Music Reviews: Vinyl

Along with an Acoustical-Systems A*Stellar turntable to review, company founder and designer Dietrich Brakemeier brought along a remarkable sounding solo piano record his company sponsored produced and released on vinyl and CD last year, created using a purist minimal microphone technique, and Studer tape recorders. The venue was an old brewery—the Sudhaus—(which I assume translated to "suds house", the name given to my college fraternity living room), now a... Read More

If you were a suburban white kid of a certain age and remember when Elvis appeared, seemingly from outer space, everything in your world changed (unless your parents were into Black music). Of course there was an Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, and Milton Berle show "pre-reel" that you may have caught, but this person looked and sounded like no one else you'd ever seen before on television and it didn't appear to be an act. Even when Elvis goofed around... Read More

The lack of archival Led Zeppelin releases in recent years makes the divided 2014-15 remaster campaign, complemented with unreleased studio rarities, a treasure trove in hindsight. Scholarly knowledge of seasoned collectors on what’s presumed to exist in the archives and what’s leaked in bootleg circles makes the group a no-brainer candidate for being one of rock’s most preserved acts. Nonetheless, Jimmy Page’s itch for perfectionism has left so little released in the... Read More

Purple Rain arrived in 1984 two years after 1999, Prince's first big critical and commercial success. With songs like "Little Red Corvette" and the title track, It was the record that established his stardom and eventually in the year 1999, it was certified quadruple Platinum. Following his passing in 2016 it again charted, peaking at #7—better than when it was originally released.Quick aside: I was in Minneapolis on April 21st, 2016, the day Prince... Read More

In the audiophile ghettos otherwise known as "hi-fi shows" Hip Hop music rarely if ever gets played. Blues? Yes. A lot of blues. Jazz? Yes a lot of jazz. Some classical too, but Hip Hop? Not that I can recall. Some say it's the coarse language. Around the time this now classic Hip Hop album was released late 1992, a Howard Stern Show character named "Stuttering John" (Melendez) stuck a microphone in Walter Cronkite's face at a press event... Read More

Wishbone Ash’s Argus was made in rock-and-roll’s golden age; when labels pelted fistfuls of money at any band with guitars, bass, drums, someone who could shake a tambourine, and someone who could sing harmony. This is evidenced by a minor-gods-canon band like Wishbone Ash getting the esteemed honor of a Hipgnosis cover. Assistant Bruce Atkins was dressed up in a costume borrowed from The Devils and posed over the Verdon Gorge in France. When folding out the jacket,... Read More

Deutsche Grammophon rounds off its new cycle of major works by the Russian composer from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony with another essential purchase for lovers of this composer’s music and dedicated audiophiles.  Digital done right.  

Our reissue story starts May 27th 2015 at Bernie Grundman mastering, Gower Avenue, Hollywood, CA. Chad Kassem is there, Contemporary Records founder Lester Koenig's son John is there, I am there. Most importantly the master tape of Sonny Rollins' Way Out West is there.

Where, in 1980, was there room for The Soft Boys? The U.S. charts were distended with the dregs of Disco while England was being detained by the onset of synthpop. No one particularly wanted to know about a band of Cambridge smarties who wrote songs that sounded as if they’d be drawn from a tincture of Yves Tanguy.Still, they had their admirers. And when Robyn Hitchcock leant starboard towards a solo career, most of them disembarked with him. That left two albums and... Read More

The Buckingham-Nicks, Fleetwood Mac hook-up post the Bob Welch exit created a monster rock group but it took more than a year following the July, 1975 release for Fleetwood Mac to reach No. 1. Fans of the original blues group Fleetwood Mac were mostly disenchanted if not disgusted (my wife), but this group's success cannot be denied. It gave 1975 rockers what they wanted and at this point why it did is a waste of time to reiterate.If you think this release is a... Read More

First thought upon seeing Grace Bergere's cover portrait was "punk Ida Lupino" but that's not a good way to start a review since how many readers today know Ida Lupino? So let's just say a young woman with an attitude. A dark attitude. And a genuine one. She doesn't look like a poseur. It goes deep. That's before opening and playing the record and reading the lyrics.It's difficult enough in 2025 to pull off a rock record that... Read More

Unlike most "completest" or multi-disc sets containing every snippet of recorded tape that you might listen to once out of curiosity and never again revisit, this thoughtfully curated set covering just Nick Drake's debut album is one that bears repeated listening. It's been on the turntable almost constantly since it arrived shortly after publishing the review of Brad Mehldau's Elliott Smith tribute Ride Into the Sun in which the pianist... Read More

The Doors: a group that has more compilations than actual studio releases. Longtime fans will whinge at nauseam when an anniversary passes and the major label earwigs grace record store shelves with another ‘ultimate’ or ‘best of’ collection. Regardless of the oversaturation of releases such as those, it engrains the self-marketed ‘Band from Venice’ in the public’s consciousness, or subjects novices to the Lizard King ethos. Their discography is even more complex when... Read More

1975 was a weird year for pop music. The Captain and Tennille had the best-selling single of the year with “Love Will Keep Us Together.” Meanwhile, Neil Young was parked in the ditch, wasted at the wake on Tonight’s The Night. Just over the guardrail, Bob Dylan returned from his own surreal excursions. Queen released the biggest song of their career. While the Carpenters were snuggled up in their parent-pleasing inoffensive confections, Led Zeppelin dealt blockbuster... Read More

One needn't be an Elliott Smith fan or even know who he was to appreciate Brad Mehldau's rich musical examination of emotional light and darkness using the late singer/songwriter's creativity as a guide to understanding "visionary depressives" generally, and specifically Smith and his often sad and dark, but simultaneously uplifting music. Smith fans are legion, intense, and like Nick Drake, another "visionary depressive", even in... Read More

Amina Claudine Myers should be a lot more famous than she is. A composer-pianist-organist-singer of spiritual depth and grand virtuosity, she has been recording, as a leader or accompanist, for nearly a half century, but mainly for small labels and as a member of an alliance—the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which also spawned the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and many others—that didn’t (and... Read More

In the heart of the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, just under the Market Street Elevated (‘the el’ as the locals call it), is a mural of text and visual interpretations of songs from a native’s album. That mural alone cements Kurt Vile's place within the city’s culture. Originally from the borough of Lansdowne, Kurt’s career progressed from creating low-fidelity bedroom recordings to the slickest-sounding nuggets from his home studio. Vile’s twist on... Read More