Electrifying extracts from a Sunday service in the last snake-handling church in the Appalachians: the trance-like rhythms of a demented kind of rockabilly punk, with duelling guitars, concussive trap drums, and possessed, howling vocals.
“I’d sworn to stay far away from the snakes at the service,” recalls the recording engineer, “but instead they were waved in my face as they coiled in the preachers’ hands, and I crouched down at the foot of the altar tending to the equipment. The pastor soon was bitten and blood splattered, pooling on the floor. The female parishioners hurriedly came to wipe up the mess, and it instantly became clear just what the rolls of paper towels stacked on the pulpit had been for. You can actually hear this moment transpire towards the end of the track ‘Don’t Worry It’s Just a Snakebite (What Has Happened to This Generation?)’. The congregation leapt to its feet and a mini mosh-pit formed. The tag-team preachers huffed handkerchiefs soaked in strychnine, as they circled like aggro frontmen and an elderly worshipper held the flame of a candle to her throat, closing her eyes and swaying. The church PA blew out from the screams as a bonnet-wearing senior whacked away at a trap kit that dwarfed her. It was the most metal thing I’d ever seen, rendering Slayer mere kids play.”
Classic Brazilian boogie, from 1983; including a killer version of Tania Maria’s Come With Me — Vem Menina — and the dancefloor smash O Amigo De Nova York.
Dazzling, revolutionary genius.
‘Stalling was a visionary whose work deserves consideration among the finest American avant-garde music ever recorded. As these selections from WB cartoons dating between 1936 and 1958 attest, his cut and paste style — a singular collision between jazz, classical, pop, and virtually everything else in between — was unprecedented in its utter disregard for notions of time, rhythm, and compositional development; Stalling didn’t just break the rules, he made them irrelevant. That in the process he created music beloved by succeeding generations of children is more impressive still’ (AllMusic).
‘Gathers revelatory unheard material from this prolific period including the fabled Electric Nebraska sessions with the E Street Band and solo home and studio recordings, joined by a 2025 remaster of the original album, plus a new performance film of all ten Nebraska songs played in sequence.
‘Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic masterwork is augmented by seventeen contemporary recordings (fifteen previously unreleased) that were part of the groundswell of inspiration that shaped Nebraska and share its haunting themes.’