Two Days Later

The Beatles’ Get Back sessions have been written about to death, so we'll keep it brief. The Beatles gathered on January 2, 1969 at Twickenham Studios with the intention of rehearsing brand new songs for a concert that would be televised live throughout the world. They also agreed to have the entire process filmed for an accompanying documentary.

After two live dates cut for the long-suffering faithful, Fink – comprising singer/songwriter/guitarist Fin Greenall, bassist Guy Whittaker, and drummer Tim Thornton – offer their first new studio material in three years. Hard Believer is, for the most part, a slow burner; one that employs a more varied, albeit moodier set of textures and sounds than its predecessor, 2011's Perfect Darkness. Recorded at Hollywood Sound with producer/engineer Billy Bush (Garbage, Foster the People), the pace here is generally slow – even dirge-like in places – but the timbral palette that illustrates these melancholy songs puts them across in often unexpected ways. The opening title track begins on the blues tip (with Greenall once more revealing his great debt to guitarist Davy Graham). Spare, gently reverbed acoustic guitar and stomp box initiate, but at a tad over a minute in, a multi-tracked vocal chorus subtly enters, followed shortly thereafter by kick drum, skeletal bassline, electric guitar, more echo, piano, and more lathered-on effects to erect a stoned crescendo inside the repetitive-to-the-point-of-hypnosis groove.

Forever on My Mind, the new album of previously unreleased Son House recordings from Easy Eye Sound, the independent label operated by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, is the premiere release from Waterman’s personal cache of ’60s recordings by some of the titans of Delta blues. His collection of quarter-inch tapes — which are being restored to remarkable clarity by Easy Eye Sound — have gone unreleased until now.

Gentleman Jim Reeves was perhaps the biggest male star to emerge from the Nashville sound. His mellow baritone voice and muted velvet orchestration combined to create a sound that echoed around his world and has lasted to this day. Detractors will call the sound country-pop (or plain pop), but none can argue against the large audience that loves this music. Reeves was capable of singing hard country ("Mexican Joe" went to number one in 1953), but he made his greatest impact as a country-pop crooner. From 1955 through 1969, Reeves was consistently in the country and pop charts – an amazing fact in light of his untimely death in an airplane accident in 1964. Not only was he a presence in the American charts, but he became country music's foremost international ambassador and, if anything, was even more popular in Europe and Britain than in his native America.

For years, Led Zeppelin fans complained that there was one missing item in the group's catalog: a good live album. It's not that there weren't live albums to be had. The Song Remains the Same, of course, was a soundtrack of a live performance, but it was a choppy, uneven performance, lacking the majesty of the group at its peak…

With this new release SOMM pays an affectionate tribute to John Joubert who is turns 90 in March 2017. It also adds a veritable gem to the operatic catalogue: the world première of his 2-Act Opera Jane Eyre recorded live during a concert performance at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, Birmingham on 25th October last.