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The Lurkers Beggars Arkive release a 5 Albums box set for pioneering British punk band The Lurkers. The Lurkers were the first ever band on Beggars Banquet and the whole label history boils down to their existence. Formed in West London in 1976, they are one of the most notable bands of early UK punk and within eighteen months the band had 5 UK Top 75 chart singles with appearances on Top Of The Pops.
This 5CD, 86 track box includes their two Beggars Banquet albums (Fulham Fallout and God’s Lonely Men), all of their singles and nine demos, 21 BBC session tracks and the Pete Stride/John Plain album New Guitars In Town (the first time on CD). Now cult icons, their early singles have been noted over the years as being punk classics.

Henry Rollins included their debut album Fulham Fallout as one of his 20 favorite punk albums in LA Weekly and Mojo included their ‘Just Thirteen’ single in their list of Best Punk Rock Singles Of All Time.

Disc 1: Fulham Fallout

1. Ain’t Got a Clue
2. I Don’t Need to Tell Her
3. Total War
4. Hey You
5. Shadow
6. Then I Kicked Her
7. Go Go Go
8. Jenny
9. Time of Year
10. Self Destruct
11. It’s Quiet Here
12. Gerald
13. I’m on Heat
14. Be My Prisoner

Disc 2: God’s Lonely Men

1. She Knows
2. God’s Lonely Men
3. Out in the Dark
4. Cyanie
5. Whatever Happened to Mary
6. Take Me Back to Babylon
7. Room 309
8. I’ll Be with You
9. Non-Contender
10. Seven O’Clock Someday
11. Sleep on Diamonds
12. Bad Times

Disc 3: Singles & Demos

1. Shadow (Single Version)
2. Love Story
3. Freak Show
4. Mass Media Believer
5. Be My Prisoner (Streets Version)
6. Ain’t Got a Clue
7. Ooh! Ooh! I Love You
8. We Are the Chaos Bros. (Fulham Fallout Firty Free)
9. I Don’t Need to Tell Her
10. Pills
11. Just Thirteen
12. Countdown
13. Out in the Dark
14. Cyanide
15. Suzie Is a Floozie
16. Cyanide (Pub Version)
17. New Guitar in Town
18. Little Ole Wine Drinker Me
19. Total War (Demo)
20. Then I Kissed Her (Demo)
21. I Love the Dark (Demo)
22. Freak Show (LP Demo)
23. Cold Old Night (Demo)
24. Pick Me Up (Demo)
25. Mary’s Coming Home (Demo)
26. New Guitar in Town (Demo)
27. Little Ole Wine Drinker Me (Demo)

Disc 4: BBC sessions

1. Freak Show
2. Total War
3. I’m on Heat
4. Then I Kissed Her
5. Be My Prisoner
6. Ain’t Got a Clue
7. Pills
8. I Don’t Need to Tell Her
9. Jenny
10. (Here Comes the) Bad Times
11. God’s Lonely Men
12. In Room 309
13. Countdown
14. Whatever Happened to Mary
15. Take Me Back to Babylon
16. Out in the Dark
17. See the World
18. You’d Better Move on
19. Cold Old Night
20. School Girls
21. Pick Me Up

Disc 5: Pete Stride & John Plain – New Guitars In Town

1. Laugh at Me
2. School Girls
3. Cold Old Night
4. He’ll Have to Go
5. Just Like a Clown
6. Half the Time
7. New Guitar in Town
8. Cure for Love
9. Restless Kind
10. You Better Move on
11. Pick Me Up
12. Jimmy Brown

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Country singer-songwriter Darrell Scott takes sustainable living seriously. He uses wood for heat, the sun for power, and grows his own food on his home on the Cumberland Plateau, outside of Nashville. In fact, the word sustainability is the first one listed in his biography on his website, www.darrellscott.com/bio. Except he spells it “sustain-ability”. That’s how seriously he takes it; he chews each side of the conjunction to show its individual importance and relationship to each other.

