What does it sound like?:

Here’s a great idea for a re-release; take the best calendar year for a band and put out everything they recorded, both official releases, alternate mixes and unreleased tracks.

So, the first cab off the Universal rank is Thin Lizzy 1976, five CDs and a Blu-ray or limited edition coloured LP sets.

You get brand new stereo and atmos mixes of the Jailbreak and Johnny the Fox albums, demos, radio sessions, outtakes, remastered original versions of the albums plus a previously unreleased live show.

By the beginning of 1976 the classic lineup of the band had been together for 18 months;Phil Lynott, Brian Downey, Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson; and the band’s distinctive take on the classic ‘Wishbone Ash twin-lead guitar’ attack had begun to cut through, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Jailbreak album was recorded at The Who’s Ramport Studios in Battersea, London, between December ’75 and February ’76, with John Alcock producing. The band had worked up the songs in a small studio in Buckinghamshire in late ’75 so that the arrangements were really tight by the time they got to Ramport, (too tight for Robertson who later complained that » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

This latest instalment of Joni Mitchell’s beautifully curated Archives series covers her “jazz” period when she made Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus and the live album Shadows And Light. As usual, there is a beautifully illustrated book, an explanatory interview with Cameron Crowe and individual covers for each jewel case. None of the music appears on the released albums and is presented in chronological order.

Joni Mitchell, alone, in front of a microphone, spinning her eloquent yarns, her fingers spellbinding the guitar strings around her vocals, sounds so at ease, so natural. The words and melodies emerge fully formed, poetic, personal and profound, and the flow of the guitar lines are constantly questing, yearning, moving forward. It appears that all she had to do, in a studio or on a stage, was to stand up and open her mouth. Joni’s Archives box sets demonstrate time and time again, that thought, word and music were aligned from the very beginning. This Volume of six CDs is seven hours long. You may think you are being short changed by five of them being live, especially when you consider that she did not tour for three » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

After 1974’s Red album, there was a seven year hiatus in studio activity, before Robert Fripp eventually reconvened Crimson to produce the Discipline set in 1981 followed by Beat the following year. Only Fripp and Bruford remained of the Red line up, being supplemented by Adrian Belew and Tony Levin, and the music they produced had a very different sound, influenced in part by the energy of the new wave scene Fripp had witnessed whilst living in New York. The 1982 European dates were joint shows with Roxy Music (their set, taken from the same night as this recording, can be heard on their Heart Still Beating album). Crimson were already well honed and in top form after US shows, and the enthusiastic crowd lap up fierce renditions of pieces drawn mostly from the most recent two records, with just two older efforts, Red and Larks Tongues, being performed. Whether you like this album or not is very much determined by your feelings about this line up of the band, which certainly wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The music is angular and almost industrial in sound and certainly isn’t an easy listen, but the » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

This limited edition vinyl release is a follow up to Wakeman’s Final One Man Solo Tour of North and South America from earlier this year. It is a piece he wrote for solo piano after performing The Yes Suite for orchestra and choir at his London Palladium concert in 2023.

This work contains more than 30 musical fragments of YES music that Rick was a part of, including the much maligned, (by him, let’s be fair,) Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Picking out your favourite elements is great fun but the piece soon becomes a whole entity, as you give it time and space. I found that putting it on in the background while I was writing was a lovely thing to do as it would suddenly catch me as the beginning of South Side of the Sky or Long Distance Runaround would emerge.

The aforementioned elements of TFTO work perfectly alongside parts of Close to the Edge and nothing grates or diverts.

The second piece is a piano adaptation of the main themes and melodies from Rick’s ‘The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’. Again, this is » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Q: Why is the old fool reviewing an album which is already three weeks old?

A: Because my copy only arrived yesterday after I cancelled the presell-one ordered on the Tax Dodgers because they said they couldn’t guarantee delivery by Christmas and what the feck is that all about so I bought it from Burning Shed and got it in 24 hours so up yours Jeff Bezos.

