reid says, “But don’t expect ‘the Mary Chain goes jazz.’ People should expect a Jesus and Mary Chain record, and that’s certainly what Glasgow Eyes is. Our creative approach is remarkably the same as it was in 1984, just hit the studio and see what happens. We went in with a bunch of songs and let it take its course. There are no rules, you just do whatever it takes. And there’s a telepathy there — we are those weird not-quite twins that finish each other’s sentences.”
Norah Jones
Visions
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Norah Jones’ ninth solo studio album Visions is a collaboration with producer and multi-instrumentalist Leon Michels. Visions is a vibrant and joyous 12-song set that finds Jones singing about feeling free, wanting to dance, making it right, and acceptance of what life brings. It’s the yang to the yin that was Pick Me Up Off The Floor, Jones’ last album of new original songs which was released early in the pandemic lockdown of 2020 and foreshadowed many of the dark emotions of that period. “The reason I called the album Visions is because a lot of the ideas came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep,” says Jones. “We did most of the songs in the same way — I was at the piano or on guitar and Leon was playing drums and we were just jamming on stuff. I like the rawness between me and Leon, the way it sounds kind of garage-y but also kind of soulful, because that’s where he’s coming from, but also not overly perfected.”
Judas Priest
Invincible Shield
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Following their amazing headline show at the PowerTrip Festival in Indio, California, Judas Priest announced their latest studio album Invincible Shield. Over the past 50 plus years Judas Priest have sold over 50 million albums worldwide and headlined the world’s biggest stadiums. With their evolving music and live performances also came a powerful unique identity — a look which has both defined the group and influenced future generations of metal bands the world over. With each year the Judas Priest legend continues to grow — 2022 saw them inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and complete a sold-out world tour in support of their 50th anniversary. As we roll into 2024, Judas Priest continue to retain their crown as one of the biggest and best British bands in the world.”
Jon Langford & The Bright Shiners
Where It Really Starts
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Jon Langford has been in more bands than you have digits — and that’s true even if you were born with a few extras! From his early days in Mekons, Delta 5, Three Johns and even Sisters Of Mercy (booted for not wearing black) to a veritable explosion of one-off recordings and performances with more names than we could ever hope to list in full. A Wikipedia description for this group, The Bright Shiners (described therein as ‘circa 2022 through at least 2023, in Northern California’) provides some sense of the complex taxonomy needed just to keep track of Jon’s massive oeuvre. Happily, that’s an understated description of a serious new outlet for his endless creativity, and The Bright Shiners’ recording activities have produced a full album, Where It Really Starts, the first recording in a collaboration with Tamineh Gueramy, Alice Spencer, and Jon’s frequent musical partner, John Szymanski.”
The Libertines
All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “On All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade, the quartet of unlikely lads have gathered from their newfound homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to solder a strongest-ever internal bond, and scale new creative heights resulting in the best music of their extraordinary career so far. Featuring 11 new sparkling Libertines songs with songwriting credits shared among the four band members, the album was produced by Grammy-nominated producer Dimitri Tikovoï (Horrors, Charli XCX, Becky Hill) and recorded at The Albion Rooms in Margate. Recorded in just four weeks earlier this year during February and March and finished over seven days at La Ferme de Gestein Studios in Normandy, with additional production and mixed by Dan Grech-Marguerat (Lana Del Rey, Liam Gallagher, Paul McCartney). For Carl Barat, the whole Libertines journey has been leading to this moment. “Our first record was born out of panic, and disbelief that we were actually allowed to be in a studio; the second was born of total strife and misery; the third was born of complexity; this one feels like we were all actually in the same place, at the same speed, and we really connected.”
Taj Mahal
Swinging’ Live at The Church in Tulsa
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With his latest release, Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa, Taj Mahal adds to his legendary legacy with an extraordinary set recorded at the Tulsa studio best known as the home base of the late, great Leon Russell. The 10 songs reach across multiple genres that he has explored in his incomparable career, and feature his long-time quartet — bassist Bill Rich, drummer Kester Smith, and guitarist / Hawaiian lap steel player Bobby Ingano — augmented by dobro player Rob Ickes and guitarist and vocalist Trey Hensley. In a career spanning seven decades and almost 50 albums, Taj Mahal has not only helped popularize and reshape the scope of the blues, but he has also personified the concept of “World Music” since years before the phrase even existed. From a base of traditional country blues, Taj has explored and incorporated reggae, Latin, R&B, Cajun, Caribbean, gospel, West African, jazz, calypso, Hawaiian slack-key, and countless other musical styles into his astonishing body of work.”
Meatbodies
Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Meatbodies’ latest undertaking and borderline lost album, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, is their most varied and realized work to date. It’s a melodic, hook-filled rock epic in which frontman and lead guitarist Chad Ubovich faces the trials of sobriety, redemption, reinvention while literally learning to walk and play again. Resurrection not only accompanies the record, but its production as well, Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom examines themes surrounding love and loss, escapism, defeatism, hedonism, psychedelics and much more. It recalls the searing Blue Cheer-meets-Iggy Pop-with-psychedelia that permeated previous releases, but adds new elements of shoegaze, classic alternative, Britpop, drone, and hints of country. Simultaneously an ode to ’80s LA punk and the rise of indie / alternative music in the U.K., it plays like a radio station broadcasting from the void.”
Moor Mother
The Great Bailout
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “How do you engage the stunning, evocative, haunting gift that is Moor Mother’s latest album The Great Bailout? Only by following the trail of verbal and sonic poetry delivered. Only by letting Moor Mother and her co-conspiring collaborators — Lonnie Holley, Mary Lattimore, Alya Al Sultani, Kyle Kidd and more — “people who have their own path of positivity and connectedness,” be the tour guide. The Great Bailout is Moor Mother aka Camae Ayewa’s ninth studio album. Ayewa’s music contains multitudes of instruments, voices and cacophony that take on themes of Afrofuturism and collective memory with the forebearers of jazz, hip hop and beat poetry in mind. So: Come! Come look! Come see! Come hear! Come see London, come see Liverpool, for the first time even if it for the millionth. Know its provenance, know its haunting. Clear the mist over your eyes and heart as if the famous London Fog has been cleared by the clarion call of Moor Mother. For this is what The Great Bailout is: a call to knowing through a sonic scene that is unafraid to look a violent legacy in the eye.”
Romano Nervoso
From Villarosa to Rotherham
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “In just a few short years Romano Nervoso and his Italian-Belgian band of ne’er-do-wells have torn up the Italian music scene at full-tilt boogie. From local bars and taverns to some of the biggest concert venues and festivals across Europe, the undisputed ‘Godfather of Spaghetti Rock’, with his charismatic onstage presence and unmistakable style, is without question a worthy addition to any venue. His new album From Villarosa to Rotherham is divided into two parts: The first features songs in Italian in salute to his hometown, whereas part two leaves Southern Italy behind and heads to Rotherham, for six tracks in English, in tribute to his beloved wife who hails from the South Yorkshire town. Written in just under four weeks, From Villarosa to Rotherham is a return to the roots of punk rock. Short, sharp, spontaneous songs delivered in a style that is uniquely his own.”
