Grift Your Teeth

Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny. That’s the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador, ‘Everyone’s Crushed,’ out May 26. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duo’s 2021 breakthrough, ‘Structure,’Rachel Brown (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease. Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes’ most collaborative record ever, it’s a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music that’s pretty and violent, raw and indelible.

Florida guitar player Willie Lomax has a reverent appreciation for the history of the blues, and it shows on his debut release from his own Big Boss Records. Featuring the Delta rhythms of the great Sam Carr on drums, and solid vocals from James Peterson, Give Me Back My Teeth has a lean, gritty sound that combines Southern juke joint rawness with uptown Chicago blues to produce an album that is solid as bedrock. Highlights include the opener, "Where I've Been," the wise and wistful "Way a Tree Falls," the gutbucket "Razorback," and the impressive 11-minute suite "Blues for Jackie Robinson," which manages to be experimental without being disruptive to the overall tone and feel of the album. Lomax would add Shawn Brown on vocals for his next two albums, and move on to more Memphis soul territory, but this debut shows an impressive writer and player with a clear vision for what contemporary blues can be.

'Feet and Teeth' is the second album of Belgian blues band The Alley Gators. "Alligator feet and alligator teeth are regularly used in South to increase gambling luck. Like the ever-popular rabbit foot, also considered lucky for gamblers, the alligator foot may worn as a key chain charm or carried in a mojo bag along with such natural curios as rattlesnake rattles, badger teeth, bat hearts, nutmegs, buckeye nuts, Lucky Hand roots, five-finger grass, John the Conqueror roots, and lodestones dressed with magnetic sand."

It was worth the wait for Colombian-American songstress Kali Uchis’s first full-length. A romantic collage of artists and sounds she’s encountered along the way—Tyler, The Creator and Bootsy Collins on “After the Storm”, and Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn on the surfy “In My Dreams”—the album draws on Latin pop (“Nuestro Planeta”), hypnotic R&B (“Just a Stranger”), and high-flying psych-rock (“Tomorrow,” with production from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). It’s a sign of Uchis’ artistic vision that she pulled so many creative minds into a single body of work that sounds so distinctly her own.

Frank Zappa - Road Tapes, Venue #2 (2013) {2CD Vaulternative Records VR 2013-1 rec 1973}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 886 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 329 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 272 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1973, 2013 Vaulternative Records / ZFT | VR 2013-2
Rock / Experimental Rock / Avant-Garde / Art Rock / Jazz Rock

Official Release #96. Live recordings from 3 shows in Finlandia Hall, Helsinki Finland - August 23 & 24 1973. One year after the release of Frank Zappa‘s “Road Tapes, Venue #1” the Zappa Family Trust have announced a second volume in this series of “primitive audio documentary attempts to capture the essence of what was highly and improbably and even impossibly out there on the road in some of the worst audio terrain imaginable”.

Remastered, expanded, and pREServed for future generations – this is the latest in a series of archival Residents reissues that will continue throughout 2019 and beyond.