This won’t be detailed review; if you’re a Yes fan you probably have it already; but it will be an unutterably enthusiastic review because this album makes me happier than almost anything else which I’ve heard this year.

Richie Castellano is a multi-instrumentalist who has been a member of Blue Oyster Cult for two decades. In his spare time he has a bunch of friends who play classic Yes music. In the summer of 2018 they posted a version of Close to the Edge on YouTube which got over half a million views and comments. In response to some of the comments, Richie wrote:

“This isn’t a bunch of music snobs showing off. This is genuine love for Yes and their music. We are hardcore Yes fans » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Anyone who likes Frank Zappa should know “Apostrophe”; it’s one of his most accessible albums, where he fully demonstrated his mid-70s satirical funk to the amusement or irritation of the TRUE FANS. The track listing, including the unforgettable “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow”, “Nanook Rubs It”, “Cozmik Debris”, and “Stink-Foot” are a statement of intent. This is comedy music, and complementary to the reciting of Monty Python skits to admiring girls in the 4th form, and hoping your hair is starting to get good at the back. These times are now past, and though doubtless there is some adolescent comedy surrealism to take it’s place, I’m not sure there is a modern equivalent of Frank Zappa. Maybe, given Moon Unit’s recent autobiography, that’s not such a bad thing.

The playing on “Apostrophe” is tight, the weirdness is reasonably constrained, and songs become ruder later in the 70s. The band shines; George Duke gives it swing, funk, and soul on keyboards, as does Napoleon Murphy-Brock; a pre-Genesis Chester Thompson beats the crap out of the drums, and on the title track, there is that perrential thing of wonder, a bass solo, here performed by » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Gilmour’s fifth studio album comes after a 9 year hiatus, and a proclamation from DG that this is the best music he’s made since “Dark Side Of The Moon”. Bold. And just in case any Floyd fans still might not be paying attention, the closing track (which rather confusingly has the same title as the second track) is an instrumental that Gilmour built from a jam he recorded with the late Rick Wright back in 2006 when the latter had toured with DG.

It’s essentially a Gilmour family project – Polly Samson once again provides lyrics, whilst children Romany, Gabriel and Charlie add vocal or lyrical support – augmented by a number of top drawer session musicians that include Steve Gadd, Guy Pratt and Roger Eno. Although the opening track “Black Cat” is only a touch over 90 seconds, it’s sets the scene for nearly everything follows. Swirling, synth soundscapes a bed for DG’s trademark, often melancholy tone.

The first version of “Luck and Strange” follows, a sparse bluesy shuffle. Just as it settles into a loping groove the entire vibe is knocked sideways by DG’s vocal that is clearly well out of » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

A new live album and blu-ray release from Britain’s premier prog band, Big Big Train, ‘hits the shelves’ just in time for their Autumn tour of the U.K and Europe.

The recordings are from the two triumphant nights at London’s Cadogan Hall at the end of their 17-date, The Journey Continues Tour, of last year.

I was able to take in seven dates of the tour, travelling to Basel, through Zurich to Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Edinburgh, Birmingham and London. After every show various band-members looked out for me, making sure that I had travelled well, eaten properly, etc; it’s that kind of band.

The one thing you know with any Big Big Train release is that the sound will be immaculate. Their producer, Rob Aubrey, is also their live sound-engineer and he’ll have mixed these recordings to within an inch of their lives. So, yes, it is as good a sounding live album as you are ever likely to hear; no mean feat when there are up to eleven musicians on stage at any one time.