Scott notes that conservation used to be a popular idea back in the ‘70s, as the future promised to be overpopulated and polluted if we did not safeguard our resources. Unfortunately, Scott says today the world acts as if we will never run out of resources in our rush to become bigger: fracking for natural gas, building pipelines, and such. He practices what he preaches on Couchville Sessions, but maybe not in the way you might think. His recycling is of a different nature.

The songs on Scott’s new album were recorded in his living room during 2001 and 2002 and feature the playing English multi-instrumentalist Danny Thompson and Nashville musicians drummer Kenny Malone and guitarist Dan Dugmore. The homemade process endows the music with a comfortable, downhome feeling. Even when there is virtuoso picking, the riffs seem playful. Scott took the tapes to Bill Payne to master in 2015, and now more than a dozen years later the music is available. Payne allegedly performed his magic in the living room of Scott’s new domicile.

Now one can’t quite call this composting. That would require breaking down the old tracks. But one really can’t call this a new crop of tunes either. In any case, it does reveal Scott’s consistency. Most of these decade plus year old songs, both originals and covers, resemble his more recent output in terms of sound and quality. Ironically, the most dated cut is a Scott original called “It’s About Time”. It’s squeaky clean acoustic arrangement recalls past countrypolitan styles of another era. The cutesy lyrical wordplay and Scott’s affected vocals seem out of place here, among a funereal version of Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man”, a melancholy treatment of Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta”, and a somber take on James Taylor’s “Another Grey Morning”. Every song doesn’t have to be sad, but they cannot be facile.

Scott does offer some fine happy moments. The opening cut, “Down to the River”, celebrates the diversity of friends who sing together soulfully only to be criticized by the music police for not sticking to one genre. The magic realism of this tale goes from fanciful to the nitty gritty without ever losing direction. The band plays loose and free to capture the mood and Scott even yodels off-key to emphasize that being crazy has its merits. The song ends with a wooly Guy Clark narration that seals the deal. And the album contains more serious depictions of life, such as the character study of a woman and her abusive boyfriend, “Waiting for the Clothes to Get Clean”. The sketch strongly captures the pathos of such a relationship without being cloying. The simple, mantra-like melody suggests how we fall into patterns without knowing we are falling into a trap until it is too late.

Other self-penned tracks like “Love Is the Reason”, “Morning Man”, and “Come Into This Room” offer proof of both Scott’s songwriting talents and his singing to set a mood and hook an audience. The band just falls into the groove and subtly reveals their talents.

As a preservationist, Scott understands how to treasure resources. Putting out 15-year-old material with a good band and just a minimum of reprocessing fits in with his lifestyle and behavior, and we are all the better for it.

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This album was recorded in just four days with a band that had never played together before and most of the songs were done live in a couple of takes; given that genesis, the record sounds remarkable with subtleties that you’d only expect from painful rehearsal and painstaking planning. As ever, Payne’s songs are tightly constructed. It’s hard to pick them apart as everything slots together so seamlessly. They aren’t overly ambitious and they stick to a quite narrow genre but they do exhibit differences in texture, tempo and melody, which keeps everything fresh. He works in the borderlands between folk, country and rock with a spattering of gentle psych thrown in, at his most folkish on After Tonight a gentle troubadour with an acoustic guitar and a gentle touch.

The Brightest Star is more upbeat with a swell of a chorus that hits like a high tide smashing into the sea wall, with a shower of piano notes for decoration. Slower and aching is Holding On, which plays in the same sandpit as Ryan Adams, but doesn’t steal any of his toys. There’s a gentleness of touch about Payne, he never sounds aggressive, the music always sounds inclusive and welcoming. All Of These Things has a series of notes in the background that spiral up like sparks from a bonfire and a warm glow that makes you want to move nearer to it. Thoughts On Thoughts sounds a bit like Spain; with the flickering acoustic guitar and the clicking percussion, it takes me to Andalucía. Evangeline (Los Angeles) on the other hand takes me to Jay Bennett era Wilco, the gentle simmering before Jim O’Rourke took them into uncharted waters.

