Between the release of their first album 1965’s Begin Here and the second, and last, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle, the Zombies issued a staggering number of excellent songs. Unlike many of their compatriots in the U.K. like the Beatles and Kinks, the group’s output was regulated to singles and a few songs recorded for the soundtrack of the film Bunny Lake is Missing. It seems the record company lacked the vision to steer the band’s career in the only direction that made sense – the LP market – and kept trying to replicate the success of early hits like “She’s Not There.’ The band themselves did their part by making songs that were easily the equal of anything topping the charts, but their fortunes kept waning until they finally threw in the towel.
Category: rock
The Snuts’ new record Joy in Short Moments marks the Scottish band’s fourth studio album, and it follows the huge commercial success of their opening trilogy, all of which peaked in the UK Top 10. It’s easy to see why; the band are constantly catchy and often relatable.
There’s no better example of this on the record than the reflective and wise ‘Youth Ain’t Easy’, featuring the lyrics “Now that I’m old, youth ain’t easy”, which seems sure to resonate with a young crowd. Yet, the group do not remain so upbeat and joyous that it becomes cheesy; they contrast the happy, upbeat numbers with more sombre moments like ‘PTS’, a song looking back on a relationship through the lens of ‘Post Traumatic Stress’, which ends on the slightly sour…
The Monkees celebrate the 60th anniversary of their self-titled debut album with a new deluxe edition through Rhino. The 1LP/3CD collection expands the 1966 album with its original stereo and mono mixes alongside rare recordings from the sessions and the television series that established Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork as international stars. The collection has been produced by Monkees historian Andrew Sandoval, with new liner notes from Dolenz. The release documents an album that became central to the unusual relationship between television and recorded music in the 1960s. The Monkees was created alongside the NBC television series of the same name, with the music assembled through a combination of the four performers…
Phil Lynott is best known to most as the frontman of Irish rockers Thin Lizzy, but now, 40 years after his death, his solo work is being celebrated with an 8CD box set called The Story Of My Life.
The box set features both of Lynott’s solo albums – 1980’s Solo in Soho and 1982’s The Phil Lynott Album – alongside remixes, rare demos, alternate versions and archive recordings, many available officially for the first time.
The box set is also home to an unreleased album called Fatalistic Attitude. This was effectively an early version of The Phil Lynott Album. It was prepared for release in January 1982 but was considered “too dark” for release and reworked and released eight months later. Using Philip Lynott’s personal acetate copy…
GarciaLive Volume 23: August 14th, 1993 presents the Jerry Garcia Band’s final performance at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, CA. The two sets that the group performed that night were originally recorded to two-track digital audio tape straight from the soundboard by John Cutler. All told, Garcia played Shoreline 39 times with the Grateful Dead and on three occasions with the Jerry Garcia Band. This show took place seven years after the opening of the venue. The Grateful Dead were slated to perform the initial gig at the facility but it was cancelled due to Garcia’s health complications. Indeed, as the label notes, “Although JGB was conceived as a low-key respite — a chance for Garcia to relax and cut loose in small clubs away from the stadium circus…
…May 1975 found Pete Townshend turning 30 and troubled by thoughts of the future. What would it hold for The Who, the music business, and rock and roll itself? He poured his anxieties and emotions into The Who by Numbers, the October ’75 release of which would become the band’s seventh studio album. On October 30, Polydor and UMe celebrates 51 years of The Who by Numbers with a new 5CD/1Blu-ray Super Deluxe Edition.
Sessions for the album began in April 1975 and continued through early June, with producer Glyn Johns (Who’s Next) at the helm. Though Townshend recalled being detached from the sessions with his bandmates in various states of distraction, the resulting album became one of the band’s most distinctive. Underneath a drawing…
For many of us who have a faint aversion to heavy rock, Queens of the Stone Age have long occupied a strange loophole. On paper, they ought to repel: the bulldozing riffs, the desert-rock machismo, the leather-jacketed sneer. And yet the songs slip past the defences. Beneath the fuzz and menace, Josh Homme has always had the instincts of a classic pop craftsman making MOR in disguise – decisive chord changes, gleaming hooks, tight structures, middle-eight pay-offs – dragged through a heavy-rock filter and left out in the sun to warp.
