33 1/3 HHV Records 89 Items

Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

Aphex Twin

Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

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Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous — Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning. In the United States, it was Richard D. James's first full length on Sire Records (home to Madonna and Depeche Mode) under the moniker Aphex Twin; Sire helped usher him in as a major force in music, electronic or otherwise.

Faithful to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, Selected Ambient Works Volume II was intentionally functional: it furnished chill out rooms, the sanctuaries amid intense raves. Choreographers and film directors began to employ it to their own ends, and in the intervening decades this background music came to the fore, adapted by classical composers who reverse-engineered its fragile textures for performance on acoustic instruments. Simultaneously, “ambient” has moved from esoteric sound art to central tenet of online culture. This book contends that despite a reputation for being beatless, the album exudes percussive curiosity, providing a sonic metaphor for our technologically mediated era of countless synchronized nanosecond metronomes.

144 pages.

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J Dilla

Madvillain (MF DOOM & Madlib)

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From a Los Angeles hospital bed, equipped with little more than a laptop and a stack of records, James “J Dilla” Yancey crafted a set of tracks that would forever change the way beatmakers viewed their artform. The songs on Donuts are not hip hop music as “hip hop music” is typically defined; they careen and crash into each other, in one moment noisy and abrasive, gorgeous and heartbreaking the next. The samples and melodies tell the story of a man coming to terms with his declining health, a final love letter to the family and friends he was leaving behind. As a prolific producer with a voracious appetite for the history and mechanics of the music he loved, J Dilla knew the records that went into constructing Donuts inside and out. He could have taken them all and made a much different, more accessible album. If the widely accepted view is that his final work is a record about dying, the question becomes why did he make this record about dying?

Drawing from philosophy, critical theory and musicology, as well as Dilla’s own musical catalogue, Jordan Ferguson shows that the contradictory, irascible and confrontational music found on Donuts is as much a result of an artist’s declining health as it is an example of what scholars call “late style,” placing the album in a musical tradition that stretches back centuries.

152 pages.

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Madvillainy By Will Hagle

Computer World By Steve Tupai Francis

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R.I.P. MF DOOM

Unpacks the complex layers of Madvillainy, the 2004 classic collaborative LP between producer Madlib and rapper MF Doom, whose success both relied on and rejected the tendencies of the social media age

This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF Doom's resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avantgarde jazz to hip-hop. Written from the alternating perspectives of three fake music journalist superheroes— featuring interviews with Wildchild, M.E.D., Walasia, Daedalus, Stones Throw execs, and many other real individuals involved with the album's creation—this book blends fiction and non-fiction to celebrate Madvillainy not just as an album, but as a folkloric artifact. It is one specific retelling of a story which, like Madvillain’s music, continues to spawn infinite legends.

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Kraftwerk

The Geto Boys By Rolf Potts

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Kraftwerk's most concise and focused conceptual statement, Computer World, was also their most influential album, paving the way for a range of new musical styles and genres. This book explores the band's revolutionary sonic template, and their lyrical obsessions in detail.

An analysis of the bands work reveals a unifying theme, overlooked by other writers, of movement and transition. While many remarked on the prevalence of travel within Kraftwerk's art: Autobahn (1974) – cars, Trans-Europe Express (1977) – trains, The Man- Machine (1978) – space, and Tour De France (1982) – bicycles, Francis contends that this is a surface manifestation of a deeper theoretical subtext in their work. Movement is really a reflection of the concept of transition, through time and space, from one physical, emotional, or existential state of being to another. The book explores transition, as expressed on Computer World, via theories of post-humanism, cybernetics and the anthropology of transnationalism.

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Geto Boys

$ 16.73*

Endtroducing by Eliot Wilder

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At the outset of summer in 1990, a Houston gangsta rap group called the Geto Boys was poised to debut its self-titled third album under the guidance of hip-hop guru Rick Rubin. What might have been a low-profile remix release from a little-known corner of the rap universe began to make headlines when the album's distributor refused to work with the group, citing its violent and depraved lyrics. When The Geto Boys was finally released, chain stores refused to stock it, concert promoters canceled the group's performances, and veteran rock critic Robert Christgau declared the group "sick motherfuckers."
One quarter of a century later the album is considered a hardcore classic, having left an immutable influence on gangsta rap, horrorcore, and the rise of Southern hip-hop.
Charting the rise of the Geto Boys from the earliest days of Houston's rap scene, Rolf Potts documents a moment in music history when hip-hop was beginning to replace rock as the transgressive sound of American youth. In creating an album that was both sonically innovative and unprecedentedly vulgar, the Geto Boys were accomplishing something that went beyond music. To paraphrase a sentiment from Don DeLillo, this group of young men from Houston's Fifth Ward ghetto had figured out the "language of being noticed" - which is, in the end, the only language America understands.

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DJ Shadow

Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

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Over the course of several long conversations with Josh Davis (DJ Shadow), we learn about his early years in California, the friends and mentors who helped him along the way, his relationship with Mo’Wax and James Lavelle, and the genesis and creation of his widely acknowledged masterpiece, Endtroducing.

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Oasis

People's Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

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Oasis’s incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century.

In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis ‘everymen’: Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping.

Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as “Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.

144 pages.

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A Tribe Called Quest

$ 18.83*

Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

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One of the finest hip-hop albums ever made, A Tribe Called Quest's debut record (featuring stone-cold classics like "Can I Kick It?" and "Bonita Applebum") took the idea of the boasting hip-hop male and turned it on its head. For many listeners, when this non-traditional, surprisingly feminine album was released, it was like hearing an entirely new form of music.

In this book, Shawn Taylor explores the creation of the album as well as the impact it had on him at the time - a 17-year-old high-school geek who was equally into hip-hop, punk, new wave, skateboarding, and Dungeons & Dragons: all of a sudden, with this one album, the world made more sense. He has spent many years investigating this album, from the packaging to the song placement to each and every sample - Shawn Taylor knows this record like he knows his tattoos, and he's finally been able to write a fascinating and highly entertaining book about it.

128 pages.
• See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/a-tribe-called-quests-peoples-instinctive-travels-and-the-paths-of-rhythm-9780826419231/#sthash.cFZ9YfTa.dpuf

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Sonic Youth

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - 1970s Jazz Fusion

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Daydream Nation is the kind of gorgeous monstrosity (born of extremes, rife with difficulties, and mythic in proportion) that can crush the will of the most resilient, well-intentioned listener if the necessary preparations haven’t been made. Matthew Stearns explores the album from a range of angles, including a track-by-track analysis and a look at the historical and cultural context within which the album was made. Featuring a foreword by Lee Ranaldo and exclusive interviews with the band, this truly is the definitive guide to Daydream Nation.

172 pages.

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Matthew Reed Baker

Jarmark By Kamila Rymajdo

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Preorder shipping from 2025-05-30

The once derided musical hybrid that is 1970s Jazz Fusion has since become one of the most influential genres of music in jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop.

The once derided musical hybrid that is 1970s Jazz Fusion has since become one of the most influential genres of music in jazz, rock, soul, and hip-hop. This book is a celebration of one of the most adventurous but unappreciated eras in popular music, wherein the traditional sounds of jazz were melded and mashed up with funk, soul, hard rock, and electronics. Even as they were accused of selling out and contaminating traditional jazz, artists like Miles Davis, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra made some of the most creative and invigorating music of the era.

Full of the musicians' personal stories and anecdotes, this book provides a discussion of their albums and the cultural context for their music. That context also includes how these albums have been passed down through generations and have reverberated through the music of today, inspiring both hip-hop and electronic artists through sampling and contemporary jazz and soul artists who are less constrained by traditional genres. Though recorded decades ago, jazz fusion remains culturally vital and sonically thrilling to this very day.

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Taco Hemingway

Machiavelli And The Four Seasons By Tyler Jenke

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Preorder shipping from 2025-02-28

Taco Hemingway is the first Polish artist to be streamed a billion times on Spotify. His fifth studio album, Jarmark, is his most political work to date. Previously described as the voice of a generation with nothing to say, Hemingway's shift towards political themes can be seen as an intervention, especially as Jarmark's lead single 'Polskie Tango' was released just two days before the 2020 presidential election.

As such, this book examines the album as a response to a crisis point in Polish society, with the country divided about its future, both politically and socially. It also explores the album's textual and musical characteristics while situating Hemingway's career within the broader context of Polish rap history as well as Polish migration. Additionally, the book discusses the album's impact through its critical reception, sales, awards, and social media commentary.

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TISM

Paul's Boutique by Dan LeRoy

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Preorder shipping from 2025-03-20

Focusing on one of Australian music's most enigmatic bands, Tyler Jenke forms an in-depth analysis at the rise of anonymous, pseudonymous Melbourne collective This Is Serious Mum (better known as Tism), as they become one of the country's most unexpected groups to reach the popular music charts with their third album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons. Throughout the volume, Jenke discusses the origins of Tism as they slowly go from a bedroom concept to an underground success, and further to become a staple of concert stages and commercial radio in Australia. Jenke focuses on the steps that resulted in Tism shifting their sound from their tried-and-true pub-rock and avant-garde roots, to flirting with the world of electronic music, and receiving both top ten success and an Aria Award. Alongside an analysis of the band's brush with commercial success, Jenke also looks into the group's use of Dadaism and both avant-garde and classic pop musicianship in their work, dissecting the aspects of their rise to fame within the Australian music industry and analysing Tism's status as one of the most memorable, mysterious and paradoxically successful groups to have ever existed within the country's vibrant alternative music scene.

