AIMS Music
“Whoosh!” sees Deep Purple for the third time joining forces with producer Bob Ezrin, who invited the band to Nashville to write and record new songs. Together they created the most versatile album in their collaboration.
Deep Purple “stretched out in all directions” without any limitation, letting their creativity go. “Deep Purple is putting the Deep back into Purple” was the half-joking motto in the studio after the first songs made it clear that Ezrin and Purple were on their path to creating an album pushing the boundaries of time, while voicing their resentment about the current situation of the world and addressing all generations.
In recent years, Deep Purple has progressively moved into new areas, piquing the interest of fans who were not born when the mighty Purple machine ruled the music world. Their holy grail of “In Rock” (1970), “Machine Head” (1972) and “Made In Japan” (1973) catapulted Deep Purple to the top in concert grosses and album sales around the world, with tracks such as “Smoke On The Water” ascending them to mega-status.
The band’s 20th studio album “inFinite” has become one of their most successful albums ever, braking chart records accumulated by the hard rock legends over an impressive 50-year history.
Waking Hours, by Photay (aka Evan Shornstein), is a meditation on time and our obsessive need to actively fill each moment. The NYC native's search for calm is at the album's very core; while he admits it was therapeutic to create, it's not to be mistaken for a healing excursion. Largely electronic, frequents on the verge pop; extensively features Evan's own vocals. Sonically intimate and inviting, it suggests Photay is perhaps at his best when blurring genre lines.
Legendary Greek symphonic death metal outfit SEPTICFLESH deliver unto us the long-awaited 'Infernus Sinfonica MMXIX,' a true milestone in the history of extreme metal. Captured at the Metropolitan Theatre in Mexico City in front of a sold out audience of 3200 metal maniacs, this unique live album/concert recording captures the brutality and bombast of the band playing in tandem with the Symphony Experience Orchestra - led by award-winning Maestro Gerardo Urbán Y Fernández - and the National University Of Mexico Children’s and Youth Choir (over 130 musicians total).
Joining them for this one-of-a-kind concert experience is longtime collaborator, clean vocalist, and co-founder Sotiris Vayenas in what marks his first ever North American appearance with the band. In a white-hot set spanning their four critically-acclaimed recent albums – ‘Communion (2008),’ ‘The Great Mass (2011),’ ‘Titan (2014),’ & ‘Codex Omega (2017)’ - the trailblazing quartet unleash their full powers for their first-ever live album recording. 'Infernus Sinfonica MMXIX' is at once impressive, monumental, stunning and arguably the crown-jewel in their already impressive career to date.
CD Two pocket wallet with lyric and photo book
Barely a year after the release of their acclaimed debut album 'Dogrel' (which charted Top 10 in the UK, earned a Mercury Prize nomination, Fallon performance, and #1 Album of the Year positions for BBC 6Music and Rough Trade), Fontaines DC have returned with an intensely confident, patient, and complex sophomore album. 'A Hero's Death' arrives battered and bruised, albeit beautiful - a heady and philosophical take on the modern world, and its great uncertainty.
2020 release from the indie pop duo. The Naked and Famous' album reasserts the group as one of modern indie-pop's most exciting sonic trailblazers, taking them to emotionally inspired depths, while maintaining the fresh effervescence that has led to over 600 million collective streams to date. While they have sonically mastered the art of dreamy, hook-laden synth-pop, The Naked and Famous have stuck to their guns as far as intimate storytelling. Recover is largely an autobiographical record rooted in a powerful sentiment of survival, and of the very human process of self-preservation - of saving, choosing and celebrating oneself in a world constantly trying to put us down.
2020 release. Portugal's Gaerea challenges the archetype of black metal, coloring outside of the genre's lines with melancholy texture and deep emotion. Limbo devours the listener with misanthropic catharsis and cinematic agony, delivering palpable emotion for 52 uninterrupted minutes. Prepare to lose yourself in the nihilistic abyss with this devastating offering.
