The soundtrack to the movie Big Bad Love, made from Larry Brown's collection of stories is, as it should be, a very Southern affair - more accurately, a thing of the Mississippi hill country, also acting as a very effective ad for the Fat Possum label, since seven of the tracks here come from their artists.
What will attract a lot of people to this disc is the appearance of two new Tom Waits tracks. "Long Way Home" takes him on the kind of blues route that's become so familiar in his work - a kind of enigmatic blues that remains a love song and a promise for the future, putting it in the same realm as "Jayne's Blue Wish," a Waits-ian lullaby with gentle, if sometimes disturbed, dreams for tomorrow, his guitar work cast into relief by a quiet trumpet solo…
Peter Laughner was a singer songwriter from Cleveland like no other. Before his untimely death in 1977, he played in numerous bands, most notably Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu, and also as a solo performer. He wrote for a variety of weekly newspapers and Creem, where he was a contemporary of Lester Bangs. He famously told Jane Scott of the Cleveland Plain Dealer that he wanted to do for Cleveland what “…Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York.” In many ways, Peter did in fact put the Cleveland underground on the map.
C89 is another celebration of the Eighties Indie scene, documenting a golden era when tuneful guitar-based bands made records on shoestring budgets, often issued on small labels with hand-made artwork, with little hope of mainstream exposure.
Dubbed Hotel Last Resort, it’s set for a July 26th due date through [PIAS]. It represents Violent Femmes’ tenth (overall and first since We Can Do Anything from 2016. The forthcoming collection spans a total of 13 songs, most of which feature additional instrumentation from Violent Femmes’ longtime backing band Horn of Dilemma. There are also two covers included — “I’m Not Gonna Cry”, originally by Greek rock super stars Pyx Lax, and a rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”.
In the five years that have elapsed since the release of Alvvays’ second album, Antisocialites, and their long-awaited third, Blue Rev, the Toronto-via-PEI band had to deal with every possible roadblock a band could face: lineup changes, demo thefts, gear-destroying basement floods—and that was before the pandemic.