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Beastie Boys

Moon Pix By Donna Kozloskie

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Dan LeRoy uncovers the story of this outrageous era in Beastie Boys history ... 129 pages

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Cat Power

Come To My Garden By Brittnay L. Proctor

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Moon Pix was conceived during a hallucinatory waking nightmare in the South Carolina home of Chan Marshall one fateful day in 1997. Spirits violently swam up around her house, looming at the windows, beckoning her to join them. Her and her acoustic guitar warded them off song after song, nearly the entire album rushed forth onto a tape recorder that night. Facts, fictions and visions ripple throughout the accounts of Moon Pix from every angle- memories of screaming at an audience, spirals of drunkenness, swimming with sharks in Australia, intense, resonant lyrics and thunderstorms ringing through speakers. Like all legends, the aura surrounding them is an impression, a sensory feeling of unreliable memories: layers of stories become histories.

Through interviews with key players, audience member accounts, fictional narrative imaginings, a collection of record reviews and other explorations of truth, this book, like Moon Pix itself, is an ode to the myth within the music and the music within the myth.

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Minnie Ripperton

Come Away With Esg By Cheri Percy

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Come to My Garden (1970) introduced the world to Minnie Riperton, the solo artist. Minnie captivated listeners with her earth-shattering voice's uncanny ability to evoke melancholy and exultance. Born out of Charles Stepney's masterful composition and Richard Rudolph's attentive songwriting, the album fused a plethora of music genres. A blip in the universe of fusion music that would come to dominate the 1970s, Come to My Garden also featured the work of young bandleaders like Ramsey Lewis and Maurice White, thus bridging the divide between jazz and R&B.

Despite fairly positive reviews of the album, even in its many re-releases, it never garnered critical attention. Minnie Riperton's Come to My Garden by Brittnay L. Proctor uses rare archival ephemera, the multiple re-issues of the album, interviews, cultural history, and personal narrative to outline how the revolutionary album came to be and its lasting impact on popular music of the post-soul era (the late 20th to the early 21st century).

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ESG

To Pimp A Butterfly By Sequoia L. Maner

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ESG were one of the first bands to sign to British indie label Factory Records, working with famed producer Martin Hannett on their early EPs. The band's signature guitar sound from iconic single 'ufo' has been sampled in hundreds of hip hop records, and everyone from Karen O to Kathleen Hanna lists the South Bronx group as a direct influence. So why do the Scroggins sisters appear as nothing more than a footnote in the 1980s music scene?

Through interviews with founding member Renee Scroggins, alongside cult-figures from 1980s New York and North England, this book follows the story of a group of sisters who made it out of the New York projects and into the heart of the dancefloor. Come Away With ESG repositions ESG in their rightful place as punk pioneers and explains how their primal beats have paved the way for modern dance music today.

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Kendrick Lamar

The Velvet Rope By Ayanna Dozier

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Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering plauditory albums reviews, many awards, and even a canonized place in Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois archive. Why did this strangely compelling and masterful record stimulate the emotions and imaginations of listeners?

This book takes a deep dive into the sounds, images, and lyrics of To Pimp a Butterfly to suggest that Kendrick appeals to the psyche of a nation in crisis and embraces the development of a radical political conscience. Kendrick breathes fresh life into the black musical protest tradition and cultivates a platform for loving resistance. Combining funk, jazz, and spoken word, To Pimp a Butterfly's expansive sonic and lyrical geography brings a level of innovation to a field dominated by the predictability of trap music. More importantly, Kendrick's introspective and philosophical songs compel us to believe in a future where we gon' be alright!

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Janet Jackson

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

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The question of control for Black women is a costly one. From 1986 onwards, the trajectory of Janet Jackson's career can be summed up in her desire for control. Control for Janet was never simply just about her desire for economic and creative control over her career but was, rather, an existential question about the desire to control and be in control over her bodily integrity as a Black woman.

This book examines Janet's continuation of her quest for control as heard in her sixth album, The Velvet Rope. Engaging with the album, the promotion, the tour, and its accompanying music videos, this study unpacks how Janet uses Black cultural production as an emancipatory act of self-creation that allows her to reconcile with and, potentially, heal from trauma, pain, and feelings of alienation. The Velvet Rope's arc moves audiences to imagine the possibility of what emancipation from oppression--from sexual, to internal, to societal--could look like for the singer and for others. The sexually charged content and themes of abuse, including self-harm and domestic violence, were dismissed as “selling points” for Janet at the time of its release. The album stands out as a revelatory expression of emotional vulnerability by the singer, one that many other artists have followed in the 20-plus years since its release.

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Murder Ballads By Santi Elijah Holley

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In a bar called The Bucket of Blood, a man shoots the bartender four times in the head. In the small town of Millhaven, a teenage girl secretly and gleefully murders her neighbors. A serial killer travels from home to home, quoting John Milton in his victims' blood.

Murder Ballads, the ninth studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is a gruesome, blood-splattered reimagining of English ballads, American folk and blues music, and classic literature. Most of the stories told on Murder Ballads have been interpreted many times, but never before had they been so graphic or profane. Though earning the band their first Parental Advisory warning label, Murder Ballads, released in 1996, brought Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds their biggest critical and commercial success, thanks in part to the award-winning single, “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” an unlikely duet with Australian pop singer, Kylie Minogue.

Closely examining each of the ten songs on the album, Santi Elijah Holley investigates the stories behind the songs, and the numerous ways these ballads have been interpreted through the years. Murder Ballads is a tour through the evolution of folk music, and a journey into the dark secrets of American history.

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Pearl Jam

Vs. By Clint Brownlee

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Vs. is the sound of a band on fire. The same confluence of talent, passion, timing, and fate that made “grunge” the world's soundtrack also lit a short fuse beneath Pearl Jam. The band combusted between late 1992 and mid-1994, the span during which they planned, recorded, and supported their sophomore record. The spotlight, the pressure, the pace-it all nearly turned the thriving act to ash. Eddie Vedder, the reluctant public face of the band, responded by lashing out lyrically. Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, and Stone Gossard, who beheld success with varying degrees of anxious satisfaction, attacked their instruments in solidarity. Dave Abbruzzese welcomed the rock-star lifestyle, and left his mark on the record with more than just potent percussion. Vs. roils with fury-and at times, gently steams-over the trappings of fame, human faults, and societal injustice. The record is a thrashing testament to Pearl Jam's urgent creativity and greater-good interests, and the band's logistical calculations behind it drew a career-defining line in the sand. It promised the world that Pearl Jam would neither burn out nor fade away. This book weaves research, little-known details, and band members' memories into a definitive account of how Vs. set them on a path toward enduring integrity and relevance.

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Carole King

Tapestry By Loren Glass

$ 18.83*

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Carole King's Tapestry is both an anthemic embodiment of second-wave feminism and an apotheosis of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound and scene. And these two elements of the album's historic significance are closely related insofar as the professional autonomy of the singer-songwriter is an expression of the freedom and independence women of King's generation sought as the turbulent sixties came to a close.

Aligning King's own development from girl to woman with the larger shift in the music industry from teen-oriented singles by girl groups to albums by adult-oriented singer-songwriters, this volume situates Tapestry both within King's original vision as the third in a trilogy (preceded by Now That Everything's Been Said and Writer) and as a watershed in musical and cultural history, challenging the male dominance of the music and entertainment industries and laying the groundwork for female dominated genres such as women's music and Riot Grrrl punk.

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Roxy Music

Avalon By Simon Morrison

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Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower-reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the chance-based elements, and the maquillage of previous albums.

The production and engineering imposed on Avalon confiscates emotion and replaces it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, as amour courtois insists.

The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture of Avalon, an album that creates an allusive sheen. Be nostalgic, by all means, but embrace that feeling's falseness, because nostalgia-whether inspired by medieval Arthuriana or 1940s film noir repartee or a 1980s drug-induced high-deceives. Nostalgia defines our fantasies and our (not Ferry's) essential artifice.

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Once Upon A Time By Alex Jeffery

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In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy Music's art-rock-the full-length sold millions and spawned smashes such as "Hungry Like the Wolf" and the title track.

However, Rio wasn't a success everywhere at first; in fact, the LP had to be buffed-up with remixes and reissued before it found an audience in America. The album was further buoyed by colorful music videos, which established Duran Duran as leaders of an MTV-driven second British Invasion, and the group's cutting-edge visual aesthetic. Via extensive new interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration-and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist.

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Donna Summer

The Archandroid By Alyssa Favreau

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Contradicting assumptions that disco albums are shallow and packed with filler, Donna Summer's double album Once Upon A Time stands out as a piece that delivers on its promise of an immaculately crafted journey from start to finish. A new interpretation of the Cinderella story, it is set in the then contemporary world of New York disco and takes the listener on a journey from urban isolation and deep despair to joy and vindication, all filtered through the mind of its naïve and fantasy-prone protagonist.

