VMP Magazine

One of the most damaging fabrications that’s peddled across North American culture is that optimism and positivity have a static manifestation. The notion that these states exist only in sunny weather or major chords forwards a tricky, idealized aesthetic that leaves little room to explore alternative ways of expressing an appreciation for brightness. Admissions of disappointment and darkness are more giving than their imagery suggests; most often, they’re striving for something better via a process of exorcism. It’s healthy and productive to cast out darkness, but if it’s shunned as darkness for darkness’ sake, it extinguishes the redemption hiding beneath.

Today, we're selling the first vinyl pressing of UGK's 2007 album, Underground Kingz. Here are Liner Notes about the album, which is a 3LP on wood grain vinyl.

Nico Segal, 24, can’t get to everything in all the lives he’s living. It may not appear that way: trumpeter, producer, and songwriter running from the bloodline of Chicago jazz and cut from the new cloth of Chicago’s rap renaissance. As a key member in the Social Experiment, Segal’s spent several years in the project alongside Chance the Rapper and company, lending his genre-defying expertise to stage and studio. Under his now-abandoned Donnie Trumpet moniker (for the obvious reason of not just playing trumpet) he went on to curate Surf: a sprawling free album with a mile-long cast of collaborators hidden within its margins for listeners to discover on their own accord.

We’re reissuing Lee “Scratch” Perry and the Upsetters’ Eastwood Rides Again on orange vinyl with red splatter in our store this month, so we’re hipping you to the album here since it isn’t available in full on streaming services.

We’re selling a limited edition reissue of Betty Padgett’s self-titled debut on COLOR vinyl. Below, we present a history of the album.

We’re selling a 500 copy, limited edition green vinyl version of Link Wray’s Link Wray in the Vinyl Me, Please store. To help you learn more about it, here’s an excerpt from Chris Morris’ new Liner Notes for the album:

It’s 1996: after a breakout feature on the Puff Daddy-orchestrated remix of Gina Thompson’s “The Things That You Do,” a 24-year-old Missy Elliott is in a label bidding war featuring many labels throwing checks at her and she doesn’t even want all the attention. She was no industry secret: once a member of the Swing Mob imprint, she teamed up with childhood friend Timbaland to further curate an extensive writing and production resume for the likes of Aaliyah, Jodeci, Mary J. Blige, Ginuwine and 702 among many others. Missy’s pen was behind several industry darlings, yet the spotlight wasn’t the incentive; her primary goal was to secure her own imprint to build new artists up herself, not be a solo artist.

We’re excited to announce a Vinyl Me, Please exclusive reissue of A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s landmark 2009 album, Ashes Grammar, which came out originally with only 200 vinyl copies. You can buy the album here, and read this interview with Ben Daniels from the band about the making of the album.

For as long as humankind has had access to technology, we’ve used it to feed into guilty pleasures, keep tabs on significant others, call out haters as we see fit, and post jealousy-inducing selfies. As the cultural landscape has shifted to a more digitally-focused society, the vernacular in popular music has morphed to reflect the access gadgets and the internet have offered. Despite existing in a talent echelon all her own, Beyonce has made a lyrical evolution in line with the technological advances seen worldwide. From the internet dissing days of Destiny’s Child to the notable absence of tech on Lemonade, Beyoncé has utilized the universality of the future, voyeurism and love in her lyrics.

We talk to Noga Erez about her debut LP, Off The Radar, which we have in our store now on an exclusive blue vinyl.

The decision of which singers get to be stars, the generational icons, the ones with the deep catalog and the devoted fanbase, is some combination of blind luck, ambition, and an algorithm involving time, place, talent, and radio promotion. Which is to say musical history is riddled with talents who deserved more than they got, performers who flitted away on the periphery and maybe had very short periods near or in the spotlight, before they were relegated to the Trivial Pursuit of musical history. Merry Clayton is one of those performers, though not for any fault of her own. She had a musical instrument--her voice--that sounded like it could summon gale force winds, and the backing of Ode Records (the label of Carole King) and Jack Nitzsche, the legendary record producer who would use Clayton for a series of legendary singles she’d sing back-up on (more on those in a bit). Nearly every rock-loving person born since 1945 has heard Merry Clayton’s voice. Despite all this, her highest chart position for one of her albums was 146.

On May 16, we'll be selling Skogens Frukter, a brand new compilation of new and beloved songs by Swedish star Daniel Norgren. He came onto Vinyl Me, Please's radar thanks to Levi Sheppard, so we had him write about who Daniel is, and why he's one of Europe's best kept secrets.

It’s hard to describe what the inside of Alexandra Savior’s brain looks like, but she supposes there’s a lot of velvet. Listening to her debut album, Belladonna of Sadness, you can imagine there might be a few dimly lit hallways, scarlet-hued walls, a creepy parlor filled with omniscient stone-faced characters... and a gun positioned perilously on a side table.

If you logged online at any point during 2016, you most likely saw the term “dumpster fire.” The idea of 2016 being awful became a meme in itself, but not one that was particularly funny. There’s not much of relaying all those gritty details to you again – you can turn on cable news for that. Everyone will take their own lessons from that pivotal period in history. For synth-pop duo Sylvan Esso, it meant realizing that they had some growing up to do.

