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Lotti Golden wasn’t about to miss her big chance. At the age of 17, while still a senior at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, she’d landed a staff songwriting job with Saturday Music, a song publisher in midtown Manhattan. But Golden had bigger ambitions. So, when her boss, Bob Crewe, stepped into a crowded elevator with her one day at work, she knew she had to pitch him on making a record.

“I had never met him before. I’d never seen him around the office. He was elusive,...

The Concord episode of Prime Video's Secret Level showed the hidden potential of the ill-fated hero shooter, and it hinted at what could have been for the video game. Secret Level adapted 15 video games, both old and new, to television, but not all of them were absolute icons of the industry. One game in particular - Concord - was an objective failure, and it was a bit surprising to see it in Secret Level. Even though the game was a failure, Secret Level actually ended up enhancing Concord and showing off the game's true potential.

Concord was a hero shooter game, meaning players controlled specific characters that had their own set of abilities and powers. Like Overwatch 2 or Marvel Rivals, players would have formed teams based around each character's abilities, and they would fight against similarly structured enemy teams. Unfortunately, Concord also didn't do enough to differentiate itself from other hero shooters,...

The aims of the animated anthology Secret Level, whose 15 shorts are based on video and tabletop games, are clear enough: As production company Blur Studio puts it on their website, “Secret Level is our love letter to gaming.” But despite the tangible earnestness of that claim, the series fails to shake off the cynicism of its commercial function and blinkered politics. Beneath flashes of beauty and fits of inspiration lies an elaborate branding exercise.

Secret Level features a handful of shorts that conjure impressive moods. The bleak industrial landscapes in “Armored Core: Asset Management” all but subsume the episode’s protagonist (Keanu Reeves)—and the formidable mech he pilots—conveying the extent of his alienation and the stakes of his mission; the economical “Warhammer 40,000: And They Shall Know No Fear” spares us unnecessary dialogue, setting its space marines loose with sweltering kineticism; and the martial arts revenge tale of...

To the average listener hearing Jessica Pratt for the first time, it’s possible to mistake her for an artist from a different era. Her music sounds decades old, like an obscure artist unearthed from the dusty bin of a Midwestern antique shop. But this is not the Langley Schools Music Project, and Pratt is no Connie Converse. Born in 1987, the Los Angeles musician has been surprising people with her otherworldly indie folk since 2012. And now she’s returned with her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, out May 3 via Mexican Summer.

Pioneering psychedelic band Love are reissuing their final LP, 1974's Reel to Real, in remastered deluxe format with 12 bonus tracks (including four newly discovered Arthur Lee originals). High Moon Records – the same label responsible for last year's limited-edition reissue of the band's lost-then-found 1973 LP, Black Beauty – will release the first-ever CD/digital versions of Reel to Real on November 27th; vinyl editions, available for the first time in over four decades, will be available February 19th, 2016.

The deluxe Reel to Real will include a booklet featuring an essay from Rolling Stone...

High Moon Records has planned limited-edition reissues of hard-to-find albums from seminal psychedelic rockers Love and founding Byrds member Gene Clark. Love's Black Beauty, which the band recorded in 1973 but wasn't available until High Moon put it out on vinyl in 2012, will be available on CD for the first time on November 11th. And Clark's Two Sides to Every Story, which came out in 1977, will be available as an expanded CD release on November 18th. Both releases will contain bonus tracks.

Love recorded their Black Beauty album for the Buffalo Records label,...

Love's unreleased 1973 LP Black Beauty will finally hit shelves on June 7th, according to a statement released by the new label High Moon Records. Produced by Paul Rothchild – who worked on The Doors' first five albums – the R&b-infused album was meant to be the first record by a new line-up of Love three years after frontman Arthur Lee quietly disbanded the Sixties psychedelic band. Lee's record label went bankrupt before the LP was due out and album was shelved.

Arthur Lee And Love's Essential Bootlegs

For the past four...