Adolf Hibou
Princess Barely Legal

Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies sees a true classic from the band’s catalog back in print for the first time in a long time. Arguably the first album where the duo truly nailed their patented sound, Ride the Skies saw Lightning Bolt refine the auditory chaos of their self-titled debut into something much more concise and direct, bulking out pieces with more muscular sonics without sacrificing the sheer velocity and wild energy that made their first release so exhilarating.

A few years in the not-so-distant past, a clairvoyant delivered an indelible message to Connan Mockasin. Inferring a project involving his father that had not yet been started, a woman he’d met only by chance told him: “You need to make it your priority, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”.Though Connan and his father, Ade, had always joked that they’d make an album together, it was this extrasensory perception that summoned It’s Just Wind — its name a retort used by Ade’s father “whenever he broke wind and caused a ruckus around him” — into the realm of the real. Ade had himself only recently hovered precariously between realms; suffering a sudden cardiac arrest which left him flatlined for 40 minutes, and then in a coma. “I couldn’t win a raffle if there were two tickets in a plastic bucket” he muses, “so the chances of surviving a coronary ... surviving was good luck.”Match struck against the box by future-seeing eyes, Connan proposed that the next of his yearly artist residencies at Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths festival, in Marfa, Texas, be used to make the album that had been stirring in Ade for 40 years or more; for despite maintaining a lifelong interest in music, playing in various bands throughout the 1960s and 70s, recording sessions, and even making an album with his band The Autumn Stone, which survives only in the form of damaged master tapes — a fate he blithely aligns with the nearly-but-never-quite of The League of Gentleman’s Creme Brulee — an Ade Hosford album had never yet tasted the air.With both label and medical sign-off, Ade left New Zealand on a desert-bound plane, armed with a children’s school exercise book of song ideas (“I wrote ‘POETRY’ on the front so the Americans didn’t see I was writing lyrics”). Aside from Ade’s notes, the album didn’t yet have a definite shape. Travel-weary, knee-deep in first-night margaritas, and on the precipice of going to bed, Connan and his band spontaneously upped instruments and began playing together in the studio they’d set up to start recording the next day. And, in a souplike stupor of which he has little memory (“I had a lot of nasty drugs pumped through me, my doctor at the time said it’d cooked the brain a bit”) Ade joined them, testing out bits of lyrics from his book, getting them wrong by accident, getting them wrong on purpose, cutting, sticking and ad-libbing through the fug, around Connan and Co.’s improvised arrangements, never quite sure of what the hell was going to come out next. When they listened back to what they’d captured on the 8-track cassette the next morning, they found that they had, somehow, committed the majority of an album to tape. “The whole recording was quite a fluke; it was the most natural recording I’ve ever been involved with,” reflects Connan. “It just seemed to be the right thing at the right time... There was a nice magic to it.” Ade concurs: “I got a bit emotional at one point, because the music was rolling right over the top of my head. I was standing facing the engineer and I had keyboards [John Carroll Kirby] one side, Connan [guitar, number two vocals], drummer [Matthew Eccles], bassist [Nicholas Harsant] the other side, and number two guitarist [Rory McCarthy, aka Infinite Bisous] right behind me, sitting on the couch, so I was completely enveloped. The sound roared over the top, and it got me.”After just a couple more days of mixing and tweaking, still in-situ in Marfa, It’s Just Wind materialised: as much one continuous piece of music, operating on its own auto-written dream-logic, as a series of ten discrete songs. It starts with the big, bad tale of ‘The Wolf’ — a twisted, bongwater-and-panpipes spoken-word rehash of the familiar tale over a drum-machine beat, featuring three porky little shits and a rent-demanding lupine landlord. Sandwiched between instrumentals that are sometimes like mist rolling around a mountain-top (‘Edge of Darkness’), sometimes smooth, breezy and just slightly jolty, like the tape has worn thin in places (‘It’s Just Wind’) and sometimes 68-second master strokes of squelchy weirdo-funkery (‘What It Are’) are snippets of mussed-up vocal interjection from Connan (‘Tight Waxing’), and gruff rhythm-and-blues-inflected observations of the seemingly mundane (“Thirty-two leaf / sixty-four pages / seven millimeter ruled”, Ade sings on ‘Stuck’ — a lyric pulled not from inside his notebook, but from its very material reality).Tucked under the ruckus of jam, distortion, and wry surrealism, there’s also a quietly contemplative narrative thread. ‘Te Awanga’ tells of a 6-week journey, undertaken long ago in a metal boat, from a far-off land to a distant land. ‘Marfa’ laments the inevitability of the 9-5, and ‘Round Peg in a Square Hole’ considers the quiet melancholia of not fitting in. “It’s primarily a story about a guy who was born in London, England, and came to New Zealand as a young child ... just a matter of survival basically, a story of some guy surviving in a new land,” Ade surmises. The lines between the jest and the serious, the fictive and the lived, blur, as the plotline of It’s Just Wind bends gently around Ade’s own. Indeed, the cover art — a drawing of a former boss, found by Connan with a stash of other artwork in the roof of Ade’s house — is also plucked from Ade’s past. A quality of bittersweet self-reflection, redolent of Bowie’s Blackstar or Cash’s American IV, pervades, as an old man, from a point of slight detachment, surveys his life like a landscape. Whiskey in hand, Ade looks across life and land both, from a porch, on final track ‘Clifton’. He laughs at it all. At slight remove from his debut album — to be released on the occasion of his 72nd birthday — he laughs at that too. “I’ve been listening to it every day for three years, and I still don’t understand it”.Both a lifetime in the making and utterly impromptu, it means everything and nothing. It is, after all, just wind.-Diva Harris, June 2021

