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Featured Release
Pat Metheny
Unity Band + Signed Print
For the first time since his 1980 release 80/81, Metheny has recorded with a band that features tenor saxophone. Unity Band introduces a new Metheny ensemble of the same name with Chris Potter on sax and bass clarinet, longtime collaborator Antonio Sanchez on drums, and the up-and-coming Ben Williams on bass. The album features nine new Metheny compositions. Says Metheny: "This is a group of musicians who can do just about anything.” Pre-orders include a print signed by Metheny and an instant download of the opening track, "New Year."
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Pat Metheny
Unity Band + Signed Print
For the first time since his 1980 release 80/81, Metheny has recorded with a band that features tenor saxophone. Unity Band introduces a new Metheny ensemble of the same name with Chris Potter on sax and bass clarinet, longtime collaborator Antonio Sanchez on drums, and the up-and-coming Ben Williams on bass. The album features nine new Metheny compositions. Says Metheny: "This is a group of musicians who can do just about anything.” Pre-orders include a print signed by Metheny and an instant download of the opening track, "New Year."
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Sara Watkins
Sun Midnight Sun
The second solo album from singer/songwriter/fiddle player Sara Watkins, Sun Midnight Sun, produced by Blake Mills, features guest appearances by Fiona Apple, Jackson Browne, Sean Watkins, and more. The album includes songs written by Watkins, several collaborations with Mills, songs by Dan Wilson and Willie Nelson, and a duet with Fiona Apple on The Everly Brothers classic “You’re the One I Love.” USA Today calls the album "flawless" and "a gorgeous pop masterpiece ... pure musical pleasure." The Wrap says "it might be the finest album of the year."
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Amadou & Mariam
Folila
Folila, Amadou & Mariam's first studio album since 2009's acclaimed Welcome to Mali, was helmed by longtime producer Marc-Antoine Moreau and epitomizes the duo's embrace of collaboration, with contributions by Santigold, TV on the Radio, Nick Zinner, Theophilus London, Bassekou Kouyate, and others. "From start to finish," says the Christian Science Monitor, "Folila can barely contain the joy." The Independent says: "[A]t the heart of every song is the irresistible combination of Amadou's trilling, cyclical guitar figures and the duo's uplifting vocal harmonies."
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Ry Cooder
Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
Inspired by a news headline about the Wall Street bailout, Ry Cooder began work on Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down with the track “No Banker Left Behind,” an ode to the corrupt few spared from the financial crisis while most were left to fend for themselves. Uncut calls this "one of his best albums ever ... an impassioned portrait of 21st century America and its injustices" in which Cooder is "remade as a modern-day Woody Guthrie, fearless and funny, for like Guthrie he nails his targets with droll humour while empathising with society's underdogs." The BBC calls it "essential listening."
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Emmylou Harris
Hard Bargain
Hard Bargain comprises 13 tracks, featuring 11 original songs by Emmylou Harris, all "suffused with kindly intimacy," says the New York Times. Two songs look back at relationships that were central to Harris’ creative life—with Kate McGarrigle and Gram Parsons. A deluxe edition includes a DVD featuring six performances interspersed with interviews. The Los Angeles Times raves: "This exquisite collection from the woman who has been the conscience of progressive country music for more than three decades ranks with the best work she's done."
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Björk
Biophilia
Biophilia is an interdisciplinary exploration of the universe and its physical forces—particularly those where music, nature, and technology meet—inspired by these relationships between musical structures and natural phenomena, from the atomic to the cosmic. The BBC raves: "An amazing, inventive and wholly unique eighth album from an artist without peer." NPR calls it "astounding."
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Billy Bragg + Wilco
Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions
On the acclaimed Mermaid Avenue albums, Billy Bragg and Wilco put music to lyrics by folk legend Woody Guthrie for which he had not written music or made recordings. Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions includes the original two volumes (the second re-mastered); a third volume with 17 previously unreleased recordings from those sessions; the 1999 documentary on the sessions, Man in the Sand; and a 48-page booklet with new liner notes by Nora Guthrie, lyrics, archival photographs, and facsimiles of lyric sheets and sketches by Woody Guthrie. "Nobody has picked up on Woody as effectively—or unexpectedly—as this transatlantic get-together," says the BBC. "What's remarkable," says Pitchfork, is "the number of gems these sessions produced."
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Kronos Quartet
Music of Vladimir Martynov
This album includes three works written for Kronos Quartet by the contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov and features a special guest performance from former Kronos cellist Joan Jeanrenaud on a piece the Times of London describes as "something to treasure" and the Los Angeles Times calls a “masterpiece. The performance, exquisitely recorded, is radiant."
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The Black Keys
El Camino
Produced by Danger Mouse and The Black Keys, the band's seventh studio album was recorded at singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in the band’s new hometown of Nashville during the spring of 2011. "They sound like a band who think they've made the year's best rock 'n' roll album," says the Guardian, "probably because that's exactly what they've done." The Independent calls it "by some distance the most powerful, compelling rock album of the year."
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Caetano Veloso + David Byrne
Live at Carnegie Hall
In 2004, Caetano Veloso curated a week of special concerts at New York’s Carnegie Hall and invited his longtime friend and collaborator David Byrne to join him for the show captured here. Each performs an acoustic set of his own songs and also perform together. The Seattle Times calls the concert "an absolute jewel." The Observer gives the album four stars, calling it "an entrancing showcase of their respective talents ... and even on disc a sense of joy and spontaneity is palpable." The Herald says it "leaves the listener grinning from ear to ear."