Blog

Boy Harsher have announced Get Mean, their first new album since the 2022 film and soundtrack The Runner. Due September 18 via Atlantic Records, the twelve-track album follows Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller through the breakup of their romantic relationship, a period of familial loss and creative uncertainty, and the difficult decision to continue Boy Harsher together.

Alongside the announcement, the duo have unveiled “Hard Beat,” a lean, driving darkwave track accompanied by a Boy Harsher-directed video about surveillance, deviance, desire, and trauma. Where June’s “Jeans” introduced their return through wiry new wave guitar and western detail, “Hard Beat” bears down on the machinery that first made Boy Harsher such a commanding presence in clubs: a catchy bass-synth figure, an unrelenting kick drum, and Matthews’ voice cutting through the track like cold air rushing through an open car window.

One cannot help but hear a trace of Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel” in its fusion of movement, erotic surrender, and mechanical repetition. Boy Harsher pushes that feeling toward a harder, more body-driven strain of darkwave, with the bass carrying the physical weight while Matthews slips between confession, invitation, and command. The highway becomes both an escape route and a place where control can abruptly change hands.

Directed by Boy Harsher with cinematography from Owen Smith-Clark, the video draws from Helmut Newton’s 1995 “High and Mighty” feature and the sexually charged queer punk cinema of Gregg Araki. It opens inside a windowless room lined with yellowed tiles, where an old CRT television displays Angel Zinovieff seated in a wheelchair. The image soon cuts from the monitor to Zinovieff herself, dressed in black with one leg held inside an elaborate metal brace. Rods and clamps run along her fishnet-covered limb, turning an orthopedic device into something between medical apparatus, restraint, and severe fetishwear.

The camera studies the brace in close-up before moving to the controls of a vintage Cadillac tearing along a nearly deserted highway at night. Metal joints, pedals, switches, leather gloves, and the car’s gear selector enter into a visual correspondence with the hardware fastened around Zinovieff’s leg. The human body and the automobile appear as related machines, each capable of movement while remaining subject to whoever controls its mechanisms.

Inside the Cadillac, Cheeky Ma and Mo Stark play the two “freaky deviants” hurtling through the blue-black night. The driver smokes, laughs, paws at the dashboard, and turns a handheld MiniDV camcorder on the other occupants, its mounted light firing directly into their faces. At moments, the camcorder is raised with the casual recklessness of someone filming a party while driving; elsewhere, its bright eye takes on the invasive force of an interrogation lamp. Rings, lacquered nails, facial piercings, glossy fabric, and black leather crowd the frame as passing streetlights sweep across the interior.

Jae Matthews occupies the backseat beneath a black funeral veil. Red and green light divide her face behind the netting as she sings directly toward the lens, sometimes alone and sometimes pressed close against another veiled figure. The mesh softens and fractures their features, lending the encounters an uneasy intimacy: a kiss, a threat, and an identification photograph can seem separated by only a few frames. Matthews remains a passenger, yet her fixed gaze and repeated appeals to “make it real” steadily pull the car’s disorder around her.

The highway is continually fed back into the tiled room through the CRT monitor. At first, the television shows Zinovieff in her wheelchair; it later carries the empty road, faces from the Cadillac, and camcorder images stamped with a red recording indicator and apparent geographic coordinates. Those transfers make it increasingly difficult to determine who is watching whom. The people in the Cadillac document each other, the closed-circuit system observes the room, and the video finally points its cameras outward at the audience.

Under choreography by performance artist Monica Mirabile of FLUCT, Zinovieff’s physical restraint develops into a violent, increasingly expansive dance. She folds at the waist, whips her hair, claws at her clothing, arches backward, and strikes the tiled walls with open palms. Her movements carry the strain of a body fighting both its enclosure and the device attached to it. The editing cuts these gestures against the Cadillac’s acceleration, collapsing stillness and speed into the same state of agitation.

Blue highway footage, sickly green tiles, sudden red washes, and overexposed camcorder glare keep the two locations visually connected. As the song intensifies, the cuts become faster and the images less stable: veiled faces double against one another, the driver leans toward the camera with a feral grin, Zinovieff’s hair lashes across her face, and the road stretches ahead without revealing a destination. Near the end, the Cadillac is viewed from outside, with its occupants compressed behind the windshield and Matthews’ veiled face visible within the moving vehicle. The car continues through the darkness as though escape itself has become another form of confinement.

