Harvest of Highlights

  • Fresh Juice 19th May 2025

    Kassi Valazza – Your Heart’s A Tin Box The warm hazy country shimmer in Kassi’s music certainly caught my attention in 2023 with her wonderful ‘Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing’ album and she has pushed on further up and further in with this years ‘From Newman Street’ LP. That same analogue tone remains but do I… Read more

  • Old Fruit 16th May 2025

    The Renegades – Thirteen Women It’s a sixties garage rock themed half dozen track selections this week beginning with this, a raucous and still ever-so-slightly cheesy version of a song that, up to that point, was maybe best known as a Bill Haley b-side. It has a special place in my garage rock heart for… Read more

  • Fresh Juice 12th May 2025

    Galactic & Irma Thomas – Puppet On Your String Irma Thomas is the goddess of New Orleans soul music, in fact you can go even further than that and claim she is the true queen of soul. It seems barely comprehensible that she was making classic R&B as far back as the fifties and can… Read more

  • Old Fruit 9th May 2025

    Ivor Cutler – Shoplifters One of the true British eccentrics of the twentieth century, Ivor Cutler could make records that seemed primitive and childlike in their execution but somehow snuck some depth in through the back door of your mind and could have you think about things in a whole new way. He would mostly… Read more

  • Renaissance – Renaissance

    The Island label in the late sixties and early seventies remains a fertile hunting ground for serious vinyl collectors from this era. One reason for that is that the label comes across like it was run by actual music lovers that extended to great attention and artistry being put into even the sampler compilation LPs… Read more

  • The Kinks – Dead End Street

    It might have something to do with their ban from playing in America that led The Kinks to focus on such British sounding and referencing music in the mid sixties, but it equally could be this attention to detail and characters of his native land was the natural writing mode for Ray Davies. Either way… Read more