As well as charting the production of the album within the legendary Munich Machine in Germany, this book digs deep into the album's rich themes and subtexts. Approaching the book from inventive angles, the four essays within the book act as a prism connecting the reader to the classical aspirations of Eurodisco, the history of the black fairy tale and a queer knowledge that reads Summer's Cinderella tale in some surprising ways.

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Janelle Monae

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In Janelle Monáe's full-length debut, the science fiction concept album The ArchAndroid, the android Cindi Mayweather is on the run from the authorities for the crime of loving a human. Living in 28th century Metropolis, Cindi fights for survival, soon realizing that she is in fact the prophesied ArchAndroid, a robot messiah meant to liberate the masses and lead them toward a wonderland where all can be free. Taking into account the literary merit of Monáe's astounding multimedia body of work, the political relevance of the science fictional themes and aesthetics she explores, and her role as an Atlanta-based pop cultural juggernaut, this book explores the lavish world building of Cindi's story, and the many literary, cinematic, and musical influences brought together to create it. Throughout, a history of Monáe's move to Atlanta, her signing with Bad Boy Records, and the trials of developing a full-length concept album in an industry devoted to the production of marketable singles can be found, charting the artist's own rise to power. The stories of Monáe and of Cindi are inextricably entwined, each making the other more compelling, fantastical, and deeply felt.

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Michael Jackson

Dangerous By Susan Fast

Sounds Of Silver By Ryan Leas

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Dangerous is Michael Jackson's coming of age album. Granted, that's a bold claim to make given that many think his best work lay behind him by the time this record was made. It offers Jackson on a threshold, at long last embracing adulthood-politically questioning, sexually charged-yet unable to convince a skeptical public who had, by this time, been wholly indoctrinated by a vicious media. Even though the record sold well, few understood or were willing to accept the depth and breadth of Jackson's vision; and then before it could be fully grasped, it was eclipsed by a shifting pop music landscape and personal scandal-the latter perhaps linked to his assertive new politics. This book tries to cut through the din of dominant narratives about Jackson, taking up the mature, nuanced artistic statement he offered on Dangerous in all its complexity. It is read here as a concept album, one that offers a compelling narrative arc of postmodern angst, love, lust, seduction, betrayal, damnation, and above all else racial politics, in ways heretofore unseen in his music. This record offered a Michael Jackson that was mystifying for a world that had accepted him as a child and as childlike and, hence, as safe; this Michael Jackson was, indeed, dangerous.

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LCD Soundsystem

Psychocandy By Paula Mejia

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When LCD Soundsystem broke up in 2011, they left behind a small but remarkable catalog of music. On top of the genius singles and a longform composition for Nike, there was a trilogy of full-length albums. During that initial run, LCD Soundsystem-and the project's mastermind, James Murphy-were at the center of several 21st century developments in pop culture: indie music's growing mainstream clout, Brooklyn surpassing Manhattan as an epicenter of creativity in America, the collision and eventual erosion of genre perceptions, and the rapid and profound growth and impact of digital culture. Amidst this storm, Murphy crafted Sound Of Silver, the centerpiece of LCD's work.

At the time of Sound Of Silver's creation and release, Murphy was a man closing in on 40 while fronting a critically-adored band still on the ascent. This album was the first place where he earnestly grappled with questions of aging, of being an artist, and the decisions we make with the time we have left. Anchored by a series of colossal, intense dance-rock songs, Sound Of Silver called upon the rhythms of New York City in order to draw out, dissect, and ultimately rip open these meditations. By the time LCD Soundsystem reunited in 2016, Sound Of Silver had already proven to be a generational touchstone, living on as a document of what it's like to be alive in the 21st century.

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The Jesus And Mary Chain

Soundtrack For Twin Peaks By Clare Nina Norelli

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The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band's notorious live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring, inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback channeling the rage of the working-class who'd had enough, Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself.

Yet Psychocandy's blackened candy heart center – calling out to phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm – makes it a pop album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined, emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple with pop music's relation to ourselves.

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Angelo Badalamenti

Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde By Andrew Barker

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When Twin Peaks debuted on the ABC network on the night of April 8, 1990, thirty-five million viewers tuned in to some of the most unusual television of their lives. Centered on an eccentric, coffee-loving FBI agent's investigation into the murder of a small town teen queen, Twin Peaks brought the aesthetic of arthouse cinema to a prime time television audience and became a cult sensation in the process.

Part of Twin Peaks' charm was its unforgettable soundtrack by Angelo Badalamenti, a longtime musical collaborator of film director and Twin Peaks co-creator David Lynch. Badalamenti's evocative music, with its haunting themes and jazzy moodscapes, served as a constant in a narrative that was often unhinged and went on to become one of the most popular and influential television soundtracks of all time. How did a unique collaborative process between a director and composer result in a perfectly postmodern soundtrack that ran the gamut of musical styles from jazz to dreamy pop to synthesizer doom and beyond? And how did Badalamenti's musical cues work with Twin Peaks' visuals, constantly evolving and playing off viewers' expectations and associations? Under the guidance of Angelo Badalamenti's beautifully dark sonic palette, Clare Nina Norelli delves deep into the world of Twin Peaks to answer all this and more.

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The Pharcyde

Saturday Night By Patrick Rivers & William Fulton

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As immediately believable as they were cartoonish, as much an inner city cipher as a suburban boys gang, the foursome that made up the Pharcyde were the most relatable MCs to ever pass the mic. On their debut and magnum opus Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, they created a record almost overstuffed with possibility, the sound of four restless man-children fresh out of their teens, finding a perfect outlet in a form of music that was just as young and fertile.

And like the product of any adolescent, Bizarre Ride wears its contrarianism and contradictions on its sleeve. It's a party album about shyness and unrequited love. A swirl of jubilant L.A. psychedelia recorded in the midst of the Rodney King trial. A blast of black consciousness that still makes room to poke fun at Public Enemy and reference the Pixies. A dense, sophisticated sonic stew punctuated by yo mama jokes and prank calls. While hip-hop was already calcifying its tropes of steely machismo and aspirational fantasy, Bizarre Ride was a pure distillation of the average hip-hop listener's actual lifestyle-the joys and sorrows of four guys who were young, broke, sexually frustrated, and way too clever for their own good. A touchstone for Kanye West, Drake, Lil B and a whole generation of off-center MCs, Bizarre Ride sketched out a whole strata of emotions that other rappers hadn't yet dared to tackle, and to a certain extent, still haven't.

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Camp Lo

The Suburbs By Eric Edelstein

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Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba are Camp Lo. These two emcees from the Bronx, NY entered the American hip hop scene with an insider slang that bewildered listeners as they radiated the look of a bygone era of black culture. In 1996, they collaborated with producer Ski and a host of other contributors to create Uptown Saturday Night, featuring the seminal single “Luchini (a.k.a. This is It).” While other 1990s rappers referred to 1970s Blaxploitation culture, Camp Lo were self-described “time travelers” who weaved the slang and style of a soulful past into state-of-the-art lyrical flows.

Uptown Saturday Night is a tapestry of 1970s black popular culture and 1990s New York City hip hop. This volume will detail how the album's fantastic world of “Coolie High” reflected classic films like Cooley High and the Sidney Poitier film from which the album's title is derived, and promoted vintage slang and fashion. The book features new interviews with Camp Lo, producer Ski, Trugoy the Dove from De La Soul, Ish from Digable Planets, and others, and offers musical and cultural analyses that detail the development of the album and its essential contributions to a post-soul aesthetic.

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Arcade Fire

Homogenic By Emily Mackay

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The Suburbs is an incredibly sentimental and nostalgic album, which generally moved critics but was jarring to others. But it also made a heavy impact on fans and – to the surprise of many – won Album of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards. This immensely visceral album triggers a sincere celebration of not formative years spent in a cookie-cutter development, but of feeling self-important, immortal, and desperate to escape. It examines youth and amplifies an innate sense of longing and remembrance.
Eric Eidelstein's The Suburbs explores this weird, utopic recollection of youth by comparing the album to suburban scenes in film and television, such as Blue Velvet, Mad Men, The Americans, and Spike Jonze's Scenes from the Suburbs. Through the close examination of film and televised depictions of the suburbs, both past and present, Eidelstein delves into the societal factors and artistic depictions that make the suburbs such a fascinating cultural construct, and uncovers why the album creates such a relatable and universal sense of reminiscence.

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Björk

Transformer By Ezra Furman

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In recent years, Björk's artistry has become ever more ambitious and ever more respected. With the release of her conceptual app-album Biophilia in 2011, and a huge retrospective exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art coinciding with her most recent album, Vulnicura, in 2015, her status as artpop auteur has been secured. The album that made all this possible, though is 1997's Homogenic, a turning point in Björk's career and still among her finest musical achievements. Produced under great strain, it moves beyond the stylistic magpie rush of Debut and the urbanophile future-pop of Post, to something darker, stronger and braver, full of dramatic assertions of independence, sharp, stuttering beats, rich strings and raw outbursts of noise. It created, as the Alexander McQueen designed sleeve clearly asserted, a new Björk, one who would never stop hunting.

