The Lovin’ Spoonful were one of the most popular American bands of the 1960s; they were also one of the most confounding. They were a thoroughly modern band capable of transcendent pop moments like “Do You Believe in Magic,” beautiful ballads like “Didn’t Want to Have to Do it,” hot rockers like “Summer in the City,” and songs like “Rain on the Roof” that niftily anticipated country-rock, but they also padded out their albums with old-timey jug band and blues songs that made them seem like fogeys before their time. This split made them a brilliant singles band, while their albums were more hit and miss.
The whole unruly mess is available for view in one sprawling package on Strawberry Records’ complete retrospective What a Day for…
Category: box-set
To celebrate 50 years since the formation of Rainbow and the release of the debut album Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Demon Music present a comprehensive box set covering the years 1975-1976.
As well as including the seminal first two studio album, the box set includes a trilogy of live albums from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting the band’s first shows in Europe with shows from Cologne, Dusseldorf and Nurnberg. The final disc of this 9 disc set features a multitude of rare mixes, edits and studio rehearsal performances all newly mastered by Andy Pearce & Matt Wortham.
…Rainbow was initially formed as a Ritchie Blackmore solo project in the early months of 1975, after a Deep Purple tour of the previous…
Freddie & the Dreamers were the clowns of the British Invasion, playing their pop music for laughs while the other groups of the time were dead serious. Lead singer Freddie Garrity began playing in skiffle groups in the late ’50s, switching to rock & roll in the early ’60s.
After the Beatles broke the American market wide open, Freddie & the Dreamers followed in the flood of acts that tried to duplicate the overwhelming success of the Fab Four. The group’s hits were more numerous in the U.K. than in America, where they had only one Top Ten hit, the number one “I’m Telling You Now.” As 1965 turned into 1966, the group stopped charting in the U.S. and the hits began to dwindle in the U.K.; by 1968 the original group disbanded.
Folk music in the United States underwent a rebirth of sorts in the 1960s when young people began using the direct messaging and emotionally bold sound of the genre as a component of protest, making songs that expressed their political views and reflected the sweeping social change their generation was experiencing. With 100 songs and well over four hours of music, When Will They Ever Learn? A Story of U.S. Folk Music 1963-1969 explores every phase of the folk revolution of the ’60s, tracking the evolution as it quickly grew away from traditional trappings into forms that were more experimental but no less righteous. The earliest waves of collegiate folk-rock are represented by the spartan production and vocal harmony-centric songs of groups like…
Aussie hard rock combo Rose Tattoo have persisted on and off with many personnel changes for many decades, despite the deaths of most of the early band’s lineup. Emerging in the late 1970’s with a bluesy blend of strident hard rock and melodic, no-frills heavy metal, the band’s first four albums yielded the hits “Bad Boy for Love,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw,” “Nice Boys,” and “Scarred for Life.” One of Australia’s premier hard rock acts, Rose Tattoo found less success overseas, though they did influence American acts like Guns N’ Roses, Keel, L.A. Guns, and Nashville Pussy, all of whom have covered the band’s songs.
Rose Tattoo was formed in Sydney in 1976 by ex-Buffalo guitarist Peter Wells and — with the additions of former Buster Brown…
Take a look at Thames & Hudson’s magnificently illustrated coffee table tome Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco, and among the phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic artwork promoting nights at venues such as the Fillmore, Winterland, Carousel and Avalon ballrooms, three names trailing clouds of lysergic glory occur more than any others – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Yet although the Dead and the Airplane have become the stuff of legend, the other corner of the original San Fran acid-rock trinity has been rather forgotten. This 79-track boxset chronicling Quicksilver’s protean iterations over seven albums in the space of five tumultuous years – along with a generous helping of bonus tracks…
This lengthy album covers multiple phases of Feldman’s musical thinking from 1950 to 1972. Meaningfully, he wrote many of these compositions to play with friends such as John Cage and David Tudor. These challenging pieces, in which Feldman wanted to wash away compositional rhetoric and allow sounds to be heard on their own terms, function as aural palate cleansers. To realize Feldman’s scores, with their indeterminate elements, the pianists must play an active role in the compositional process and coordinate very closely. These musicians do so seamlessly and intuitively, never losing the required concentration, while the recording engineers do incredible work in miking and blending up to five pianos at once. The earliest pieces, such as…
Cherry Red Records compilation album A World of Our Own is a colossal release for one with such a finite scope. Comprising three discs and 86 tracks, it covers, as its subtitle suggests, The UK and Irish Folk Explosion of 1965 with maximalist gusto. This breadth is not the result of curatorial indecision but rather commemorates a singular slice of space and time, marked by an abundance of creativity and celebrating a gamut of interpretations of musical tradition.
