Joy Press

Following the end of her marriage to longtime collaborator and guitarist Darrel Higham in 2015, Irish vocalist Imelda May returns with her fifth studio album, 2017's dark-hued Life. Love. Flesh. Blood. Produced by acclaimed roots icon T-Bone Burnett, Life. Love. Flesh. Blood finds May transforming both her sound and image with a suitably haunting and soulful set of songs rife with heartache. Gone are her rockabilly-tinged grooves (and trademark pompadour), replaced with a ballad-heavy, reverb-soaked aesthetic and dark brown Chrissie Hynde-style shag, all of which befits her post-divorce attitude of mourn and move on. If her earlier albums matched '50s rock bounce with '80s new wave attitude, then Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is pure '60s songcraft, a Roy Orbison-esque combination of dusky Americana and vintage British soul.

Raging Slab's first major-label album is pretty interesting in retrospect, in that it's both of its time and very clearly a harbinger of the future – which of course is all the more bemusing in that the band was so clearly inspired by the past more than anything else. The quintet's obsession with '70s rock trudge and stomp – perfectly evident with song titles like "Shiny Mama," "Get off My Jollies," and "San Loco" – pretty soon would get full validation in the grunge explosion and even the nü-metal fallout later. The clipped blasts of feedback on the verses of lead single "Don't Dog Me" aren't that far removed from what Ross Robinson would oversee in later years, while some of the massed harmonies at points – "Geronimo" is a great example – easily foreshadow Alice in Chains' take on it.

In April 1979, the band began recording their debut album, Unknown Pleasures, at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. Producer Martin Hannett contributed significantly to the final sound. The band initially disliked the "spacious, atmospheric sound" of the album, which did not reflect their more aggressive live sound. Hook said in 2006, "It definitely didn't turn out sounding the way I wanted it…. But now I can see that Martin did a good job on it…. There's no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound." The album cover was designed by Peter Saville, who would go on to provide artwork for future Joy Division releases. Unknown Pleasures was released in June and sold through its initial pressing of 10,000 copies. Tony Wilson said that the relative success of the album turned the indie label into a true business and a "revolutionary force" that operated outside of the major record label system. Reviewing the album for Melody Maker, writer Jon Savage called Unknown Pleasures an "opaque manifesto" and declared "[leaving] the twentieth century is difficult; most people prefer to go back and nostalgize, Oh boy. Joy Division at least set a course in the present with contrails for the future—perhaps you can’t ask for much more. Indeed, Unknown Pleasures may very well be one of the best, white, English, debut LPs of the year". Wikipedia.