New Releases
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January 14, 2022Punch Brothers' album Hell on Church Street is the band's reimaigining of, and homage to, the late bluegrass great Tony Rice’s landmark solo album Church Street Blues, featuring an inspired collection of songs by Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Bill Monroe, and others. Recorded in November 2020, Hell on Church Street had been intended as both its own work of art and a gift to Rice, who died later that year. "After we got over the shock of losing our hero and friend," Noam Pikelny says, "we realized what Tony had left with us was his music, his spirit, and his legacy." "We spent a lot of time contemplating what happened when Church Street Blues hit our ears as a band," Chris Thile says: "we held it out, we conversed with it, and now we’re handing it to you." Nonesuch Store orders include a print signed by the band while supplies last.
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The Black Keys mark ten years of their four-time Grammy Award–winning album Brothers with a deluxe 10th anniversary edition featuring the remastered original album plus three previously unavailable songs, a new liner note by David Fricke, and photos from the archives. The album, recorded primarily at Alabama's legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, is "a masterpiece," exclaimed Rolling Stone; Uncut said it proves The Black Keys to be "one of the best rock 'n' roll bands on the planet."
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Devendra Banhart's cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower,” was released in honor of the 45th anniversary of The Grateful Dead’s album Blues for Allah. The song was produced and mixed by Noah Georgeson and recorded with his current touring band: Nicole Lawrence on guitar, Jeremy Harris on synths, and Gregory Rogove on drums and percussion. It was recorded remotely in various studios and home studios around Los Angeles and Stinson Beach, CA.
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Clint Mansell's haunting score to director Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream, performed by Kronos Quartet, returns to vinyl for the film's 20th anniversary year. The soundtrack was originally released on Nonesuch in 2000; the first vinyl edition was released for Record Store Day in 2016 with new artwork and two previously unreleased bonus tracks. The new 2-LP vinyl edition, which also includes the bonus tracks, features the original 2000 soundtrack cover art for the anniversary. "Brilliant stuff," says Classic FM.
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This is the first-ever vinyl release of k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times. As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch. It really feels like the way I hear music, this mash-up of genres, and I think it reflects all the styles that have preceded this in my catalogue. I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."
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For his 2020 album with Exploding Star Orchestra, Dimensional Stardust (International Anthem / Nonesuch Records), multidisciplinary artist Rob Mazurek arranged his pieces for eleven musicians, including Jeff Parker, and commissioned his long-time lyrics collaborator Damon Locks to draft original texts for the songs. The album recalls an array of Mazurek’s symphonic influences, from Béla Bartók to Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, he distills an orchestra of explosive improvisers into a graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.
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Tristan Perich's Drift Multiply (New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records), for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, the composer's largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes.
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The soundtrack to Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch Records in 2007, is available here in its first-ever vinyl edition, a two-LP set. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Tony Award–winning musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."
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Mountain Man performs the English folk song "Greensleeves," as part of its Mountain Man Sings series of cover singles. "'Greensleeves' is one of our favorite winter songs," says the trio. "It occupies a strange melodic balance point between crystalline winter whimsy and the kind of grim determination required to embark into the emotional wilds of the holiday season."