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Lou Reed

24 Hour Revenge Therapy By Ronen Givony

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Transformer, Lou Reed's most enduringly popular album, is described with varying labels: it's often called a glam rock album, a proto-punk album, a commercial breakthrough for Lou Reed, and an album about being gay. And yet, it doesn't neatly fit into any of these descriptors. Buried underneath the radio-friendly exterior lie coded confessions of the subversive, wounded intelligence that gives this album its staying power as a work of art. Here Lou Reed managed to make a fun, accessible rock'n'roll record that is also a troubled meditation on the ambiguities-sexual, musical and otherwise-that defined his public persona and helped make him one of the most fascinating and influential figures in rock history. Through close listening and personal reflections, songwriter Ezra Furman explores Reed's and Transformer's unstable identities, and the secrets the songs challenge us to uncover.

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Jawbreaker

In On The Kill Taker By Joe Gross

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Two and a half decades on, Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (1993-94) is the rare album to have lost none of its original loyalty, affection, and reverence. If anything, today, the cult of Jawbreaker-in their own words, "the little band that could but would probably rather not"-is now many times greater than it was when they broke up in 1996. Like the best work of Fugazi, The Clash, and Operation Ivy, the album is now is a rite of passage and a beloved classic among partisans of intelligent, committed, literary punk music and poetry.

Why, when a thousand other artists came and went in that confounding decade of the 90s, did Jawbreaker somehow come to seem like more than just another band? Why do they persist, today, in meaning so much to so many people? And how did it happen that, two years after releasing their masterpiece, the band that was somehow more than just a band to its fans-closer to equipment for living-was no longer?

Ronen Givony's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy is an extended tribute in the spirit of Nicholson Baker's U & I: a passionate, highly personal, and occasionally obsessive study of one of the great confessional rock albums of the 90s. At the same time, it offers a quizzical look back to the toxic authenticity battles of the decade, ponders what happened to the question of "selling out," and asks whether we today are enriched or impoverished by that debate becoming obsolete.

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Fugazi

Blue Lines By Ian Bourland

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By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album In on the Kill Taker, the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs (combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining Repeater and 1991's impressionistic follow-up Steady Diet of Nothing) inside of five years, Fugazi was on creative roll, astounding increasingly large audiences as they toured, blasting fist-pumping anthems and jammy noise-workouts that roared into every open underground heart. When the album debuted on the now-SoundScan-driven charts, Fugazi had never been more in the public eye.

Few knew how difficult it had been to make this popular breakthrough. Disappointed with the sound of the self-produced Steady Diet, the band recorded with legendary engineer Steve Albini, only to scrap the sessions and record at home in D.C. with Ted Niceley, their brilliant, under-known producer. Inadvertently, Fugazi chose an unsure moment to make In on the Kill Taker: as Nirvana and Sonic Youth were yanking the American rock underground into the media glare, and “breaking” punk in every possible meaning of the word. Despite all of this, Kill Taker became an alt-rock classic in spite of itself, even as its defiant, muscular sound stood in stark contrast to everything represented by the mainstreaming of a culture and worldview they held dear.

This book features new interviews with all four members of Fugazi and members of their creative community.

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Massive Attack

Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

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In 1991, a loose-knit collective released a record called Blue Lines under the name Massive Attack, splicing together American hip-hop and soul with the sounds of the British underground. With its marauding bass lines, angular guitars, and psychedelic effects, Blue Lines built on the Caribbean soundsystems and nascent rave scene of the 1980s while also looking ahead to the group's signature blend of epic cinematics and lush downtempo. In the process, Blue Lines invented an entirely new genre called trip hop and launched the career of a rapper named Tricky.

Ultimately, Blue Lines created the sonic playbook for an emerging future: hybrid, digital, cosmopolitan, and rooted in the black and immigrant communities who animated the urban wreckage of the postindustrial city. Massive Attack envisioned an alternate future in sharp counterpoint to the glossy triumphalism of Brit Pop. And while the group would go on to bigger things, this record was both a warning shot and a definitive statement that sounds as otherworldy today as on the day of its release. As Blue Lines's iconic flame logo spun on turntables the world over, Massive Attack and their spaced-out urban blues reimagined music for the 1990s and beyond.

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Joy Division

Meat is Murder by Joe Pernice

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The Smiths

The Velvet Underground And Nico by Joe Harvard

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A Catholic high school near Boston in 1985. A time of suicides, gymnasium humiliations, smoking for beginners, asthma attacks, and incendiary teenage infatuations. Infatuations with a girl (Allison), with a band (The Smiths) and with an album, Meat is Murder, that was so raw, so vivid and so melodic that you could cling to it like a lifeboat in a storm.

In this brilliant novella Joe Pernice tells the story of an asthmatic kid's discovery of Meat is Murder.

Here is a short exceropt:
One morning as I was jogging my way past the bronze plaque commemorating the deaths of one student and one motorcyclist, my necktie flapping like a windsock, Ray floored the brake pedal of his Dodge as he closed in on me. Fifty mile an hour traffic came to a screeching, nearly murderous halt behind him. He leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window in one fluid motion. He dispensed with formalities while I marveled at the audacity of his driving and, tossing something at me, winked and said, "Here. I'm going to kill myself." He pegged the gas, leaving a surprisingly good patch of rubber for such a shitty car. In the gutter, sugared with sand put down during the winter's last snow, I saw written in red felt ink on masking tape stuck to a smoky-clear cassette: "Smiths: Meat."

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The Velvet Underground

Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

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The Velvet Underground and Nico has influenced the sound of more bands than any other album. And remarkably, it still sounds as fresh and challenging today as it did upon its release in 1967. In this book, Joe Harvard covers everything from Lou Reed's lyrical genius to John Cale's groundbreaking instrumentation, and from the creative input of Andy Warhol to the fine details of the recording process. With input from co-producer Norman Dolph and Velvets fan Jonathan Richman, Harvard documents the creation of a record which - in the eyes of many - has never been matched.

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The Beach Boys

Doolittle by Ben Sissario

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Pet Sounds is, rightly, one of the most celebrated pop albums ever released. It has also been written about, pored over, and analyzed more than most other albums put together. In this disarming book, Jim Fusilli focuses primarily on the emotional core of the album, on Brian Wilson's pitch-perfect cry of despair. In doing so, he brings to life the search for equilibrium and acceptance that still gives Pet Sounds its heart almost four decades after its release.

For all the ups and downs, the scandals and, finally, the good times that are associated with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, nothing can diminish the beauty of Pet Sounds – its sense of adventure, its insight into the boundless mysteries of young love and how all its elements seem to coalesce to lay bare an insecure teen confronted by the uncertainties of adulthood, a man who wishes life were as simple as he believed it once was. More than a wonderful work that has easily withstood the test of time, Pet Sounds raises pop to the level of art through its musical sophistication and the precision of its statement which, taken together, celebrate the fulfillment of Brian Wilson's ambition.

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Pixies

Reign In Blood by D.X. Ferris

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The Pixies have had a career unlike any other in alternative rock, disappearing as not-quite-the-next-big-things only to become gods in absentia. Doolittle is their knotty masterpiece, the embodiment of the Pixies' abrasive, exuberant, enigmatic pop. Informed by exclusive interviews with the band, Sisario looks at the making of the album and its place in rock history, and studies its continued influence in light of the Pixies triumphant reunion.

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Slayer

Spiderland by Scott Tennent

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Issued on America's premier rap label at the peak of the thrash metal movement, Slayer's controversial Reign in Blood remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal, a seamless 29-minute procession of ten blindingly fast, apocalyptic songs. The first English book about Slayer explores the creation of the most universally respected metal album and its long road to the stores, through original interviews with the entire band, producer Rick Rubin, engineer Andy Wallace, cover artist Larry Carroll, and Def Jam insiders from Russell Simmons to M.C. Serch. From Tori Amos to Pantera's Phil Anselmo, dozens of fans and artists discuss the record's ongoing impact and Slayer's status in the small fraternity of rock's greatest groups.

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Slint

Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr.

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Of all the seminal albums to come out in 1991-the year of Nevermind, Loveless, Ten, and Out of Time, among others-none were quieter, both in volume and influence, than Spiderland, and no band more mysterious than Slint. Few single albums can lay claim to sparking an entire genre, but Spiderland-all six songs of it-laid the foundation for post rock in the 1990s. Yet for so much obvious influence, both the band and the album remain something of a puzzle.

This thoroughly researched book is the first substantive attempt to break through some of the mystery surrounding Spiderland and the band that made it. Scott Tennent has written a long overdue look at this remarkable album and its origins, delving into the small, insular musical universe that included bands like Squirrel Bait, Maurice, Bitch Magnet, and Bastro. The story, helped by in-depth interviews with band members David Pajo and Todd Brashear, explores the formation of Slint, the recording of Tweez, and the band's dramatic move into the sound of Spiderland.

