Monday’s Not Coming

It’s been four years since Zach Saginaw, aka Shigeto, returned home to Michigan from a stint in Brooklyn, NY, and since then, the multi-faceted musician has become a part of the fabric of Detroit’s music scene. While always having a personal approach to his projects, Saginaw’s influences for his third album, The New Monday are more about the community of Detroit than anything else. Named after a weekly DJ event called Monday is the New Monday that Saginaw does at the unassuming Motor City Wine with a group of friends, The New Monday is the result of Saginaw diving into the city’s deep record culture, where there legacy of artist’s of the past help Saginaw embrace his own contributions.

With 21 slabs of pure, joyous funk complete with huge drums, blistering horn charts, pulsing basslines, stacks of wah-wah fuzz guitars, and enough energy and rhythm to rearrange the stratosphere, this delightful set of rare and independent California funk releases from the late '60s and early '70s is as much a nonstop dance party as it is an affirming revelation. It never stops grooving – from the opener, Water Color’s “All Bundled into One,” a release so rare only one copy is known to exist, to the closer, a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” by Mr. Clean & the Soul Inc., this is one powerful document. None of these sides was a national hit, and most didn’t even crack the local airwaves, but it’s not because they lack quality. There is so much to marvel at here, including the above-mentioned tracks as well as Arthur Monday’s thundering and slightly spooky “What Goes Around Comes Around” and the charging horns and percolating guitar of J.G.D. & the New Breed’s “North Richmond Breakaway.” It’s joyous funk as deep as the ocean is blue. You can’t go wrong with this one. – Steve Leggett

Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records – The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be – a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s.

Obscene Extreme 2004 is a 2004 compilation of some of the most brutal grindcore music in existence up to that point. The sound of ruptured spleens was put together by Obscene Productions.

The ever autumnal trio (and sometimes quartet) paint a lovely picture of country sides, bonfires, and melancholy with their tender guitar pop. Collection includes: Suburban Light (2000); The Violet Hour (2003); Strange Geometry (2005); God Save The Clientele (2007).