Category Cover Art

RAINBOW VINYL — GREEN

These greens were grown in the USA. Dig in. * Like a swampy Booker T. and the M.G.s, The Meters played their funk with honest, no frills competence, part of the reason they backed up so many other artists (including recordings by Robert Palmer and Sir Paul McCartney). This LP, from 1972, is well-played but […]

RAINBOW VINYL — YELLOW

Like a reverse sunset, we fade from orange to yellow. * Melbourne’s Skyhooks were hugely popular and successful in the mid to late 1970s, playing a glammed-up radio-friendly rock. This debut is beloved of an entire generation who lapped up the insightful and sometimes mischievous songs set in places we knew well. You can’t beat […]

RAINBOW VINYL — ORANGE

Town successfully painted red? Well it must be orange time. The Claypool Lennon Delirium is a psychedelic dosette box created by bass player extraordinaire Les Claypool and Sean Lennon. Owing much to 1960s psychedelia in general and early Pink Floyd in particular, Monolith of Phobos is a quirky delight. Arguably the magnum opus of German […]

RAINBOW VINYL — RED

Although UK musician David Kubinec has had a long career spanning a huge period of time*, I’m not really familiar with his work and only purchased this 1978 LP because I’d rarely encountered coloured vinyl in the seventies. Although Kubinec is a keyboard player, it is the guitarists who stand out on this album: Ollie […]

ANOTHER COVER IN A DIFFERENT SETTING

In the holiday post a few weeks ago—Vinyl Hunter-Gatherer Goes Surfing—there was a 1971 George Benson LP of which I wrote, ‘Hoping I haven’t re-purchased it, misled by a different cover’. The brain is a funny old organ and some of the organ stops don’t work as smoothly as they once did. When the catalogue […]

ROCKIN’ ROOSTER

Rockin’ All Over The World #9 — Britain The British progressive blues-rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s was a fertile, swirling, multi-coloured circus. Various hybrids of rock and other styles were progressively blended (or mangled, depending on your point of view) to produce inventive albums full of delightful musical surprises. Often these […]

1970 COUNTDOWN | NUMBER 3

3.  MILES DAVIS — BITCHES BREW It shimmers, it growls. It moans and howls. There is glowing radiance and dirty work. With this double album—sometimes mesmerising and occasionally jolting—Miles Davis changed both jazz and popular music. Having done cool, modal and progressive (all that restlessness!), Miles and producer Teo Macero engineered this vast work from […]

1970 COUNTDOWN | #20 —#11

20  VAROUS—Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack & More It is sprawling, patchy, frustrating, and incomplete yet the soundtrack to the film of the event of the decade (the 60s, that is) is essential. Held in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm just outside of the small town of Woodstock, the actual name of […]

INCOMING [WINTER 2019 EDITION]

Having enjoyed a couple of recent posts where fellow music nuts share the, er, nuts they have gathered, I thought I’d join the party. Don’t know how it is in your neighbourhood, but in these parts the price of second-hand records has become so absurd that it is often better value buying new re-issues. Seems […]

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

Prior to 2017’s Tomorrow Forever, the last Matthew Sweet album of original material was 2011’s Modern Art. In between was the third volume of Under The Covers, the charming series recorded by Sweet and ex-Bangle Susanna Hoffs. Matthew Sweet’s personal circumstances had changed considerably in the intervening years: he re-located away from Los Angeles to […]