For all his brilliance, Paul Gilbert used to work within classic rock idiom for decades, and it took embarking on a solo career for the guitarist to develop riveting unpredictability to everything he does. This is how it was with Gilbert’s Dio tribute in 2023, and and this is how it’s going to be with its follow-up that will enter stores on February 27th, 2026, because Paul’s new album turns George Washington’s “Rules of Civility” – WROC – into a series of rock pieces.
Numbering only twelve studio platters, Warren Zevon‘s creative legacy is, nevertheless, immense, but that somehow hasn’t been reflected in his concert recordings: for the artist who had been touring from 1976 almost until his untimely passing in 2003, two live albums aren’t enough. Finally, though, there’s going to be a third chapter in the saga started in in 1980 with “Stand In The Fire” and continued with “Learning To Flinch” in 1993: November 28th and December 5th will see the appearance – respectively, on vinyl, for Record Store Day, and CD – of “Epilogue: Live At The Edmonton Folk Music Festival” which documents the late troubadour’s last-ever show.
A superstar in rockabilly circles, Robert Gordon may have not been as famous as he deserved, yet the singer’s choice of guitar slingers – and their eagerness to work with him – spoke volumes of this artist’s immense talent. Gordon toured quite a lot with Chris Spedding, but at the onset of the his career Robert’s sidekick was none other than the legendary Link Wray, and it was on the strength of the vocalist’s eponymous debut album from 1977 that the two embarked on their first European trek in the beginning of the following year. The friends would also perform songs from “Fresh Fish Special” which would see the release six months later – and now a couple of their concert sets are to be issued on CD and DVD.
For a band who have been doing the rounds for close on half a century now, GENE LOVES JEZEBEL can’t boast an appropriate number of onstage albums, and there was only one released in the Welsh group’s first – and, arguably, finest – decade, “Glad To Be Alive” from 1986, issued hot on the heels of a Nottingham show it documented. The problem was that recording saw the light as a limited edition and had only six pieces out of the seventeen the ensemble performed on March 17th, so a new version seemed long overdue. Finally, a CD variant will arrive on December 31st.
While the emphasis “better late than never” idiom usually falls on the rock ‘n’ roll-appropriate second and fourth words, it’s the first that CONEY HATCH load with importance in 2025, the year when the Ontarian ensemble finally went not only for the expanded, 40-anniversary reissue of their eponymous debut, but also for its concert interpretation in acoustic form.