The band had varied the set-list on most dates and the idea for the two nights in London » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

When Steve Marriott left Small Faces in 1969 to form Humble Pie, the remainder of the band, Ian McLagan keys, Ronnie Lane bass and Kenney Jones drums, recruited Rod Stewart vocals and Ronnie Wood guitar from The Jeff Beck Group, and shortened their name to Faces. They had an unusual contractual arrangement to tiptoe around. Faces were signed to Warner Brothers and Stewart, as a solo artist, to Mercury. Lines were blurred by Faces musicians regularly appearing on Rod Stewart records. It certainly kept them all busy. Faces released four albums during the period covered by this box, First Step, Long Player, A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… To A Blind Horse and Ooh La La and Stewart four, An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down, Gasoline Alley, Every Picture Tells A Story and Never A Dull Moment, plus, most of Smiler was recorded. They had a lot of material to tap into when they played live. Fortunately, they toured constantly.

A Faces gig was a boozy night out with your mates, rumbustious, teetering on the edge of chaos. Unlike many Rock bands of the time, they were unafraid to embrace fun. » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

On 30 August Laurie Anderson released a new album – Amelia. It charts, over 35 minutes and 22 tracks, the 1937 round-the-world flight of Amelia Earhart. Each track takes you further on the journey, from Oakland, California, eastwards via Miami, San Juan, Brazil, Sénégal, Sudan, Pakistan, Burma etc.

Anderson uses multiple voices, many of which are her own as well as Earhart and Anomi, to quote from the travel logs and the reports to Earhart’s husband en route, as well as to describe the landscape and seascape below the low altitude flight.

The mainly spoken word, albeit sing-songy style that Anderson affects is accompanied by her ubiquitous viola tones and drones, string orchestra arrangements and live bass, drum and guitar overdubs. To create the roar of the aircraft engine which was the constant soundtrack to the flight, she sampled and mixed together tyres driving over gravel, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, and her own electronics. There are tracks with radio interference, tracks with almost no sound at all apart from spoken voice, even quotes from Altered Images, Buffalo Springfield and her own earlier work. To call it a soundscape may be a cliché, » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

In 1983, Synchronicity and its big single, Every Breathe You Take, put The Police on top of the world, right up there with David Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The numbers are mind boggling: 15.8 million sales of the original nine track LP, 3.8 million for the seven inch. Every Breathe You Take is the best selling single of 1983 in the USA and became the most played song on the radio ever in 1999, a position it holds today. Puff Diddy sampled it, without permission, for I’ll Be Missing You, a record that enjoyed an even longer stint at number one in 1997. All its royalties go to Sting as well. This one song accounts for an estimated third of all Sting’s royalties income, earning him £2000 a day for a prolonged period. The creator of the distinctive guitar figure, Andy Summers, gets no credit at all. The subsequent tour was one of the highest grossing of a money-spinning eighties, and like most of the album, the music was stripped down to just the three musicians. They were officially the biggest band in the world, crowned by a triumphant performance at » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

When Fleetwood Mac signed for Reprise the future looked bright. With the addition of Danny Kirwan on guitar and Peter Green at the helm, they forged a unique kind of fluid and instinctive Blues Rock tinged with Latin flavours that was also chart-friendly. The first album as part of the deal, Then Play On, and its contemporaneous singles, Oh Well and The Green Manalishi (With The Two Pronged Crown), comfortably made the top ten in the UK and left a mark in the US. Green, however, started to fret about making too much money, took to wearing robes and a crucifix, and, shortly after a spiritual experience on LSD at a commune near Munich, left the band. Without their talisman, they drifted in a wilderness for five years, multiple personnel lost along the way, while releasing six more albums. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were the only constants. Jeremy Spencer, Danny Kirwan, Bob Welch, Bob Weston, Dave Walker, all came and went. Kirwan’s alcohol-fuelled rage, smashing his Gibson Les Paul and refusing to play, was spectacular, and Weston’s affair with Fleetwood’s wife was unwise, but Spencer’s disappearance from the grid, subsumed by the Flirty » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