The video also sharpens the track’s resemblance to Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel.” Anton Corbijn’s film famously presents Dave Gahan with an injured leg and crutches before a woman assumes control of the journey. “Hard Beat” rearranges that imagery around Zinovieff’s brace, the vintage Cadillac, female control, and the unstable line between passenger and captive. Those shared elements—bodily injury, roadway travel, erotic power, and surrendered agency—make the connection unusually specific, while Boy Harsher drives the idea into a harder and more openly confrontational setting.

The MiniDV camcorder establishes another suggestive post-punk reference. Its repeated appearance in “Hard Beat,” together with Nathaniel Jerome’s promotional portrait of Gus Muller pointing a camcorder directly at the viewer while Matthews stands behind him, immediately recalls the artwork and promotional campaign for New Order’s 2001 album Get Ready. Photographed by Jürgen Teller under Peter Saville’s art direction, that campaign similarly placed a handheld camera between its subject and audience. With Boy Harsher calling their album Get Mean, another clipped two-word imperative beginning with “Get,” the parallel feels likely intentional, even though the duo have not explicitly confirmed it. Here, New Order’s invitation to be prepared becomes Boy Harsher’s warning to toughen up.

Watch the video for Hard Beat below:

Get Mean began during a period when the continuation of Boy Harsher was far from assured. In early 2024, after years of international touring, increasingly ambitious collaborations, and projects that moved between music and film, Matthews and Muller ended their relationship. The separation followed personal turmoil, family loss, and a creative block that left the prospect of another album feeling remote.

The situation confronted the pair with questions that reached beyond the ordinary mechanics of making another record:

What happens when a band that’s been forged in intimacy, cloaked in the sonic textures of darkly swooning electronics, and dedicated to plumbing the complex and contradictory depths of romantic feeling falls apart? What’s left after grief takes everything? What does a breakup album look like for a band as singular as Boy Harsher?

Writing resumed when Matthews took to the road, moving through West Texas, the Pacific Northwest, South Florida, and points between. That unsettled geography became part of the album itself. Described as Boy Harsher’s “road album,” Get Mean was recorded across eight locations in the United States, Mexico, and Italy, gathering cellphone voice notes, environmental fragments, and changing emotional states along the way.

Matthews describes the album as:

“what I had to give during the most extreme period of my life.”

Across its twelve tracks, the familiar coldwave propulsion of Boy Harsher meets detuned pads, squelching synth leads, pedal-steel bends, New Romantic guitar, percussive jokes, and unadorned recordings captured on a phone. Those additions allow grief and exhaustion to coexist with flirtation, humor, and the possibility of beginning again. The record follows the collapse of one form of intimacy while testing whether another—the creative bond between Matthews and Muller—can survive it.

Get Mean arrives September 18 via Atlantic Records. Pre-order and pre-save the album here.

Matthews and Muller formed Boy Harsher in 2014 after meeting while studying film in Savannah. Their first EP, Lesser Man, began as a small cassette release before the track “Pain” spread widely online. The duo followed it with Yr Body Is Nothing in 2016, the Country Girl EP in 2017, and Careful in 2019. Their filmmaking background came fully into view with The Runner, the 2022 horror film and accompanying soundtrack that they wrote, produced, directed, and scored.

Their cinematic work continues with The Lonely Woman, their forthcoming feature-length horror thriller starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs, Sturgill Simpson, Will Oldham, and Jake Weary. Boy Harsher are directing the film and providing its score.

Following the release of Get Mean, Boy Harsher will begin an extensive North American headline tour before continuing through Europe and the United Kingdom. The itinerary includes sold-out two-night runs in Chicago and Portland, a sold-out Los Angeles appearance at the Hollywood Palladium, and a London headline show at the Roundhouse.

