Music Reviews: Rock

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

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

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

Back in the mid '60s, the popularity of The Monkees mystified many a maturing adolescent craving authenticity not just in music but in everything. According to a Wikipedia post then aspiring filmmaker Bob Rafelson developed "the initial idea" for The Monkees in 1962, well before Beatlemania arrived in America, and for that matter in the U.K. as well. The Wiki story doesn't make clear precisely what was "the initial idea", but whatever it... Read More

A tide was turning when the dawn of the 1980s coincided with the demise of the progressive rock genre and one of its godfathers, Yes. Punk and New Wave made old hat of everything musically that preceded it and MTV shifted the focus of the music industry to an artist’s image. As for Yes, fans found it hard to embrace the new lineup that integrated pop duo The Buggles, where vocalist Trevor Horn had to fill Jon Anderson’s hard-to-fill shoes. Their streak of crafting... Read More

Deep Purple’s Mark II lineup of Blackmore/Lord/Paice/Gillan/Glover, strayed from the group’s psychedelic origins, adapting to the harder-rocking style of contemporaries like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, which became the pillars of what became heavy metal. Fueled by lengthy and dynamic improvisations, the group was an untamable force on the live stage, something that worked in favor of their reputation and against the notion that it would translate efficiently on... Read More

Okay, here's my sub mission: I'm spoiled. I have the original 11 track Virgin U.K. release (A2/B1) issued in haste and quickly corrected to the 12 track standard version. You want Steve Jones's snarling, fibrillating singular animal guitar (arguably the glue that holds the record together, created by reproducing his guitar part an octave down as explained in Chris Thomas's notes in this reissue) make your ears sizzle. You want Lydon/Rotten's... Read More

If the music wasn't so interesting and singular, the story behind the album recorded in 1967 and released in 1968 would easily be more so. Dumped by Decca after having a string of great singles including "She's Not There", the group self-financed this project, recorded much of it at what later would be called Abbey Road Studios (with some at Olympic), signed to CBS, put out two singles and then this album released April, 1968 a month after the band... Read More

Last month, Sacramento Nu-Metal band Deftones dropped their 10th studio album Private Music. Coincidentally, this album also marks nearly 30 years since their debut LP Adrenaline released in 1995. Deftones have come a long way in 30 years, and their longevity is rare, especially for a band associated with a style of music that mostly died off in the mid 2000s. But part of their staying power has been the musical creativity that has long elevated the group far above... Read More

To be brief: compared to the version included in the deluxe box set of a few years ago, this re-mastered One-Step version cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering sounds soooo much better, it's kind of ridiculous.I took it to my friend Anthony Chiarella's (he's CEO of Specialty Sound & Vision, which distributes Gryphon among other products) and played it on his system during a meeting of the New York/N.J. Audio club and the reaction in the... 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

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

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

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