Free Shipping On Orders Over $100
9 products
Council Skies (With Bonus 7")
Regular price $45.00 Save $-45.00From the evocative album title to the cover art, to the lyrics themselves, Council Skies sees Noel Gallagher reclaiming his past and paying homage to his Mancunian roots. His most varied and accomplished solo record to date, Noel's fourth solo studio album is a record framed by confidence, risk-taking, surefooted creative freedom, and great emotional depth. Council Skies was recorded at Noel's own Lone Star Sound Recording Studios in London, with the album's lusciously orchestrated strings recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Produced by Noel with long-time collaborator Paul ‘Strangeboy' Stacey, the album also features performances from Johnny Marr on three tracks, including the single "Pretty Boy." Council Skies takes its title from a book by revered northern illustrator and friend of Noel, artist Pete McKee. It covers themes of youthful yearning, and unbridled ambition.
Speaking of the album, Noel says: "It's going back to the beginning. Daydreaming, looking up at the sky and wondering about what life could be ... that's as true to me now as it was in the early ‘90s. When I was growing up in poverty and unemployment, music took me out of that. Top of the Pops on TV transformed your Thursday night into this fantasy world, and that's what I think music should be. I want my music to be elevating and transforming in some way."
The artwork, shot by renowned Manchester photographer Kevin Cummins, sees Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' live equipment setup placed on the original center spot of what was Maine Road Football Stadium, with this year marking 100 years since the ground was opened as the former home of Noel's beloved Manchester City FC. Throughout the accompanying album artwork, Cummins captures locations poignant to Noel's formative years - culminating with a striking image of Manchester's Piccadilly train station, marking the moment Noel left his home city for London. This visual representation perfectly encapsulates the themes, journey and emotional heart of Council Skies.
Heavyweight vinyl LP with a bonus 7" featuring an exclusive acoustic version of "Pretty Boy."
LP
7"
Spirit Power: The Best of Johnny Marr (Exclusive Gold Vinyl)
Regular price $38.00 Save $-38.00Spirit Power: The Best of Johnny Marr (Exclusive Gold Vinyl) Johnny Marr will release a compilation of solo songs, Spirit Power: The former Smiths guitarist curated the collection from the last 10 years of his output and recorded a pair of new tracks, "Somewhere" and "The Answer."
Vide Noir
Regular price $36.00 Save $-36.00Vide Noir was written and recorded over the past two years at Lord Huron's Los Angeles studio and informal clubhouse, Whispering Pines, and was mixed by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips/MGMT). Singer, songwriter and producer Ben Schneider found inspiration wandering restlessly through his adopted home of L.A. at night: "My nighttime drives ranged all over the city – across the twinkling grid of the valley, into the creeping shadows of the foothills, through downtown's neon canyons and way out to the darksome ocean. I started imagining Vide Noir as an epic odyssey through the city, across dimensions, and out into the cosmos. A journey along the spectrum of human experience. A search for meaning amidst the cold indifference of The Universe," he says.
Lead single "Wait by the River" is already the subject of early critical praise; the Los Angeles Times proclaims, "It's a gorgeous song, one with the majesty of a 1950s doo-wop ballad," while SPIN adds, "[‘Wait by the River'] offers a refined, waltz-like sound that can't quite cover for the sins of a fatalistically obsessed narrator." UPROXX furthers, "The track sounds like something you'd slowly sway back and forth to in close proximity with a special someone at a ‘50s high school dance, like a more doo-wop Fleet Foxes, a vibe they previously proved they can nail with ‘The Night We Met.'"
A true multi-media artist, Schneider has once again created an adorned world to inhabit within Vide Noir: the album will be accompanied by a wealth of imagery, films and immersive experiences crafted to expand upon its narratives and themes. This builds on Schneider's past work, which used videos, a comic book, a choose-your-own-adventure hotline and assorted Easter eggs as means of deepening the listener experience.
Come on Feel - 30th Anniversary
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Expanded 30th anniversary re-issue of The Lemonheads’ classic 1993 album. The breakthrough record that took American alt rock global and catapulted Evan Dando into the hearts of a generation. With a wealth of unreleased demos, alternative versions and rarities - including covers of Victoria Williams, Buddy Holly and The Flying Burrito Brothers plus the Cole Porter standard ‘Miss Otis Regrets’.
In the 90’s Evan’s Lemonheads produced hit after a hit, a string of super cool singles: ‘Big Gay Heart’, ‘Into Your Arms’, ‘It’s About Time’, and ‘The Great Big NO’. Pure genius filling the radio waves and taking the stage... Some 30 years on; Evan is still knocking that song writing thing out of the park and ‘Come On Feel The Lemonheads’ sounds as fresh and perky as it ever did. Amid the hits on the original record are stencils and outlines for yet more magical music and now this deluxe edition adds a second disc of demos and acoustic versions, plus a host of one-offs from sessions and compilations that add further colour to the myth and how it was created.
There’s the cover of Victoria Williams’ ‘Frying Pan’ from her ‘Sweet Relief’ album, which is joined by an eclectic set of flipsides and out-takes, like their version of ‘Little Black Egg’ by The Nightcrawlers, Evan’s homage to Gram Parsons on the winsome ‘Streets Of Baltimore’ and Buddy Holly’s melancholy ‘Learning The Game’. Evan knows a good song when he hears it, as ‘Come On Feel The Lemonheads’ certainly proved.
