Kalporz X Monolith Cocktail: Top 7 Of The Week
July 25, 2025
Our continuing partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. Samuel Conficoni brings us a choice septet of curious and interesting new/releases.
Jeff Tweedy of Wilco.
At regular points during the year the Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals at Kalporz. The site recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Here’s to longevity, which isn’t easy in the unstable online world.
From the site’s regular new series, This Week’s Top 7, Kalporz mainstay Samuel Conficoni shares seven (plus a sneaky bonus) choice recommendations; many of which lean towards the country, or share a theme with Bob Dylan.
7. Ever true to themselves, the Whitneys have released a new song.
“Dandelions” previews Small Talk, the new album released this November by Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s group, and the follow up to 2022’s Spark album.
6. Margo Price between innovation and quotation.
With a visual reference to Bob Dylan‘s legendary 1965 music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, the singer-songwriter’s new single, which follows on from the previous intriguing “Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down”, is titled “Don’t Wake Me Up” and features Jesse Welles. Her new album, “Hard Headed Woman”, will be released at the end of August on Loma Vista.
5. An unleashed Jeff Tweedy announces a new triple album and a tour.
Twilight Override will contain thirty songs and be released at the end of September. The Wilco leader offers us a taste of his new solo album by sharing four previews: “Enough”, “One Tiny Flower”, “Out in the Dark” and “Stray Cats in Spain”. Tweedy and his band will be in North America this fall, and in Europe next February.
4. “She Explains Things to Me” is David Byrne’s kaleidoscopic new track.
After last month’s “Everybody Laughs”, a new preview that gives us a taste of the intensity of Who Is the Sky?, the Talking Heads frontman’s new solo album, due out in early September on Matador.
3. 80 years later, the Kronos Quartet commemorates J. Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb test by performing (in two versions) a Bob Dylan classic.
To commemorate the extraordinary event of July 16, 1945, the Kronos Quartet has recorded two versions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, the poetic gem that Bob Dylan composed in late 1962, likely inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and which he included on his masterpiece album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released the following May. Among the names featured on the project are Willie Nelson, who, at 92, is currently touring the US with his Outlaw Festival, which also features Bob Dylan and his band; Ringo Starr, who turned 85 a few days ago; Iggy Pop; Laurie Anderson; Tom Morello; and Charlotte Gainsbourg. One version of the song is intense and hypnotic folk-rock, while the other, the “Drone Version”, is a reinterpretation of the classic in spoken-word form.
2. A passionate tribute to Jason Molina, so we never forget him.
Jason Molina, best known for his singer-songwriter project Songs: Ohia, passed away prematurely in 2013. After the fascinating and seminal reissues of much of his catalogue over the past decade or so, a compilation album dedicated to him, titled I Will Swim to You: A Tribute to Jason Molina, will be released by Run for Cover in early September. The album features, among many others, MJ Lenderman, Hand Habits, Sun June, Advance Base, Lutalo, and Horse Jumper of Love. Lenderman’s version of Molina’s “Just Be Simple” was shared the other week.
1. Woody Guthrie again, unforgettable and ever-present.
Shamus Records will release a fascinating double volume entitled Woody at Home in mid-August, containing 22 previously unreleased tracks by the legendary singer-songwriter. Among the many fascinating pieces is his only recording of “Deportee”, a legendary song performed over the decades by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and Joni Mitchell, which Guthrie wrote after the deaths of 38 people, including 22 migrant farmworkers, in a 1948 plane crash. Thanks to the restoration of some analog tapes, on which Guthrie himself recorded these songs at home when he was 38, these two volumes have reached us. They will be enhanced by a book containing exclusive photos of Guthrie and his family and some of his lyrics, obtained from the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.
[Bonus Track] 0. Headlights by Alex G is a great album.
Headlights, the tenth studio album by Alex G (the moniker of American singer-songwriter Alex Giannascoli) our artist of the month was released this month. This is his first release for a major label, in this case RCA, and from the first listens – as the singles that preceded it had already demonstrated – it seems to be an excellent album, yet another step forward for an artist who knows how to renew himself and make his compositions engaging every time while maintaining a sincere, visionary style that is true to himself.