Such a kaleidoscopic array exemplifies the core populist values that generally underpinned the folk revival movements of the mid-20th century. So, too, do the individual cuts selected to represent the metaphorical explosion at the album’s center. What emerges from it all is a well-fleshed-out…
After the early-Nineties alt-rock explosion, bands that had made it big in the Eighties largely pulled their hair out trying to fit in. U2 went disco. Guns N’ Roses spent about 25 years chasing Chinese Democracy. And Metallica? Well, they just got weird — and, contrary to popular belief, that wasn’t a bad thing.
Neither of the quartet’s Load albums, released in 1996 and 1997, sound overtly “alt,” since James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s riffs owed a greater debt to the blues and Lynyrd Skynyrd than shoegaze or Pixies. But they achieved a simulacrum of “alt,” at least for headbangers, by playing with a looseness that still feels like a rejection of the white-knuckle thrashing that earned them their legend. Hetfield had learned…
While the Beatles were whipping up the initial storms of mania in the U.K., bands in America weren’t just sitting around waiting for something to happen. Contrary to popular belief there were a few burgeoning rock & roll scenes cooking along quite nicely in the colonies. On the West Coast, surf music was riding the waves, while on college campuses across the country bands were cranking out a raucous take on rock & roll mixed with R&B in a style later known as frat rock. The early rumblings of garage rock were being heard in small towns and cities too, creating a vibrant sound that even the mighty Beatles couldn’t wipe out. Cherry Red’s 2026 compilation Steppin’ Out: The Roots of Garage Rock 1963-1965 digs into these strands of American music, unearthing…
The San Diego via Boston alt trio’s complete original studio recordings, remastered, restored, and compiled into one lavish box set. ‘Wait a Lifetime’ gathers the band’s peerless albums ‘Junk’ and ‘This Afternoon Malady’, plus ‘R.I.P.’, expanded to include their unfinished 3rd album, singles, splits, and comp tracks.
Jejune were never the Berklee-educated New England scene’s best band, but they proved their mettle all the same, penning a pair of albums that almost inadvertently steered the course of the emo underground. Those records aren’t without their faults, sure, but it’s hard to get an accurate read on the US scene without them. And they’ve never sounded better; with a fresh lick of paint, ‘Junk’ and its superior, if way more…
This three-disc package from Edsel combines Labi Siffre’s self-titled debut (1970) and The Singer and the Song (1971) with a disc of additional contemporaneous material. At the time of the set’s release, the still-active British singer/songwriter was in the midst of a commercial upswing with film, television, and ad placements, as well as social media, introducing his underexposed and underappreciated early work to a new generation of listeners. (All of this occurring two decades after Siffre’s songs were sampled for tracks by Jay-Z, Eminem, and Kanye West, among others.) Edsel originally expanded and reissued these two albums separately in 2015, and in 2020 made the discs part of the comprehensive nine-disc box My Song. For the box, two post-1971 B-sides…
Fischer-Z found success across Europe and sold more than two million albums and collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Steve Cropper and Dexys Midnight Runners’ horn section. Band main man John Watts has released 26 albums and played around 4,000 concerts so far.
Fischer-Z continue to release brand new music and tour all over the world and celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2026. The celebrations begin with this expanded 3CD deluxe digipak which collects their first three albums; World Salad (1979), Going Deaf for a Living (1980) and Red Skies Over Paradise (1981), originally released on United Artists and Liberty. This expanded collection is completed by a selection of bonus tracks from each album’s original release.
Founded in Long Island, New York in 1969, Mountain were one of the most influential American rock bands of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Their musical style fused blues, hard rock and progressive influences and was anchored around the virtuoso guitarist Leslie West, the producer, writer and multi-instrumentalist Felix Pappalardi, drummer Corky Laing and keyboard player Steve Knight.