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Miles Davis

$ 13.38* $ 16.73 -20%

Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

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Dead Kennedys

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In 1978, San Francisco plunged from a summer of
political tension into an autumn cascade of
malevolence that so eluded human comprehension it
seemed almost demonic. The battles over property
taxes and a ballot initiative calling for a ban on
homosexuals teaching in public schools gave way to
the madness of the Jonestown massacre and the
murders of Mayor George Moscone and city
supervisor Harvey Milk at the hands of their former colleague, Dan
White.
In the year that followed this season of insanity, it made sense that a
band called Dead Kennedys played Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach,
referring to Governor Jerry Brown as a "zen fascist," calling for
landlords to be lynched and yuppie gentrifiers to be sent to Cambodia to
work for "a bowl of rice a day," critiquing government welfare and
defense policies, and commenting on dead and dying children. Drawing
on Bay Area zines as well as new interviews with the band and fans,
Michael Stewart Foley treats Dead Kennedys' first record, Fresh Fruit
for Rotting Vegetables, as a critical historical document, one that not
only qualified as political expression but also stimulated emotions and
ideals that were, if you can believe it, utopian.

160 pages.

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Can

Tago Mago by Alan Warner

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Finally, a brilliant exploration of the German rock band Can's monumental 1971 album Tago Mago.
Tago Mago is a hugely unique and influential album that deserves close analysis from a fan, rather than a
musicologist. In this officially approved account of one of the most influential and powerful albums of the 1970s, Scottish novelist Alan Warner details the
concrete music we hear on the album as well as how it was composed,
executed and recorded—including the history of the album in terms of
its release, promotion and art work. Warner includes a backtracking of
the history of the band up to that point and also some description of Can's unique recording approach taking into account their home studio set up. Yet this tale of Tago Mago is more than just a history of the band; it is also the tale of a young man obsessed with record collecting
in the dark and mysterious period of pop music before Google.
Through a combination of Warner’s own experiences and interviews with the two surviving members of the band (drummer Jaki Liebezeit, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt and bassist Holger Czukay) Can’s Tago Mago
is a hilariously personal and illuminating picture of one of the biggest names in experimental rock.

160 pages, paperback.

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Words like "inspiring," "expansive," and "moving" are
regularly used to describe Sigur Rós's ( ), and yet the
only words heard on the record itself are a handful of
meaningless nonsense syllables. The album has no
title—or rather, its title is no title: just an empty pair
of parentheses. The intention being that listeners will
fill in the parentheses with their own title, their own
interpretation of the sounds on the record. The CD
sleeve consists of twelve pages that are essentially blank, lacking song
titles, liner notes or production credits. Instead, it contains only semitranslucent
frosted images of abstract natural scenes (tree branches,
clouds, etc.), on which the listener is free to inscribe their own notes—
or no notes at all. And then there are the lyrics, sung in a deliberately
unintelligible tongue called "Hopelandic" which the band invites listeners
to interpret freely.
Ethan Hayden's book doesn't try to fill in the gaps between the album's
parentheses, but instead explores the ways in which listeners might
attempt to do so. Examining the communicative powers of asemantic
language, the book asks whether music can bring sense to nonsense.
What happens to the voice when it stops singing conventional
language: does it simply become another musical instrument, or is it
somehow more "human"? What role does space play on ( )? And how do
we interpret music that we cannot possibly understand, but feel very
deeply that we do?

168 pages, paperback.

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An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that Dummy engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade; and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

248 pages.

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It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

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This is a brilliant exploration of Radiohead's game-changing album, looking at its place in the career of "The World's Best Band" with ten years of hindsight. Radiohead's Kid A never had a chance on paper. Not only did the band have the unenviable task of following up the near-universally lauded "OK Computer", but Kid A didn't even have an official single or video. Neither did it help that the band largely abandoned rock-pop conventions for a sound that traversed glitch, free-jazz, modern composition, and krautrock. Rather than simply reinforcing Kid A's canonical status, Marvin Lin situates the album in the temporal, examining it from various philosophical and cultural interpretations of time in order to arrive at its political and social stakes. Why should we care how time is expressed through its aesthetic components like repetition, sampling, and hybridization? Where does the album subvert our sense of time with songs like "Treefingers"? In which ways does it attempt to transcend time and with what implications? Time is perhaps art's biggest enemy - all human creations will be erased eventually - but it's through these various articulations that we are able to uncover some of the most interesting insights about Kid A.

160 pages.

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Public Enemy

Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

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Christopher R. Weingarten provides a thrilling account of how the Bomb Squad produced such a singular-sounding record: engineering, sampling, scratching, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing - even occasionally stomping
on vinyl that sounded too clean. Using production techniques that have never been duplicated, the Bomb Squad plundered
and reconfigured their own compositions to make frenetic splatter collages; they played samples by hand together in a
room like a rock band to create a "not quite right" tension; they hand-picked their samples from only the ugliest squawks and sirens.

Weingarten treats the samples used on Nation Of Millions as molecules of a greater whole, slivers of music that retain their own secret histories and folk traditions. Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago would re-emerge anew? This is a compelling and thoroughly researched investigation that tells the story of one of hip-hop's landmark albums.

160 pages.

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Nas

OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

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Contradiction, the yin and the yang, the simultaneous existence of two competing realities, and the larger than life persona that depicts populist realism are at the core of Nas's debut album, Illmatic. Yet Nas's identity -as an inner-city youth, a child of hip-hop, and a Black American - predicts those philosophical quandaries as much as it does its brazen ambition. Partly because of that recklessly broad scope, the artistic impact of Illmatic was massive. The record finds its place in the greatest transition in hip hop up to that point, the spot where the streets and the charts collided.

128 pages.

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Radiohead

Together Alone By Barnaby Smith

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Seemingly granted ‘classic album’ status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World – a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created.

144 pages.

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Crowded House

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Plunderphonics

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Intertextual, passionate and personal throughout, Crowded House's Together Alone is a key addition to the surprisingly limited range of scholarship on one of Australasia's most successful and adored bands.

Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House's Together Alone (1993) was unprecedented in its Australasian context, and in the process of making this album, the group's sound transformed profoundly. Crowded House's Together Alone examines why Neil Finn took the daring decision to record amid the wilds of Karekare Beach, West Auckland, considers how British producer Youth impacted the band's dynamics, and places the album within a wider artistic context, expanding beyond pop.

The book also recounts author Barnaby Smith's visit to Karekare on the trail of Together Alone's atmospheric melancholy – a psychogeographic adventure exploring what it means to visit a landscape under the spell of the music it has inspired. A song-by-song analysis further explores the fragile alchemy that produced the most poetic statement in the Crowded House catalogue.

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Matthew Blackwell

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - 20th Century Ambient

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Featuring interviews with John Oswald, Negativland, and others and drawing on a wealth of research on copyright and intellectual property, Plunderphonics explores the impact of a genre that made illegality a point of pride.

Beginning in the 1980s, a group of pranksters and hoaxers led by Canadian composer John Oswald and San Francisco band Negativland took on the major labels by making music with purposefully uncleared samples. Pillaging and parodying music from Dolly Parton, Beethoven, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, U2 and dozens of others, they incited legal threats that they then turned into publicity for their cause. Their battle for fair use was largely successful, leading to future stars like The Avalanches and Girl Talk who took remix culture to new heights.

In a wide-ranging history that discusses landmark works by Steinski, the Tape-beatles, People Like Us, and Danger Mouse, this book narrates the battle against restrictive copyright laws and the rise of a movement toward a shared creative commons.

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Dusty Henry

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Tropicália

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Through text and comics, 20th Century Ambient searches through ambient music's recent history to unearth how the genre has evolved and the role it plays in our daily lives.

Ambient music is a part of our daily lives, whether we all realize it or not. It's the undercurrent in some of our favorite songs. It's the mood-setting background music in our favorite movies and video games. We hear it in the placid music pumped through the speakers in department stores, on critically acclaimed albums from generational talents, and in synthesizer drones from the depths of Soundcloud. It's present in the peaceful sounds of spa music, new-age chants, and wellness resources like the Calm app that purport ambient's healing properties. You can find it on those strange, anonymous instrumental nature albums you can buy at Bed Bath & Beyond. It shows up in genres ranging from electronic and rock music to jazz and lo-fi beats. Ambient is everywhere.

20th Century Ambient details a crucial period in which ambient music became a fully realized idea and is secretly one of the most popular genres in the world. Ambient has existed debatably as long as music itself. It wasn't until the 20th century that it became a defined genre. This book walks through ambient's ambiguous timeline to uncover not just the genre's evolution but to understand why it resonates so deeply with the human spirit. From Erik Satie's classical compositions, hidden histories in blues and dub music, innovations by Brian Eno and Alice Coltrane, all the way through modern artists spearheading ambient in the still early 21st century.

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Ana Leorne

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Death Metal

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This comprehensive portrait of Tropicália, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, demonstrates how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a post-colonial world.

While bossa nova nurtured a snobbish audience rooted in jazz and Música popular brasileira (MPB) spoke to a multicultural yet oppressed nation, Tropicália invested in a crossover instigated by the progressive youth who refused to glorify a past it didn't identify with and whose outdated codes it didn't intend to perpetuate. This portrait of Tropicália, exploring everything from influences and results to context and main players, shows how the genre helped reinvent Brazil's cultural identity in a postcolonial world.

The genre's core comes from a unique mix of native and foreign influences: Tropicália doesn't reject the international pop panorama but is an undeniable product of it. The book sets the strangling military dictatorship and its resulting censorship serving as the sociopolitical backdrop of the genre. Tropicália propelled culture (and counterculture) forward, moving away from senseless niche intellectualisms in favour of a broader reach of Brazilian music.

