The Rivalry of Renegade X

X: The Godless Void and Other Stories appeared at a timely point in …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's career. It arrived six years after the release of 2014's IX, during which time Conrad Keely returned from Cambodia to the band's home base of Austin, Texas, and also coincided with their 25th anniversary. It makes sense, then, that their tenth album finds them taking stock. As …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead explore how people become more themselves over time while everything else changes, they deliver their most emotionally direct music in quite a while. Their need to follow their hearts – even if they get a little broken along the way – has dominated their music since Source Tags & Codes, and the tension between cathartic freedom and poignancy is as powerful on X: The Godless Void and Other Stories as it was on that landmark album.

In 1968, an ad from Frank Zappa in the L.A. Free Press read: “The Mothers of Invention cordially invite you to join them on Tuesday, July 23, 1968 when they will be taking over the Whisky a Go Go for 5 full hours of unprecedented merriment, which will be secretly recorded for an upcoming record album. Dress optional. Starting sometime in the evening. R.S.V.D.T.” That album ultimately ended up remaining mostly unheard, until now. The live collection Whisky a Go Go, 1968 is set to finally be released June 21st, 2024, via Zappa Records/UMe.

In 1968, an ad from Frank Zappa in the L.A. Free Press read: “The Mothers of Invention cordially invite you to join them on Tuesday, July 23, 1968 when they will be taking over the Whisky a Go Go for 5 full hours of unprecedented merriment, which will be secretly recorded for an upcoming record album. Dress optional. Starting sometime in the evening. R.S.V.D.T.” That album ultimately ended up remaining mostly unheard, until now. The live collection Whisky a Go Go, 1968 is set to finally be released June 21st, 2024, via Zappa Records/UMe.

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.

The Art of Noise‘s 1987 album In No Sense? Nonsense! is reissued as a two-CD deluxe edition in November 2018. Gary Lagan had left after In Visible Silence leaving Anne Dudley and J.J. Jeczalik to continue as a duo. Dudley recalls, “At that time, we were meeting new people, doing adverts and films and things. There was lots of new input. These adverts generated other new tracks. They would evolve and we’d agree they were good ideas. And we’d ask each other what would happen if we did this, this and this? So that kept everything evolving.” The reissue features newly-remastered audio including bonus seven-inch and 12-inch mixes including collaborations with Paul McCartney (the Art of Noise ‘Spies Like Us’ remix) and Duane Eddy (‘Spies’). Additionally, there are 22 unreleased recordings from the sessions, taken from the original master tapes.

A surprising fact from the musicological realm is that Haydn wrote about the same number of operas as Mozart–though it's true that some of them were written for the marionette theater at Esterhaza, rather than the opera house. In other words, old "Gius[eppe] Haydn"–as the title page of this opera refers to him–was a master. Better known to some by its alternate title, L'anima del filosofo, Haydn's Orfeo ed Euridice was written in 1791 for the King's Theater, Haymarket, during the composer's first English sojourn, but went unperformed there or anywhere else until 1950. The libretto, by Carlo Francesco Badini, is based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, with its decidedly unhappy ending to the story (Euridice dies a second time, Orpheus is poisoned, and the Bacchantes perish in a storm).

Imelda de'Lambertazzi (1830) was written just before Donizetti's first great international success, Anna Bolena, and it remains one of his many operas that has never made it into the repertoire. In his illuminating program notes, Jeremy Commons argues that Imelda was probably Donizetti's most forward-looking, even avant-garde opera; the composer was determined to create music that matched the demands of the drama, and therefore ignored many of the operatic conventions audiences had come to expect. It's no surprise, then, that it was badly received, and has rarely been revived.

In 1968, an ad from Frank Zappa in the L.A. Free Press read: “The Mothers of Invention cordially invite you to join them on Tuesday, July 23, 1968 when they will be taking over the Whisky a Go Go for 5 full hours of unprecedented merriment, which will be secretly recorded for an upcoming record album. Dress optional. Starting sometime in the evening. R.S.V.D.T.” That album ultimately ended up remaining mostly unheard, until now. The live collection Whisky a Go Go, 1968 is set to finally be released June 21st, 2024, via Zappa Records/UMe.