![King Crimson - Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (40th Anniversary Edition) (1973/2023) [High Fidelity Pure Audio Blu-Ray Disc]](https://imghd.xyz/images/2024/05/12/138741_front.md.jpg)
Nicki Minaj – Pink Friday 2 (Gag City PLUTO Edition) (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:20:04 minutes | 901 MB | Genre: Hip-Hop, Rap
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Republic Records
Barbie fans, rejoice! Nicki Minaj’s wildly anticipated new LP, Pink Friday 2, is out now via Young Money and Republic Records. With features from J. Cole, Drake, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Wayne, and more, plus production from FINNEAS, Boi-1da, and ATL Jacob, the album is one of the most exciting events of the year.
Pink Friday 2 was worth the wait. With 22 tracks clocking in at over 70 minutes, Nicki has offered up plenty of hits for her fans to obsess over. Opener “Are You Gone Already” features production from FINNEAS, while the album’s first feature comes on the J. Cole-assisted “Let Me Calm Down.”
The Gag City PLUTO Edition expands on the original 2 bonus tracks of the Deluxe version with an additional track, “Press Play” featuring Future, AKA Pluto.
Read more
Nailah Hunter – Lovegaze (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 40:44 minutes | 461 MB | Genre: Art Pop, Indie Folk, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Fat Possum
The LA-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Nailah Hunter has been recording mystical folk and ambient-inspired music since 2019, releasing a series of singles and two EPs: Spells and, most recently, Quietude. Now signed to Fat Possum, Lovegaze is Hunter’s debut full-length, an enthralling album that draws listeners into her enchanting cosmology. As the daughter of a Belizean pastor, Hunter began her musical journey in the church where she played drums, guitar and sang in the choir. She continued on to study music at CalArts, where she studied vocal performance and was given her first harp lesson. Associating the instrument with fantasy, psychedelia, and dream worlds, Hunter became an immediate devotee, locking herself in a room for six hours a day to practice the instrument. To make Lovegaze, Hunter decamped to a small coastal city along the English Channel where she began recording demos with a borrowed celtic harp. After being introduced to London-based producer Cicely Goulder, Hunter returned to England a year later to further develop the songs. The resulting collection is a bewitching testament to the resiliency of the natural world.
Read more
London Voices – Heaven To Earth (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:10:16 minutes | 700 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Signum Records
Heaven to Earth is a collection of tuneful, singable, sacred choral pieces by the best-selling RSCM composer Joanna Forbes L’Estrange. Joanna began her musical life as a chorister in her local parish church choir and although she became a professional soprano, singing with ensembles including The Swingles, Tenebrae and London Voices, it was parish church choirs she had in mind when writing the music for this album. The pieces sit comfortably within the vocal ranges of the singers, the organ accompaniments are designed to support the choir, there is minimal divisi, and the harmonies are attractive and approachable. Above all, the settings are written with the intention of enhancing the meaning of the words, both for those who sing them and for those who hear them.
Read more
Kid Cudi – INSANO (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:04:08 minutes | 762 MB | Genre: Hip-Hop, Rap
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Republic Records
Insano (stylized in all caps) is the ninth studio album by American rapper Kid Cudi. It was released on January 12, 2024, via Wicked Awesome Records and Republic Records. Kid Cudi had announced this would be his last contractual album with Republic, the major-label he had been with since his commercial debut album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day (2009). The album follows his 2022 effort Entergalactic, which was accompanied by a visual component, an award-winning TV special of the same name.
The album, which features guest appearances from fellow American rappers Travis Scott, ASAP Rocky, Lil Yachty, Young Thug, Lil Wayne, XXXTentacion and Pharrell Williams, also features American hip hop artist DJ Drama presenting songs much like Drama’s famed Gangsta Grillz series. Additionally the album includes production from Plain Pat, Dot da Genius, Bnyx, Keyon Christ, Mike Zombie and Cudi himself, among others.