Queens-based songwriter Matt Longo (aka Thin Lear) has always been drawn to the stories of forgotten eccentrics but never haunted by their subjects. And yet, upon the reading of 1920's occultist Netta Fornario, and her misunderstood demise on a tiny island off of Scotland, he unearthed the inspiration for a surreal and ethereal collection of songs, Wooden Cave. Pulling influence from the insular world of Astral Weeks, the melodic adventurousness of Harry Nilsson, and the eclecticism of Shuggie Otis, Thin Lear creates songs existing on a sonic and lyrical island of their own. The result is eleven tracks sprawling from ornate, warm ballads, to psychedelically-tinged folk, to propulsive grooves, brimming with melody and heart. Wooden Cave, written for outsiders like Netta, radiates with a sonic glow that harkens back to 70's-era studio obsessives, familiar and surprising in equal measure, like a face from a dream.
Chicago bred trio The Lawrence Arms will release Skeleton Coast, their first album in six years, on July 17.
Skeleton Coast was recorded 30 miles east of El Paso, TX at Sonic Ranch Studios with longtime producer Matt Allison. It was kind of like album camp in the sense that we were in this very remote setting for two weeks and really focusing on making the record. That was a very different experience for us because we’ve always made our records in Chicago which is home and all the things about home are in the way,” says vocalist and guitarist Chris McCaughan.
The album contains the elements of the band’s sound that fans have come to love for the past two decades but recontextualizes them in a way that somehow sounds perfectly aligned with this strange time in our collective history. Although it was written and recorded before the Coronavirus upended the world, the band’s seventh studio album sounds eerily prescient as it imagines an apocalyptic future where coyotes croon and wolf packs roam free. “For a band who has been around as long as us, this is about as urgent of a record as we could make,” vocalist and bassist Brendan Kelly explains. “It may be kind of dark but it’s really about searching for light in the darkness and finding it, as small as those moments may seem. That’s sort of where we’re at: Collecting the scraps of things that could make for a bearable existence in dark times.”
With a legendary career spanning nearly five decades, KANSAS has firmly established itself as one of America’s iconic classic rock bands. This "garage band" from Topeka released their debut album in 1974 after being discovered by Wally Gold, who worked for Don Kirshner, and have gone on to sell more than 30 million albums worldwide. The band is currently comprised of original drummer Phil Ehart, bassist/vocalist Billy Greer, vocalist/keyboardist Ronnie Platt, violinist/guitarist David Ragsdale, keyboardist/vocalist Tom Brislin, guitarist Zak Rizvi, and original guitarist Richard Williams. With no signs of slowing down, KANSAS continues to perform in front of large and enthusiastic audiences around the world.The summer of 2020 marks the release of “The Absence of Presence,” KANSAS’s sixteenth studio album. The wide-ranging progressive rock album, released by InsideOut Music, follows-up 2016’s “The Prelude Implicit,” which debuted at #14 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart.
After a legendary career as the enigmatic frontman for Pulp, and a successful run of solo albums and collaborations, Jarvis Cocker debuts his first new full length album since 2009 with musical project JARV IS' JARV IS... an ongoing live experience because life is an ongoing live experience. THIS IS NOT A LIVE ALBUM'it's an ALIVE ALBUM. Thanks for listening.
Arca is one of the world's most transformative musical talents. Since breaking through with her 2012 EPs Stretch 1 and Stretch 2, she's created an unprecedented body of work drawing from club music, experimental noise, and the ballad tradition of her native Venezuela, while reaching beyond music to encompass performance, visual art, and technology. As a collaborator with Björk, Kanye West, and FKA twigs, she's stretched contemporary music's sonic boundaries and helped set the sound of her era. As a Latinx nonbinary trans woman, she's redefined the role of the diva for a new generation. Her latest work is KiCk i, the first in a series of upcoming works, each with it's own sonic theme. For the first installment, KiCk i, Arca pursues pleasure, dignity, and dance floor liberation by refracting club music, reggaetón, and pop through her radical vision.