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Back in 2010 Dan Stuart’s brain broke and he fled to Mexico as so many others (Bierce, Lawrence, Lowry, Burroughs, Kerouac, etc.) had before him. He settled in Oaxaca and wrote an album and false memoir that shared the same title: The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings. Both were explorations of the events that had led to his unraveling, his early days leading the erratically magnificent Green On Red and his later years as a kept man and occasional screenwriter who wandered the streets of NYC and Barcelona looking for opium dens that no longer existed and whores that always will. Recording alone in a concrete bunker in Oaxaca, with only the help of a banda engineer keeping time with a 30 peso little black egg shaker, Marlowe’s Revenge was born.

Later, in a mescal and weed haze and looking for co-conspirators, he came across a Twin Tones video online and sent them a kite. They were half Stuart’s age but oddly they had some mutual friends and knew more than a little about his previous work. Stuart was invited to their gritty home studio in northern Mexico City and the first night they cut Soy Un Hombre and soon had a half dozen more. Curious what would happen, Stuart sent Twin Tone’s leader Gabriel Lopez some of the Oaxaca solo stuff with instructions to overdub to their heart’s content. The result is an olla podrida (foul stew) of tracks both live and collage where most of the rules of recording were broken (more shaker!) and only someone like JD Foster could mix.

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Freeman’s new album, Letters Never Read — the second she’s recorded with Teddy Thompson producing — is even more fetching in its finessing of contradictions than its predecessor. “Lovers On The Run” is one of the album’s most musically chipper moments — gently jaunty phrasing over a marching groove — but it depicts an endless loop of infatuation and abandonment. The brisk, tuneful “Just Say It Now” advocates for honesty about one-sided affection. Hers is a bruised sort of romanticism, all wispy, beguiling melodies, finessed arrangements and lyrics that sway between harboring hope for lasting sweetness and bracing for disappointment. When Freeman offers extreme vows of fealty in “Make You My Own” (“I would lay down my soul at your feet / I’d need never to drink or to eat / I would know not the smallest defeat”), pleas for tenderness in “Turtle Dove” or rejects an untrustworthy lover with cool finality in “That’s Alright,” her lilting delivery carries a profound, pensive burden: the awareness that comfort and pleasure are fleeting.

What’s striking is that Freeman’s interpretations of down-home material are deliberately spare, yet no less elegant. She transforms “Yonder Comes a Sucker,” made famous by Jim Reeves in the 1950s as a droll hillbilly hoedown, into a softly swinging romp accompanied by nothing but a jazzily martial drum pattern. She brings a patient, knowing quality to the frailing banjo number “Over There,” a traditional gospel tune that’s been known by several other names. And she sings “Ern & Zorry’s Sneakin’ Bitin’ Dog” (a ditty composed by Gayheart long ago) entirely a capella, shading her performance with feathery note bending, faint rhythmic friskiness and just a touch of vibrato.

The ease with which Freeman knits together sturdiness and sophistication is a revelation, and one that’s arrived right on time.

Though Sabrina Malheiros‘ recording career dates back to the late 1990s, Clareia is only her fourth solo long-player, and her first in six long years. The break was the result of 13 years of intense activity. Though she’d released only three long-players during the period, there were numerous 12″ singles, remixes, and featured vocal appearances with dance music producers and her father Alex Malheiros’ groups Banda Utopia and Azymuth. While her previous catalog filtered breathtaking nu-bossa through jazz, hip-hop, samba, and R&B, Clareia offers a new dimension, deriving its inspiration from ’80s Brazilian soul and disco, making it a perfect entry for summertime. Like its predecessor, Clareia was produced and arranged by Daniel “Venom” Maunick, son of…

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…Incognito’s Bluey; he also handles the programming and synths. Two-thirds of Azymuth are present here, with Alex in the bass chair and keyboardist Kiko Continentino on piano and Rhodes. Celebrated Brazilian reed and woodwind master Leo Gandelman also lends a hand on a couple of tracks.