Read more
Jacqueline du Pré – Elgar & Delius: The Cello Concertos by Jacqueline du Pré (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:50 minutes | 964 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alexandre Bak – Classical Music Reference Recording
The tragedy of du Pré’s brief career is still fresh in the public memory and can be summarised here. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father’s Channel Islands ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set. She studied at Herbert Walenn’s London Violoncello School and at ten became a pupil of William Pleeth, who had himself studied with Julius Klengel. Pleeth played with a good deal of uninhibited body movement and passed this trait on to du Pré, whose total physical involvement in her playing was to endear her to audiences. She made a successful London recital début in 1961, studied with Casals in Switzerland, Tortelier in Paris and Rostropovich in Moscow with varying degrees of success – one wonders what these players could have taught such a natural musician – and gradually consolidated her reputation at home. She began recording for EMI in 1962 and by 1965, when her famous disc of the Elgar Concerto was made, she was a star. That year she made her American début and in 1967 she married the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
Read more
Hoorsees – Big (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 33:31 minutes | 402 MB | Genre: Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Shoegaze
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cargo Neptune
For two albums Parisian quartet Hoorsees received heaps of praise for their 90’s inspired sardonic, guitar pop steeped in equal parts melancholy and nostalgia. Returning with their third LP, Big, released today, Hoorsees channels less Pavement or Weezer and instead, embrace their French roots. Evolving a synth pop sensibility, they don’t manage to completely shake their adoration of American sounds though, complementing warm walls of electronic pads with angular riffs that pay tribute to The Strokes. Big is not just a stylistic shift for the band, but also a shift in responsibilities. For the first time, Alex Delamard (voice/guitar) shares lead vocal duties with Zoe Gilbert (vocals/bass), with both continuing to be backed by Thomas Gachod (guitar/keyboard) and Nicolas Coste (drums).
Read more
Hannah Wicklund – The Prize (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 42:02 minutes | 483 MB | Genre: Blues Rock, Female Vocal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Independent
Hannah Wicklund is a 26-year-old Nashville-based, South Carolina- born rock singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and painter. Her new album, The Prize features half of Greta Van Fleet for this second album. Yet their presence shouldn’t overshadow a de facto one-woman show, with her tearing wah-wah riffs on Witness, pounding piano on the title track, and always leading with a voice that is instantly under your skin.
Read more
George Winston – December (1980/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:45 minutes | 715 MB | Genre: Folk
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Dancing Cat Records
December is George Winston’s fourth piano album, following the album “Autumn”. Recorded in the fall of 1982 (released later that year).
George Winston’s best-selling album has been certified platinum three times by the RIAA: more than three million copies have been sold. The success of this album (along with some of his other albums from the early eighties) allowed the Windham Hill label to enter the international market in earnest.
In 2001, for the twentieth anniversary, the album was re-released with the addition of two bonus tracks (“A Christmas Song” and “Sleep Baby Mine”). It was also re-released in 2013 by Valley Entertainment and Winston’s own label Dancing Cat Records.
Read more
Cocteau Twins – Milk & Kisses (2024 Remaster) (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 42:44 minutes | 498 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © EMI
Milk & Kisses shouldn’t be as good as it is. Riven by years of interpersonal tensions brought on by the romantic relationship (and subsequent dissolution) between vocalist Elizabeth Fraser and guitarist Robin Guthrie as well as the aftereffects of Guthrie’s substance abuse (and recovery), Cocteau Twins was a band on its last legs in the mid-’90s. Despite the fact they were ultimately winding down, this period was remarkably collaborative and incredibly productive. (Milk & Kisses was preceded by a pair of standalone EPs that—just like in the band’s formative years—presented cohesive sonic concepts of their own; Twinlights was a largely acoustic affair, with piano-and-guitar versions of old and new songs, while Otherness brought in Seefeel’s Mark Clifford to remix a handful of tracks.)
Read more
Cocteau Twins – Four-Calendar Café (2024 Remaster) (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 41:07 minutes | 489 MB | Genre: Alternative Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © EMI
Four-Calendar Café may be the most vexing album in the Cocteau Twins’ discography. Following the success of Heaven or Las Vegas, it’s not surprising that the group continued to explore sounds that were accessibly structured, melody-forward, and, even occasionally, lyrically transparent. Instead of leaning into Heaven’s note-perfect combination of beautiful bombast and cosmic catchiness, the Twins made a record that was reliant on gentle, midtempo acoustic compositions that have a quiet, somewhat unfinished feel, which gets amplified by the somewhat sluggish sequence. The first two tracks—”Know Who You Are at Every Age” and “Evangeline”—are certainly up to the group’s standard for beauty, but they’re also notably low-key. It’s not until the chiming, open chords of “Bluebeard” ring out that any sort of life appears to have been breathed into the proceedings.
Read more