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T Coles

Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack By Rose Bridges

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Featuring exclusive interviews with key figures, from Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway to guitarist Bill Steer of Gentlemans Pistols, Carcass, and Napalm Death, this is your guide through the history of death metal.

Guitars playing abrasive, discordant riffs, the thunderous double-kick of the drums acting like an accelerated heartbeat, and porcine, guttural vocals pummeling twisted lyrics. Courting controversy from inception to its modern day iteration, death metal presents a number of contradictions: Driven and adventurous musicians compete to make uncomfortable noises; it is crude and far beyond parody and yet consistently popular; and the music is pig-headedly uncommercial despite making a few labels, albeit briefly, wealthy.

This book explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its aims and intentions, its crossovers to the mainstream, successes and failures, and tracks how it developed from the bedrooms of Birmingham and Florida to the near-mainstream, to the murky cult status it enjoys today.

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Yoko Kanno

Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto

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Cowboy Bebop is one of the most beloved anime series of all time, and if you ask its fans why, you can expect to hear about its music. Composer Yoko Kanno created an eclectic blend of jazz, rock, lullabies, folk and funk (to list just a few) for Cowboy Bebop's many moods and environments. Cowboy Bebop's blend of science fiction, westerns and gangster films promised to be "the work which becomes a new genre itself," and only Kanno's score could deliver.

In this volume of 33 1/3 Japan, musicologist Rose Bridges helps listeners make sense of the music of Cowboy Bebop. The book places it within the context of Bebop's influences and Kanno's larger body of work. It analyzes how the music tells Spike, Faye, Jet and the rest of the crew's stories. Cowboy Bebop and its music are like nothing else, and they deserve a guide to match.

33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

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Getz/Gilberto By Bryan Daniel McCann

This Is Hardcore By Jane Savidge

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Most die-hard Brazilian music fans would argue that Getz/Gilberto, the iconic 1964 album featuring "The Girl from Ipanema," is not the best bossa nova record. Yet we've all heard "The Girl from Ipanema" as background music in a thousand anodyne settings, from cocktail parties to telephone hold music. So how did Getz/Gilberto become the Brazilian album known around the world, crossing generational and demographic divides?

Bryan McCann traces the history and making of Getz/Gilberto as a musical collaboration between leading figure of bossa nova João Gilberto and Philadelphia-born and New York-raised cool jazz artist Stan Getz. McCann also reveals the contributions of the less-understood participants (Astrud Gilberto's unrehearsed, English-language vocals; Creed Taylor's immaculate production; Olga Albizu's arresting, abstract-expressionist cover art) to show how a perfect balance of talents led to not just a great album, but a global pop sensation. And he explains how Getz/Gilberto emerged from the context of Bossa Nova Rio de Janeiro, the brief period when the subtle harmonies and aching melodies of bossa nova seemed to distill the spirit of a modernizing, sensuous city.

33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

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Pulp

Switched-On Bach By Roshanak Kheshti

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This Is Hardcore is Pulp's cry for help. A giant, sprawling, flawed masterpiece of a record, the 1998 album manages to tackle some of the most inappropriate grown-up issues of the day – fame, ageing, mortality, drugs, and pornography – and still come out crying and laughing on the other side. The subject of pornography dominates the record – from its controversial artwork to the images conjured up by songs like "Seductive Barry" and the title track – after Pulp's main man, Jarvis Cocker – who'd spent most of his teenage and adult life chasing celebrity, only to be cruelly disappointed when it finally arrived in spades – hit upon the grand notion of using pornography as a metaphor for fame. The album's commercial failure as a follow-up to the band's Britpop-defining, Different Class, also symbolizes a death knell for Britpop itself.

Dark, right? Except just like Pulp themselves, Jane Savidge's book is playful and sometimes very funny indeed. Kicking off with an imaginary conversation between Jarvis Cocker and the people who run the Total Fame Solutions helpline, Savidge expertly guides us through the trials and tribulations of an album that begins with the so-called Michael Jackson Incident, when Cocker got up on stage at the 1996 Brit Awards and waggled his fully-clothed bum at the King of Pop. Pulp's This Is Hardcore may be a sleazy run through porn and mental demise, and an album that chronicles Cocker's continuing disillusionment with his newfound lot in life, but Savidge's book assesses the cultural and historical context of the album with insider knowledge and a sharp modern lens, ultimately making a case for it as one of the most important albums of the 1990s.

"Essential reading, plain and simple." - Cult Following
"Savidge knows the album backwards." – UNCUT

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Wendy Carlos

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - '70s Teen Pop

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So much, popular and scholarly, has been written about the synthesizer, Bob Moog and his brand-name instrument, and even Wendy Carlos, the musician who made this instrument famous. No one, however, has examined the importance of spy technology, the Cold War and Carlos's gender to this critically important innovation.

Through a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology studies, Roshanak Kheshti engages in a reading of Carlos's music within this gendered context. By focusing on Switched-On Bach (the highest selling classical music recording of all time), this book explores the significance of gender to the album's--and, as a result, the Moog synthesizer's--phenomenal success.

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Lucretia Tye Jasmine

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - South African Popular Music

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Teen pop is a sub-genre of popular music marketed to tweens and teens. Its melodic yearning and veneer of sincerity appeal to an emerging romantic eroticism and autonomy. But tweens and teens buy music that isn't primarily marketed to them, too. Teen pop encompasses several kinds of musical styles, not limiting itself to just one-teen pop wants to play.

During the 1970s, teen pop sometimes worked subversively, challenging the status quo it seemed to represent. Male pop stars such as David Cassidy were shown suggestively in popular magazines and female pop stars such as Cher had their own TV shows. Teen magazines, pin-ups, comics, films, and TV programs provided luscious visual stereo, promoting fashion styles, lingo, and dance moves, signaling individual identity but also community. The music provided a way for young people to believe they had something all their own, an authenticity experimenting with sexuality and social conduct, all dressed up in glitter and satin, blue jeans and boom boxes, torn fishnets and safety pins and, magically, their dreams. Cartoon pop and made-for-TV bands! Bubblegum pop! Glam! Hip hop! Hard rock and pop rock and stadium rock! Punk! Disco! Teen pop reinforced aspects of the counterculture it absorbed as the music kept playing-and playing back.

Although it's very difficult to attain and maintain social progress and play it forward-there are so many tragedies-'70s Teen Pop examines how liberation and a true counterculture can be possible through music.

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Lior Phillips

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Soul-Folk

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From the storied ache of mbube harmonies of the '40s to the electronic boom of kwaito and the amapiano and house explosion of the '00s, this book explores vignettes taken from across South Africa's popular music history. There are moments in time where music can be a mighty weapon in the fight for freedom. Disguised in a danceable hook or shouted for the world to hear, artists have used songs to deliver important truths and bring listeners together in the face of a segregated reality. In the grip of the brutal apartheid era, South Africa crafted its own idiosyncratic popular musical vernacular that operated both as sociopolitical tool and realm of escape. In a country with 11 official languages, music had the power to unite South Africans in protest. Artists bloomed a new idyll from the branches of countless storied musical traditions, and in turn found themselves banned or exiled-the profound epiphany that music can exist both within the pleasure of itself and for serving a far greater purpose.

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Ashawnta Jackson

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Shoegaze

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Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light- the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals- and creating something wholly new, wholly theirs, wholly ours.

This book traces the growing imprints of soul-folk and how it made its way from folk tradition to subgenre. Along the way, it explores the musicians, albums, and histories that made the genre what it is.

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Ryan Pinkard

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Krautrock

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What the hell is shoegaze? A scene? A movement? A sound? Back in the Nineties, many would have said the so-called genre was entirely fabricated. The term itself, an offensive piss-take given by the notoriously catty and scene-obsessed British music press, was plainly rejected by the absurdly small collection of bands to which it supposedly applied.

Today shoegaze is undeniable. As a descriptor and as a source of influence, it is used in more ways and by more bands than anyone could have dreamed of 30 years ago. Between those periods of invention and ubiquity, the term, along with the bands it first described, all but disappeared off the face of the earth.

In this ambitious oral history of a genre that has eluded definition for three decades, Ryan Pinkard unearths the first wave of shoegaze, following the core bands, their sounds, their influence, and their journeys in and out of obscurity. His analysis is woven through dozens of original interviews with artists, label heads, and critics. What he discovers is the unlikely odyssey of this esoteric, experimental music form, which nearly became a mainstream entity, only to be viciously killed off, forgotten, and rediscovered by a new generation that regards it as one of the most influential alternative music events since the Velvet Underground.

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Marshall Gu

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Math Rock

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Krautrock is not a music genre. Krautrock is a way of life. Its sonic diversity and global reach belie the common culture from where it emerged. This is a band-by-band history.

In May 1945, the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, putting an end to the European front of World War II and the Third Reich. In the immediate aftermath, German youth were tasked to create their own culture. Krautrock is this unlikely success story, as hundreds of bands-including Kraftwerk and Can-seemed to sprout overnight in the early 1970s, forging a unique and experimental sound that was different than American or British rock. The major innovation of krautrock is not only its motorik beat, the steady click-click of Can's Jaki Liebezeit or monolithic stomp-stomp of Neu!'s Klaus Dinger, but also how the musicians relate to each other. In krautrock, no musician is given more focus than any other, and listening to these bands is to witness interplay common in jazz music. Thus, krautrock represents German politics reflected in music: a dictatorship replaced by democracy.

