Category Progressive
1975 COUNTDOWN | #20 — #11
#20 BETTY DAVIS — NASTY GAL Paradoxically, Nasty Gal is Betty Davis’s fiercest and most polished record. Produced by Davis herself, it fuses hard funk with glam-inflected edge: serrated guitar riffs, tight horn stabs over a rhythm section that struts and swaggers. Davis’s vocals are raw, confrontational and defiantly sexual, pushing beyond the already bold […]
1975 COUNTDOWN | #30 — #21
#30 NEIL YOUNG — ZUMA After the grim soul scouring of Tonight’s The Night, Young reformed Crazy Horse with new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro replacing Danny Whitten. Zuma blends wistful reflection with raw electric power. “Don’t Cry No Tears” and “Barstool Blues” evoke rough-edged tenderness, while “Cortez the Killer” stands among his finest works—a thunderhead […]
1975 COUNTDOWN | #40 — #31
#40 DAVID BOWIE — YOUNG AMERICANS The greasepaint and sequins have been relegated to the dress-up box as Bowie shifts direction again. Recorded in Philadelphia and New York with contributions from Luther Vandross and guitarist Carlos Alomar, the album drew heavily on American R&B and funk influences. Its sound—lush, rhythmic, brass-laden—captured Bowie’s fascination with U.S. […]
1975 COUNTDOWN | #50 — #41
#50 AC/DC — T.N.T. The Aussie rockers crank it up a notch for their second album of 1975. “It’s a long way to the top” fully deserves its iconic status, while “High voltage” offers exactly that: raw, electrifying rock. Add in a title track that boasts one of Malcolm Young’s best riffs and you have […]
1975 COUNTDOWN | #60 — #51
DONNA SUMMER — LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY This is the album that launched both Summer and producer Giorgio Moroder into the disco pantheon. The 17-minute title track remains audacious: a slow-burning, hypnotic groove built around Summer’s breathy, erotic vocals and Moroder’s pulsing synthesizers. Its frank sexuality redefined how intimacy could sound in pop music […]
1975 COUNTDOWN | #75 — #66
Welcome to the sixth annual 50 year countdown. Beginning in 2020 with 70 FROM ’70 we’ve sampled music from each year and attempted to find the ‘keepers’. This year is no exception, though the fragmentation of rock music into sub-genres makes any attempt at ranking increasingly fraught. In this initial set we have keyboard-based prog, […]
DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED
After a very creditable British R&B pop album that yielded the hit single “Go Now” The Moody Blues went through some personnel changes and directional realignments that resulted in them being invited by Deram Records to create a rock+orchestra version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony to demonstrate new recording techniques. With full support from producer […]
ALBUM COVERS… WITH RECORDS!
A collection of album covers featuring vinyl records. * Let’s start globally, shall we? Van Der Graaf have it large with a record the size of the earth. VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR — World Record [1976] * Despite it being a record obsessive’s nightmare, I do love this cover (which is not by Hipgnosis). The […]
I RUN TO YOU
September 23rd is the forty-eighth anniversary of the release of Steely Dan’s Aja. ♥ From its striking cover—timeless in its enigmatic simplicity—to the fadeout of the final song, Aja resides comfortably in classic album territory. Several other ‘classics’ came out in 1977, commercial monsters including Fleetwood Mac Rumours and the Eagles Hotel California. But where […]
ZAP YOUR MIND!!
Acid Mothers Temple. Just one of many names linked to Kawabata Makoto, the Japanese guitarist who founded the collective back in the mid-1990s. His aim was to play improvised psychedelic rock around the world and document the explorations on his own record label. With a catalogue of hundreds of albums featuring almost as many players, […]
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