VMP Magazine

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.

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.

Grey beach rock tinges waves of modern, moody psychedelia on the LA-based Froth’s forthcoming third album Outside (Briefly). We’ve got the chillest recent release in our store this month, and it’s filled with tracks as dynamic as Froth’s weird career so far.

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.