Absolutely Alternate

The ultimate compendium of a half century of the best music, now revised and updated. 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die is a highly readable list of the best, the most important, and the most influential pop albums from 1955 through today. Carefully selected by a team of international critics and some of the best-known music reviewers and commentators, each album is a groundbreaking work seminal to the understanding and appreciation of music from the 1950s to the present. Included with each entry are production details and credits as well as reproductions of original album cover art. Perhaps most important of all, each album featured comes with an authoritative description of its importance and influence.

After a notable two-year absence from the new-release racks, The Lucksmiths return with a mighty "don't argue" in the shape of 'Spring a Leak', their exhaustive new collection of lost treasures. No mere greatest hits collection, 'Spring a Leak' compiles over a decade's worth of great recordings that have never made it onto a Lucksmiths full-length: b-sides, alternative versions (from 7" singles and demos), songs recorded especially for compilations, live, radio and TV sessions, cover versions, remixes, and various previously unreleased ephemera.

Curated by frontman Pete Burns and drummer/keyboard player Steve Coy, the set comprises eight albums, three of which (Fan The Flame (Part 1), Nukleopatra and Fragile) receive their UK debut release via this set (with new cover art).The first four albums issued in the 1980s all feature here as two-CD sets, except 1985’s Stock Aitken Waterman produced Youthquake (which spawned the mega-hit You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) – which is a three-disc package. So this box delivers the original album track listings for each long-player, plus plenty of rarities, live recordings, alternate mixes and instrumental versions. In fact, it also contains 12 previously unreleased remixes and tracks from the band’s vaults. 1987 greatest hits album Rip It Up is also present and correct (as a two-CD set).

The 14-track album, 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, was recorded LIVE at the CMA Theater located inside the historic Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum located in Nashville, TN in May 2016. Mixed by GRAMMY Award-winning Ted Hutt and Ryan Mall. "Fifty years is a long time for a place like Nashville, Tennessee. Time rolls on slowly around here like flotsam and jetsam in the muddy Cumberland River. But certain things have accelerated the pace of our city. And certain people have sent the hands of the clock spinning. Bob Dylan is the greatest of these time-bending, paradigm-shifting Nashville cats," says Ketch Secor, the primary vocalist of the Old Crow Medicine Show. "By deciding to record his newly found rock n' roll voice in 1966 Nashville, Bob swung the gates of Country music wide open; so wide, in fact, that 50 years later there was still enough of a crack left for Old Crow Medicine Show to sneak its banjos and fiddles through the gates with string band swagger."

Originally released on 12th March 1993, the album hit the No.1 spot in both the UK and Ireland and sold over 6 million copies worldwide. The four disc box set contains the album on the first CD and bonus material spread over three further discs. Of course all of those previous bonus tracks are included, but so too are unreleased early demos, a live performance from 31 July 1994 at the Féile Festival in Ireland and a series of radio sessions from 1992-1993. The box includes a poster and four postcards.

This 5xCD box set from Cherry Red offers a compelling look at shoegaze's prime era. Still in a Dream takes a wide trawl approach to its genre, which has upsides and downsides. As with Rhino’s goth box A Life Less Lived, shoegaze is generously interpreted to include antecedents and formative influences, which bulks up the quality.

ROYAL REPUBLIC don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures’ – only pleasures, free of compromise. Since meeting at the Malmö Academy Of Music in 2007, they’ve become Sweden’s most addictive rock’n’roll export; mixing riffy guitars, king-sized tunes and jet-packed beats with their own eclectic tastes and inimitable joie de vivre. Plus the kind of snazzy suits most of their contemporaries wish they had the balls to pull off. They’ll rock the shit out of you and make you dance like you’ve just won the lottery.

Art is often informed by the life experiences of the artist, and what happens to them can impact their work in any number of ways. In November 2018, the singer and songwriter Joe Henry was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and as he wrestled with the prospect of mortality and the physically and emotionally taxing process of treatment, he practiced his own form of self-care – he wrote songs, a bunch of them, and then set about recording them at the home studio of a friend and collaborator, recording engineer S. Husky Höskulds. The product of these sessions, 2019's The Gospel According to Water, in many respects sounds like an ordinary Joe Henry album, with his rich voice and smartly crafted lyrics front and center, but the feel is decidedly different.