CIMS RECOMMENDS: KEITH RICHARDS ‘VINTAGE VINOS’ COMPILATION CD

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December 1, 2010 - Recommended , The Record Exchange Blog - by The Record Exchange - No Comments

BUY THIS INDIE EXCLUSIVE CD ONLY AT THE RECORD EXCHANGE!

As we discovered in the pages of his autobiography LIFE, Keith Richards is proud, justifiably so, of his great band. No, not that one. The X-Pensive Winos, the group he formed in 1987 when the Rolling Stones were on hiatus.

The band had an A-list lineup with Steve Jordan and Charlie Drayton sharing duties on drums and bass, Waddy Wachtel – the American Keith Richards – on guitar, Ivan Neville on keys and the Stones’ frequent collaborator Bobby Keyes on saxophone. Sarah Dash, one-time member of Labelle, shared lead vocals with Richards, who played guitar and fronted the band.

Richards’ three albums on which the X-pensive Winos appear are now out of print, but some of their best tracks are available again on the indie store exclusive compilation Vintage Vinos … another way to connect with what makes him so special. — Wall Street Journal

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CIMS RECOMMENDS: ELVIS COSTELLO, ELTON JOHN AND LEON RUSSELL, PAUL MCCARTNEY AND WINGS; BUY AT THE RX!

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November 2, 2010 - Recommended , The Record Exchange Blog - by The Record Exchange - No Comments

Elvis Costello
National Ransom
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In a career that has spanned more than 30 years, Elvis Costello has distinguished himself as one of pop music’s most prolific and versatile musicians. What’s more, in the last decade he’s proven himself to be the ultimate carpetbagger by bringing his bile-spewing lyrics and endless melodicism to the American South and re-making American roots music in his bespectacled, gap-toothed image. His latest work, National Ransom, was produced by T Bone Burnett, and features all members of The Imposters and The Sugarcanes performing a wide variety of new combos with guests Vince Gill, Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller and Leon Russell. The man is a genius … and you need this!

Elton John and Leon Russell
The Union
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Produced by T Bone Burnett, The Union marks the culmination of a mutual musical adoration that began in the late-1960s, ahead of Elton John‘s debut U.S. performance in 1970 at The Troubadour Club in Los Angeles. The album is a collaboration between Elton and Leon Russell, with songs by Elton and Bernie Taupin; by Elton, Bernie and Leon; by Elton and Leon and by Leon alone. The Union was recorded in Los Angeles earlier this year, with guest musicians including Brian Wilson, Booker T, Don Was and Neil Young. Cameron Crowe has filmed the sessions for a documentary, creating too a moment of history as this is the first time that the genesis of Elton’s music has been recorded on film. Elton describes it as a “Seventies record with a modern feel.” Furthermore, it was produced by the ubiquitous T Bone Burnett. What more do you need?

Paul McCartney and Wings
Band on the Run
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Band on the Run should have been a disaster. Two of Wings‘ original members quit in a huff just before its production. The whimsical decision to record in Lagos, Nigeria, became a nightmare when Paul McCartney and company found themselves in a decaying studio, then had many of the project’s demos stolen by armed bandits. Despite these hardships — perhaps because of them — Band on the Run remains the most focused and consistently satisfying record of McCartney’s post-Beatles career. Band on the Run will be available in a variety of formats originating with the single disc digitally remastered, essential 9-track standard edition, a three-disc version (including a DVD), a four-disc deluxe package with a big-ass book of unreleased photos, and (why not) on sweet, sweet double-vinyl complete with hi-res downloads of all the goods. You need this.

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CIMS RECOMMENDS: JIMMY EAT WORLD, BLACK ANGELS, ROBERT PLANT, JAMEY JOHNSON – AVAILABLE NOW AT THE RX!

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October 5, 2010 - The Record Exchange Blog - by The Record Exchange - No Comments

Robert Plant
Band of Joy
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Having won enough awards to keep his mantelpiece groaning for years for his 2007 collaboration with Alison Krauss, Robert Plant resists the temptation to repeat the Americana formula and give us Raising More Sand. Instead he invokes the name of Band of Joy, the psychedelic blues group he originally fronted before the birth of Led Zeppelin over four decades’ earlier, for an album of bounding energy and unexpected eclecticism.

