Music Reviews: Vinyl

A musical and sonic spectacular, k.d. lang's free-flowing, daring explorations of unrequited love/lust and liberation sound today as daringly personal, sometimes painful and always fresh as they did in 1992 when Ingénue was originally released to enthusiastic reviews, commercial success and multiple Grammy nominations and the well-deserved award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Freed from her "country roots" on earlier records, Ingénue was a mix... Read More

Batch #7 of the Original Source Series of AAA vinyl reissues concludes with one of the gems of the 70s DG catalogue in a stunning sonic refresh, courtesy of Emil Berliner Studios, mastered and cut directly from multiple 8-track master tapes.  Don’t miss this one - even if you do not normally buy classical.

Batch #7 of DG’s Original Source vinyl reissues, mastered and cut directly from 4-track master tapes at Emil Berliner Studios, gets up close and personal in Scriabin’s masterpiece of sensual overload, and Tchaikovsky’s evergreen ode to forbidden love.

These two new works, "Fillmore Street" and "Little Wordstar", scored for jazz orchestra and studio orchestra respectively, recall people places of personal significance to the composer and reference ecological themes of climate change, global warming, and endangered species.

On January 15, 1959, when John Coltrane recorded the album Bags & Trane at Atlantic Studios in New York City with Milt Jackson, he was nearly at the end of the sideman-apprentice stage of his career. For two years, he had been playing with the Miles Davis Quintet/Sextet, one of the most successful groups in jazz. His time with Miles had been controversial. Part of jazz's audience and its critical establishment were never happy with the innovative nature of... Read More

As a record, Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music holds up just fine. But as an idea? It may be one of the most beautiful we ever had.The story is a familiar one, as far the American musical mythos is concerned: Back in 1962, at the flashpoint of the civil rights movement, Charles recorded 12 standbys originally by Hank Williams (“You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,”) Don Gibson (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”), and other luminaries of the tradition.Six... Read More

The Electric Recording Company (UK) release of Lightning Hopkins' «Goin' Away», recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in 1963, is not the kind of reissue that will impress all audiophiles. Other, far cheaper versions have more dynamics and a more brightly lit soundstage. But the ERC version is a very convincing, and very expensive, time machine.

Batch #7 of the Original Source Series from Deutsche Grammophon turns to a long established classic of the DG catalogue. Karl Böhm was the great Mozartian of his age, and his many recordings of the composer's orchestral, choral and operatic music have been mainstays for decades. Remastered and recut directly from the 4-track master tapes, this handsome reissue casts Böhm's account in a new sonic light.

Batch #7 of the Original Source deluxe vinyl reissue series from Deutsche Grammophon (all mastered and cut DIRECTLY from 4 and 8-track master tapes by Emil Berliner Studios) kicks off with an established catalogue classic. The young firebrand conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, protégé of Leonard Bernstein, made his mark early with a series of acclaimed recordings for DG in the 1970s, and this Tchaikovsky 1st - at the time a work that was rarely recorded - may be the most celebrated of them all.

Until Katy Lied, the "commercial" $29.99 Steely Dan reissues were cut using Bernie Grundman mastered digital files. All of the previous Dan albums therefore should have sonically resembled the UHQR 45rpm versions issued by Analogue Productions. None did. All sounded D.O.A. They were cut by a lesser known, let's say "second tier" Long Island, N.Y. based mastering engineer. Was the problem the quality of his cutting system? After all, a lacquer... Read More

By 1971, Yes had became synonymous with "progressive rock". After executing an array of rearranged covers and hybrids of blues and jazz on its first two albums (Yes and Time and a Word), the release of The Yes Album laid down the foundation for the group's “golden run”, which ran up until the mid-1970s. Tracks like “Yours Is No Disgrace,” “Starship Trooper,” and “I’ve Seen All Good People” were quick to become repertoire staples of their now 50+ year... Read More

Once upon a time, when great recording studios were a “thing”, long before they became almost extinct—when no one thought such a thing was even possible—studio owners and sound conscious musicians competed with one another to find new and improved recording technology.“Improved” came in many guises, some of which turned out to be worse. For instance, in the mid-1970s, the Aphex Aural Exciter grabbed the attention of both studio owners and musicians. It did what the... Read More

Repertoire both familiar and welcomingly unfamiliar is put through its paces by this nascent collaboration between one of the world’s top orchestras with its dynamic new Chief Conductor.  This gorgeously appointed set is not only a compelling snapshot of a new musical era at the Philharmonie, it’s also a great way for classical novices to introduce themselves to an eclectic range of music in first-rate performances. 

There's a misconception among some that King Crimson was Robert Fripp centered around a revolving door of personnel. The group's ever-changing style followed a new age philosophy of the music finding its players, leading to constant reinvention and being purely progressive. By the mid-1970s, King Crimson’s third lineup consisted of guitarist Robert Fripp, bassist/vocalist John Wetton, violinist David Cross, and percussionist Bill Bruford. This incarnation’s... Read More

The jacket is for a mono record so guess what? I played this record using a mono cartridge. Someone, (I thought in a comment but now I don't see it) claimed the recording was in stereo so upon returning from a trip to Seattle I played it using a stereo cartridge and? Yes, it's a fine stereo recording! Fine in that RVG kept it "natural", using stereo simply to produce space. Collapsing it to mono either with a mono cartridge or a "mono"... Read More

1971 was a pivotal year for R&B/soul music. Stevie Wonder's Where I'm Coming From was released in April. Marvin Gaye's What's Going On was released in May. Maggot Brain by Funkadelic was released in July, Curtis Mayfield's Curtis in September, and Sly's There's a Riot Goin’ On in November. All of these albums were entirely composed of original music and expressed the disappointment, despair, and anger of young Black people living... Read More

In 2019 Yuya Uchida, the father of rock & roll in Japan, passed away at age 79. Uchida was not an instrumentalist, and he never found fame as a singer, but his fingerprint was on much of the guitar-driven music infecting Japan from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. After a brief career releasing some early Elvis-inspired rock and roll singles at the dawn of the 60s, his passion was reinvigorated when the Beatles came to Tokyo in 1966 to perform five nights... Read More

Of all the '60s era artists that expanded their craft to unfathomable heights, The Velvet Underground was arguably the most adventurous. Few if any other contemporaries sought to work in unorthodox approaches to both instrumentation (drones, detuned guitars, and distortion) and subject matter (drug use, S&M, and prostitution). These approaches appear prominently on their first two albums, The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat. A key... Read More