Charts Recap for September 20th - 26th, 2021

We’ve got a fresh weekly best-seller top-ten posted! And we’ve got a new record and artist in the top spot! Australia’s prolific garage-psych breakouts KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD have captured the number-one seller rank with their latest LP Butterfly 3000. The band has almost 20 full-lengths under their belt at this point but haven’t even started to lose their spark, sounding as wild, vital, catchy, and fresh as ever. Like most the King Giz records, many variants on the LP exist and we’ve got a few.

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2021 continues to be a very strong year for jazz reissues/archivals, and the latest such record to ascend our charts is Maiden Voyage, the 1965 full-length from HERBIE HANCOCK. Though this is well before his later adventures in far-out synth-funk, MV stands as one of the finer jazz records of the mid-60s and a bit of a coming out for Hancock. Glad for it to be back in-print. We can only hope classic labels like Blue Note here keep digging into the treasures in their catalog!

Speaking of excellent archival releases, down at number eight we’ve got another stellar new one. The latest Volume 3 of the WAMONO A TO Z series is a collection of funky jazz and groovy sounds from Japan. Vol. 3 is guaranteed to provide with some cuts you’ve never heard, mostly of the seventies and eighties. Fun fact: the word wamono basically means old Japanese music.