Krautrock explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its influences and innovations, its more mainstream acts (like Faust, Kraftwerk, and Can) as well as the less universally known (including Harmonia, Popol Vuh, Embryo, and Ash Ra Tempel), and how the genre developed in post-war Germany and what it means to today's listeners.

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Jeff Gomez

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Math rock sounds like blueprints look: exact, precise, architectural. This trance-like progressive metal music with indie rock and jazz influences has been captivating and challenging listeners for decades. Bands associated with the genre include King Crimson, Black Flag, Don Caballero, Slint, American Football, Toe, Elephant Gym, Covet, and thousands more. In an online age of bedroom producers and sampled beats and loops, math rock is music that is absolutely and resolutely played: men and woman in rooms with instruments creating chaos, beauty, and beautiful chaos.

This is the first book-length look at the global phenomenon. Containing interviews with prominent musicians, producers, and critics spanning the globe, Math Rock will delight longtime fans while also serving as a primer for those who want to delve deeper. It shows why and how an intellectually complex, largely faceless, and almost entirely instrumental form of music has been capturing the attention of listeners for 50 years-and counting.

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Jethro Tull

Aqualung By Allan Moore

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society By Andy Miller

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Formed in 1968, Jethro Tull are one of rock's most enduring bands. Their 1971 album Aqualung, with its provocative lyrical content and continuous music shifts, is Tull's most successful and most misunderstood record. Here, music professor and fan Allan Moore tackles the album on a track-by-track basis, looking at Ian Anderson's lyrics and studying the complex structures and arrangements of these classic songs.

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The Kinks

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn By John Cavanagh

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Ignored by virtually everyone upon its release in November 1968, 'The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society' is now seen as one of the best British albums ever recorded. Here, Andy Miller traces the perilous circumstances surrounding its creation, and celebrates the timeless, perfectly crafted songs pieced together by a band who were on the verge of disintegration and who refused to follow fashion.

EXCERPT
'Big Sky' contains some of the most beautiful, thunderous music The Kinks ever recorded, aligned to a vulnerability and warmth no other group - and I mean no other group - could ever hope to equal. It is a perfectly balanced production. On the one hand, the mesh of clattering drums and electric guitar never threatens to overwhelm the melody; on the other, the gossamer-light harmonies, Ray and Dave's vocal line traced by Rasa Davies' wordless falsetto, are bursting with emotion. When most of the instruments drop away at 1.20, the effect is effortlessly vivid - two lines where Davies' performance is both nonchalant and impassioned. The result is wonderfully, enchantingly sad, made more so perhaps by the knowledge that The Kinks will never again sound so refined or so right.

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Pink Floyd

My Favourites, Vol. 2 By Anirudha Bhattacharjee & Chandrashekhar Rao

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Through a series of interviews with a wide range of people connected to Pink Floyd in their earliest days (including Nick Mason, Peter Jenner, Jenny Fabian, Storm Thorgerson, Duggie Fields and Peter Whitehead), John Cavanagh paints a vivid picture of how this remarkable debut album was created. He brings to life the stories behind each track, as well as Pink Floyd's groundbreaking live performances of the time.

EXCERPT
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a wondrous creation often seen through the distorted view of later events. These things have served to overshadow the achievement of The Pink Floyd on their debut album: an outstanding group performance; a milestone in record production; and something made in much happier circumstances than I had expected to find...This is not another book about "mad Syd". This, instead, is a celebration of a moment when everything seemed possible, when creative worlds and forces converged, when an album spoke with an entirely new voice. "Such music I never dreamed of," as Rat said to Mole.

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Lata Mangeshkar

Season 14 By Rakae Rehman Jamil & Khadija Muzaffar

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A history of Hindi film music recounted from a list of 50 of Lata Mangeshakar's songs that she chose as her favorites.

Lata Mangeshkar, one of India's all-time most influential singers was known as "the Nightingale of India." For her album My Favorites Vol. 2, Lata chooses 50 songs as her favorites among her own work, from a repository of over 5,000. This book covers an expanse of nearly forty years, connecting you to the real-life events behind the songs, going back to when music listening in India was limited to the radio, the 78 RPM shellac, the occasional visit to the cinema, and later, the vinyl records, cassettes, and the 30 minutes Chitrahaar on television every week.

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Coke Studio

Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band's Kogun

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This book reviews the 13 songs of Coke Studio's 14th season and highlights how those innovations resulted in a successful reboot of the show.

In a country fraught with political instability and violence, the television show Coke Studio serves as a beacon of hope and progress in Pakistan. For over a decade, its music has not only acted as a medium for sharing Pakistan's rich musical heritage across the world, but also created an appreciation and awareness of the musical traditions embedded within the diverse communities of the country. The show has profound cultural impact in its exposure of not only Pakistan's, but the entire South Asian region's indigenous musical compositions and ancient musical traditions dating back to the 12th century.

Referencing his own personal experiences working as a session artist in Coke Studio's second and 11th seasons, Jamil emphasizes on how the show has taken a major shift in sonic palettes, visual style and production approach in the 14th season. This was largely due to the introduction of Zulfiqar Jabbar Khan (a.k.a. Xulfi) and his team of electronic producers who have hugely impacted the local music in Pakistan for more than five years with their hybrid production approach to Pakistani music; electronic dance music applied to regional melodies and instrumentation.

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Kogun E. By Taylor Atkins

Boodle Boodle Boodle By Geoff Stahl

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In 1974 a Japanese soldier emerged from the Philippine jungle where he had hidden for three decades, unconvinced that World War II had ended. Later that year, the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band released its first album, Kogun ("solitary soldier"), the title track of which adopted music from medieval Japanese no theater for the first time in a jazz context as aural commemoration of his experience. At a time when big band jazz was mostly a vehicle for nostalgia and no longer regarded as a vital art, the album was heralded as a revelation. Kogun elevated Akiyoshi's reputation as a brilliant composer/arranger and earned Tabackin acclaim as a compelling, versatile improviser on tenor saxophone and flute.

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The Clean

Since I Left You By Charles Fairchild

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The Clean's 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa/New Zealand and defined what became known as the "Dunedin Sound". At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin, on New Zealand's South Island. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the "Dunedin Sound" associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.

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The Avalanches

Don't Be Swindle By Mahon Murphy And Ran Zwigenberg

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Since I Left You has a reputation amongst its advocates that exceeds those of nearly all of its closest peers. Yet despite the inordinate amount of attention this album has received, it has never been thoroughly examined in context. While repeatedly celebrated for its artistry, technical skill, and emotional resonance - in particular its sample-based material and then-cutting edge technological feats within the electronic music genre - it has never been definitively placed in the world that produced it.

Charles Fairchild studies this album in a way no one else has. Since I Left You is placed in its historical, technological, and cultural contexts and is examined for the social and aesthetic attributes it was said to possess at the time of its release. There is a focus on the clear set of aesthetic aspirations that guided the album's creators and how those creators pasted together the fragments of many sound worlds.

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S.O.B.

The Lord Of The Rings, Vols. 1-3 By Bruce Johnson

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Apart from being the center of Japan's cultural heritage, Kyoto is home to one of Japan's leading avant-garde art and music scenes. The Kyoto University-affiliated venue Seibu Kodo has historically been the focus of this scene, creating an ethos and organizational core which hosted major international acts such as Frank Zappa and Talking Heads while pushing more local experimental and political acts. The hardcore punks in Kyoto, most of whom were high-school dropouts, borrowed the organizational structure and interacted with Seibu Kodo and its committees to create their own scene. By focusing on the seminal hardcore album Don't Be Swindle by S.O.B. and using rich archival material, this book explains the connections and entanglements of space and scene in 1980s punk.

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John Sangster

J.M.K.E.'S To The Cold Land By Brigitta Davidjants

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In three volumes and more than six LP recordings, The Lord of the Rings suite, produced during the 1970s, based on the Tolkien books, is the most ambitious, stylistically and emotionally wide-ranging compositional oeuvre ever undertaken in Australian jazz. Its composer (and one of its performers) John Sangster embraced the historical spectrum of jazz styles, from traditional to the avant-garde, through performance, recording and film/TV music. Sangster, whose career spanned from the late 1940s until his death in 1995, was one of the most complex figures in Australian music. In both temperament and musical style, he ranged from light to darkness, idolized by his colleagues, yet susceptible to (literally) homicidal rage. Nothing in the recording history of Australian jazz, and perhaps Australian music in general, matches the monumental stature of these volumes, which he called his musical autobiography.

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J.M.K.E.

Cosmic Thing By Pete Crighton

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This book explores the album 'Külmale maale' (To The Cold Land, 1989) by J.M.K.E. – the most legendary punk rock band in Estonia – concentrating on the meaning of the album in different sociocultural contexts from its release until today. In 35 years, the album has not lost its relevance: It was nominated for best pop music album of Estonia in 2014 and is listened to by all generations of punks.