Follow Boy Harsher:

• Official Website
• Bandcamp
• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube

Boy Harsher Live Dates

• 09/25 — Hudson, NY — Basilica Hudson
• 09/27 — Boston, MA — Royale
• 09/29 — Montreal, QC — MTELUS
• 09/30 — Toronto, ON — Danforth Music Hall
• 10/01 — Detroit, MI — Majestic Theatre
• 10/02 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
• 10/03 — Chicago, IL — Metro — Sold Out
• 10/04 — Minneapolis, MN — Varsity Theater
• 10/06 — Denver, CO — Summit
• 10/09 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
• 10/10 — Portland, OR — Revolution Hall — Sold Out
• 10/11 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox — Sold Out
• 10/12 — Seattle, WA — The Showbox
• 10/13 — Vancouver, BC — The Pearl — Sold Out
• 10/15 — Oakland, CA — Fox Theater
• 10/16 — Los Angeles, CA — Hollywood Palladium — Sold Out
• 10/17 — Del Mar, CA — The Sound
• 10/18 — Santa Ana, CA — Observatory Festival Grounds — Sold Out
• 10/20 — Las Vegas, NV — House of Blues
• 10/21 — Phoenix, AZ — The Van Buren
• 10/24 — Fort Worth, TX — Sick New World
• 10/26 — New Orleans, LA — Republic NOLA
• 10/27 — Atlanta, GA — Variety Playhouse
• 10/28 — Asheville, NC — The Orange Peel
• 10/30 — Washington, DC — The Howard Theatre
• 10/31 — Philadelphia, PA — Making Time
• 11/05 — New York, NY — Knockdown Center
• 11/14 — Lyon, France — Le Transbordeur
• 11/15 — Paris, France — Bataclan
• 11/16 — Strasbourg, France — La Laiterie
• 11/17 — Frankfurt, Germany — Zoom
• 11/18 — Lausanne, Switzerland — Docks
• 11/19 — Munich, Germany — Kesselhaus
• 11/20 — Vienna, Austria — Ottakringer Brauerei
• 11/21 — Leipzig, Germany — Felsenkeller
• 11/22 — Berlin, Germany — Columbiahalle
• 11/24 — Hamburg, Germany — Gruenspan
• 11/25 — Cologne, Germany — Essigfabrik
• 11/26 — Amsterdam, Netherlands — Paradiso
• 11/27 — Lille, France — L’Aéronef
• 11/28 — Nantes, France — Warehouse
• 11/29 — London, UK — Roundhouse
• 12/01 — Manchester, UK — Ritz
• 12/02 — Glasgow, UK — SWG3 TV Studio
• 12/03 — Bristol, UK — Bristol Electric at SWX
• 12/04 — Antwerp, Belgium — De Roma

The post Boy Harsher Signs to Atlantic Records and Announces New Album “Get Mean” — Watch Video for “Hard Beat” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

In 1969, Jethro Tull had a Top Three UK single with Living In The Past and also a No.1 album, Stand Up. They hadn’t yet breached the US Top Ten, though, coming close a year later with the folky/experimental Benefit. That accolade would come in 1971 with Aqualung. And what would become Tull’s best-selling album began with one of their best-known riffs.

Ian Anderson recalled that, like much of the album, the title track emerged as a result of the singer-songwriter approach he brought to the project. “That came out of an acoustic jam; you’ve just got to have the imagination to hear that. You have to know that you can make it sing.”

Tull recorded Aqualung at Island Studios in London, and while the final arrangement of the title track explored the many styles they had brought together previously, with folk and rock in the mix, it also had a more metallic edge.

In both tone and theory, the distinctive six-note guitar intro shared much DNA with the doomy, imperious riffs associated with the nascent Black Sabbath, even containing ‘The Devil’s Interval’ itself, the tritone. Indeed, Tony Iommi had briefly been in the band in ‘68, replaced by long-time Tull alumnus Martin Barre.

As well as livening the song with a brilliant solo, Barre brings heft and menace to Anderson’s tale of the heavy-breathing titular homeless person who’s ‘Sitting on a park bench/Eyeing little girls with bad intent’. But as the music broadens out and the album’s prevailing acoustic aesthetic comes into play, Anderson treats the ‘poor old sod’ with some sympathy, as he bends to pick up dog-ends on aching legs.

“Aqualung is a song about homeless people, but more importantly it’s a song about our reaction – those of us that are fortunate enough to have homes, to have a degree of wealth and happiness and family and friends and support,” said Anderson. “It’s about our reaction of guilt, distaste, awkwardness and confusion, all these things that we feel when we’re confronted with the reality of the homeless, whether it’s the slightly Chaplin-esque tramp figure on the Aqualung album or whether it’s a 17-year-old criminal, drug-addicted or working in the sex trade or whatever it might be.”

