The Residents’ ‘American Composer’s Series‘ – Cherry Red There are bad years for music. Then there’s 1983. It was the year everything got airbrushed. Bowie traded Berlin’s paranoia for peroxide and pastel suits. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ was less an album than a an attempt to allocate him his own GDP. UB40. Just…UB40. MTV had turned […]
Heat Wave – The Intoxicating World of Nexotica as Dug by Lux and Ivy I’m sure I said I wouldn’t get any more of these, but here we are. It seems entirely reasonable that some, if not all, of these records were owned by the fair, jettisoned by 50s hipsters when their family began to […]
Rosalie Cunningham – To Shoot Another Day (Esoteric Antenna) Along with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, Rosalie Cunningham has quietly established herself as one of the pre-eminent singer/songwriter/instrumentalists currently working. Her voice alone would be enough to separate her from the crowd, but what truly sets her apart is her spectacularly singular songwriting – fiendish melodies […]
Frank Sidebottom – Little Box of Bobbins – Frank’s Fantastic Anthology 1985-1993 It’s a testament to the uniqueness of Chris Sievey‘s glorious creation, that despite his own TV show, guest appearances on countless other programmes, regular attempts at cracking the hit parade, relentless touring, books and a film semi-based on his life starring Hollywood A-listers, […]
When The Alarm Clock Rings – A Compendium of British Psychedelia 1966-1969 The impression you get from talking heads and social media is that “if only such-and-such were released on vinyl, I’d definitely buy it”. The truth, as many labels saddled with even modest runs of niche (and sometimes not so niche) boxes of unsold […]
The Rubettes – The Singles 1974-1977 (Cherry Red Records) As of mid-2023, The Rubettes have had a total of 32 band members, putting them on a par with the funk conveyer belt, Funkadelic. To make sense of their lineage would be an article in itself and would be a miserable experience for all involved, not […]
Published to coincide with The Residents’ 50th anniversary, Faceless Forever is a task only the brave would ever even feeltingly consider. A band who isn’t sure itself as to what has been released, where and when, and whose mysterious identities only add to the confusion and murk which must be sifted through for answers. Jim […]
This ongoing Lux and Ivy project, which hasn’t as yet descended into tarnishing their names, has started to find its feet with recent releases, with less in the way of flitting around trying to cram in as many artists as possible but to concentrate on key artists – or in this case, key artists and […]
Some 27 years since its original release, Screaming Trees’ most successful album is given the reissue treatment courtesy of Cherry Red, the handful of B-sides on the additional disc being only part of the reason to dig deep beneath the potatoes and feast heartily on the fleshy songs which feel as refreshingly vital today as […]