Taking inspiration from the legendary British band Cream, West had approached producer Pappalardi (who had worked with Cream and Jack Bruce) with a view to him producing West’s first solo album. The resulting album ‘Mountain’ was released in July 1969 and saw West backed by Felix Pappalardi on bass and keyboards and drummer N.D. Smart.
The Pale Fountains make a strong claim for being one of the great “lost” bands of the first half of the 1980s on this career retrospective — The Complete Virgin Years — which gathers up their two albums (1984’s Pacific Street and 1985’s …From Across the Kitchen Table), all the singles and B-sides, plus a healthy number of extended versions, rough mixes, and demos.
The group were equally inspired by the mystical garage rock of Love and the sophisticated craft of Burt Bacharach while sharing the smooth production of contemporaries like the Style Council, the psychedelic shimmer of Teardrop Explodes, and the take-no-prisoners approach of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Their songs — like quite a few bands of the day — were full of fretless…
Last year, Third Man Records released the reissue of Detroit’s unheralded songwriting genius, Ted Lucas’ 1975 cult classic self-titled album Ted Lucas (OM), as part of an ambitious archival campaign intent on spreading the open secret of Lucas’s genius and putting an end to his unfair anonymity.
Third Man Records released Images of Life, a career-spanning, 3xLP retrospective boxset illuminating the staggering breadth and depth of Lucas’ work, out May 22nd. Disc one, Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970), highlights Lucas’ flirtation with psychedelic major label clout via his bands the Spike Drivers, the Misty Wizards and the Horny Toads. Disc two, Rainy Days (1970-1974) contains the solo acoustic warmth and charm most similar to the music found on his self-titled album.
…Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition explores both Tull’s Under Wraps (1984) and Anderson’s debut as a solo artist, Walk Into Light (1983), via the kind of comprehensive presentation that fans of the series have learned to expect.
The impetus for bringing the albums together is their shared sound. Both albums deviated from the folk-rooted “classic rock” sound of the ‘70s to embrace a then-contemporary style with drum machines, synthesizers, and electronics. At the time, even the band members were split on Under Wraps; bassist Dave Pegg once opined that the outtakes from Tull’s previous album – one which pointed towards Under Wraps with its integration of electronics but still featured more traditional instrumentation, too – might have made…
Over the last 50 years Scotland has often been the centre of some of the most exciting things to happen to guitar music. Author Grant McPhee has put together this comprehensive 3 CD set which documents 1985 to 1999 when Scottish independent music was thriving. It’s released by the ever reliable Cherry Red and covers a range of scenes and styles. Following on from the beginning of the decade with the mighty Postcard Records label led the way with iconic Scottish guitar bands like Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera. The baton was passed on to many of the groups featured here.
Beginning with Jesus & Mary Chain’s, ‘You Trip Me Up’ we’re thrown right into 1985. Originally signed to Creation Records…
When Jimmie Vaughan and Kim Wilson teamed up to form The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1974, they created a band that helped shape the soul of modern Texas blues. Vaughan’s history with that storied band has finally been chronicled in The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978-1989, a comprehensive four-CD box set available December 11th, 2025 via The Last Music Co.
The Jimmie Vaughan Years captures Grammy-winning Vaughan’s blues journey after he cut his teeth in Austin’s late-60s blues scene, including an early recording produced by legendary American songwriter Doc Pomus and Joel Dorn. The result is a stunning collection, not only of Vaughan’s music, but also The Fabulous Thunderbirds…
After the Numero Group released a comprehensive look at the American Analog Set’s 1990’s recordings on the New Drifters box set, it only makes sense that they would do the same for the combo’s 2000’s output. Destroy Destroy Destroy is another beautifully packaged retrospective that gathers up the three albums they released during the decade — 2001’s Know By Heart, 2003’s Promise of Love, and 2005’s Set Free — plus two discs of stray singles, EPs, compilation appearances, and rare tracks.
The set captures the evolution of the group from a more abstract musical group dedicated to repetition, space, and subtlety to one that utilized that same basic template while applying it to songs that were more narrative and concise.