Anderson has credited his then-wife, photographer Jennie Anderson, with much of the song’s earthy, quasi-Dickensian lyrical content. She had also given him early inspiration by showing him a set of photographs she had taken of homeless men in London while at art school.

At six and a half minutes, Aqualung didn’t lend itself to AM radio play, and never came out as a single. But then Tull were already way past the stage of striving for hit singles.

“It was too long, too episodic,” Anderson said later. “It starts off with a loud guitar and then goes into more laid-back acoustic stuff.”

“Many of the songs mix acoustic and electric moments, in such a way that the album became the blueprint for a lot that’s happened since,” said Barr. “Honestly, I don’t listen to it, except for reference. When you’ve played a song like Aqualung for so long live and very loudly, it’s good to go back and remind yourself what it should sound like.”

Barre’s biggest challenge came in the shape of Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page, who was working on their fourth album in the studio next door, and paid a visit just as Barre was recording his guitar solo.

“We’d locked ourselves away, and I hadn’t seen Jimmy at all,” Barre told Guitar Player in 2015. “Finally he walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to Aqualung. In those days, if you didn’t get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, ‘Go in there and do it or else.’

“And here was Jimmy, waving like mad – ‘Hey, Martin!’ – and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t wave back or I’m going to blow the solo!’”

The title track set the tone for Jethro Tull’s most iconic collection of songs, which hit No.7 in the US and No.4 at home. And in 2004, the band revisited it, playing the entire album for a radio audience of just 40 people in Washington, DC. Aqualing Live was released the following year, with royalties going to appropriate homeless charities.

More than a decade later, Anderson recorded a new version of the song, entitled Aquafugue, with the UK’s Carducci Quartet. Released on the 2017 album Jethro Tull: The String Quartets, it featured Anderson playing Barre’s iconic six-note riff on his famous flute, an instrument that hadn’t appeared on the original.

“The idea of having the string quartet play it as a fugue to introduce it and then to kind of get into the obvious payoff rendition that the fans would recognise was a little bit of arts meets crafts,” Anderson told Songfacts. “I think you’ve got to try and balance it up so that it’s not all too clever. You’ve got to mix it up a little bit.”

Along with Living In The Past and Locomotive Breath, Aqualung remains one of Jethro Tull’s essential musical moments, as well as one of the all-time great prog anthems.

Looking back on Steely Dan’s immense success and impact, it’s hard to envision a time when the supremely honed and highly original jazz-rock group weren’t at the top of their game. But when the core duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were starting out, recognition for their talent and approach would take some time – and some getting used to.

Keyboard player Fagen had stumbled across Becker practising guitar in the campus cafe at New York’s liberal arts school Bard College in 1967. Fagen wanted to start a band, but he’d struggled to find a guitarist who could play jazz and blues the way he wanted to, not “like Dick Dale”, as was the trend, he said.

Becker was playing a wild blues-based style, and Fagen had “never really heard anything like that”. The duo soon started writing together and played in various musical configurations. They found incongruous employment as part of the touring band for doo-wop crooners Jay & The Americans, whose lead singer Jay Black recalled his impression of the pair as “yoghurt-skinned” beatniks who seemed to surface only at night. “The Manson and Starkweather of rock’n’roll,” he called them.

Graduating in 1969, Fagen took the duo’s songs to Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building, the hub for popular songwriters and publishers of every stripe, from Burt Bacharach to Lou Reed, Carole King to Ellie Greenwich.

Becker and Fagen had little success there. The musical climate was not quite ready for their hipster hybrids. However, a Jay & The Americans connection clicked. Group member Kenny Vance was now a Brill resident, and he commissioned from them a soundtrack to 1971 screwball hippie film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat, which starred Robert Downey Sr and Richard Pryor.

Their style caught the attention of young producer Gary Katz, who’d begun his career working with pop and rock entertainer Bobby Darin and was newly installed at ABC/Dunhill Records, where he looked after acts including the Mamas And The Papas, Three Dog Night, the James Gang and Steppenwolf.

“I don’t have much to do with the songs,” Katz told RecordProduction.com in 2000, “but I can spot talent.”

