Tag Archives: album reviews
AH, VIENNA
Vienna, the 1980 LP by UK synth-pop art rockers Ultravox, kicked off the second phase of their career. Original frontman John Foxx had departed in 1979 after three albums and an unsuccessful foray into the American market. But keyboard player Billie Currie—who had worked with Midge Ure in Visage—convinced Midge to join Ultravox and revitalise […]
DARK PLEASURES
It’s a striking opening line to the first song on your first album: “I’ve been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand”. Searching, yearning for direction, for counsel. The song is called “Disorder”, a one-word summary of the singer’s internal state. A plea for human contact: take my hand. Please. […]
TIMELESS
Cascading keyboard notes and flurries of guitar; soon they are dancing through a frenetic dialogue as dextrous as it is energising. Welcome to “Lungs”, the unexpectedly manic opening to Timeless, the entrancing 1975 album by John Abercrombie. “Lungs” was composed by the keyboard player Jan Hammer, he of Mahavishnu Orchestra fame. In group leader Abercrombie, […]
MORE SONGS ABOUT SEX AND BOOZE
What do you get if you mix the diamond grit of Dinah Washington, the heartbreak of Billie Holiday, the brash charm of Janis Joplin and the sass of The Ronettes? It’s a heady and potent cocktail, and one that resulted in soaring peaks and desperate troughs during the short life of Amy Jade Winehouse. In […]
INOCULATE AGAINST FEAR
One of the most popular on-line music guides lists more than 50 adjectives to describe the last album by progressive-metal masters Tool. This tells you a lot about the complexity of their 2019 eighty-minute epic. Some of the descriptors are pretty obvious… dramatic, powerful, intense, heavy… words that fans of the band will see as […]
STILL BLOOMING GOOD
One of the holy grails of rock music is the making of an album that defies time. The Stone Roses achieved this with their 1989 self-titled debut, a shimmering melodic masterpiece with a dark heart. From the Jackson Pollock inspired cover with its paint-trail puzzle to the ecstatic, epic final track “I am the resurrection”, […]
CREEDENCE PUT A SPELL ON WOODSTOCK
1969 was a heck of a year for Creedence Clearwater Revival. In January they released their second album, Bayou Country. A mere seven months later came another LP, Green River. Astonishingly, CCR released yet another album that storied year: in early November, Willy And The Poor Boys were introduced to the listening public. But wait, […]
HOT ROCKS
After the lively conversation about Goats Head Soup, I thought I’d better redeem myself with a truly timeless collection of early Rolling Stones hits. * There have been too many Stones compilations to count, but Hot Rocks 1964—1971, one of the early ones, is amongst the best and has rarely been out of print. Originally […]
73 FROM ’73 | AN INTRODUCTION
From the time I first extracted the more than three hundred 1973 albums in the VC collection I knew that 73 FROM ’73 would be a challenging project. And that was before I’d even researched the holes in the stash. No New York Dolls! Betty Davis overlooked! Where’s Aerosmith? Oh, the shame. Then I mulled […]
1972 COUNTDOWN: #4 — #3
4 NEU! — NEU! ‘Hallogallo’ fades in with a repeated guitar dot over a strange percussive clack. It insinuates itself into the room and your consciousness, an hypnotic groove, repetitive yet captivating. Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of Neu! The beginning of the Neu! story is part of the early Kraftwerk story. Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger […]
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