Music Reviews: Rock

Ever since arriving on the U.K. scene, harmonica holder around neck, strumming a guitar, singing a "wind" song (about catching it not looking for answers blowing in it), and being described as "the Scottish Bob Dylan" Donovan has unfairly suffered a respect deficit among some Boomer-aged music fans. The famous clip from "Don't Look Back" where a half a decade younger Donovan plays and sings in a room full of Dylan fans has long been... Read More

Freshly sprung from his contractual ties to the other Fabs, the McCartneys and Co. in January of 1975 lit upon New Orleans. With a batch of new songs that he was sure would surpass those on Band On The Run, contemporary reports found that Paul was feeling as toppermost as he had in years. And by settling on the Crescent City as his recording venue, he may have been hoping to recapture the magic (and the Grammy noms…) he’d found by once again working outside of the... Read More

Queen’s legacy is at the same ante as the Beatles, where one in every four households is likely to own their Greatest Hits compilation. Best known for crafting mini operatic suites and sports stadium anthems, the casual listener is probably not in tune with Queen’s hard-rocking origins. Hollywood Records focused on that era with the release of Queen I last year. Different release configurations transformed it from a remix of their self-titled debut into a period deep... Read More

Dylan Peggin did a great job writing for Tracking Angle recently when he gave us the back story of the making of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album. He also gave us the scoop on the new Rhino High Fidelity pressing, giving it very high marks for packaging, music and sound.For comparison, he used the well-regarded 2006 Rhino pressing of Paranoid cut AAA by Kevin Gray, which was subsequently repressed on colored vinyl in 2015 for Vinyl Me Please. He also had the Rhino vinyl... Read More

The Doors are one of the most represented Record Store Day artists, guaranteed every year to have a special release. Whether it's reissues of long-forgotten mono mixes, singles, curated compilations, live recordings, or studio outtakes, RSD is a means for the most obsessive of Doors completists to stuff their shelves with the yearly limited edition offerings. No artist output has been nit-picked and criticized as much as the Doors' catalog, but the past few... Read More

This is a good time to be alive if you are a Neil Young fan. For years, Neil Young, an archivist like few others, has saved everything. And when I mean everything, take a gander at the Neil Young Archives. Here we find photographs, original lyric sheets, ephemera, videos, and all the music. The music quality, it goes without saying, is also presented in a similarly archival manner. For those who stream, you are treated to a digital source that is as close as you can... Read More

There wasn’t a better time than the early 2000s for a band to break through like The Donnas. After honing their craft on their first four albums on the independent punk label Lookout Records, the big leagues at Atlantic Records signed the female quartet. Between the release of the Spend The Night album, “Take It Off” becoming their signature track, and placements in film and video game soundtracks, they managed to break into the mainstream, brandishing a hard rock... Read More

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

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

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

In old school animation—the way Disney and Warner Brothers did it way back when— rough drawings of the action were sketched on paper by the animators, who then flipped through the pages to see what they've drawn come to rough life. Once these roughs met with their approval they handed them off to secondary animators usually referred to as "in-betweeners" who produced the drawings that go in between what the animators hand them, thus producing the... Read More

Whether the members of Cream were considered “cream of the crop” players or ELP debuting before a crowd of 600,000 at the Isle of Wight, supergroups became a hot-button commodity that granted success in the late 1960s. Although Humble Pie may have included members of Small Faces, The Herd, Spooky Tooth, and the Apostolic Intervention, they were keen to distance themselves from any preconceived connotations by the music press. The foursome established a sound rooted in... Read More

By 1971, things were finally starting to come together for Genesis. Vocalist Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks, and guitarists Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips initially churned out short baroque pop pieces on their 1969 debut, From Genesis to Revelation, while they were still pupils at England’s prestigious Charterhouse boarding school. Producer Johnathan King fought to keep the group’s arrangements concise to a simple pop formula, but Genesis was keen to... Read More

Serious Green Day fans will tell you American Idiot is not their favorite G.D. album and I'm not going to go down the road of naming names and producing my Top 10 G.D. albums. Your choice, but there are so many great ones, mostly fast, furious, Clash inspired all-American teen-angst infused punk with sly humor added. 2004's American Idiot is Green Day's Tommy—an ambitious, tune-filled, provocative rock opera that critiqued life in W's America and... Read More

If you were not expecting greatness from this set be prepared to be disappointed. The box set's producers understood that the high bar set by the all-analog 2014 The Beatles In Mono box set required this American follow up to be at least equally good, if not better, even though it covers but a single year in the life of The Beatles and the group's relationship with Capitol Records. But what a year it was! Filled with label competition, marketing intrigue,... Read More