Katz would later A&R Jim Croce and Chaka Khan, and while at Warner Bros Records would be instrumental in the signing of Prince. Katz concluded that Becker and Fagen’s stuff was too weird for anyone to handle but them, and their own band. Becker and Fagen were private, introverted creators, and Katz recognised that their work would be best cultivated in a small social bubble.

“They weren’t outwardly public… they had their own relationship,” he told broadcaster Denny Saunders. “They were totally bound to each other. The expression ‘soul brothers’ applies. There was very little fighting in the studio because… no matter what was going on, in the end, Donald was mother.”

Having relocated from New York to LA, by day they wrote for the label roster; by night they had a group that included jazz guitarist Denny Dias, ABC-signed drummer Jim Hodder, session guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and vocalist David Palmer, brought in due to Fagen’s lack of confidence when it came to singing live.

In August 1972, Katz took the group, now named Steely Dan (a nod to their beatnik roots, using the moniker of the steam-powered strap-on dildo from William S Burroughs’s mind-bending 1959 novel Naked Lunch), into Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles to make their debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill. The album began with the chilled Latin groove of Do It Again: glossy with its slick musicianship, arch lyrical commentary and pristine production, and blending soft rock, jazz, blues and soul in a singular 70s – and very Steely Dan – fashion.

The highlight of the album was Reelin’ In The Years. Fagen stepped up to the mic for an effervescent – perhaps autobiographical – break-up narration (‘The trip we made to Hollywood is etched upon my mind/After all the things we’ve done and seen you find another man’) as the band galloped along in shuffle time.

The main guitar part needed something special, and this marked the Dan’s first time of what would become a regular ploy of bringing in hand-picked aces. They called another old contact from Jay & The Americans, Elliott Randall, who was just out of the orchestra pit playing for the Broadway version of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and now getting some freelance muso rep.

“It was my first session for them,” Randall told Produce Like A Pro. “I thought they were really special, and they must have thought I was special too.”

“They were having trouble finding the right ‘flavour’ solo for Reelin’, and asked me to give it a go,” he told Guitar World. Randall read the lyrics and got a sense of what the song was about. Unable to find a guitar amp in the studio, he plugged his 1965 Strat into a bass amp and played. Afterwards Katz called to the recording engineer: “Did you get that?” But he’d missed it, thinking it was a practice run.

For take two, Randall recalled that his imagination was fired up. “Something got me going,” he told Produce Like A Pro. He jazzed up the chorus for the intro, and, using a sprinkling of salsa, pulled off the most joyous, expressive musical conversation, from start to finish.

“That was it! Nobody said: ‘Can we try that again?’,” Randall remembered. “I was delighted, they were happy.”

The track has made millions of others happy too, including Jimmy Page, who knows a thing or two about guitar licks. In Classic Rock in 1999 he said the Reelin’ In The Years solo was his favourite, and in 2016, in conversation with YouTuber Oliver Patrick Loughnan, Page rated it 12/10.

“I’m flattered [by that],” Randall said in 2021. “It was actually very easy [to do]… The song virtually played itself.”

Caught between
Ruins and dreams
Shadow and light
Fall from the skies in your eyes 

A bellow is the raw announcement of need, the body turning pressure into sound. A bellows is need made mechanical, disciplined into rhythm: expand, contract, receive, surrender. Its wisdom lies in reciprocity. Nothing is filled without some neighboring chamber giving way; breath becomes possible through alternating loss. Stranger still, one modest instrument may animate an entire organ, feeding many pipes from a single lung. The image flatters neither independence nor abundance. It suggests that vitality is borrowed, transferred, and timed. What seems like emptiness may be preparation, and what sounds like grandeur may begin in one hidden fold of air.

Brittany Bindrim’s new single Bellow places the song between those meanings, where anguish becomes propulsion and intimacy begins as an exchange of damaged parts. The result is dreamy, driving darkwave with warmth in its bloodstream, a song about repair that leaves every seam visible.

A steady electronic pulse carries spacious synths and Bindrim’s ethereal vocal, which seems suspended above the beat while remaining closely tied to its forward motion. The arrangement has the buoyancy of a nocturnal drive and the emotional exposure of a confession made before certainty has arrived. Where the album burned, this one breathes, opening a wider chamber around Bindrim’s voice without diluting the tension. Even its brightness has edges, as though tenderness has entered the room without being asked to tidy it.