Malheiros wrote eight of this set’s eleven tracks and co-wrote the rest. The difference in approach is evident from the go with “Celebrar.” Driven by Alex Malheiros’ popping bassline, its grooving funk is illustrated by syncopated acoustic piano, spiraling synth, handclaps, drums and percussion, and pulsing acoustic guitar. “Porto Do Sol” is faster and breezier as it weds samba and disco, while “Sol, Ceu e Mar” displays a slapped bassline that contrasts beautifully with atmospheric synths and Continentino’s elegant jazz fills. “Renascera” is pure light, its bumping bassline and sultry Rhodes are appended by handclaps, whistles, jagged synths, programmed beats, and cooking organic percussion. Malheiros hovers above it all, and her vocals glide effortlessly through her lyrics, creating blissful resonance. The title track melds soul and samba, while “Sandore” is deep pocket nu-bossa complete with Gandelman’s flute playing the role of a duet partner. (It and his sax can also be heard on the slippery samba of “Vai, Maria,” complete with batacuda drumming.) Malheiros closes her set with the spacy, nu-bossa of “Ultraleve,” with Alex’s fuzzy bassline in the role of a lead guitar. Sabrina’s multi-tracked vocals inhabit the gauzy heat of the arrangement with rimshot snares and hi-hats, synth squiggles, and Rhodes arpeggios.

It’s the perfect sendoff for a humid summertime album. Malheiros has expanded her palette on Clareia, but she hasn’t lost her signature sound in the process; she’s integrated it. This is a seamless and sensual listening experience whether taken in under the sun, under the stars, or in a club.

After starting out as a fairly anodyne Latin pop artist, Mon Laferte found critical and commercial success with 2015’s Mon Laferte, Vol. 1, when she decided to incorporate traditional Mexican music into her songwriting. For its 2017 successor, La Trenza, she partially switches her attention from her adoptive homeland to the sounds she heard while growing up in Chile. Opener “Pa Dónde Se Fue” functions as a declaration of intent as a charango and quena rhythm track is soon augmented with electric guitars and a brass section and ends up welcoming spaghetti western soundtracks and mariachi into the mix. A characteristic powerful vocal performance from Laferte and thoughtful lyrics about an absent father fill out one of the record’s several high points.

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It immediately becomes apparent, however, that Laferte is more interested in offering something for everyone than heading in a completely new direction, as the album smartly mixes North Andean rhythms, vals peruano, cumbia, and a Los Saicos cover (a highly influential Peruvian band from the ’60s), with bolero, ska, ranchera, pop, and ballads. The three stellar duets included are all key tracks that perfectly illustrate Laferte’s grand design: “Cielito de Abril,” a delicate acoustic number with compatriot Manuel García, is a tribute to the songwriting tradition of Chile; “Mi Buen Amor,” a sweeping ranchera with Enrique Bunbury, nods to both Mexico and Spain; and with “Amárrame,” she takes a kinky cumbia with Juanes for her shot at the upper ranks of Latin pop and international stardom. All three succeed brilliantly, with “Amárrame” becoming her biggest hit to date, garnering millions of hits on YouTube along the way. Closer “La Trenza,” a female empowerment message in bolero form, rounds off an impressive collection.

It should, however, be mentioned that the sterling production and genre-bending arrangements mask the occasional lyrical shortcomings. Besides the opener and closer, every song is about love in its various states (excitement, contentment, resignation, longing), and these vary from moving and engaging to silly and trite. It also helps that Laferte is a powerhouse melodramatic singer able to emote without sounding strident. Furthermore, it is remarkable how an album so heavily invested in staking a claim in the Latin Pop sweepstakes makes no concessions to trendy urban beats and yet sounds utterly attuned to contemporary sounds — even when it takes its cues from traditional folk genres. In a year with strong releases by the likes of Natalia Lafourcade, Lila Downs, Miranda!, and Juanes (not to mention the “Despacito” world craze), La Trenza further validates the notion that 2017 may turn out to be one of Latin Pop’s biggest moments in the sun.