Our Daily Bread 361: Extradition Order ‘American Prometheus’
January 17, 2020
ALBUM REVIEW
Dominic Valvona
Extradition Order ‘American Prometheus’
(Blang/Gare du Nord/HLP19/I Blame/Jezus Factory) 20th February 2020
Willed on by a whole quintet of label facilitators, the first album in a good few years from the excitable and soulful no wave Warrington troupe Extradition Order is a poignant return to the American history books. Dedicated in part to founding member Nick Boardman who passed away in 2018 (his legacy permeates this album, whether as a guiding influence or through his bass hooks and singing), the Order’s vessel this time around is “the destroyer of worlds” polyglot genius behind the fateful A-bomb Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Taking the album’s title from the Oppenheimer biography of the same name, American Prometheus is a guide to a visceral concept of the lamentable, profane and hysterical. Just as the band did with their both pining and erratic opus to the Kennedy dynasty on the 2015 Kennedy LP, the extended cast of unfortunate and listless wives, lovers, set adrift family members, rivals and enablers are given a voice in the linear story of this incredible scientist; one who, as it turns out, had quite the checkered and controversial life story.
From the very outset, a gilded pathway was laid out for the privileged N.Y. city born physicist, as succinctly raved-up on the opening meeting of post-punk and northern soul ‘Daddy, Give Me Your Money’: A rattle and roll party-ish rambunctious union of James White, Dexys and the B52s. Money and connections aside, you still need that beautiful mind and Oppenheimer had the genius gene in spades. Obviously, and for good reason his CV is overshadowed for his integral part in putting together the apocalyptic atom bomb – two of which, the Fat Boy and Fat Man, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945; covered by the Order on the raucous with theatrical bent ‘Fat Man, Thin Man’ -, but beyond that he was also instrumental in developing theories on black holes and quantum field theory. Oppenheimer would go on to denounce the bomb he helped create, suffering recriminations throughout the remainder of his career for speaking out. It also didn’t help that in the paranoid age of McCarthyism that, though never openly a supporter, he donated to many left wing causes. He also seemed to be orbiting those circles and even had affairs with two paid-up members of the cause. Famously, Oppenheimer would not only lose his security clearance but be snubbed, three times, for a Noble Prize (1945, ’51 and ’67). A link back to Extradition Order’s previous interest, JFK would, before fate cruelly took its cause, offer him a lifetime achievement award as a sort of conciliatory gesture of recognition.
American Prometheus presents the portrait of a fallen figure, an emotionally charged evisceration of a complicated man. Of course there’s many parallels to be drawn with the here and now. Songs such as the hooting ‘America First’ – Funboy Three lose the plot with early Adam And The Ants and Richard Hell – and brassy soul number ‘Manhattan’ both resonate with current themes of bullish political isolationism and sexism; the first, a reference to the isolated sloganism of that original movement of American Nationalism (which in its 1930s appeasement of Hitler and aggrandizement of such anti-Semitic national heroes as Charles Lindbergh, attempted to stand alone outside the international community), the second, the plaintive tale of the highly educated, articulate and “sexual” Kitty Puering, stifled and limited, stuck mothering two children on the Los Alamos military base in New Mexico after marrying Oppenheimer (another sorry tale in itself, Kitty originally started an affair with the scientist whilst already married; pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child, she would divorce her husband and remarry in quick time).
With colliery soul requiems, prowling hints of Blurt, cheerleader Grease rah-rah and bursts of My Life Story, The Pop Group, Style Council and The Mekons, Extradition Order blow open the myths and dramas behind the conflicted Oppenheimer: warts and all. American Prometheus is another mini triumph from a band that manages to bridge the fury and wrath of punk with the contorting squawks and funk of no wave and the brassy heralded romantic yearns of northern soul: good going guys. Expect to see this one in our albums of 2020.
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