The lyrics imagine two wounded people recognizing corresponding absences in one another. Broken pieces become points of contact; pain becomes a shared language that can be revised rather than merely endured. Bindrim leaves the identity of “we” open enough to contain lovers, collaborators, audiences, or an entire scene held together by mutual rescue. Love, in this conception, offers no return to an untouched original. It produces a new form whose strength depends upon remembering exactly where it fractured.

“Bellow lives in dualities — shadow and light, ruins and dreams — until the halves finally fit,” Bindrim says. “The broken parts aren’t flaws to hide; they’re the exact shapes that let us lock into each other. Reassembly isn’t restoration. What comes back is greater than what broke.”

The accompanying video places Bindrim inside a mirror-world governed by delay. Her ghosted double follows a breath behind, making each gesture appear divided between action and memory, while the editing locks bodily movement to the song’s measured drive. Doubling becomes less an effect than a visual argument: every self contains its afterimage, every present bears the outline of what preceded it.

Watch below:

Call Bellow a love song, though Bindrim’s version comes with splinters, sutures, and exposed joins. Its romance lies in reciprocity, in the quiet knowledge that one person may breathe for another until both can stand.

Listen to Bellow below and order the single here.

Follow Brittany Bindrim:

• Spotify 
• YouTube 
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Facebook
• Website

The post “Caught Between Ruins and Dreams” — Brittany Bindrim Reassembles What is Broken in Video for “Bellow” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

When Ronnie Wood reminded Classic Rock that the pioneers of American blues were “dangerous men”, he hardly needed to name the tyrant-in-chief. He might have been born Chester Arthur Burnett in 1910, but the nom de guerre Howlin’ Wolf suited the Chicago bluesman better.

An intimidating physical presence with a short fuse and zero reverence for the white-boy boomers who touched his hem, Wolf’s bite was almost as lethal as his bark. When he sang, in a gale-force boom that blew down the house, there was nothing else in the world that felt so powerful – and more than a half-century after his death, his catalogue remains the real deal.

Memphis Days: The Definitive Edition Vol. 1 & 2 (Bear Family, 1996)
It took one rogue genius to talent-spot another, with Ike Turner credited, in 1951, for lifting Wolf from obscurity and arranging his first sessions at Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service (soon to be Sun). The producer would later recall “the fervour on his face… the veins coming out on his neck… he sang with his damn soul”, and these compilations catch all that.

On standouts like Baby Ride With Me, the bluesman’s voice is a primal rasp that demands attention and respect, while guitarist Willie Johnson gets the memo and rolls his amp into the red. From here, there was no keeping the Wolf from the door.

Moanin’ In The Moonlight (Chess, 1959)

Wolf had been spitting out classic sides throughout the decade before this debut Chess LP put them all in one place. Benchmarks like the stinger-riff Smokestack Lightnin’, the Zep-referenced How Many More Years and Willie Dixon’s much-covered Evil (Is Going On) have been overplayed for decades, but that hasn’t blunted their impact here, Wolf singing with the emotional focus of a power drill.

The title track, too, is a must-hear, with a wide-open harp ‘n’ slide-guitar groove giving the bluesman a canvas to growl, sneer and literally howl at the moon – while scoring him a R&B chart Top 10 hit.

Howlin’ Wolf (Chess, 1962)

Colloquially known as the Rockin’ Chair album, this second set from Chess gathered Wolf’s turn-of-the-decade singles, and certified the legend. By now, Willie Dixon’s pen was scratching at pace (a key reason for Wolf’s bitter rivalry with Muddy Waters was each bluesman’s suspicion that the other was being gifted the superior songs).

There’s no question that Wolf got the prime meat here: the Stones couldn’t touch his Red Rooster, while the swagger and room-filling shout of Spoonful was beyond even Cream. “Let me tell you something,” guitarist Hubert Sumlin recalled of the latter, “it was a number one tune we had there.”

