New Music Monthly: January 2018 Releases

Welcome to the New Year (2018 for those of you keeping score)! After a couple months of diminishing returns on new music, January brings a tentative return to form for major and minor labels alike. Although the marquee names are few and far between, the new month brings new blues from stars like Tinsley Ellis and Curtis Salgado, reissues of classic LPs by Fleetwood Mac and 6 String Drag, and welcome archive releases by the Remains, Big Star, Rising Storm, and Frank Zappa and much, more more! So count up your pennies and get ready to buy some new tunes to get you through the January winter weather...

If we wrote about it, there'll be a link to it in the album title; if you want an album, hit the 'Buy!' link to get it from Amazon.com...it's just that damn easy! Your purchase puts money in the Reverend's pocket that he'll use to buy more music to write about in a never-ending loop of rock 'n' roll ecstasy! 

JANUARY 12
6 String Drag - High Hat [vinyl reissue]   BUY!
Big Star - Live at Lafayette’s Music Room   BUY!
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Wrong Creatures   BUY!
Denny Doherty - Of All the Things: The Complete ABC/Dunhill Masters   BUY!
Tinsley Ellis - Winning Hand   BUY!
The Remains - Live 1969   BUY!
Rising Storm - Calm Before...   BUY!
Curtis Salgado & Alan Hager - Rough Cut   BUY!
Joe Satriani - What Happens Next   BUY!

JANUARY 19
Black Label Society - Grimmest Hits   BUY!
Ry Cooder & David Lindley - Two Long Riders   BUY!
Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac [deluxe reissue]   BUY!
Joe Perry - Sweetzerland Manifesto   BUY!
They Might Be Giants - I Like Fun   BUY!
Walking Papers (w/Duff McKagan) - WP2   BUY!
Frank Zappa - Munich 1980   BUY!

JANUARY 26
Backtrack Blues Band - Make My Home In Florida   BUY!
Calexico - The Thread That Keeps Us   BUY!
Country Joe & the Fish - The Wave of Electrical Sound   BUY!
Ty Segall - Freedom's Goblin  BUY!

Album of the Month:The Remains' Live 1969 is a long-overdue live album by the legendary '60s-era rockers. Recorded at the legendary Boston Tea Party, the band tears through a high-energy set list that includes covers of "Hang On Sloopy" and "Johnny B. Goode" along with a smattering of originals. The band had been broken up for better than two years but got together for a one-night-only show that is sourced from recently-discovered tapes and pressed on CD and vinyl for long-suffering fans.

Country Joe & the Fish Celebrate the Summer of Love

Folk-rock outfit Country Joe & the Fish – formed in 1965 by singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald and guitarist Barry “Fish” Melton – are best known for their infamous August 1969 appearance at Woodstock, McDonald leading the audience in shouting “The Fish Cheer” (“gimme an ‘F’…”) before launching into a memorable performance of the anti-war “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” One of the most innovative and popular bands in the San Francisco area, Country Joe & the Fish were steeped in the psychedelic-rock of the time, but tempered their flower-power excesses with elements of folk, blues, and even jazz to underscore their often politically-charged lyrics.

Country Joe & the Fish released their first two albums during 1967, their debut Electric Music For the Mind and Body appearing just in time for the “Summer of Love” while I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die, recorded in July, bookended the debut LP later that year. Both albums were groundbreaking, influential efforts by a then-veteran band, musically-adventurous with McDonald’s songs offering up intelligent political commentary and satire. On January 26th, 2018 Craft Recordings will celebrate Country Joe & the Fish’s “Summer of Love’ with the release of a limited-edition vinyl box set, The Wave of Electrical Sound. Both re-mastered albums will also be reissued as stand-alone LPs and have already been released digitally on iTunes and elsewhere.

Limited to 2,000 copies worldwide, The Wave of Electrical Sound is a four-album box set offering both mono and stereo version of Electric Music For the Mind and Body and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die pressed on audiophile quality 180-gram vinyl. The albums are packaged in old-school-style tip-on jackets, with the mono versions of both albums sporting rare alternative cover artwork while the stereo versions of both feature replicas of their original cover art. The box set also includes a bunch of cool band memorabilia from the era including replicas of The Fish Game, a Fish Fan Club book, and a Fish calendar designed by Tom Weller as well as a DVD of How We Stopped The War, a 30-minute documentary film on the band and a 24-page book with rare photos and artwork and new liner notes from writer, producer, and musician Alec Palao.

In his liner notes for the box set, Palao writes, “what makes both albums Country Joe & the Fish recorded in 1967 so significant is not just the presentation, but the repertoire...the writing is extraordinary. Whatever influence from Dylan, Richard Farina and others McDonald might have absorbed, his muse was his own, and fully on display with idiosyncratic material that dripped with imagery and allusion.”

Buy the vinyl box set from Amazon.com: Country Joe & the Fish’s The Wave of Electrical Sound