New Releases for 12th May

Friday 12th May 2023

This weeks releases... Click on the covers for more info...

Available to buy on line now, will be available instore on Friday 12th May.

Butthole Surfers - Weird Revolution

First repress since the original in 2001. Copies on Discogs sell for well over £100. Weird Revolution is the eighth studio album by the band, released on Surfdog Records and Hollywood Records. It is in large part a rerecorded version of an earlier album, tentatively entitled After the Astronaut, that was abandoned in 1998. The Surfers teeter on the brink of conventional rock values. However, throughout the album, singer Gibby Haynes drives the proverbial truck into the ditch with rambling psychotic speeches.

Ritual Howls - Virtue Falters

The Detroit trio's fifth album is eight tracks of what we've come to expect from the always in-form group – a cinematic blend of twangy industrial rock, metal, noise, baritone vocals, and macabre lyrics – but with an immediate urgency not yet seen from the band on past albums. It's their most focused album to date. Detroit based 3-piece combining a blend of industrial, deathrock, drum machines, gothic elements, soundtrack-scapes, spaghetti western guitars and a thick, rumbling bass tone.

Chat Pile - Tenkiller (Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller.

While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones including arena country music.

The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” 

They Watch Us From The Moon - Chronicle: Act 1, The Ascension

Hailing from Kansas, They Watch Us From The Moon have landed to present their first magnum opus Cosmic Chronicles: Act 1, The Ascension A band with riffs as heavy as Osmium and melodic lead guitar lines (think Gilmour meets Buck Dharma) as strong as spider's silk, it’s a wonder they managed to escape the atmosphere. Perhaps it’s because the sublime vocals of TWUFTM's twin 'Space Angels' Luna Nemesis and Nova 10101001 guide you beautifully through the clouds. In fact their vocals are a total highlight throughout and lift this record far above any genre pigeonholing. TWUFTM are also a band that has a concept behind the groove. Sci-fi space opera, a love for Bowie and Queen, brought to the fore visually, in their mashing of comic book narratives and Funkadelic style alter ego’s. TWUFTM are truly an immersive experience on every level. As to the music … the colossal weight of riffs on this first-contact missive are made so gloriously enjoyable by memorable hooks, honed repetition and and an agile rhythm section that can make each one of their (sometimes 10 minute) stargaze rides feel like an epic odyssey. Fellow space travellers Hawkwind and Pink Floyd, and even Spacemen 3, have been in similar orbits before, but never this heavy. Now, alongside a trajectory charted by Monster Magnet and maintained by The Sword, Ufomammut, White Hills and Witch Mountain .... TWUFTM don't just breathe new life into cosmic tones, they take it to a different level

Roxy Gordon - Crazy Horse Never Died

For fans of Terry Allen, Leonard Cohen, Willie Dunn, John Trudell, Buffy St. Marie and Townes Van Zandt.

The Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, visual artist, American Indian Movement activist, and musician Roxy  Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945–2000) was above all a storyteller, known primarily as a writer of inimitable style and unvarnished candor, whose wide-ranging work encompassed poetry, short fiction, essays, memoirs, journalism, and criticism. Over the course of his career he recorded six albums, wrote six books, and published hundreds of shorter texts in outlets ranging from Rolling Stone and The Village Voice to the Coleman Chronicle and Democrat-Voice, in addition to founding and operating, with his wife Judy Gordon, Wowapi Press and the underground country music journal Picking Up the Tempo. Along the way he cultivated close friendships with fellow Texan songwriters such as Lubbockites Terry Allen, Butch Hancock, and Tommy X. Hancock, as well as Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, and, most famously, Townes Van Zandt, whom he called his brother. Although his work covered a vast array of topics exploring strata personal, local, global, and cosmic alike, Gordon’s primary subject as a writer, musician, and visual artist was always American Indian culture, specifically the ways it collided and coexisted with European American culture in the South and West and within the context of his own life and braided identity.

The ten songs on Crazy Horse Never Died, his first officially released and distributed album, were recorded in Dallas in 1988. “Songs” is perhaps an imprecise taxonomy for what Roxy captured on this and his other albums, all of which remain out of print or were released in instantly obscure limited editions of homebrew cassettes and CD-R’s. (Paradise of Bachelors plans to reissue remastered, expanded editions of his catalog; Crazy Horse is the first.) He only occasionally attempted to sing, and his musical recordings are primarily corollaries of, and vehicles for, his poems. His sharp West Texan drawl, tinged by formative years of reservation living in Montana and unmistakable once you hear it high, lonesome, flat, and cold-blooded as a bare rusty blade instead patiently unfurls in skewed sheets of anecdotal verse and discursive narrative rants. His songs are essentially recitations over backing tracks of fingerpicked guitars, rubbery washtub bass, and buzzing, oscillating keyboards. On the stark yellow and red jacket of Crazy Horse, which he designed himself, Gordon describes these recordings as innately ambivalent in terms of form, content, and identity: These are poems and/or songs about the American West, white and Indian. 

Crazy Horse Never Died comprises songs that span the personal and political arcs of his writing practice and the poles of his native and white ancestries. His introduction to the almost-title track in the strikingly illustrated poetry chapbook supplement to the album (included in the LP edition) draws explicit parallels between the oppression and displacement of Palestinians by Zionists and the similar treatment of Native Americans by Europeans, justifying the historical necessity of resistance to racist imperialism through terrorism.

House Of All - HOUSE Of ALL

These days everyone loves The Fall, but rarely has a band's rise to cult status been quite as lengthy, unpredictable and unprecedented as that of those lovable Mancunian misfits who went through more line-up comings and goings than anyone sane would bother to count. Martin Bramah, The Fall's singer until Mark E Smith's lesser guitar skills caused them to swap places, was, per Daryl Easlea, "possibly the last true equal to Smith in the group" and likewise the longest survivor of the original line-up. Yet while The Fall was later famous for their legendary productivity, Bramah often went great spans of time between releases, releasing fewer albums in thirty-five years (under any guise) than he has in the last seven with Blue Orchids - who already have a fantastic new album in the can. What caused HOUSE Of ALL to come together is something of a mystery. Bramah has joined forces with four other mighty Fall alumni: Steve Hanley, The Fall's longest-serving bassist, as well as his brother Paul Hanley, who drummed on what may be the best run of Fall records, from "Grotesque" to "Bend Sinister". The three have also played together as Factory Star, for a brief period. Joining them are two surprise members - drummer Simon Wolstencroft, who joined the Fall around the time Paul left, and more surprisingly, guitarist Pete Greenway, The Fall's longserving and final guitarist who has, to our knowledge, never played with the other four before. And the album? Recorded in a burst of intense creativity, we won't tempt to propagandise you, the album speaks or itself, but it wouldn't be a false boast to say that it stands with much of the best Fall or Blue Orchids music, displaying an energy and psychic impulse all its own, each member playing as sharply and with as much drive as ever, around manic motorik grooves and a shocking lack of 'compromise'. It's an album of depth which demands multiple visits to uncover its many dimensions, yet it still satisfies upon first listen.

This record is not on Spotify, take a listen here: 

Now take a listen to the playlist