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Today’s New Albums: Jack White, Dawes, Ben Harper, She & Him + More

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Each week Release Day Picks profiles new LPs and EPs Team JamBase will be checking out on release day Friday. This week we highlight new albums by Jack White, Dawes, Ben Harper, She & Him, Ty Segall, Mihali, John Moreland, ZZ Top, Lindsay Lou and Dan Tyminski. Read on for more insight into the records we have all queued up to spin.


Jack White – Entering Heaven Alive

Entering Heaven Alive is the second solo album released this year by guitarist Jack White. The record follows April’s release of Fear Of The Dawn. White, a co-founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather, recorded Entering Heaven Alive throughout 2021. The album, White’s fifth solo LP, was created entirely in-house, with recording sessions held at White’s Third Man Studio, mastering done by Third Man Mastering, vinyl production at Third Man Pressing and issued by Third Man Records. Currently on The Supply Chain Tour in support of the two albums, White has performed nine of the 11 tracks on Entering Heaven Alive live in concert. The two albums are bookended by the Fear Of The Dawn opening track “Taking Me Back” as well as its companion “Taking Me Back (Gently)” which is the final song on Entering Heaven Alive.


Dawes – Misadventures Of Doomscroller

“We’ve always prided ourselves on being minimalists,” Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith said. “With [Misadventures Of Doomscroller] we set out on being MAXIMALISTS. Still a quartet. Still not letting these songs hide behind any tricks or effects. But really letting the songs breathe and stretch and live however they want to. We decided to stop having any regard for short attention spans. Our ambitions go beyond the musical with this one.”

The resulting effort is the seven-song, 45-minute album containing two songs that stretch beyond nine minutes and another that’s just a few seconds shy. The band — Goldsmith on guitar with his brother, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, bassist Wylie Gelber and keyboardist Lee Pardini — reconnected with producer Jonathan Wilson who has now produced four of the group’s eight albums dating back to their 2009 debut. Longtime collaborator Mike Viola added vocals to the track “Comes In Waves” and Wilson played a second drum kit on “Ghost In The Machine.”


Ben Harper – Bloodline Maintenance

Ben Harper shared his new album, Bloodline Maintenance, today via Chrysalis Records. Harper’s first non-instrumental solo LP since 2016’s Call It What It Is sees the renowned singer-songwriter reflecting on the loss of a longtime friend as well as the lingering influence of his late father Leonad Harper. Dealing with such personal subject matter, Ben opted to largely record the album on his own. He played his usual guitar and signature lap steel — on which he found a new tone he describes as a cross between “Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix” — but also bass, drums and percussion.

“It was like I was moving forward and venturing into places I had never been before,” Harper said of the Bloodline Maintenance sessions. “Taking everything I’ve learned from every other record and kind of setting fire to it all and starting over. And I knew the sounds I was hearing in my head were so unorthodox that I had to do most of it myself.”


She & Him – Melt Away: A Tribute To Brian Wilson

She & Him, the duo of Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward, highlight the music of The Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson on their newly released album, Melt Away: A Tribute To Brian Wilson. Arriving today on Fantasy Records, the 14-song collection is the seventh She & Him studio album, and first since 2016’s Christmas Party. Deschanel and Ward contributed to Wilson’s 2015 album, No Pier Pressure. The 80-year-old Wilson returned the favor by appearing on the Melt Away recording of “Do It Again,” a song originally released as a Beach Boys single in 1968. “Zooey and Matt did such mind-blowing versions of our songs,” Brian Wilson said. “The harmonies are beautiful and right on. I love this record!” Regarding the project, She & Him shared the statement below:

“In the spring of 2020, we started a list of our favorite Brian songs — a very long list. We chose songs without any regard to their chart performance. The obscure ones hit us just as hard as the more popular songs — and all are ripe for re-imagining, re-interpreting, and re-inventing. Brian writes songs of beauty and loneliness and vulnerability better than anyone — and by sequencing them next to popular songs of confidence and love and fun, it creates a more complete picture of life on earth.”


Ty Segall – Hello, Hi

Ever cranking guitarist Ty Segall has another new album out today Hello, Hi. The 10-song LP follows Segall’s 2021 album Harmonizer and was largely recorded by Segall by himself, playing both acoustic and electric guitar. Released by Drag City, here’s how the venerable Chicago-based independent record label described the album:

Tossing down straight acoustic shots with electric guitar back, Hello, Hi rides through the valley of yer ol’ Canyon legends, finding an isolated place to unspool Ty’s copious reserves of nervous energy beneath an open sky. Swarms of harmony vocals caper among the clouds, but there’s a rider on the horizon behind, with crossbow trained on his very own heart — the engine driving all the relationships of life, whether down Broadway or over the cliffs at night! Whatever doesn’t get killed is getting stronger all the time. A lean, mean deal, baked in salt water and sunlight, compassion pouring out it’s beautiful blue eyes.