The story of J.M.K.E. illustrates the subcultural organization not only in Estonia but in the Soviet Union in general, where pop music and the existence of subculture was more or less censored for 50 years. Broadly, it presents the influential role of pop culture in the transition from a totalitarian society to a liberal economy and from subcultural to post-subcultural society.

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The B-52's

The Land Of Rape And Honey By Jason Pettigrew

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The B-52s were always queer, though not overtly, and this book dissects the coded queer messaging in the B-52s music, using Cosmic Thing as a launching point. Alongside the authors own queer awakening, this book looks at what was obvious all along – the B-52s aren't just pop culture icons, they are queer history.

The B-52s fifth record Cosmic Thing took the world by storm in 1989 in the wake of the band's single greatest tragedy: losing guitarist Ricky Wilson to complications from Aids in 1985. Cosmic Thing is a celebration of queer joy in the face of that seismic setback. Not only did the B-52s have to fight through their pain and grief to make Cosmic Thing, they were up against a conservative government under Reagan (then Bush), a misunderstood virus still ravaging the queer community and the expectations of what 'serious' artists were supposed to look like.

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Ministry

Blue Bell Knoll By Chris Tapley

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This is the definitive chronicle of Ministry's 1988 industrial rock release, The Land of Rape and Honey, that details the zeitgeist where post-punk, metal, funk and straight-up noise converge. Featuring interviews with Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker, Chris Connelly, Jello Biafra, Adrian Sherwood, deadmau5, Fear Factory and many more famous fans and pundits, this deeply sourced book traces back the climate surrounding Ministry's first two full length releases before examining the vision, methods and controversies that helped ascend Lorah to its rightful legend status. Lorah may be the one common title members of Nine Inch Nails, AFI and ZZ Top have in their collections, be it phonograph or phone. And the story behind it remains fascinating. Ministry mainstay Jourgensen got a taste of bitter record-biz backwash early on with his first major label bow for Arista (1983's With Sympathy), and then vowed never to drink from that cup again. His pursuit of artistic freedom culminated in Ministry's 1988 release, the record that left an entry wound on the world's assorted underground scenes while helping to foment the industrial rock revolution that inspired a countless number of bands across all sonic frontiers.

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Cocteau Twins

Universal Mother By Adele Bertei

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In this exploration of Cocteau Twins' quintessential album, Chris Tapley traces lines in all directions from Blue Bell Knoll to paint a revealing portrait of the enigmatic trio and their career-long struggles with self-doubt, stubborn principles, and pure experimentation. Throughout their career, Cocteau Twins sought to escape definition. Lyrics were a closely-guarded secret, their transcendent recordings sounded completely unique, and they were notoriously tight-lipped during interviews. The music, they said, should speak for itself. Only nobody could agree on what the music said. Released in 1988, their fifth full-length Blue Bell Knoll is the pinnacle of Cocteau Twins' legendary ambiguity. The first album recorded entirely in their own studio, these dense dreamlike songs capture the band as they refine the key elements of their iconic sound by testing the limits of language and the mixing desk. In this exploration of Cocteau Twins' quintessential album, Chris Tapley traces lines in all directions from Blue Bell Knoll to paint a revealing portrait of the enigmatic trio and their career-long struggles with self-doubt, stubborn principles, and pure experimentation. From lyrics and production to artwork and interviews, everything about this influential, one-of-a-kind band stokes contradictions and uncertainty, and raises the question: can anyone ever really define what a song means?

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Sinéad O'Connor

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With Universal Mother, Sinead O'Connor explores childhood trauma and her experiences as a woman, mother, target of scorn, and ultimate phoenix.

Released in the winter of 1994, Universal Mother was the first recorded work from O'Connor since her duo of protests in 1992 (Saturday Night Live, Madison Square Garden). The sadistic blowback she faced for publicly outing the child abuse of the Catholic Church and its cover-up would have destroyed most. Where Sinead might go next, or if she'd ever record again, was the question. It's a testament to her integrity and extraordinary courage that she was able to resurrect with this extraordinary album.

The album takes us on a deeply personal, yet universal journey of womanhood, from the archetypal bad mother to the good and the kind. A feminist statement from Germaine Greer sets the tone, followed by O'Connor letting loose a storm of rage against her abusive mother in “Fire on Bablyon”-a salvo so explosive, it need not be repeated. Other than a song called “Red Football” and a call-out of the truth behind the Irish potato famine, O'Connor is not interested in rage or revenge. With Universal Mother, she offers us a tender, evocative collection of grief and empathy in song. Her miraculous voice is the vessel-the broken, sacred voice of Mother Ireland.

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John Cale

Paris 1919 By Mark Doyle

And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out By Elliott Simpson

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John Cale's enigmatic masterpiece, Paris 1919, appeared at a time when the artist and his world were changing forever. It was 1973, the year of the Watergate hearings and the oil crisis, and Cale was at a crossroads. The white-hot rage of his Velvet Underground days was nearly spent; now he was living in Los Angeles, working for a record company and making music when time allowed. He needed to lay to rest some ghosts, but he couldn't do that without scaring up others. Paris 1919 was the result.

In this vivid, wide-ranging book, Mark Doyle hunts down the ghosts haunting Cale's most enduring solo album. There are the ghosts of New York – of the Velvets, Nico, and Warhol – that he smuggled into Los Angeles in his luggage. There is the ghost of Dylan Thomas, a fellow Welshman who haunts not just Paris 1919 but much of Cale's life and art. There are the ghosts of history, of a failed peace and the artists who sought the truth in dreams. And there are the ghosts of Christmas, surprising visitors who bring a nostalgic warmth and a touch of wintry dread. With erudition and wit, Doyle offers new ways to listen to an old album whose mysteries will never fully be resolved.

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Yo La Tengo

The Life Of Chris Gaines By Stephen Deusner

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Hailed as a “quiet masterpiece”upon release, Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out proposed a radical new future for rock music. Released at a time when the music industry was changing dramatically thanks to the rise of online file sharing, it suggested that the only way for a band to survive was to listen to themselves.

A delicate and hushed album, its songs explore the quiet battles that take place every day and the beauty that can emerge from the ordinary. In many ways, this is reflective of the story of the band that made it – self-managed for most of their career and having maintained the same line-up since 1992, Yo La Tengo almost resemble a suburbs-based nuclear family.

And Then Nothing… argues that great art does not come from suffering, but instead, steady, unglamorous work. It is an album that helped forge a new mythology for rock and roll: one not built on sex, drugs and debauchery, but instead the quiet lives of people living in peaceful suburban homes. From the nothingness of the everyday, something incredible can emerge.

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Garth Brooks

Hounds Of Love By Leah Kardos

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Garth Brooks was the best-selling country artist of the 1990s.

Actually, he was the best-selling artist of the '90s period. So why did he close out that triumphant decade by transforming into a fictional rocker named Chris Gaines? He devised an outrageous backstory for the character-complete with sex addiction, facial reconstructive surgery, wildfires, and chainsaws-and even recorded a “pre-soundtrack” to a forthcoming film about Gaines. But Garth Brooks… In the Life of Chris Gaines, which doubled as a retrospective of his alter ego's long career, was branded a fiasco before it even hit stores. It sold poorly, the film was shelved, and Garth announced his retirement the next year. Chris Gaines disappeared forever.

Or did he? Out of print since its release and absent on streaming services, the album has somehow grown from a career-derailing flop into a cult obsession. Only one world-renowned critic is brave enough to tell the full story of Chris Gaines. It's a sordid, puzzling tale of intrigue and conspiracy that poses chilling questions: Which one of them is real? Chris or Garth? Why did one of them title an album Fornucopia? And just who does this Stephen Deusner guy think he is? Well…

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Kate Bush

$ 18.83*

The Moon & Antarctica By Zachary Petit

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Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old.

This book charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener's point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush's songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and influence that Hounds Of Love has had on music cultures and creative practices through the years, underlining the artist's importance as a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere.

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Modest Mouse

$ 12.44* $ 17.78 -30%

Genre: A 33 1/3 Series - Neue Deutsche Welle

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In 1999, Modest Mouse struck out for Chicago to record their major-label debut for Epic Records. Amid indie circle cries of “sellouts,” a largely untested producer, and a half-built studio, the trio recorded the instrumental basics of The Moon & Antarctica … and then singer/songwriter Isaac Brock got his face smashed by a hooligan in a park.

With barely any vocals recorded, Brock emerged from the hospital with his jaw completely wired shut, and returned to a mostly empty studio. And there, on a diet of painkillers, in a neighborhood that wanted to purge the band from its borders, a creative alchemy took place that would redefine Modest Mouse and indie rock at large.

The fact that the band finished the album at all is surprising. The fact that it is now considered by critics as “hands-down one of the greatest records ever made” (NME) is perhaps an utter miracle.

The Moon & Antarctica is an album so strange and enigmatic, from those sweet opening notes, to the plunging depths of the middle, to the shocking, furious end, that you almost hesitate to listen to it again for fear of it losing its chaotic magic. But then you do, and you discover all-new sounds-a lost harmonic here, a stray percussion element there, a fresh interpretation of a lyric that leaves you thunderstruck.

And that ever-looming question, years on: How the hell did Modest Mouse pull this off?!

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