Big Release Day!

What a day for some new tunes! We’ve got a stack of new and recent releases hitting the bins today. So many in fact our new release shelf cannot accommodate them all. Enough with the chit chat, let’s dig into the new stuff!

Noga Erez – KIDS

Musician and producer, Noga Erez finds her feet on KIDS, her bold second album for City Slang made with her creative and life partner Ori Rousso. Building from the raw politics of her 2017 debut, Off The Radar, KIDS moves closer to home while retaining her signature smarts and swagger. Its earworms and crisp productions are locked around lyrics that deal with the personal and the political; mortality and loss; war and peace, insecurity and ambition. As with Off The Radar, Erez never pulls her punches, whether that’s with politics or production. After a series of singles, KIDS comes packed with chart-worthy outspoken pop anthems for the 21st century. KIDS replaces the shadow and fury of Off The Radar with neon brights, bold lines, in determinedly audacious and confident productions that swap ferocity for bounce, gloomy moods for fierce swagger. Erez has truly found her style, growing into a crisp bombastic sound she crafts with Rousso, that contains tension and release, anxiety and remedy, and masterly melodic licks in swipes of stomping brass, all wrapped around Erez’s versatile vocals that quick-switch from clipped flow to smoky purr; from stadium chorus to street-ready beats.

Tune-Yards – sketchy. (Indie Exclusive)

On “sketchy.” Merrill balances self-inspection and reflection with bombastic rallying cries, reminiscent of the furious tones of early days Tune-Yards. Inspired by the Beastie Boys Book and Questlove’s Creative Quest, the result is a colourful and joyous record with lyrics that cut to the bone. “I started remembering that people come to us to be entertained, to move, to feel joy. And together, I think, we can wake up.” From 2009 to 2018, Tune-Yards (both Merrill and her partner and collaborator Nate Brenner) released four critically acclaimed albums, travelled the world relentlessly to play live shows, and composed the psychedelic score to Boots Riley’s surrealist cinematic masterpiece “Sorry To Bother You”.

Death From Above 1979 – Is 4 Lovers (Indie Exclusive)

Death From Above 1979 , is the boundary pushing musical alliance made up of Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler. Is 4 Lovers, produced, mastered and recorded entirely by themselves, captures the creation of a totally new sound and a reimagining of the format they created more than 20 years ago.

Xiu Xiu – OH NO

Xiu Xiu makes beautiful music for hard times. For nearly 20 years, the band has a track record of crafting experimental music for moments when life’s harsh realities meet its existential mysteries. On the latest album, Jamie Stewart explores a recent revelation and is reminded of the power of the band’s music to surprise and connect. Listening to the songs on “OH NO”, it is hard to feel truly alone. Instead, it is a reminder that even when we’re alone, we’re alone together. “OH NO”, the group’s newest album, is an album of duets, with Stewart sharing the stage with an array of guests who have made an impact on him personally and musically. This is the first Xiu Xiu album where every song spotlights Jamie Stewart and a collaborator. The album features artists across the musical spectrum, including Sharon Van Etten, Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Grouper’s Liz Harris, Alice Bag, Chelsea Wolfe, Owen Pallet, and Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jr., all drifting into Xiu Xiu’s distinctive soundworld.

Joe Strummer – Assembly (Indie Exclusive)

ASSEMBLY showcases carefully curated singles, fan favorites, and archival rarities from the JOE STRUMMER solo catalog. This 16-track compilation features three previously unreleased versions of classic Clash tracks, including the never-before-heard “Junco Partner (Acoustic)” and electrifying live performances of “Rudie Can’t Fail” and “I Fought The Law,” the latter two of which were recorded by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros at London’s Brixton Academy on November 24, 2001.

George Harrison’s passion for introducing the world to new music expressed itself in May of 1974 when he created his own new label – DARK HORSE RECORDS. The label contained a variety of talented artists on its roster, including George himself. ASSEMBLY marks the first new JOE STRUMMER title released via the newly relaunched Dark Horse Records.

Album comes on 180g Limited Edition Red double vinyl in Gatefold Sleeve.
All tracks remastered by Grammy Award Winner Paul Hicks (The Beatles/George Harrison/ The Rolling Stones/John Lennon).