Produced with formidable intensity and an impressive sonic feel by Nashville-based country stalwart Buddy Miller, it offers yet another indication of Plant’s commendably enduring desire to keep moving. Clearly neither advancing age nor years of unabated success have deprived Plant of either his constant appetite for challenge or his ability to deliver in a cogent, credible and thoroughly convincing fashion. – BBC

Jamey Johnson
The Guitar Song
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Anointed as Nashville’s new official outlaw after 2008’s breakthrough album That Lonesome Song, Jamey Johnson, with his motorcycle man demeanor and don’t-mess-with-me baritone, fits neatly into the role. Whatever this admitted partier does in his personal life, like his hero Willie Nelson, Johnson makes great music by being attentive to the rules, customizing time-tested musical structures and lyrical themes so they fit him like a custom leather jacket.

The Guitar Song is an homage to the clichés, craft and gut instinct involved in writing great country songs. It’s a double-disc set that refreshes the genre’s many commonplaces — adultery and alcoholism, Christian faith and familial love, working-class fatalism and nostalgia for “back home” — in 25 beautifully rendered little packages. At its center is the instant classic “That’s Why I Write Songs,” an ode to Johnson’s role models: songsmiths like Whitey Shafer and Bob McDill, who labored in the Music City trenches for decades and, as Johnson sings, “make you laugh or make you cry, might help you make it through a bad goodbye.” That art of expressing sentiments that people can grasp, not reaching either too high or two low, is what makes Johnson, so shaggy on the surface, special. — Los Angeles Times

The Black Angels
Phosphene Dream
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The group’s signature noise – cheap organs, driving rhythms, guitars bathed in enough reverb to soak a blanket – is intact, and there are enough of their usual scowling nuggets (“The Sniper,” “Bad Vibrations”) to satisfy those looking for the same fix. But the Black Angels introduce just enough variation in their still-potent formula to show growth, even as they hold to their own tradition. That makes Phosphene Dream not just compelling, but damn near brilliant. – Austinist

Jimmy Eat World
Invented
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Invented is inventive in the most unmistakably Jimmy Eat World of ways. The emotion behind every song is flawless, the lyrics and structures are varied and original and, as always, it’s difficult to find a fault in anything they do – minus the fact that it sounds like everything else they’ve done in the last 10 years.

Futures (2004), Chase this Light (2007) and their newest effort this year could certainly merge into one album. This, however, is where they succeed every time, as their current attitude to song writing cannot disappoint. — The New Current

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CIMS RECOMMENDS: RYAN BINGHAM, COLOUR REVOLT, DIRTY HEADS, JOHN MELLENCAMP – AVAILABLE AT THE RX!

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September 8, 2010 - Recommended , The Record Exchange Blog - by The Record Exchange - No Comments

Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses
Junky Star
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Bingham wraps his hoarse, well-worn voice – the aural equivalent of Marlboros and Levis 501s – around a collection of barroom folk songs that, musically and thematically, cast back to vintage Dylan and, more specifically, Nebraska-era Springsteen.

With the help of his backing band, the Dead Horses, Bingham spins New Depression-era tales of lucklessness and woe that alternate between stripped-down guitar ballads and full-band rave-ups, some overly literal (“Depression”), others (the record-closing, career-high “All Choked Up Again”) ragged and mournful, but just right. — The Washington Post

Colour Revolt
The Cradle
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While Colour Revolt’s gritty, Southern roots are still prevalent on The Cradle, the propulsive synth/bass line on “Each Works,” and the haunting acoustic melody that carries “Everything Is The Same,” are reflective of how much the band has matured since their collegiate, basement-rock days. — Paste Magazine

The Dirty Heads
Any Port in a Storm
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The Dirty Heads represent a lifestyle, both musically and emotionally. It’s a lifestyle that is felt and adopted by fans of reggae, ska and hip-hop. It’s about good times, summer, fun with your friends and generally the rally cry of youth, which is all about postponing the inevitable responsibilities of adulthood for one more party.

