Over the past year, the Levellers have reissued most of their albums as lavish coloured vinyl editions. There’s now some fantastic news for those people who’ve thought about investing in a set but have never taken the plunge…
Tag Archives: box set
The Fall: Set of Ten #2 coming soon from Cog Sinister
Following their 2018 box set of archive live recordings, Cog Sinister are getting ready to release ‘Set of Ten #2’, a second box of Fall related live recordings, this time dating from between 1984-2014.
THE FALL – The Fall Sound Archives Vol 3 – 1982
Many albums get tagged with the word “seminal”, but few are more deserving of that than The Fall’s ‘Hex Enduction Hour’. Spearheading the beginning of a very prolific period for the band, ‘Hex’ is more than an album – it’s an art project. Given its subsequent influence upon on experimental underbelly of rock, punk and indie music, it’s fitting that it would eventually provide the heart of a great box set.
The third edition of Cherry Red’s Fall Sound Archives reissue series, ‘1982’ does exactly what it says on the tin. It brings together two studio albums (‘Hex Enduction Hour’ and ‘Room To Live’), various Peel Sessions and a slew of live recordings (a vastly expanded edition of ‘In A Hole’ and a harder to find live recording sourced from an Australian gig).
Zappa: Mammoth ‘Hot Rats’ box set to be released in December
There’s some very special news for Frank Zappa fans. The Zappa family will release ‘The Hot Rats Sessions’ on December 20th.
The lavish 6CD set is said to contain every note recorded during the sessions of the classic 1969 LP and will contain an abundance of rare material.
BLACKTHORNE – We Won’t Be Forgotten: The Blackthorne Anthology
Supergroups rarely last a long time. The combination of various egos usually leads to burnout pretty quickly. In the case of Blackthorne (featuring Graham Bonnet along with members of Quiet Riot, House of Lords and Skull), there wasn’t really anything you’d call genuine longevity, but their course ran a little longer than most. Formed in 1991, they released their debut ‘Afterlife’ in 1993 which led to some success in Japan. Work on a second album was undertaken in the mid-90s, but the band called it a day before the record was ready for release. The tapes remained unreleased until HNE Recordings unearthed them as part of their extensive (and excellent) Graham Bonnet reissue campaign. It’s a shame Blackthorne’s proposed second album couldn’t be heard in 1995, as at least half of it was an improvement over their first release.
Having already released ‘Afterlife’ with a handful of bonus tracks and finally gettiing ‘Blackthorne II: Don’t Kill The Thrill’ out to the fans in 2016, you’d expect that Cherry Red/HNE Recordings would have nothing more to give from Blackthorne’s all too short career, but this compilation (released in October 2019) actually adds a lot more to the band’s recorded legacy. Not so much a career overview with a few unreleased trinkets, this set is actually a vault of demos and alternate takes, peppered with a few album cuts to give a fairer overview of their short life span. Presented among the 44 tracks in this set are 30 unreleased cuts, a couple of which go right back to the band’s origins when the rhythm section featured White Lion men James Lomenzo and Greg D’Angelo. In other words, there’s a huge amount for fans to get their ears around.