RSD2022.

This is a very interesting album – not least because it’s asking you to expand the concept of what you consider “Americana”; and we’re not just talking about a bit of pop sensibility or some string washes. Combs is a Nashville based singer/songwriter, originally from Dallas Texas, and “Ideal Man” is his fourth studio album. Early comparisons, especially following his 2010 debut E.P. (“Tennessee Time”), likened him to Gene Clark and Mickey Newbury – and it’s easy to hear why when you listen to some of the cuts on this album. Songs like ‘Firestarter’ and album closer ‘You’re Like the Country’ are strong, narrative songs with great lyrical content and simple, tuneful melodies. Elsewhere on this album things get a little less identifiable and you might start to feel like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole!

De 1984 à 1999, LES SHERIFF ont mené tambour battant une carrière riche de quelques centaines de concerts en Europe et au Canada, sorti 9 albums dont 2 lives, et marqué à jamais toute une génération d’aficionados à coups de 1,2… 1,2,3,4 !Ils ont rempli tous les clubs et les Zénith de France, ouvert pour les RAMONES, été les fers de lance du mouvement Rock Alternatif aux côtés de groupes tels que La MANO NEGRA, BERURIER NOIR, Les WAMPAS, PARABELLUM et O.T.H.15 ans après avoir rendu les armes avec le sentiment du devoir accompli, les 9 musiciens passés par le groupe sont remontés sur scène pour un concert mythique devant 7000 personnes en juin 2012.Ils ont alors repris leur chevauchée fantastique depuis 2014, distillant ça et là quelques concerts à l’énergie intacte et toujours fougueuse. Cette renaissance est aussi l’occasion de rééditer un par un l’ensemble de leurs albums après leur avoir fait profiter des dernières techniques de remastering pour booster le son et profiter à nouveau de ces hymnes enivrants.Ce qui devait arriver arriva, un nouvel album voit le jour le 10 décembre 2021, pour le plus grand plaisir des fans. Il contient bien sûr son lot de tubes à chanter sous la douche, de futurs standards et de morceaux déjà cultes.

Los Lobos revient avec des reprises des groupes mythiques de Los Angeles !Le groupe Los Lobos, de Los Angeles, a toujours été inspiré par son environnement et l'endroit où il se trouve.Leur musique est influencée par le rock and roll, le Tex-Mex, la country, le zydeco, le folk, le R&B, le blues, labrown-eyed soul et la musique traditionnelle comme la cumbia, les boleros et les nortenos. Avec Native Sons, legroupe a voulu mettre en valeur toutes ces influences avec sa propre version des chansons de Los Angelesécrites par certains des plus grands auteurs-compositeurs de la ville. Native Sons comprend 13 chansonsd'artistes de Los Angeles bien connus comme Buffalo Springfield, WAR, Jackson Browne et les Beach Boys,ainsi que des morceaux profonds des Jaguars, des Basters et des Premiers. Le titre éponyme est la seulecomposition originale écrite par le groupe.