Reprise US Vinyl & CDs

Review: It's 1997 and Green Day have just unveiled Nimrod, their fifth studio album, with the clear intention of trying different ideas, en masse. Rather than specifically looking to release an album per se, the band convinced Reprise Records to let them loose on what's effectively a series of singles. Lacking the coherency of a full record, the fact it still bagged universally positive reviews - with many rightly pointing to its rousing and invigorating qualities (surely a product of its shape-shifting nature) - is testament to the band's deft abilities.

It certainly showed off the outfit's ability to craft these huge, memorable hook lines and melodies, the sort of tracks that you instantly feel you know, even on first listen. Veering between folk, punk, ska and skate rock, what's here may not have had quite the same impact as Dookie, but many ways this is a more convincing argument for their legendary status.

Review: Team Sleep were never designed to exist in the music industry most of us recognise. First of all, their music doesn't really fit into anything that's easy to categorise - dream pop, trip hop, indie, post-punk, lo-fi, psychedelic, shoegaze, electronica. In 2024, that hybridity is standard, but in 2005, when their self-titled debut album first landed, things were far more shoe-boxed, if that's even a word. This is only part of the issue, though, from a sales perspective. Almost 20 years after it's initial release, Team Sleep remains the band's only studio album. They disbanded one year later, returning in 2014 for another 12 months before disappearing again. Their hiatus continues to this day. Now if that's not reason enough to dig deeper into the legacy, we don't know what is.

Review: Crazed equestrian songwriter Neil Young hears the first reprisal of a formerly unreleased album, deemed one of his great "lost" albums. Recorded in 1977, Young commented on the record's various inspirational breeding grounds: Florida's Oceanside beach, Triad Studios in Miami, and Crazy Mama's in Nashville, and of the fact that it was "quite a personal record, mostly made up of acoustic songs with no bass or drums." Known of for years online, where it was place-held with a hand-scrawled album cover, the record now comes with full-blown official cover art, documenting Young in the brief interim period between American Stars 'N Bars and Comes A Time (1977-78).