If ever people started taking The Beastie Boys seriously, it must have been 1994. The goofy adolescents of Licensed To Ill, the spoilt frat boys in the sweetie shop of Paul’s Boutique and the lo-fi skater punks of Check Your Head, were beginning to grow up. They sharpened up their rhymes and broadened their scope with jazz, funk, flutes, a violin, golf, social conscience, climate change and Buddhism, alongside their usual obsessions with big beats, garage rock, basketball and partying. They still retained their wit, charm and an inclination to frivolity, but in a way that’s more self aware. They threw in a few dick jokes to keep themselves grounded, but there is no doubt they’d become a bit more sophisticated. They were actually a tight little unit that could actually play: Ad-Rock guitar, MCA bass, Mike D drums, Money Mark keys and Eric Bobo percussion with Mario Caldato producing. Two punk thrash tracks have Amery Smith on drums. Biz Markie pays another visit and Q-Tip’s guest spot confirms how far they’d moved towards the jazz vibe of A Tribe Called Quest. The instrumentals prove they’d bothered to put in hours of practice. Unlike » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

When Cream split up in late 1968 Atlantic Records supremo Ahmet Ertegun told Bruce the best thing he could do would be to form another trio. With “Songs For A Tailor” he proceeded to do the exact opposite.

Bruce had studied cello and composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama and didn’t see himself as “just” a bass player. He wanted his first album to showcase the diversity of his talents and do something much more expansive than Cream ever allowed. Although recorded after “Things We Like” it was released ahead of it in 1969 to mixed reactions – not wholly surprising given how it was far from a continuation of the Cream / power trio format.

Bruce returned to re-interpret nearly all of the songs on this album in the years that followed, and this box offers a return of a different sort. There is a remaster of the original mix, a new stereo and 5.1 mix plus (according to the press release ) 32 bonus tracks and DVD of the 1970 documentary of “Rope Ladder To The Moon”. The new mixes are by the much in demand Stephen » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

I loved Riley’s last elbun, and so when I was in his company first hand at the recent Maverick Festival in the heart of swinging downtown Easton I made sure that I picked up his recent release The Light, The Beautiful Liar on the vinyl that so many of the kids these days are professing is the future of sound reproduction. That and because I’d have to dig out a CD player from the cupboard under the stairs if I wanted to listen to it on polycarbonate plastic substrate.

Much as I anticipated, it’s another stellar collection of beautifully crafted songs performed by a wonderfully sympathetic supporting cast including delicately picked acoustic guitars, tastefully restrained drums, a bass player who turns up in all the right places, and perfectly pitched – in all senses – vocal harmonies (as one of my imaginary internet friends pointed out regarding a recent release by a major figure “An octave is not a harmony…”).

It suits a balmy Sunday afternoon as much as it does the wee small hours, in the same way that Jackson Browne’s Asylum years, Steve Forbert’s early work or even – yes – Gerry » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Is it prog, is it folk, is it rock? Well all three of those elements are present to a greater or lesser extent on this album which has been given a 50th Anniversary makeover. So named because it was the band’s sixth album and they had recruited a sixth member, this Ian Anderson produced effort is to be honest something of a mixed bag. There’s some good music to be sure, notably Thomas the Rhymer and The Mooncoin Jig, but there’s also a few oddities that rather spoil the flow – a bizarre attempt at Twinkle Twinkle Little Star performed as a make believe children’s choir and a bog standard rendition of To Know Him Is To Love Him add nothing to proceedings even if the latter does feature a certain David Bowie on sax. The real gold of this reissue is in the bonus material – alongside a rather superfluous single edit of Thomas are four excellent BBC recordings from 1974 taken from sessions for the Bob Harris show and Sounds of the Seventies which are worth the price of admission alone. Overall then, a middling album in the band’s back catalogue lifted » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Here is the latest instalment in Joni Mitchell’s reissue programme; a beautifully packaged box set incorporating the studio albums Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus, and the double live album, Shadows And Light. It’s a 5CD or 6LP set, featuring more of Joni’s artwork in a gorgeous book, a full size print of the painting on the outer box, and an updated cover for Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, to replace the original featuring Joni in blackface. The new cover is only an improvement in that it’s less offensive. This time, Meryl Streep writes the essay in the booklet. Bernie Grundman, who engineered the records at the time, is responsible for a tasteful remaster. In the UK, the CD price isn’t too bad at £54 but the vinyl box costs £172.

