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Tennessee River Crooks – Tennessee River Crooks (1976/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 31:11 minutes | 399 MB | Genre: Rock, Southern Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RidingEasy Records
This story played out locally all across the USA in the wake of the paradigm changing Beatles / British Invasion of 1964. Childhood friends Jimmy Stewart and Larry Farrar heard electric guitars and started a garage band, evolving into Rat Salad by 1970, Hit And Run after that, and finally the Tennessee River Crooks. The band name is taken from the cigar box roadie/manager Jerry Crouch used to stash cash in while working the door at countless gigs across Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois… like most regional working bands of the day these guys played crowd pleasing cover versions at live shows to pay the bills. However, they intended to do their own material from the very start. Originally issued as a private pressing in 1976, this rare LP is an unfiltered slice of real life in the Southern Rock genre. We are lucky some slick producer didn’t stumble across them and water it down with dollar signs in his eyes! This stuff is as pure as it gets!
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Robert Sholl, Justin Paterson, Anna McCready and Andy Visser – Les ombres du Fantôme (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:09 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Métier
Les ombres du Fantôme presents a captivating exploration of Gaston Leroux’s timeless novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910) through fourteen evocative improvisations. Recorded in May and July 2021 using the majestic organs of Coventry and Arundel Cathedrals, accompanied by soprano voice and saxophone/bass clarinet, these improvisations delve deep into the narrative, themes, characters, and events of Leroux’s masterpiece. Employing an inventive musical language and leveraging the unique acoustics of these historic buildings, Les ombres du Fantôme transcends the physical realm, delivering a dynamic spectralism that immerses listeners in a sonic journey enhanced and extended through retrospective electronic augmentations.
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Philippe Herreweghe – Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 8 (2007/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:16 minutes | 953 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PENTATONE
PentaTone provides Herreweghe and his orchestra with excellent sound quality, very realistic and with
spatially divided violin desks….
Philippe Herreweghe’s Beethoven is characteristically muscular and gritty, bringing out all the music’s visceral excitement.
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Francesco Tristano Schlimé – Prokofiev: Piano Concertos – Schlimé: Three Improvisations (2006/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:05:14 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © PENTATONE
At 25, pianist Francesco Tristano Schlimé carries an impressive-looking artistic resumé with credits that stretch beyond the so-called “standard rep” and into composition, new music, and improvisation. He’s also a pupil of Mikhail Pletnev, who lends both podium support and his trusty Russian National Orchestra in the Ravel and Prokofiev performances in hand. The results are decidedly uneven, to put it kindly. Where’s the sparkle and rhythmic verve we usually expect from the Ravel G major’s first movement? Not here. The pianist’s enervated distension of slower, lyrical passages creates awkward transitions back into the faster basic tempos, while the recessed, mushy orchestral image yields weird balances (harps all over the place, winds on another planet).
Not that you’d care, since the first-chair soloists are about as lackluster as the piano player (the first trumpet, especially). All parties evidently chowed down quaalude guacamole before sleepwalking through the slow movement, one foot dragging in front of the other, with no direction home. Its 11-minute duration (the movement usually requires nine) feels like 11 hours. The third movement’s introductory chords have the impact of an overcooked, underspiced noodle, and Schlimé responds by upping the tempo–and who can blame him? To his credit, Schlimé gives the syncopated accents and jazzy runs their due, while Pletnev and company basically phone it in.
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Ferkat Al Ard – Oghneya (1978/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 33:15 minutes | 392 MB | Genre: World, Psychedelic, Folk, MPB, Bossa Nova
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Habibi Funk Records
An absolutely legendary album from Lebanon by Issam Hajali’s group Ferkat Al Ard, “Oghneya” stands out as one of the great musical gems of the Arab world. A groundbreaking release from 1978 that represents the meeting point of Arab, jazz, folk and Brazilian styles with the talent of Ziad Rahbani, who did the albums arrangements. Filled with a variety of sounds and genres, from Baroque Pop to Psych-Folk to flashes of Bossa Nova, Tropicalia and MPB, “Oghneya” is like if Arthur Verocai took a trip to Beirut in the 70’s to record an album.
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Eliza Hardy Jones – Pickpocket (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 39:17 minutes | 466 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © River Baby Records
Multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, vocal coach and quilter, Eliza Hardy Jones, will release her sophomore solo album, Pickpocket, on April 19th. The ten-song LP explores surviving grief, birth, death, and the innate humanness surrounding a challenging and personal journey to becoming a parent. It was written, recorded, and produced by Eliza with production assistance from the multitalented producer, engineer and instrumentalist Nick Krill – who also mixed the record. Additional musicians recorded their parts in bedrooms across space and time.
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Dedicated Men of Zion – The Devil Don’t Like It (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 38:19 minutes | 450 MB | Genre: Gospel, Soul
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Bible & Tire Recording Co.
The Eastern North Carolina Sacred Soul all stars, Dedicated Men of Zion are back with the follow up to their critically acclaimed, 2020 debut album, Can’t Turn Me Around. The Devil Don’t Like It picks up where we last heard DMZ, blending traditional sacred soul offerings with the fire and passion of a touring outfit. Backed by the Sacred Soul Sound Section and produced by Bible & Tire founder, Bruce Watson, these songs are presented just as they should be, with a precision of sound and style but as raw as the original recordings demand. These men did not come to play, they came to work for the Lord.
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Big | Brave – A Chaos Of Flowers (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:00 minutes | 797 MB | Genre: Experimental Rock, Post-Metal, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Thrill Jockey
BIG|BRAVE’s music has been described as massive minimalism. Their fusillades of textural distortion and feedback emphasize their music’s frayed edges as much as its all-encompassing weight. The potency of the trio’s work is their singular artistry combining elements of traditional folk techniques and a modern deconstruction of guitar music. Gain, feedback, and amplitude are essential to A Chaos Of Flowers, an album that builds on their ferocious 2023 album nature morte. Lyrically, the songs explore the most vulnerable of human experiences, how marginalizations manifest internally and externally, the inner struggles of isolation, and co-existence in nature. A Chaos of Flowers draws on catharsis and beauty as well as the quagmire of disorientation and othering. The album is a monument of simultaneous serenity and disquiet, a subtle maelstrom of internal life.
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Betty – Handful (1971/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 34:24 minutes | 416 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RidingEasy Records
Original pressings of this private press biker rock GRAIL have sold for as much as $2000! Only 13 very lucky people have this record in their collection and nearly 300 have it in their wantlist on Discogs. Tough luck for most, considering only 200 copies were pressed back in 1971! “Thank you for being what you really are”… key words from this impossibly rare 1971 private pressing LP.
BETTY lays down who they really are straight upon “Handful” like a breathing snapshot in time. The performances and mix sound like they were done on the fly, which in the private pressing tradition means the artists are captured unfiltered with diamond-in-the-rough vitality. Their influences are seamlessly integrated into a personality filled biker rock roadhouse attack with discreet echoes of Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, the Doors, even throwing an early ’60s UK beat rock curveball at one point. They are pro at communicating but not slick enough to compromise their own reality by aping their influences. The musical elements here will be familiar but the band’s audacious attitude fire this baby up with undiluted excitement. The music feels like real life captured out in the wild rather than created in the studio.
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