The Little Book That Still Beats The M

This book collection is perfect for anyone either wanting to begin learning about trading and investing, or add a lot of quality books to their collection quickly on varied subjects and well known authors.

At first listen, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean. As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”

Forty-fifth anniversary box set release from The Velvet Underground & Nico featuring the latest remastering. Set consists of 6 discs includes 29 unreleased tracks in a 92-page hardcover book packaging with a sticker of banana. Japanese edition features the high-fidelity SHM-CD format (compatible with standard CD player). The set includes both stereo and mono versions of the album "The Velvet Underground & Nico" (Disc 1-2), as well as Nico's 1967 solo debut CD "Chelsea Girl" (Disc 3), a studio session at Scepter Studio recorded to acetate, and unreleased recording footage from rehearsal at Andy Warhol's Factory in January 1966 (Disc 4), and a live show from Columbus, Ohio (Disc 5-6).

A hypothetical loomed over Devendra Banhart while he was writing Ma, one of those questions that changes your life no matter how you answer it. “I may not have a child,” he tells Apple Music, “and I thought, maybe I should make a record where I can put in everything I would want to say to them. And while doing that, you kind of realize, well, maybe it’s also everything I wish someone had said to me.” Building on 2013’s Mala and 2016’s Ape in Pink Marble, Ma finds Banhart continuing his evolution from freak-folk poster boy to one of the more subtle stylists in his field, touching on atmospheric bossa nova (“October 12”), string-saturated ballads (“Will I See You Tonight?”), and Velvet Underground-style folk-rock (“My Boyfriend’s in the Band”) in a way that feels playful but sophisticated, naive but self-possessed—the nature boy, housebroken but still alight with beautiful ideas. Amongst the songs are a handful of meditations on the plight of Venezuela, a country where Banhart spent most of his early years, and where much of his family still lives.

In the early '70s, the India Tobacco Company sponsored an annual "All-India Simla Beat Contest." These events sparked compilations of Indian rock bands, Simla Beat 70 and Simla Beat 71, that have been combined into one package on this double-CD reissue. Very, very little Indian rock from this era has been heard in the West, and the sounds are both surprising and, in some ways, disappointing. Surprising in that it's uncanny how much this sounds like the garage bands that could have been playing in any country, although it actually sounds more like bands from Europe and South America that spoke English as a second language than it does like American or British groups. Surprising, also, in that it sounds much more like 1965-1968 rock than it does like early '70s rock, although that's understandable given that it can take years for Western trends make their impact on the other side of the globe.