Music Reviews

In April 1958, Chess Records released its third LP, The Best of Muddy Waters. It was a straight up, no compromises, hard blues album, a look back to earlier days of the label when Muddy, recording classic after classic, created the template for what became Chicago Blues. But now Chess was chasing crossover, big money, pop hits, and was no longer primarily a blues label. The prior two LPs, Rock, Rock, Rock, a movie soundtrack, and After School Session, Chuck Berry’s... Read More

Vibraphonist-composer Patricia Brennan is a rare musician: a child prodigy (she started studying music in her native Mexico at age 4) who advanced through the classical world (selected to tour with the Orchestra of the Americas at 17), then won a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music while also playing with the local Philadelphia Orchestra—and then, when she moved to New York and took up jazz, turned out to have a flair for sophisticated composition and a... Read More

Rosalìa is a Catalan singer whose musical studies focused on flamenco, but that is only one aspect of her broad and uncompromising compositional and performance abilities. Born near Barcelona in 1992, she may be more familiar as a pop performer, having produced hip-hop and reggaeton-flavoured tracks with artists like Pharrell Williams. If she is not that familiar to some North American readers today, that might change rapidly; the album “Lux” reached top ten in the... Read More

Vincent Furnier, who took on the Alice Cooper moniker after the titular group had disbanded, triumphed by releasing his first and arguably best solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare. As if going solo was entering the big unknown enough, supporting the album on the road became a huge risk. Cooper and manager Shep Gordon invested over half a million dollars of their own money into the production, making it a win-big-or-lose-everything scenario. Welcome to My Nightmare... Read More

“Some get stoned,

Some get strange,

Sooner or later, it all gets real.”

Keen listeners will recognize these lyrics from “Walk On,” a sunny number Neil Young rambles through on the middle installment of the famed “ditch” trilogy, On The Beach. But as revealed by Neil’s latest release, those words actually speak to the dark and drunk final installment: Tonight’s The Night.

Sony/Legacy, which in 2021 acquired from Warner the American rights to most of Prince’s imperial 1980s catalog, hasn’t been too active in mining his legendary vault, maybe because of issues over who actually owns what of the unreleased material and for where. (Territorial rights splits between major labels easily become an inefficient nightmare for everyone.) Aside from partnering with Warner on a super deluxe Diamonds and Pearls box set, Sony’s work has been... Read More

The enduring charm of this soundtrack and the 1/2 hour animated special associated with it—the one that everyone loves no matter age or religion—had an unusually troubled beginning. It almost wasn't produced. No one at the three networks was interested in an hour long Charlie Brown special having nothing to do with Christmas so it was trimmed to a half hour version but still in 1964 no one wanted it. But Fantasy had commissioned Vince Guaraldi to produce a... Read More

Spins of Ray Charles's Ingredients In a Recipe For Soul—original ABC-Paramount pressing followed by a new Tangerine Records reissue appropriately pressed on orange vinyl— preceded a first play of Jerome Sabbagh's latest album of 8 originals each dedicated to a different individual, a few with whom he's crossed career paths, but others not. Coincidentally, the bluesy opener "Lone Jack" dedicated to both Ray Charles and Sabbagh's producing... Read More

If you already own the earlier edition of Anthology 1, 2, and 3, this new box set containing those plus Anthology 4— 13 previously unreleased tracks and 17 songs selected from super deluxe versions of five classic albums plus 2025 Jeff Lynne mixes of "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love"— might not be enough to get you to buy it yet again but maybe the additional 26 never before released on vinyl tracks will entice you to buy the separately available... Read More

The Donnas were at a career crossroads in the mid-2000s. Atlantic Records’ revolving door of personnel left the group without the core team of people who helped market them via product placements, both benefiting album sales and landing them major tours. First-year sales of 2004’s Gold Medal were a mere 20% of what 2002’s Spend The Night achieved. Atlantic insisted that The Donnas’ follow-up effort be more rooted in pop and assisted by outside writers. Not aligning... Read More

No other group in the 1980s lived up to the hedonistic rock-and-roll lifestyle than did Mötley Crüe. Emerging from the sleazy Hollywood scene, they sought to craft an entity that was described by bassist Nikki Sixx as, ‘David Bowie and the Sex Pistols thrown in a blender with Black Sabbath.’ Their debaucherous history often eclipses the impact of their recorded output, immortalized in both the memoir and Netflix adaptation The Dirt. It goes without saying that their... Read More

A landmark recording gets a fabulous new remastering from master tapes that have rarely been played.

Of course this wasn't Little Feat's "last album" any more than boomer rock band "final tours" are ever final. As Dennis McNally's well-illustrated excellent annotation points out without actually saying it, Lowell George was not exactly ebullient about things when this was recorded and the songs weren't either though there are a few classics like "All That You Dream" and "Long Distance Love". In fact all of... Read More

Mode was a '50s era west coast jazz label with a distinctive look thanks to Eva Diana's colorful portraits but more importantly, the label, in its 6 months of operation produced 31 albums and managed to release 29 of them. And of equal importance to TrackingAngle readers, the sets were recorded at Radio Recorders and engineered by a then just starting out Dayton "Bones" Howe! As you'll hear unless you already have some of the '80's... Read More

It’s almost a Hollywood cliché…promising young band signs to a major and comes out the other end pummeled, singed and largely indistinguishable. In 1983 The Dream Syndicate tumbled into bed with A&M Records, which helped cushion their fall with a $150K recording budget for sophomore outing Medicine Show. The songs were just as solid as their Indie debut (The Days of Wine and Roses) but something had broken in the process.“We’d come out the other side of the... Read More

Disguised in Kabuki-esque makeup and looking imposing in studded leather uniforms, KISS was the grotesque footnote of a musical subset on the verge of being submerged by disco that deafened and blinded the musical landscape. Their brand of unadulterating hard rock, delivered with on-stage theatrics, wooed audiences across the United States, often upstaging the headliners they opened for. Sustaining a live reputation conflicted with the timid nature of their album... Read More

Sweet, sweeping strings, fluttering flutes, melancholic trombone, soft bass line and an insistent bossa nova beat tapped out on a snare rim, back the then little known performer but well known composer Antonio Carlos Jobim on his first studio album (though his songs had previously appeared on a 1958 João Gilberto album and of course of Stan Getz's Jazz Samba). Jobim plays rhythm acoustic guitar and taps out on one finger piano the melodies to a dozen of his most... Read More

Ghost is the ultimate entity for admirers of heavy metal and theatre. The group, satirizing the Catholic Church by praising the Devil instead of God, is fronted by Tobias Forge, who dons a prosthetic mask and devilish papal regalia under the pseudonym Papa Emeritus. In the eyes of devout liturgics, Ghost’s schtick is blasphemous and has become the root of some minor controversies over the years. Their live show is still a spectacle to witness, borrowing elements from... Read More

Every album by tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd these past few years is a voyage of sorts, his latest, Figure in Blue, more than most, and not just because he turned 87 while recording it this past March, though every birthday at that point is a milestone, and every creative endeavor is both a reminiscence and an ambitious plunge into the now. This double-LP—98 minutes of starkly revealing music, Lloyd blowing front and center, backed only by Jason Moran on piano and... Read More