Tokugawa Onna Keibatsu Shi The Joy of Torture (1968)

Manchester’s The Slow Readers Club return with their fourth album, The Joy Of The Return. Opening to an energetic blend of driving drums and infectious guitar lines, the opening track builds through evocative verses and anthemic choruses, imbued with their idiosyncratic brand of insightful and confronting lyricism and set against relentlessly danceable and energy-provoking instrumentation. “‘All I Hear’ is about a lack of agency and an inability to affect change. That there’s something happening, and you have no choice but to go along with it,” explains singer Aaron Starkie.

The Sound of Silence is a 1968 studio album by Carmen McRae, produced by Joel Dorn. Carmen McRae was at her absolute peak when signed to Atlantic Records in the sixties. Every song is tremendous in this classic set featuring the magical voice of Carmen McRae in rich and powerful sublime form with glorious tones, easily making her one of the best of the greatest ever while earning that "Singer's Singer" title.

Little Boy Blues started as a mid-'60s garage rock band leaning toward Rolling Stones-ish blues rock, with a lesser degree of folk-rock. By the time their sole album came out in 1968, however, they were very much into period psychedelic heavy rock, with more of a soul color to some of the songs and the arrangements than the average such band. Comprised entirely of original material (from Little Boy Blue Ray Levin), In the Woodland of Weir is of fair but somewhat anonymous quality, stewing together psychedelic-influenced wordplay, blue-eyed soul, and fuzz guitar-and-organ-drenched harder rocking passages.

Exciting accounts of eight anthems spanning nearly two hundred years, with a welcome emphasis firmly on recent works.