It all starts in November 1975, with Joni joining Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review and indulging in the vices of the road, in Joni’s case a prodigious cocaine habit and an affair with a cowboy lothario, Sam Shepard. Naturally, she wrote a song about it, the sinewy and sexy Coyote, a disarmingly frank, participant’s view of the “passion play” that occurs on tour. It’s » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Unlike its predecessors the newly released third album from Petty’s sideman-in-chief, Mike Campbell and his Dirty Knobs possesses some of that unmistakeable Heartbreakers sound. The Dirty Knobs slipped in (where IS Moose?) under the radar during Covid, and their first two albums consisted largely of fairly uninspired blues workouts and sub-Springsteen stompers. This time though, Campbell has ratcheted up the Byrdsian guitar flourishes to deliver the band’s best offering yet. Heartbreakers Benmont Tench and Steve Ferrone guest on a couple of tracks, and Lucinda Williams and Graham Nash provide duet vocals on Hell or High Water and Dare to Dream respectively. Opening song The Greatest is apparently a message of thanks to the audience that turns up at gigs, but it could equally be about Petty himself. Angel of Mercy and Hands are Tied could easily have been penned for the Heartbreakers, and Campbell’s vocals have never sounded more Petty-esque than they do here. There’s a rattling guitar mashup on Shake These Blues, and although the momentum slips a bit towards the end, this is 43 minutes well worth spending in the company of an old friend.

What does it all *mean*?

Mike Campbell » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

When the full 1978 Bern show was included as part of the Heavy Horses box set a few years ago, I for one thought this live set from the same period would be excluded from the reissue series. How wrong I was, as here it is in this 3cd and 3 dvd set in the now tried and trusted book format. Steven Wilson once again handles the remix of the original double album, a good chunk of which originates from the aforementioned Swiss concert, with other tracks being recorded at other venues on the tour, and the whole thing having some studio fairy dust sprinkled over it by Ian Anderson that summer at Maison Rouge. The album restores to the running order a couple of songs omitted from the original release, and each of the two cds ends with a handful of previously unreleased soundcheck recordings, which are ok but fairly inessential overall – the most interesting is an early run through of 4WD (Low Ratio) which turned up a couple of years later on A. The third cd is the Madison Square Garden show from later the same year – this is the » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

In David Bowie’s universe, all the stars aligned for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, catapulting him into superstar status. However, as this 5CD + Blu-Ray box demonstrates, its gestation was far from straightforward. A ragbag of songs were only pulled together thematically at the last minute. Some had been released under a different name and more were intended for other artists. It was less of a carefully calculated concept and more a string of serependitious events. However, the final dystopian product, delivered by the outrageous, charismatic persona Bowie adopted, filled a cultural void in the early, pessimistic seventies, and launched his career.

Disc one takes us back to the same wellspring as A Divine Symmetry in early 1971 and Bowie’s return from an eye-opening promotional tour of America, his head bursting with ideas for songs. Both Ziggy and Lady Stardust were there from the start, along with many Hunky Dory songs. Neither were part of a grand scheme. Lady Stardust was originally a tribute to Marc Bolan, entitled He Was Alright (Song For Marc), and could easily have worked its way onto side two of Hunky Dory. » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

It’s a very long time since I last heard this album, which was originally released in 2012 and now comes as a cd plus bluray set. It’s a one off collaboration between Chris Squire and Steve Hackett, recorded over four years as they exchanged ideas as and when their busy schedules permitted. As you’d expect from these two prog heavyweights, the best pieces of music here fall firmly within that genre, The highlight for me is the title track, although Tall Ships and Storm Chaser also stand out, the latter being the only song that was ever performed in a live setting, being played by Hackett on his 2009 tour. Aliens is a song that was written for Yes and played by the band on their 2008/9 tour although it never made it onto an album. The rest of the album is okay, but for me doesn’t quite maintain the high standard set by these songs. The bluray has a 5.1 mix of the album, but sadly there’s no bonus content on either disc, the cupboard presumably being bare.