The group’s new album, What Now, is not just about the 2016 election. That’s more of a catalyst than anything. It’s a record about love, technology, identity, and being honest with yourself. That last point is key. Talking with lead vocalist Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn, it’s clear they have no fronts and no fucks to give. Even in an interview, they’ll challenge each other’s opinions and try to uncover the truth. Whether that’s debating existential ideas like love or even their own songwriting process, they quip like friendly sparring partners. That energy is what makes What Now work so well.

Sonically, the album expands their sound further into a maximalist, pop direction. Meath has never sound more self-assured than on lead single “Radio,” singing pointed criticisms of the pop music industry like “Now don’t you look good sucking American dick?” Their humor and insight are their greatest assets and they’re more than willing to put themselves in their own crosshairs as well. We caught up with Meath and Sanborn to uncover the ambitious themes of their new record and the process it took to land on the final product.

This month, we're presenting a VMP-only Coke bottle clear vinyl edition of Son House's Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions, (buy it here) remastered from original master tapes. In researching the album--and Son House--we found an unbelievable tale of blues enthusiasts trying to find old blues artists, defunct record labels not realizing how influential someone would be when they recorded them, a 21-year-old guitarist, and a second coming of a career the artist never could have seen coming.

Insofar as a composer can become famous in modern American society, with the exception of maybe Hans Zimmer, Philip Glass is the most famous one. He’s gone from being an enfant terrible of the minimalist scene that costarred luminaries like LaMonte Young, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, to having his works soundtrack pivotal moments in prestige pics. It’s hard to reduce Glass’ works to a single album--Glassworks was the one that first broke him to a wider audience--but Solo Piano is maybe his most enduring work. It’s his best stand alone album, and it’s been used as emotional shorthand in movies and TV shows.

It’s also been performed and reimagined the most out of all of Glass’ works, as even a cursory look at YouTube proves. So, in honor of our reissue of Solo Piano, we are honoring the seven songs on the album by picking our favorite covers of each of them. You can buy Solo Piano on April 17 from the Vinyl Me, Please store.

Methyl Ethel’s album was not made for you. Let’s get that straight right now. The second LP from the Perth art-rock outfit dropped out of the mind of Jake Webb—song by song, like Tetris blocks morphing shape until they locked into place. When the level cleared, he’s on to the next puzzle. While Everything Is Forgotten was just released March 3 on 4AD, Webb’s consumed by another project, tinkering away at an album that we won’t hear for “a long time.” At least that’s what Webb says to me on the phone, calling from some Australian bathroom where he went to find some tranquility.

Today, we're happy to announce our 180g vinyl reissue campaign with Blue Note Records. We'll be doing four reissues throughout the year, and the first one is Eddie Gale's totemic Ghetto Music. You can buy it by following the link over there on the right.

We're also excited to bring you these, the original liner notes to the album written by John Norris in 1968 when the album came out. Norris was a huge figure in jazz journalism in the '60s; he started the now defunct CODA Magazine, that featured writing on basically every important jazz artist between 1962 and 2009. These liner notes will also be on the back of our exclusive, but we figured you'd want to read them if you're not sure what to make of the album.

This week, we’re releasing the Vinyl Me, Please book, 100 Albums You Need In Your Collection, in our member store. It’s out on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other book retailers on April 4, but you can add it to your April shipment by buying it this week. Here, the book’s co-editor tries to convince you to buy it.

His giddy laugh comes booming through the phone. It’s only 6 a.m. Seattle time when I place the call to Philadelphia and I’m working my way through a pot of coffee. But within seconds of chatting with Strand of Oaks’ Timothy Showalter, it’s hard not to get caught up in his infectious spirit as he recalls spending the morning petting his cat. By his own self-admission, Showalter is not subtle. The same grinning enthusiasm he has while shredding on his guitar and whipping his hair across the stage is the same he has when talking about the underrated virtues of Jane’s Addiction or retelling his favorite moments crate digging for dub records.

This month, we're excited to be featuring a limited edition of Wagon Christ's Musipal. It's not necessarily a well known record, so we had Gary Suarez, our electronic columnist--his Digital/Divide drops at the end of every month--write about why the album is important, and place it in the lineage of electronic music that came before and since.

If you listen to the blues enough, you realize that some players’ genius isn’t so much in their complete originality; rather, someone’s greatness can be measured solely how they recontextualize and reimagine classics of the genre.

Arriving too late for the boom in Delta blues interest--thanks to being way younger than basically every hero he worshipped who got a second wave of fame in the ‘60s--Taj Mahal has made an entire career out of reconfiguring the blues, often pairing it with musical forms you wouldn’t expect, and scoring films.

Our metal columnist Andy O'Connor and our electronic columnist Gary Suarez pick titles for our store (which opens today!) and tell you why.

Deaf Forever and Digital/Divide are metal and electronic music columns by Andy O’Connor and Gary Suarez. We’re having Andy and Gary pick a new album for the store each month—here are this month's picks:

No one really knows how many albums are released each year. With free mixtapes sites, Spotify, and Bandcamp opening up their loving arms to any album made by anyone, the best estimates are that there are around 75K albums made each year. If you wanted to keep up and listen to them all, you’d need to listen to 1442 albums a week. If you figure the average album is about 35 minutes, you literally don’t have enough hours in the week to listen to everything released each year. Some things are going to fall through the cracks.

That’s where we come in: Here’s our list of the 15 most overlooked albums of 2016 that we think deserved more attention than they got. But that’s not all: We believe that these albums are not only worth listening to, we think they’re worth owning as well, so you can purchase each and every one of these albums in the VMP Store, right now.

Without further ado, here’s our list of most overlooked albums from 2016.