The Dirty Heads pull from a wide range of influences, including vintage reggae, underground hip-hop, skate punk lyrics, and weave them together in a sublime, seamless way to create a sound that is both familiar yet unique unto themselves. Four Huntington Beach dudes with talent, harmonies and great songs who are beyond trends, though cool in their casual ways and ageless in a wisdom that belies their youth.

John Mellencamp
No Better Than This
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If you were one of those people who weren’t real fond of John (then Cougar) Mellencamp in the early ‘80s, you weren’t alone. But hopefully you came to realize that he wasn’t going away no matter how sick you were of “Jack and Diane,” and that he was the real deal: A midwestern farm town boy who was just as passionate about rock ‘n’ roll and acoustic music as he was about the rural way of life, and didn’t care who agreed with him.

Now, three decades later, Mellencamp is still pushing the envelope and doing life on his own terms. Hot on the heels of his ambitious 54-track On The Rural Route 7609, he’s back with No Better Than This, an album of sonically stripped-down material recorded at historically significant locations throughout the South, including Sun Studios in Memphis, the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, and, maybe coolest of all, room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, the very room where blues master Robert Johnson recorded in 1936. The ambient result is undeniable. Produced by the ubiquitous T Bone Burnett, it doesn’t get much more real than this. — American Songwriter

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CIMS RECOMMENDS: TOM JONES, M.I.A. BUY AT RECORD EXCHANGE FOR $9.99!

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August 4, 2010 - Recommended , The Record Exchange Blog - by The Record Exchange - No Comments

Tom Jones
Praise & Blame

“We wanted to go back to basics, go back to the source, it was just me singing live with a rhythm section – no overdubbing, no gimmicks, no complicated horn and string arrangements, just get the song down in an entire take, capture the meaning of the song, its spirituality, its life, and capture that moment, right there. And I think that’s what we’ve done,” says Tom Jones, the veteran singer from Wales, who turns 70 this year and who has just completed Praise and Blame, his follow up to 2008’s acclaimed 24 Hours and quite simply his finest work to date.

It is a truly remarkable record, one that captures the Tom Jones who listened to Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the radio as a child growing up, who thought gospel music was “just like rock’n’roll, every bit as exciting but with deeper lyrics,” the Tom Jones who belted out The Lord’s Prayer as a jubilatory spiritual in school assembly, “because that was the only way I knew how to sing it, it was natural for me.”

This is Tom Jones going back to his roots on an album of gospel, blues, traditional and country songs, wearing his heart on his sleeve, emotionally raw and true. With musicians including steel guitarist BJ Cole, keyboardist Booker T Jones (of Memphis soul legends Booker T and the MGs), Hammond organist Chris Holland and background vocalists Gillian Welch, Alison Pierce, Dave Rawlings and Orin Waters at hand, Tom has quite simply delivered his tour de force. It’s him bearing his soul, singing from the heart, telling it like it is.

BUY THE CD FOR $9.99 HERE

M.I.A.
Maya

Maya Arulpragasam was born in Hounslow, London, England. When she was six months old, her family moved back to their homeland, Sri Lanka. At eight years old, Maya moved back to London, where she and her family were housed as refugees from the civil unrest in their native region. Maya learned proper English at school and slang at home by listening to NWA and Public Enemy on the radio.

In 2000, Maya was encouraged by electro-clash icon Peaches to make music on a Roland MC-505 Groovebox and she pulled lyrics from journals she had written during a four-month trip to the Caribbean island of St. Vincent to craft her first songs. In 2005, she released Arular, and reached the mainstream charts in Europe and the U.K. It was considered as much a political statement as a musical one, as it referenced the Tamil Tigers.

In 2007, Kala was released. Like Arular, it received unanimous international critical praise. It topped multiple “Best of the Year” lists in publications around the world with its deft mixture of politics, social consciousness, and inimitable genre-blending.

On Maya, M.I.A. continues her musical exploration into new territory including rock, dubstep and more. She is not a typical artist and Maya pushes the envelope with controversial sounds, lyrics, and imagery. M.I.A is many things — a visual-artist, musician, revolutionary, and style-icon — and just when you think you have Maya pegged, it will surprise you.