What does it all *mean*?

A one off curio by two very talented musicians that’s » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

If I could have requested an opening to the new Blow Monkeys album then the first 20 seconds of the first track Stranger To Me Now would have been my order. An orchestral, lazy, jazzy, funky intro that is like the first sip of a cold pint on a summer’s day. You’re in, you’re set, all senses tuned in, this is going to be great. The song is gorgeous, the band perfect, Robert’s vocal comfortingly familiar yet more mature. It feels very personal. What a start.

If as the second track suggests Waking Up Is Hard To Do then this slice of pure funk might just be what you need to get yourself up and about. Not for the first time though a Dr Robert song is not what you imagine it to be. This song is about a struggle with a past that wasn’t always easy and I sense a theme developing.

Rope A Dope was the tactic adopted by Mohammad Ali to deal with the monster that was George Foreman. Reeling him in and exhausting him before cutting the man mountain down. Robert pleads with his darling to take a swing at » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

This release is volume 12 of the Private Parts and Pieces series, the first new addition to it since 2012’s City of Dreams. It’s a collection of 23 mostly short, sometimes all too short, mainly instrumental pieces accumulated over the years that drifts along in a rather pleasant way on a warm summer’s evening. While there’s just one song featuring vocals, the remainder, although often disparate in nature, meld together to form a cohesive overall musical mood. The highlight for me is the opening four part Wynchmore Hill Suite, which brought to mind Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge period. Sometimes one track does rather tend to blur into the next, but if you’re going to treat the album as one continuous piece that’s no bad thing really, although I wish some of the musical themes had been extended and explored a little further as they end just as they seem about to get going. An interesting laid back album full of inventive musical ideas that’s well worth investigating, although it does seem to run out of steam a bit in the latter stages.

What does it all *mean*?

Phillips is something of a cottage industry, » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Macclesfield, 1974. I am 16, 3 years into learning the guitar and keen for new music. I pop into Barry White’s record shop in Brook Green, location of many cool sounds. On the counter there is a mysterious looking sleeve with a strange exotic font and what looks like an ear but closer examination reveals it is actually an unidentifiable morphing shape hinting at a depthless vortex into which to fall. The music fills the shop – at one moment funky, the next rocking and bluesy, then spacy with swirling effects and layers of guitars. I’ve heard of Robin Trower, mostly second hand and of the “Hendrix ripoff” variety, but have never actually heard him. It doesn’t sound at all like Hendrix, I love it and my carefully coveted pocked money and paper round pay is exchanged for a copy. I’ve come back to this album many times in the ensuing decades, particularly the live album he released a few years later and never tire of Robin’s playing and particularly Jim Dewar’s great bass playing and sensational singing.

And so to the 50th anniversary of Robin Trower’s 1974 album “Bridge of Sighs”. This is » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Maggie Rogers’ third official album, released on 12 April has been in my ears every day since then. I’ve been gradually getting familiar with her 10 new songs, letting them seep in, slowly noticing the differences between them, absorbing the words, noticing musical details. Like with each of the previous releases, there is a change in musical style. I would characterize them, sequentially, as folk, dance, rock and now MOR/country. This would normally put me off as being bland, and it seemed somewhat like that to me at first – a disappointing selection of songs after the catchy bangers that she strutted out. But this is Maggie Rogers, and I have found she really rewards repeat listening. It’s now my favourite of hers – a record where the singing isn’t afraid to take centre stage and not hide behind production. There are ‘tent post’ songs, that are more immediately catchy – Drunk, The Kill, Don’t Forget Me. The 5 songs between those last two to start with, slipped past without grabbing my attention at all, such is the contrasting pop appeal of them. Apparently all songs were written and recorded in 5 days total, » Continue Reading.