“Come On Feel was home to some of his best, sharpest writing – fabulous sunny powerpop and beautiful ballads” The Guardian
I Know I'm Funny Haha
Regular price $25.00 Save $-25.00I Know I'm Funny haha is Webster's most realized manifestation yet of this emotional and musical alchemy. Continuing to bloom from her 2019 breakthrough and Secretly Canadian debut Atlanta Millionaires Club, Webster's sound draws as much from the lap-steel singer-songwriter pop of the 1970s and teardrop country tunes as it does from the audacious personalities of her city's rap and R&B community. The album began for Webster with the stirring ballad "In a Good Way," as in "You make me want to cry in a good way"-an instantclassic Faye Webster one-liner. It's beguilingly simple, the kind of melody and arrangement that seem to have existed forever. A sense of relief charges the neo-psychedelic pop of "Cheers," where Webster experiments with an overdriven guitar tone. She also collaborated, on "Overslept," with the Japanese artist Mei Ehara, who she calls the biggest influence on her new music. Webster's music is full of personality. Many of her songs contain bits of girl-group-esque talk-singing, which color her atypical storysongs. Webster says she's in a growth mindset, pushing herself to learn more, to be more vulnerable. "Growth is really important to me," she says. "I hope people will relate to my songs, and not just be like 'this is a good record' but 'this makes me feel something. This is making me think differently, this is making me question things.' I told myself a few years ago that I was going to be more honest in my songwriting, that honesty is the best route to take with music. If I have a voice and people are listening to me, I'm not going to waste it."
Tracks
Beacon Street Collection
Regular price $32.00 Save $-32.00Produced by No Doubt and recorded in various locations around Southern California, including the band’s homemade studio on Beacon Avenue in Anaheim, California, the originally self-distributed ‘The Beacon Street Collection’ features 10 tracks that the band released independently during the creative period prior to their blockbuster debut album, Tragic Kingdom. Now officially available on vinyl for the first time! This LP is pressed on 180g black vinyl.
Side A:
Side B:
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2022 Remaster)
Regular price $40.00 Save $-40.00Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was widely acclaimed as one of 2002’s best albums, appearing in year-end lists of Mojo, NME, Q, Rolling Stone, and Uncut, among many others. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot also was featured in multiple decade-end lists, with Rolling Stone naming it #3 Album of the 2000s, as well as many Greatest Albums of All Time lists, including in the NME.Among Yankee’s inspirations was a recording Tweedy bought at Tower Records in the late 1990s, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. As Bob Mehr points out in his new album note, the record got “deep under Tweedy’s skin.” Tweedy said in his 2017 memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), “It was as fascinating to me as anything being made by actual musicians using actual instruments … I wanted to know why it was so hypnotic to me. Why could I listen to hours of this stuff, even though I had no clue what any of them were saying. That question became the foundation for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot … the way people communicated or ultimately failed to communicate.” The album takes its title from a haunting recording of a woman repeating those words that is included in The Conet Project; that recording is sampled in the penultimate song on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, “Poor Places.”“Conceptually, Tweedy had decided to focus on a big idea for the next album: the state of America. His lyrics—often distilled from scribbled pages of free verse or poetry—became a form of inquiry,” Mehr continues. Tweedy said, in 2004, “I wanted to write about the stuff right in front of my eyes, microscopically looking at America and asking questions about each little thing … How can there be all these good things and things that I love about America, alongside all of these things that I’m ashamed of? And that was an internal question, too; I think I felt that way about myself.”Mehr says, “Exploring those questions, while weaving in strands of Eastern philosophy and bits of autobiography—Yankee lyrics would be loaded with the pained imagery of someone suffering from migraines and mental health issues—Tweedy would conjure a deep examination of both country and self.”Describing the uncanny, strangely prescient feeling of the album, which Wilco began offering as a free stream on its website in 2001, Mehr notes: “In the wake of 9/11, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot would be burdened with unintended meaning. The disc had originally been scheduled for a September 11 release. Its cover—a Sam Jones-shot image of Chicago’s twin Marina Towers angled in looming fashion—bore an eerie resemblance to the felled World Trade Center towers. And the songs—with titles like ‘Ashes of American Flags’ and ‘War on War,’ and lyrics about how ‘tall buildings shake, sad voices escape’—took on a terrible new resonance.”
NFR
Regular price $48.00 Save $-48.00Grammy-nominated for Album of the Year and Song of the Year ("Norman Fucking Rockwell"), Norman F---ing Rockwell! is the sixth studio album by Lana Del Rey and follow-up to 2017's Lust For Life. The 14-track collection was largely produced and co-written with frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff (St Vincent, Taylor Swift, Lorde) while Rick Nowels and Zach Dawes also make contributions.
Del Rey teased new material for over a year, releasing a few stand-alone singles including "Venice Bitch," "Mariners Apartment Complex" and "Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have – But I Have It," plus a cover of Sublime's "Doin Time" for the band's 2019 documentary.
The singer notes that the album is, "in the vein of a Laurel Canyon sound. And it's kind of transformed a little bit because there's some surf elements to some of the songs – it's not really surfy like Dick Dale but a lot of electric guitar, a little Red Hot Chili Peppers influence in there." The pulp-inspired pop art cover was shot by young sister Caroline 'Chuck' Grant and features the torch singer embracing actor Duke Nicholson in front of a painted backdrop.
LP1
LP2
Live Through This
Regular price $34.00 Save $-34.00Limited vinyl LP pressing. Live Through This is the second studio album by Hole, the band led by Courtney Love. Considered a contemporary classic, this record was included in Rolling Stone Magazine's list of 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. Features production by Sean Slade and Paul Q Kolderie with mixing by Scott Litt and J Mascis. Live Through This was Hole's only album to feature bassist Kristen Pfaff before her death in June 1994. Recorded in October 1993, the album marked a divergence from the band's unpolished hardcore aesthetics to more refined melodies and song structure. The album's lyrics and packaging reflect Love's preoccupation with beauty, and it's songs contain repeated motifs of milk, motherhood, anti-elitism, and violence against women.