Mihali- Effection

Twiddle guitarist Mihali returns today with his second solo studio album, Effection, via Ineffable Records. Mihali Savoulidis crafted the reggae album’s 10 tracks with longtime friend and collaborator Nathan Aurora. Nathan and Mihali worked together remotely as the material on Effection came to fruition during the pandemic. When it was finally time to cut the record, Savoulidis tapped Nate Feinstein of California roots reggae band Iya Terra to produce and engineer E.N. Young to mix. Iya Terra also appears on “All Day,” the closing track on an album full of special guests including Jacob Hemphill of SOJA on the title track, Iration on “Living Is The Lesson,” Dispatch’s Chadwick Stokes on “Open House,” The Movement & The Elovaters on “Greater Escape” and bluegrass quartet Kitchen Dwellers on “Ballad of the Broken.”

“On this record, I tried not to go super heavy or deep on the emotional side of things,” Mihal said of the new LP. “Instead, there is a lot of happiness and hope on Effection. I’m incredibly proud and excited to be releasing this music, and as always, evolving with it.”


John Moreland – Birds In The Ceiling

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based singer-songwriter John Moreland put out his new album, Birds In The Ceiling, on Old Omens/Thirty Tigers. The record is a follow-up to Moreland’s 2020 release, LP5. Moreland once again tapped Denton, Texas-based engineer and drummer Matt Pence, who also helmed LP5, to co-produce the new record. Keyboardist John Calvin Abney and bassist Bonnie Whitmore were part of the recording sessions held in October 2021 at Echo Lab in Denton.

“I wanted to expand my guitar playing on this album,” Moreland stated. “I played all the guitars, and I just wanted to approach it with more compositional intent.”


ZZ Top – Raw

Legendary Texas rockers ZZ Top are back with Raw, an album consisting of the band’s iconic hit songs as well as earlier favorites. ZZ Top largely captured the record live at New Braunfels, Texas’ historic Gruene Hall in conjunction with the 2019 documentary That Little Ol’ Band From Texas. Raw features the classic ZZ Top lineup on music from the era they speak of above including “Brown Sugar,” “Certified Blues,” and “Just Got Paid.” The LP also boasts some of their later hits like “Legs,” “Tush,” “LaGrange,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’” and more. The 12-track collection produced by ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons is also one of Dusty Hill’s final recordings and is dedicated “In righteous memory” to the late bassist who passed away on July 28, 2021. Gibbons and drummer Frank Beard shared their thoughts on the Raw sessions with Hill in the album’s liner notes:

​​“It was, in a very real way, a return to our roots. Just us and the music, no audience of thousands, no concession stands, no parking lot social hour, no phalanx of tour busses. Just us and the music. We knew right then it was a very special circumstance, all of us in the same place at the same time, and what a time it most certainly was! It was as bare bones as when we first started touring in a behemoth Chrysler station wagon, driving vast stretches between those early far-flung shows under blackened Texas skies and first hearing our records on the radio. We were bonded as brothers. ‘The Dust’ may have left the building but he’s still very much with us.”


Lindsay Lou – You Thought You Knew

Lindsay Lou released a new EP, You Thought You Knew. Lou tapped Dave O’Donnell (James Taylor) to produce You Thought You Knew. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter wrote the songs on the EP during the COVID-19 pandemic at her home on Petaway Avenue. Several of Lou’s musician friends were recruited to appear on the EP.

“I pulled in some of my favorite new acoustic musicians in Nashville, all of whom are close friends that I’ve been running into at house parties and jams around town since I moved here from Michigan in 2015,” Lindsay Lou told Holler.

Among the guests is fellow Michigan native, guitarist Billy Strings on the song “Freedom.” Strings originally recorded “Freedom” with his band for inclusion on his Grammy-winning 2019 album, Home. Lou joined Strings and his group on the live debut of the song at the 2018 Hoxeyville Music Festival in Wellston, Michigan.


Dan Tyminski – One More Time Before You: A Tribute To Tony Rice

14-time Grammy-winning bluegrass musician and Alison Krauss & Union Station member Dan Tyminski released his EP One More Time Before You Go: A Tribute To Tony Rice today. A massively influential figure in the bluegrass world and beyond, Tony Rice changed the trajectory of Tyminski’s career. Early on, Dan favored the mandolin and banjo, that is until he heard Tony on “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder” with J.D. Crowe and the New South for the first time, urging him to focus on the six-string. Tyminski tapped his Union Station bandmate renowned dobroist Jerry Douglas along with fellow bluegrass greats Sam Bush and Todd Phillips to contribute to “One More Time Before You Go.” The record also features some of bluegrass’ rising stars including Billy Strings on “Where The Soul Of A Man Never Dies,” Molly Tuttle on lead single “Church Street Blues” and more. Tyminski mourned along with the bluegrass world upon hearing of Rice’s passing in late 2020.

“I cried all day on day one, and on day two, had written the instrumental part,” Dan said of Rice’s passing and penning One More Time Before You Go’s title track.


Compiled by Scott Bernstein, Nate Todd and Andy Kahn.

Source: JamBase.com