We have a lot of new stuff this time. Let’s start off with the new albums for the bands that we know very well already. Chuck Prophet (ex Green On Red) has a brand new album Temple Beautiful lovingly dedicated to his home town of San Francisco. Heartless Bastards from Cincinnati are also here with a new record. It’s simply called Arrow. Besides his new album One Thought Revealed, Bill Fox also has a cassette tape out with some rare recordings that he made over the years. It’s called Before I Went To Harvard. Tav Falco reissued his legenrady Behind The Magnolia Curtain and The Cramps put together a compilation of their earliest singles. New names this time are all over the map. We have The Riffbrokers, a roots rock/power pop band from Seattle, The Dark Rags from the hometown of rockxs.com, Athens Greece, Blackbox Revalation from Brussels, Belgium, Calibro 35 from Milan, Italy and Janey and The Ravemen from London, England.
Minutemen – There Ain’t Shit on TV Tonight;
The Riffbrokers – Around Too Long;
The Dark Rags – On Your Own (All Alone);
Kevn Kinney – Hurricane;
Heartless Bastards – New Resolution;
Heartless Bastards – Simple Feeling;
Chuck Prophet – Castro Halloween;
Green On Red – Five ‘Til Five;
Blackbox Revelation- Shiver of Joy;
Janey And The Ravemen – I Want You;
The Happy Thoughts – Half Day;
True Sons Of Thunder – Get Away;
Smrts – Dr Jekyll’s Dilemma;
Calibro 35 – New Dehli Deli;
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns – St. Louis Blues;
The Cramps – Twist & Shout;
Bill Fox – Moonlight Staggers On A Lonesome Toe;
Bill Fox – Mary Ellen’s Cemetary Gray.
Today’s podcast is a podcast about another podcast. Radio Free Song Club is one of the most exciting musical websites that I stumbled upon last year. It features a loose collective of mainly New York based singer songwriters that gather together about once a month to put together a mixture of intimately recorded set of songs usually specially written for the show. There are also occasional cover versions and tributes. It’s all absolutely free on their website. The atmosphere in the sessions is breezy and the sound is very competent. If you like my selection of the best performances at the club, go to their site and check out the rest. http://radiofreesongclub.com/
We have several new things this week. Daniel Kroha from Gories has a new solo ep in blues style called The Folk-Blues Stylings. The Sky Drops is a new band at the Little Lighthouse that comes from Delaware. Their new ep Making Mountains is exceptional. Natural Child is another new band that comes from Nashville. We introduce them here. Mark Lanegan’s new album Blues Funeral is just about to come out, so we sample it in this show with one new song. Holly Renee Allen is a folk/rock singer from Virginia with a wonderful voice. She teamed up with Martin Kearns on her new album Red Dirt Soul. Leonard Cohen also pulled out an excellent album called Old Friends. We also have a brand new song by the swam-pop zydeco musician Rosie Ledet.
Kevn Kinney used to be in the band called Drivin ‘N’ Cryin, but now he has a solo careers quite in the past decade. His new album A Good Country Mile is a collaboration with Anton Fier. Terry Adams is not the only remaining original or classic line up member of NRBQ, but the record is still very nice and worth checking out. Legendary Bill Fox from Cleveland has a new record out called One Thought Revealed. We also have reissues for Reatards and Eddy Current Suppression Ring today. New band for today is Slow Animal from New Jersey. This show is dedicated to Etta James.
The Nuns was one of the first punk bands from the San Francisco rock scene. One of the punk pioneers from that era was Jennifer Anderson, better known as Jennifer Miro. This beautiful woman sadly died alone in New York last December and it took several weeks for the news to spread around. She was 54. Today’s show goes to her. We also have one new band today, Happy Thoughts from Indiana. The instrumental band Smrts from Australia have a new record out called Smrts Have Friends and Visit Them At Night, which will be an vinyl only release available in February. Wooden Wand also has a new record called Brairwood, which he recorded with a combo of several experienced musicians from Birmingham, AL. Evan Dando’s hotel room recordings from 1993 are out as a new Lemonheads release called Hotel Sessions.
Rock’n’rollers don’t spare themselfes. Their lives are intense. They pack a lot of action in their lifetime and often leave young. These people inspire us and entertain us. We learn from them too. The past year saw the passing of many great ones: New Orleans vocalist Benny Spellman, original bass player of The Shadows Jet Harris, rock’n’roll promoter from Cleveland Steve Popovic, the saxophonist from the E Street Clarence Clemons, Gerry Stuck-in-the-middle Rafferty, Rundgren’s keyboardist Moogy Klingman, the songwriter Jerry Leiber, Polly up-yours Styrene, the original guitar master Hubert Sumlin, his disciple Gary Moore, drumming wizard Keef Hartley, singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey, John Walker brother and the jazz giant from Zagreb Bosko Petrovic… we remember all of them today with a show dedicated to those that left us last year. And 2012 didn’t start the right way either. She already took Tom Ardolino from NRBQ and one of my favorite writers ever Josef Skvorecky. We will remember them with deepest respect.
The third part of our “Best of 2011” series brings you the best short forms in the past year in the first half of the show. I mean by that eps, singles, mini albums and so on. The second half of the show is all about reissues and albums that were issued last year, but were recorded much earlier. The absolute stand out in that batch last year was in my mind one of the last recordings (if not the last recording) of Rainer Ptacek mere weeks before his death back in 1997. Best short forms and reissues are otherwise lined up in a random free-form order. I did not attempt to chart them.
It’s the end of 2011 and it’s time to assess the damage. It’s the part two of the Top 30 albums of 2011 at the Little Lighthouse. It was a lean year when it comes to really big earth shattering albums, but it was also a year with a lot of good records. The champion for this year is Mikal Cronin and his debut record. The rest of the list goes something like this…
PMS Issue three, edited by Dubravka Juraga and Snezana Zabic, brings you four Chicago poets, Nicolas Garcia, Tasha Marren, Luis Urrea, and Paul Martinez Pompa, and music by local bands Island, Tiny Manatee, The Embraceables, The Pralines, Hannah Frank Trio, The Injured Parties, as well as New York’s own Rebel Diaz (transplants from Chicago).
It’s the end of 2011 and it’s time to assess the damage. I prepared the list of 30 best new albums in this year, also a separate list of best short forms (singles, eps, downloads…) and reissues. We will cover this in our next three shows. We begin today with the best albums, positions from 30 to 16. Top 15 will be presented in our next show. So, start today and find out which one is the best album next week.