Notable vinyl releases out this Friday - 17 November (2023)

Bryan Ferry's ninth solo studio album 'Mamouna' is being reissued for the first time since 1994 and is being released on two deluxe formats. It was Bryan Ferry's first studio album in seven years to feature original recordings, having worked on the album for six years under the working title of 'Horoscope'. The previously unreleased alternate recordings to the final 'Mamouna' versions are collected for the first time on these deluxe reissues as the 'Horoscope' album. The 2LP audiophile heavyweight vinyl was half-speed cut at Abbey Road Studios, London, by master engineer Miles Showell. The artwork direction for the updated reissue was overseen by Bryan Ferry himself.

Following the release of the critically acclaimed Random Access Memories 10th Anniversary Edition earlier this year, this new iteration of the GRAMMY-award winning Album of the Year strips away all drum and percussive elements from the album, giving listeners the ability to dive deeper into the layers of instrumentation on each track.

Bachman has a dedicated fan base who is tightly focused on his next steps. While he has always been restless with his art, his stylistic changes in 2020's "Axacan" demonstrated - and excited - many within that fan base as to how transformative his work and vision can be for "traditional" music in these modern times. This fresh work continued with 2022's "Almanac Behind". "When The Roses Come Again" is a perfect next step to this trendline, a synthesis of tradition and abstraction. In other words, it is yet another vivid reimagining of what a "traditional" album can be in modern times. On this LP Bachman takes acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle and mouth harp alongside oscillators, drum apps and more to construct one-man string band compositions. Integrating technology as a tool for collage, as well as acoustic instruments that pre-date all of us, Bachman excitingly creates an album that has as much to do with Terry Riley, Laraaji, Eno’s late 70’s ambient albums, and 75 Dollar Bill, as it does the Carter Family, Stanley Brothers, and Hobart Smith.

10th anniversary remix and remaster of Deafheaven's monolithic 2013 release. Sunbather created a radical shift in heavy music culture, an acceptance of the genre by previous outsiders, and a trailblazing sound that heretofore hadn't been heard outside of learned circles One of the most important and original rock bands of the past fifteen years, the long-awaited reissue of this pivotal release celebrates it's tenth anniversary with a fresh shine and coat of paint- a newly remixed and remastered sound by original producer Jack Shirley with available spacial audio.

Global icon and recent Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Dolly Parton, has joined forces with some of rock music's most legendary artists along with today's biggest stars for her first-ever rock album, Rockstar. The ever-evolving Parton teamed up with an all-star roster of musicians for the 30-song collection which includes 9 original tracks and 21 covers of iconic rock anthems.

Iron & Wine's Who Can See Forever is an accompanying live record to the film of the same name. Captured at Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, the soundtrack features nineteen songs from the twenty plus year career of singer-songwriter Sam Beam. Having found inventive ways to re-invent his catalog live over the years, Who Can See Forever offers new and fresh versions of Iron & Wine songs including "The Trapeze Swinger", "Boy With a Coin" and "Naked As We Came." The film - initially intended as a live concert film - evolved into a visual portrait capturing Beam during a creative outburst that earned him four Grammy nominations in four years. Like his music, the film touches on universally personal themes as Beam juggles being an artist, husband and father. Taken as one, the soundtrack and film are a fascinating first-time glimpse behind-the-scenes of Iron & Wine.

Kurt Vile - "Back To Moon Beach" - Back To Moon Beach is an EP by no one's definition but Kurt Vile's. For Kurt, this collection is an expression of just how deep his well of non-album material runs. This includes six tracks culled from various sessions over the last four years, and represents a wide swath of the inspirational musical community Kurt surrounds himself with. 

After a disparate couple of years which saw the band at their most polarised and fragmented, Madness reunited in an industrial unit in Cricklewood at the beginning of the year, where Suggs, Mark, Chrissy Boy, Mike, Lee and Woody realised that what united them was always bigger than what divided them. Emerging re-energised and reinvigorated with a fresh bounce in their nutty step, the result was their most harmonious recording experience to date. For the first time ever, a brand new album came into the world that they were all completely agreed on. Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C’est La Vie is the band's inaugural foray into self producing, working alongside engineer and mixer Matt Glasbey (Ed Sheeran, Maisie Peters, Rag’N’Bone Man). The governing principle behind Theatre Of the Absurd Presents C’est La Vie, is: “let Madness be Madness”. The result is an album of typically timeless brilliance that also reflects the wonky years of its creation, these 14 songs representing the cream of the bumper crop of tunes the group cooked up, whittled down this punchy, focused set. 

The XX Anniversary edition features remastered audio, unreleased live versions, demos and photos as well as a new, in depth interview with the band where they discuss the ups and downs of the recording process as well as the social environment they found themselves in which influenced the albums themes. In addition, there is an interview and Q&A with the album’s producer, Rich Costey. The deluxe box set is housed in a silver foiled slipcase and includes a 40 page casebound book with debossed cover detailing.

Released July 9, 2013, Major Arcana is filled with wedding chapel exorcisms, oiled-down attractants and criminally twisted puny little villains — this is Dupuis' haunted lexicon as she scales the toxic Aggro Crag of a breakup. And while Dupuis wrote these songs, the band's convulsing arrangements and diverse influences sprawled the squigglier edges of feedbacked fuzz to mete out matters of the heart. Falcone — who, it's worth noting, has a knack for vocal harmony — swung as much as he smashed the drums. In easily tipoverable songs, Ferm's burly bass and percussive overdubs gave the unruly glee its momentum. Robidoux ripped skronky guitar solos and countered Dupuis' riffs with decorative splatter. Over a four-day marathon session at Sonelab in Easthampton, recording engineer Justin Pizzoferrato sparked the studio imagination of Speedy Ortiz — not only leaning into gritty tones but layer-caking dense dynamics that made these songs pop and pulverize.

As the album title suggests, Songs of Silence is a lyricless, instrumental album, and is hugely evocative for that. Unlike anything you’ve previously heard from Vince Clarke as an artisan of dynamic electropop, Songs of Silence has about it a more sober ambient electronic beauty, its unique characteristics put it in a category of its own. For the creation of the record Vince set himself two rules – first that the sounds he himself generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack (a modular synthesizer format introduced in the mid-90s) and secondly that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout. The resultant pieces, with the Eurorack sound clay then manipulated on Logic Pro, amount to wordless narratives, in which a sense of synthgenerated, cosmic remoteness is often jolted by stark interventions, reminders of the human hand at work amid this machinery.