Back on Record Store Day 2011, The Flaming Lips released Heady Nuggs, a limited-edition indie-store exclusive vinyl box set of the band’s first five Warner Bros. records.

If you missed out, didn’t have the bread or only wanted a couple of the titles in the box set, your ship has come in — now available individually on wax at The Record Exchange are the five Lips albums from Heady Nuggs:

Hit to Death in the Future Head
Transmissions from the Satellite Heart
Clouds Taste Metallic
The Soft Bulletin
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

OTHER NEW VINYL RELEASES:

The Heartless Bastards Arrow
Neurosis Enemy of the Sun
Neurosis Souls at Zero
Amos Lee As the Crow Flies
Ingrid Michaelson Human Again
Burning Witch Box
Shins Simple Song/September
Gotan Project La Revancha Del Tango
Justice On’n'on
Islands Sleep and a Forgetting

BUY THE VINYL HERE

Sharon Van Etten’s 2010 album Epic was an understated masterpiece, with the Brooklynite wrangling mighty emotion from the most spartan of ingredients. It saw her garner a raft of high-profile admirers, including the likes of Bon Iver and The National. Yet with her career blossoming, the opposite was true of her personal life. Finding herself homeless, Van Etten spent 14 months in the studio with The National’s Aaron Dessner, picking over the bones of a shattered relationship. The resulting record, Tramp, reflects the period well – musically, it reaches new heights of richness, urgency and confidence, while lyrically it’s every bit as intense and piercing as the back story would suggest.

The 12 songs capture her in the throes of various long, dark nights of the soul. A slightly disparate collection, perhaps (it was recorded sporadically over those 14 months), but the slight sense of unevenness makes for a rich patchwork of emotional turmoil, with the irritable thrashing of opener ‘Warsaw’ and the unresolved tension of ‘Serpents’ rubbing up alongside the strung-out melancholy of ‘Kevin’s’ and the tentative stoicism of ‘We Are Fine’.

If Epic was a hidden treasure, Tramp feels like Sharon Van Etten’s career-defining album. It’s a wonderful record, a colossal achievement, and features some of the most breathtaking, moving and downright beautiful music you’ll hear all year. — Drowned in Sound

OTHER NEW VINYL RELEASES:

Of Montreal Paralytic Stalks
Dr. Dog Be the Void
Deftones Saturday Night Wrist
Battles Dross Glop 1
Fucked Up Year of the Tiger
Plimsouls Beach Town Confidential: Live
Ben Kweller Go Fly a Kite
Thelonious Monk Unique Thelonious Monk
Silverstein Short Songs
A Place to Bury Strangers Onwards to the Wall
The Fray Scars & Stories
Mount Eerie Distorted Cymbals

BUY THE VINYL HERE

Sunn 0)))‘s Greg Anderson, Stephen O’Malley, and longtime partner G. Stuart Dahlquist — respectively credited as the Duke, MK Ultra Blizzard, and G:Subharmonia — trudge through riffs in synchronous, suspended time, making up for a lack of surprises with a wealth of tone. They’d recorded their only previous release, The GrimmRobe Demos, in a small Los Angeles studio, but ØØ VOID was captured in Hollywood’s Grandmaster, a high-fidelity location where Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, No Doubt, and Tool have all made records. Sunn O))) have always had a reputation for exacting technical standards and for pushing the limits of their force and fidelity (“Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results,” their credo goes), and ØØ VOID offers the first perfect sign of that. These recordings are monolithic, dense, and relentless, even if the compositions themselves sound much as you might expect.

There are some allusions to extracurricular influences here, like the ghastly vocals of Scream’s Pete Stahl, which circle like ghosts inside the electric tide of “NN O)))”.  A delicate pluck opens “Rabbit’s Revenge”, and long, thin tones sometimes rise to gird a riff’s lumbering end. Speaking of subtle additions, the 14-minute crawl is a cover of an early version of the Melvins song that some have suggested (and others have contested) became 1992′s “Hung Bunny”; listen closely past the five-minute mark, and you’ll notice that Sunn O))) seem to have momentarily drafted a drummer and a screamer. It’s actually a bootleg of Melvins playing the song, the sample spliced beneath the drone as both acknowledgment and texture. Years later, Sunn O)))’s evolution would come to depend on such outside sounds. — Pitchfork

OTHER NEW VINYL RELEASES:

Leonard Cohen Old Ideas
Hospitality Hospitality
Various Artists Matador Intended Play 2012 (only $1.99!)
Hit the Lights Invicta
Black Cobra Invernal
Ladytron Witching Hour
The Lonely Forest Arrows
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman Fabled City
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman One Man Revolution
Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman Union Town
Thee Headcoats The Kids Are All Square – This is Hip!
Thee Headcoats Knights of the Baskervilles

Our friends at Beggars Group — which includes such fine indie labels as Matador, 4AD, XL and True Panther — released some great albums in 2011 (and 2010), and to celebrate, we’re offering 10 select titles on vinyl — all of which come with a code to download the digital version of the album for free — on sale through January 15!

The titles are as follows:

St. Vincent Strange Mercy ($13.99)
Tyler, the Creator Goblin ($15.99)
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks Mirror Traffic ($16.99)
Altas Sound Parallax ($14.99)
Fucked Up David Comes to Life ($16.99)
Kurt Vile Smoke Ring for My Halo ($13.99)
Tune-Yards Whokill ($13.99)
Girls Father, Son, Holy Ghost ($19.99)
The Horrors Skying ($17.99)
Deerhunter Halcyon Digest ($13.99)

The Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ best album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik benefits immensely from Rick Rubin’s production — John Frusciante’s guitar is less overpoweringly noisy, leaving room for differing textures and clearer lines, while the band overall is more focused and less indulgent, even if some of the grooves drag on too long.

Lyrically, Anthony Kiedis is as preoccupied with sex as ever, whether invoking it as his muse, begging for it, or boasting in great detail about his prowess, best showcased on the infectiously funky singles “Give It Away” and “Suck My Kiss.” However, he tempers his testosterone with a more sensitive side, writing about the emotional side of failed relationships (“Breaking the Girl,” “I Could Have Lied”), his drug addictions (“Under the Bridge” and an elegy for Hillel Slovak, “My Lovely Man”), and some hippie-ish calls for a peaceful utopia. — Allmusic

OTHER NEW VINYL RELEASES:

Snow Patrol Fallen Empires
Mutemath Odd Soul
The Fall Ersatz G.B.
The Fall Laptop Dog
Mark Lanegan Band Gravedigger’s Song