The Real Folk Blues (Chess, 1965)

In the mid-’60s, Chess anthologised many of its stars – from John Lee Hooker to Sonny Boy Williamson II – in the Real Folk Blues compilation series. But don’t be fooled by the umbrella title: there’s nothing remotely shoes-off about the Wolf’s entry, which sets out its stall with the self-penned bob ‘n’ weave rave-up Killing Floor (the band’s instrumentation as lacerating as their boss’s voice), and even feels dangerous when they slow it down on the Cream-covered Sittin’ On The Top of The World.

These days, you’ll find these tunes bundled as a two-fer with 1967’s almost-as-good More Real Folk Blues – so no excuse.

The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (Chess, 1971)

When Chess producer Norman Dayron floated the ‘master-and-student’ concept to Eric Clapton backstage in San Francisco, the British bluesman jumped at the chance. The Wolf took more convincing: even once sessions began at Olympic with a revolving-door of luminaries including Ringo Starr, Bill Wyman and Mick Jagger, the senior statesman was a powder-keg (“On the second day,” says Dayron, “Wolf got surly. He was a fish out of water”).

It’s not as good as the credits would suggest, but when this makeshift lineup cooks on I Ain’t Superstitious and Poor Boy, it’s far more than a gimmick.

Live & Cookin’ At Alice’s Revisited (Chess, 1972)

“Thank you very much. I really appreciate you, because you are my people. You made me and I’m gonna howl for ya”. By 1972, Wolf might have been in failing health, his arrhythmia controlled by prescription drugs, his kidneys soon to go rogue – but he was as good as his word on this late-period live set.

A cover of arch-rival Muddy Waters’ Mean Mistreater is maybe the best collision of the band and its leader, but it’s The Big House that’s the real treasure, the bluesman exhorting his players to “make it funky” as he owns the eye of the storm. Four years later, he was dead.

The Chess Box (Chess, 1991)

The price tag on Amazon is a joke, but it’s worth a trip to Discogs, because for those who want to immerse themselves in Wolf World, this three-disc box-set manages the near-impossible and does justice to the legend.

Chess’s chronological selection of 75 tracks is hard to fault – taking in big-hitters, rarities and acoustic curveballs – the sound as sharp as you could realistically hope for, and the spoken-word tracks a rare window into a man who gave little away in his lifetime. Throw in a well-assembled booklet including rare archive shots, and it’s a shoo-in for completists.

The Howlin’ Wolf Story DVD (Bluebird, 2009)

You had to see Wolf live to feel his full force of nature: a pleasure denied to us since his swansong at the Chicago Amphitheater in November 1975. Still, this DVD does a fine job of reanimating the bluesman, combing the archives for gold like the 1965 Shindig! variety show appearance (complete with awed introduction by Mick Jagger and Brian Jones) and the festival set where Wolf butts heads with a heckling Son House (“You had a chance wi’ your life, but you ain’t done nuthin’ with it!”).

With testimony from family and bandmates like Sumlin, too, it’s as close you’ll come to knowing what made him tick.

Smokestack Lightning: The Complete Chess Masters 1951-1960 (Chess, 2011)

A second impossibly lavish multi-disc boxset might feel like overkill, but Smokestack Lightning justifies its release, covering different ground from The Chess Box and drilling deep into the white heat of Wolf’s first decade at the Chicago label. As we’ve established, the Wolf of later years has his merits, but gun to the head, this early material is the stuff: primal, powerful and with everything to prove.

Be warned: the number of alternate takes across these 97 tracks means dabblers shouldn’t apply. But for the true obsessives, you’ll find no better.

The first time you hit that spin button, there’s something almost magnetic about it. Online slots have come a long way from the clunky one-armed bandits you’d find in a smoky casino corner. And if you haven’t explored what’s out … Continue reading →

The post What Unfolds When You Dive Into the World of Online Slots appeared first on DMME.net.

Their debut album will arrive in 2027.

The post Emasculator (Ex-Abnormality, Etc.) Sign With Relapse Records appeared first on Theprp.com.

Routing them back home from their current tour together.

The post No Cure Announce New August Shows With Bayway appeared first on Theprp.com.

That had to be substantial.

The post Nickelback Reveal They Sold 80% Of Their Catalog Rights Several Years Ago appeared first on Theprp.com.

The Baltimore deathgrinde maniacs have released their new single “Feral Future”, accompanied by an official lyric video. It is the band’s first new music in four years, arriving on the heels of their return to Season Of Mist.
Read more…