Neil Young – Young Shakespeare

Just two months after the release of his seminal album After The Gold Rush, Neil Young played a solo show at The Shakespeare Theater, Stratford, CT on January 22, 1971. The show was filmed and recorded, and the concert shown on German TV later in 1971.
In 2020, while Neil and his team were reviewing his Archive for future projects, Neil re-visited the 16mm film and audio recording of this show that had been preserved in the Archive for almost 50 years. Piecing together the tapes and footage, Neil realized that he had the full concert – the film of which is the earliest live footage of Neil performing that is known to exist. Neil has written on NYA that this show is “superior to our beloved “Massey Hall.”
A calmer performance, without the celebratory atmosphere of Massey Hall, captured live on 16mm. “Young Shakespeare” is a very special event. To my fans, I say this is the best ever.” As an insight into Neil’s prolific song writing at the time, the concert features two songs from the recently released After The Gold Rush but four songs from the classic Harvest album that was still over a year away from being released. The wonderful set list also includes acoustic renditions of favorites such as “Ohio”, “Cowgirl In the Sand”, “Helpless”, “Down By The River” and “Sugar Mountain”. The ancient analog tapes have been lovingly restored – resulting in (as Neil says on NYA) “one of the purest sounding acoustic performances we have in the Archive”.
This beautiful concert is being released on 1 LP. Young Shakespeare is being released almost exactly 50 years after the original performance.

Spoon – Gimme Fiction (Indie Exclusive)

Spoon’s classic “Gimme Fiction” pressed onto limited red and white vinyl. Recorded throughout 2004 at Jim Eno’s Public Hifi studio in Austin with the production help of Mike McCarthy (…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead), “Gimme Fiction”, Spoon’s fifth full-length, is the sound of a band who, having long since found their own voice, were making the catchiest, most confident rock’n’roll of any group on the planet. Though there are still echoes of some of Britt Daniel’s influences, “Gimme Fiction” is a sprawling, exhilarating, filler-free album of keenly focused artistic vision and ambition. Features the hit single “I Turn My Camera On,” as well as other tracks included on the recent greatest hits “Everything Hits At Once: The Best of Spoon”. Nothing short of a dizzying, soulful masterpiece, easily the most expansive work in their career.

Volbeat – The Strength/The Sound/The Songs

“The Strength / The Sound / The Songs” was first released by Mascot Records in 2005, launching the band on to the greater European music stage with bone-shaking performances at Roskilde, Download and Pinkpop. The album, which includes their first single, a cover of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Wanna Be With You” and fan favorites “Pool Of Booze, Booze, Booza” and “Soulweeper”, crashed into the Danish charts and earned the band a slew of Danish Music Awards. The album has gone on to be certified double platinum in their home country, gold in Germany and has generated over 180 million streams and (still) counting. These new limited vinyl variants celebrate both the legacy of the album and the future that will bring countless more performances of these songs to the stage.

Pylon – Chomp (Indie Exclusive)

In the late 1970’s Athens, Georgia was buzzing with a raw but sophisticated music scene. The turn of the decade began producing new sounds from bands like the B-52’s, R.E.M. and Art-Rock luminaries, Pylon. Before they were a band, Pylon were art-school students at the University of Georgia: invigorated by big ideas about art and creativity. In 1980 the band released its first record, Gyrate and began touring across the country in support of the release. Following the critical acclaim of Gyrate, Pylon went back into the studio. They gleefully pulled their songs apart and put them back together in new shapes, revealing a band of self-proclaimed non-musicians who had transformed gradually but noticeably into real ones. The resulting album was, Chomp. Now, more than three decades later, both studio recordings have been remastered from their original audio tapes and are set for release on New West Records.

Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over the Country Club

Following the success of her 2019 GRAMMY®-nominated album “Norman Fucking Rockwell”, Lana Del Rey will release her highly anticipated, seventh studio album on March 19th, 2021. Chemtrails Over The Country Club features eleven songs, including singles “Let Me Love You Like A Woman” and the title-track “Chemtrails Over The Country Club”.

Madlib – Sound Ancestors

Gil Evans to Miles Davis…. Holger Czukay to the ensemble known as Can….Jean Claude Vannier to Serge Gainsbourg on “Histoire de Melody Nelson”. That’s the only way to explain the specificity of Four Tet and Madlib’s collaboration, in this special album that showcases a two-decade long friendship that has resulted in an album that follows Madlib’s classics like Quasimoto’s “The Unseen”, “Madvillainy” and his “Pinata” and “Bandana” albums with Freddie Gibbs. “A few months ago I completed work on an album with my friend Madlib that we’d been making for the last few years. He is always making loads of music in all sorts of styles and I was listening to some of his new beats and studio sessions when I had the idea that it would be great to hear some of these ideas made into a Madlib solo album. Not made into beats for vocalists to use but instead arranged into tracks that could all flow together in an album designed to be listened to start to finish. I put this concept to him when we were hanging out eating some nice food one day and we decided to work on this together with him sending me tracks, loops, ideas and experiments that I would arrange, edit, manipulate and combine. I was sent hundreds of pieces of music over a couple of years stretch and during that time I put together this album with all the parts that fitted with my vision” – Kieren Hebden aka Four Tet.

Did you make it all the way down here? You still need more tunes?
Check out the recent restocks and additions to our selection here at Backbeat. Link will take you to our eShop.
https://shop.backbeatperth.com/collections/recent-restocks-and-additions

OK, enough typing for me, off to go listen to the latest Noga Erez.

See you soon.