Pop on Floor It!!!, the new and second full-length effort from the Texas Gentlemen, and prepare your eardrums to be hit with everything from woozy, brass-fueled Dixieland-style jazz (“Veal Cutlass”), to slinky, chicken-scratch country funk (“Bare Maximum”) to lushly orchestrated pop-soul balladry (“Ain’t Nothin’ New”)—and that’s all in just the first 10 minutes of play time.
While the Gentlemen’s sound is clearly steeped in the classic roots, rock and pop music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s a dreamy (the lilting “Sing Me to Sleep”), spacey (“Skyway Streetcar”) and occasionally progressive (“Dark at the End of the Tunnel”) element to what they do that seems to detach the music from belonging to any particular place and time. Add in elements of funk, soul, country, r&b, southern rock, gospel and essentially any other style that catches their musically omnivorous ears; an expansive and detailed approach to arrangement that sees the songs adorned with all manner of horns, strings and heavenly background vocals (“Hard Road”) and you have a collection of tunes that is more than just a mere album. Rather, Floor It!!! is a rich and righteous ride.
Gaslighter is the brilliant 2020 album from The Chicks, and is the fifth studio album to be released by the band. It is The Chick's first new album since 2006's Taking The Long Way, which won five Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. Gaslighter is produced by Jack Antonoff with The Chicks. Superstars, renegades, innovators, heroes, villains, and moms, The Chicks have grown from a band into a cultural phenomenon. Since the release of their debut album, Wide Open Spaces in 1998, The Chicks' music has stirred emotions in fans across the world, making them one of the biggest and most influential bands of our time.
2020 release. Love Letter is the legendary saxophonist Jimmy Heath's stunningly elegant last testament, a take on seminal ballads. Includes songs written by Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Dorham in addition to original material. Partially recorded in New York in the days preceding his 93rd birthday, Jimmy presided over a brilliant cast of colleagues and friends. The result is pure Heath: polished, inventive, candid, beautiful. Guest artists include Wynton Marsalis, Gregory Porter, and more.
Lianne La Havas's self-titled, third album spans the arc of a relationship. "What plays a big role in the album is the idea of the life cycle of plants and nature—equating this journey with a seasonal thing that blooms, thrives, goes away, and comes back even stronger," she says. Its musical references are as varied as Milton Nascimento, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Al Green, and Destiny’s Child. In keeping with the album's intimate feel, everyone who contributed is a trusted collaborator, including longtime songwriting ally Matt Hales, co-producer Beni Giles, and guest co-producer Mura Masa.
2020 release. Unfollow the Rules is Rufus Wainwright's ninth of original material, his first since Out of the Game (2012), and his first with BMG. The album was produced by Mitchell Froom, and other contributors include Matt Chamberlain, Jim Keltner, and Blake Mills. Includes "Trouble in Paradise", "Damsel in Distress", "Peaceful Afternoon", and "Alone Time". There's still a sense of mischief in Wainwright's songs, but there's also abundant passion, honesty and a kind of fearlessness pervading this album. He pushes the boundaries of pop with these tracks, which were mostly recorded in single takes, and his vocals are at their soaring, sublime best.
Digitally remastered and expanded edition of this 2017 album by the Australian metal band. Features three bonus tracks.
2020 release. Pianist Gerald Clayton makes his Blue Note debut with Happening: Live At The Village Vanguard. An example of musical gambles taken on stage, the exceptional quintet (tenor sax-Walter Smith III, bassist-Joe Sanders, drummer-Marcus Gilmore) deliver dynamic performances at NYC's legendary Village Vanguard. With four Clayton originals and Billy Strayhorn's "Take the Coltrane". He then pares down to a trio for the lively version of Bud Powell's "Celia" and a stunning rendition of "Body and Soul".
The members of the original Joshua Redman Quartet—Redman(saxophone), Brad Mehldau(piano), Christian McBride(bass), and Brian Blade (drums)—reunite with the July 10, 2020 release of RoundAgain,the group’s first recording since 1994’s MoodSwing.The album features seven newly composed songs: three from Redman, two from Mehldau, and one each from McBride and Blade.
