Latest New Release Vinyl Arrivals

Let’s get caught up on some of the recent new releases that have come out the past week or two.
We’ve got the latest from Alice in Chains, Great Lake Swimmers and Death Cab for Cutie. Also a couple of limited colour vinyl reissues from Mac DeMarco (these won’t last long) and for the first time on vinyl the stellar album from Julee Cruise “The Voice of Love”. Check out the details below! It’s always a good day for some new tunes.

Alice in Chains – Rainier Fog
Rainier Fog was recorded in Los Angeles, Nashville, and for the first time in more than 20 years, their hometown of Seattle. Mixed by Joe Barresi (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age), Rainier Fog is the band’s third straight album recorded with Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Deftones), who produced Black Gives Way To Blue and The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.

Songs like “Red Giant,” “The One You Know,” and title track “Rainier Fog” see them staying true to their roots; massive in sound, the songs are edgy, inventive and uncompromising.

“It’s a record we haven’t done yet,” says Cantrell. “But it’s got our fingerprint and it’s f-ing strong.”

Great Lake Swimmers – The Waves, The Wake
Toronto’s indie darlings Great Lake Swimmers have released their latest album, The Waves, The Wake.
Recorded in the 145-year-old Bishop Cronyn Memorial Church and produced by Chris Stringer (Union Sound), lead singer-songwriter Tony Dekker decided to challenge himself by writing new music without any acoustic guitar, which has always been his instrumental mainstay. Each song on the album is brought to life in its own distinctive way, using an acoustic palette that includes woodwinds, harp, congas, marimba and pipe organ.

Death Cab For Cutie – Thank You For Today
Thank You for Today is the sound of Death Cab for Cutie both expanding and refining; a band twenty years into its evolution, still uncovering new curves in its signatures, new sonic corners to explore. The Seattle band’s ninth studio album, recorded in Los Angeles with producer Rich Costey in late 2017 and early 2018, stands alongside classic Death Cab for Cutie albums including their 1998 debut ‘Something About Airplanes’ and 2003’s masterful ‘Transatlanticism’ as a definitive collection — ten tracks that are by turns beautiful and dynamic and darkly anthemic and bittersweet. “I realized early on in the process that I wanted to write a record that is very much who we are,” says singer and guitarist Ben Gibbard. “I wanted to go more inward, and create something more personal.” On songs such as the kinetic “Gold Rush,” “Northern Lights” and “You Moved Away,” Gibbard ruminates on the flux going on in his hometown, and weaves a thread throughout the album about how interconnected geography is with memory, and how hard it can be to hold onto places, and to people, too.

Mac DeMarco – 2 Demos (Limited Green Vinyl)
Mac DeMarco’s debut full length, 2, released in 2012, cleaned up the songwriter’s warped take on soft rock and brought it to a broader audience. Given DeMarco’s affinity for keeping things lo-fi — 2 was the first time he’d bothered to record demos — it’s revealing to hear these songs in their most embryonic form. The performances here are a little looser and the sound a little hazier than on the actual LP, lending an atmosphere of dreamy vulnerability, especially to ballads like “Annie” and the Lennon-esque “Sherrill.”

Captured Tracks now brings this limited edition demos release back in print on green vinyl to celebrate the label’s 10th Anniversary.

Mac DeMarco – Salad Days Demos (Limited White Vinyl)
Mac DeMarco’s breakthrough sophomore album, Salad Days – released on April Fools’, 2014 – garnered widespread critical acclaim, landing on over 30 Year End lists. It was the album that catapulted DeMarco from “loveable slacker” to “mature songwriter with a gaptoothed grin,” all at the tender age of 23. DeMarco’s demos for Salad Days, originally included in an expanded edition of the album only available on Captured Tracks Mail Order site, peel back the curtain of said artist, who, up until then, may have been more known for his raucous live shows than his genuine talent as a songwriter and craftsman. This collection of demos and sketches as well as previously unreleased instrumental demos offer a rare insight into Mac’s world and process.

Captured Tracks now brings this limited edition demos release back in print on white vinyl to celebrate the label’s 10th Anniversary.

Julee Cruise – The Voice of Love (Limited Red Vinyl)
25 years after its initial release, Julee Cruise’s sophomore album The Voice of Love has been issued for the first time on vinyl as a deluxe 2xLP. In 1992, after the release of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, and Julee Cruise returned to the studio with new compositions as well as the intent to craft previously instrumental score-based material from Fire Walk With Me and Wild at Heart into Julee Cruise songs. The result was 1993’s final studio album The Voice of Love. “In the studio, David would always say ‘[sing] like an angel, like an angel…” Cruise remembers.

The End.