Music Reviews: Vinyl

The scope of modern music is so vast that almost everything and anything is dubbed under a specific subgenre. In the case of Blackwater Holylight, the all-female trio are the queens of ‘doomgaze.’ Their sound is rooted in doom metal, drawing obvious influence from Monolord and Weedwater, yet interjects shoegaze overtones, akin to My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, providing many textural layers. Coupled with introspective lyrics about vulnerability and... Read More

"This looks like a fire drill at an assisted living center" I quipped to my wife as we exited the Mayo Performing Arts Center theater and into the lobby March 13th, 2024 following Peter Frampton's energized and most enjoyable "feel good, rock hard" performance. Sorry, but that's what the audience looked like half a century later. At least we still are alive. I could give you a long list of who's not as I'm sure can many reading... Read More

If you're old enough to have bought Axis: Bold As Love when it was first released in January of 1968, and you were a stoner, you'll not likely ever forget your first spin, especially in stereo, wearing Koss Pro 4A headphones. Eddie Kramer was never shy about using the pan pots and things flew around your head and shifted left to right to left, sometimes without purpose. But it was fun, it was a free-wheeling time and Jimi had as deft a sense of humor as he... Read More

Let’s cut to the chase: Miles Davis’ The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel is one of the most thrilling jazz albums ever, ceaselessly captivating, “the sound of surprise” (as Whitney Balliett once defined jazz) at every turn. A 10-LP boxed set, recorded live at a small Chicago club called the Plugged Nickel in December 1965, it captures Miles Davis, the most masterfully innovative trumpeter of the era (perhaps of all eras), fronting what came to be called his... Read More

The music of 007 continues to shine in this La-La Land Records' release of - finally - all the music from John Barry's superb score for Moonraker (1979). With substantially upgraded sonics, fans can now enjoy a musical highlight of the series both on CD and vinyl. Includes an interview with reissue producer Neil S. Bulk.

Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), Igor Stravinsky’s primal ballet score, stands at the crossroads of much of music and art. Premiered in the spring of 1913 it sits ominously in between the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and the start of the first world war in 1914. All three pivotal events in retrospect, are seen as starting points of the modern age. But we must ask: why is this 35 minute ballet deserving of such historical weight? What makes it the point... Read More

Mick and Keith went shopping for a new guitarist after Mick Taylor exited the band. Why not conduct live auditions in the studio while tape rolled and let's produce an album out of that? The original Black and Blue release Spring 1976 was in many ways an anti-climactic affair. An unfocused set of tunes, some great, some less so. A middling quality gatefold jacket, no annotation of any kind, just an inner sleeve showing the "Glimmer Twins" as producers... Read More

Powerful blasts of syncopated big band brass driven by the core quartet's sinewy rhythmic thrusts deliver an album's worth of adrenaline inducing musical aggression that resonates as appropriately today as it did in 1971 when this Strata-East label's debut album was originally released. As annotator Syd Schwartz points out, the album was a "musical project, self-powered, self-funded and done 100% on their own terms", but others saw it as... Read More

Following the commercial flop of Astral Weeks, his moody, mystical, musically eclectic masterpiece, that years later found its commercial footing, to detach themselves from New York City chaos, Van Morrison and wife Janet (Rigsbee) Planet moved to the Catskill Mountains near the town of Woodstock, New York.Earlier, following the break up of his group Them, he'd signed a contract with Bert Berns's Bang Records and in March of 1967 entered famed A&R... Read More

In the mid-seventies Philips recorded Colin Davis conducting the Boston Symphony in a complete cycle of Sibelius’s numbered symphonies, beginning with this classic coupling of the Fifth and Seventh. Now remixed and remastered by Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer at Berliner Studies, it is one of three new releases inaugurating Decca’s new Pure Analogue Project remastering and remixing celebrated vintage titles.

David Bowie’s artistry and career are pinpointed by not just what genre he was exploring at a given point in time, but by the cities of the world in which he found himself. Glamorous London was the hub for Ziggy Stardust, Philadelphia’s soulful streets influenced Young Americans, debaucherous Los Angeles in 1976 gave birth to Station to Station and the Thin White Duke.The Thin White Duke was an extension of Thomas Newton, an extraterrestrial character that David Bowie... Read More

In 2000, Warning’s prominent acoustic guitars and more nuanced lyrical approach might’ve alienated Green Day's core fanbase, as it sold significantly less than their previous major label LPs and seems comparatively forgotten in the popular memory. Now, however, a lavish 25th anniversary 5LP or 4CD super deluxe box set presents Warning as the excellent power pop record it’s always been.

• Officially Sanctioned Concord Music Group, Inc.
ALL VALVE Heritage pressing cut directly from the original analogue master tapes.
• No equalization, compression or any other processing undertaken during the cutting process.
• Cut in TRUE monaural using 1960's Lyrec SV8 all valve cutting system and Ortofon DS522 mono cutter head.
• Hand-crafted sleeve artwork faithfully recreated using a vintage letterpress procedure.
• Released in strictly limited, individually - numbered edition of 345.

Recorded in 1957 and released in 1959 on Norman Granz's new Verve Record label, this makes a fitting debut for the new Verve Vault series produced by Verve exec Ken Druker. It arrived a while back along with a Antonio Carlos Jobim The Composer of Desafinado Plays and I'm finally getting around to writing about it Two more disparate albums from the Verve catalog I cannot imagine, which is why they made such a good choice to inaugurate the new Verve Vault... Read More

When people think of KISS without context, Gene Simmons, the fire-breathing, blood-spitting demon who convinced shocked parents that the group’s name was an acronym for ‘Knights in Satan’s Service’, first comes to mind. Nonetheless, the group’s biggest hit was sung not by Simmons, but by the group's drummer, Peter Criss. Criss played in numerous Brooklyn area bands before becoming the Catman in the world's hottest band. His jazz-rooted drumming (he was a... Read More

Decca - one of the oldest and most storied of classical labels - joins Deutsche Grammophon in revisiting its fabled back-catalogue to breathe new sonic life into legendary recordings.  With Rainer Maillard and Sidney C. Meyer of Emil Berliner Studios once more flexing their all-analogue, direct-from-the-mastertape-to-lathe mastering and cutting skills, is sonic and musical nirvana once again being visited upon vinyl collectors?

When the audiophile houses started reissuing Blue Note jazz albums on vinyl (Classic Records in the late 1990s, Analogue Productions and Music Matters Jazz 20 years later, a decade after Classic had gone out of business), they focused almost exclusively on the storied label’s mainstream titles from the 1950s and early ‘60s, by the likes of Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, Dexter Gordon, early Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, and, of course, John Coltrane’s sole... Read More

In Pt. I of the 2025 year-end ‘Original Source’ round up, I looked at two recordings a bit off the beaten path in terms of repertoire. Well, now we get to some more well-trodden territory.Today we’re looking at a disc of orchestral war horses from Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble for which he was once principal guest conductor. The majority of the LP is taken up by Pictures at an Exhibition, Modest Mussorgsky’s... Read More