The Lawrence Arms - Greatest Story Ever Told - VINYL LP

Vinyl LP pressing including bonus CD edition. 2014 from legendary Chicago Punk band The Lawrence Arms, their first album in eight years. A beloved band in the Punk scene from their inception in 1999, members Brendan Kelly (vocals/bassist), Chris McCaughan (vocals/guitar), and Neil Hennessey (drummer) have released five studio albums to date. Their sixth album and first with Epitaph, Metropole captures Inchthat alone-in-a-crowd, stranger-in-a-strange-land kind of S*#tInch according to Kelly.

Michael Smith was an incredibly talented, politically ferocious dub poet who, tragically, lived long enough to only one record. Highlights include the striking poem, and title track, the epic storytelling of 'Trainer', the emotional pull of 'Mi Feel It' as well as the deft irony and sly humour featured in tracks like 'Black and White' and 'Long Time'. Smith's words, sometimes playful, sometimes heart-rending, were always as sharp as a scalpel. This Black History Month version is remastered at Abbey Road, featuring enhanced artwork, period photos and four bonus instrumental tracks, previously unreleased.

The 'living Baroque' idiom of Federico Maria Sardelli has been extensively documented on Brilliant Classics, with albums of concertos (BC94749), cantatas (BC95068) and harpsichord music (BC95488) that have advanced the reputation of this modern composer and scholar and won international attention, with 5-star reviews in Diapason and elsewhere. Now Sardelli turns his imagination to the genre of the trio sonata that exemplified chamber music-making in the Baroque era. The collection of six presented here divides into two sub-genres, of the church sonatas (Nos. 2, 4, 5) and chamber sonata (Nos. 1, 3, 6) which would have been heard in a domestic, albeit aristocratically appointed, context. Sardelli makes passing and subtle allusions to poignant melancholy (in the Larghetto of the First Sonata), to an infernal rhythmic impulse (the second movement of the Fifth), to more profound meditations on mortality (such as the Adagio without bass of the Third), and even to declarations of love (the opening of the Sixth) - though the subject of Sardelli's affection is surely Vivaldi himself. According to the composer, this is not Baroque pastiche. Rather, as a noted scholar of Vivaldi, he seeks to recreate such music in his own image with music of the present which 'regains it's own original language and adheres to it's own original criteria, expressing vibrant new ideas that are in keeping with it's identity.' It would be quite possible to think that the trio sonatas here had been written with a goose quill in 17th-century Venice, but they are by no means dry exercises in imitation. Rather they are full of an authentically Venetian vibrancy and color from any age, sparkling with a variety of knowing brilliance that belongs to the temperamental character of the city. The performances here are given by musicians who have long worked with Sardelli in his Modo Antiquo ensemble which has