It’s true of their biggest songs. “No One Knows” has the melodic snap of vintage radio rock; “Go with the Flow” turns motoric velocity into power-pop; “Make It Wit Chu”, for all its leer, is essentially a soft-rock seduction ballad.
…includes two exclusive bonus tracks.
The iconic Tony Iommi has released a new solo record, From the Dark, squarely in his wheelhouse of titanic riffs, thundering low end, and flights-of-fancy vocals. It is good to see the metal god still churning out headbanging tunes in a style his fans will instantly recognize.
Working with vocalist Jørn Lande (who co-wrote the songs), bassist Becky Baldwin, and drummer Karl Brazil, Iommi keeps his tried-and-true hard-rock vision intact. Co-produced by Tony and Mike Exeter, his long-time creative partner, co-writer, producer, and audio engineer, the album feels timeless, thick with metal riffs and grandiose dreams.
The classic heavy metal guitar licks of a genre…
Dating back to 1994’s Live…My Truck Is My Home and The 9 Volt Years: Battery Powered Home Demos from four years later, Marshall Crenshaw has created an alternate universe for himself with a discerning series of recordings from his personal archives (not to mention expanded editions of previously released studio efforts).
Like last year’s From the Hellhole, The Bootleg Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw 1984-1987, this is an amalgam of original songs and covers, interwoven with snippets of novelties. The overall effect of the often-informal fifteen-track sequence is much like that of the Beatles’ Get Back in its early stages, an array of content that illuminates not only the fundamental skills of all the contributors, but also the principal’s attributes as a songwriter…
For Wüsthoff, music began long before Faust. As a child he watched his father lose himself in music, playing accordion renditions of operettas, film themes and folk songs with complete absorption. At eleven he discovered jazz through a radio programme tracing its history, then taught himself guitar and piano as a teenager, developing an instinctive relationship with sound driven by curiosity rather than convention. That outlook would become central to Faust, not simply as a band but as an enduring way of thinking. Reflecting on those formative years, Wüsthoff describes them as the experience that shaped everything that followed: without Faust, he says, he would never have made this record in the way he has today. Produced by Onnen Bock…
One of rock’s most distinctive and magnetic frontmen, Weiland left an unmistakable mark on the genre through his work with Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver and his acclaimed solo career. From the alternative-rock explosion of the 1990s through the hard-rock resurgence of the 2000s, his singular voice, commanding stage presence and restless creative spirit made him one of the era’s most recognizable rock stars.
Scott Weiland: Live captures Weiland and his band on tour in 2009 in support of his second solo album, Happy In Galoshes, offering a powerful snapshot of the legendary singer in his element and showcasing the full force of his voice and stage presence. Featuring previously unreleased recordings discovered through…
Rayland Baxter has spent much of his career chasing clarity – but his newest record True Violet feels like the first time he’s truly found it. His 2022 album If I Were A Butterfly evoked transformation, but in Baxter’s own view, True Violet is the record where the true metamorphosis has unfolded.
Catalyzed less by a sudden realization than by hard-earned understanding, True Violet is a record about the slow, steady process of becoming someone new. It’s about looking in the mirror, taking responsibility for your own life, and sitting with difficult emotions instead of trying to outrun them.
Baxter spent the years around the release of If I Were A Butterfly, a record shaped by solitude and the loss of his father…
Full Scrotal Scorpio stands out as one of the most fascinating art-rock/art-punk records in recent memory. Much of its appeal lies in an unconventional approach that could easily seem limiting on paper: building an entire rock album around the piano rather than the electric guitar. Yet across these twelve tracks, the piano proves more than capable of carrying the music, delivering a sound that feels both distinctive and compelling. Remarkably, there is never a moment when the absence of guitars becomes noticeable. Instead, the arrangements feel perfectly suited to the songs, making it difficult to imagine Full Scrotal Scorpio sounding any other way.
Behind this glorious racket is Kristeen Young, a New York-based artist who has spent…
Back in the year 2000, The Stooges’ proto-punk classic Fun House was given the seven-disc 30th-anniversary box-set treatment. However, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions wasn’t your typical canonization project. There was no treasure trove of previously unreleased songs, no alternate arrangements to give us insight into the band’s creative process, no unearthed live recordings to transport us back to that particular moment. 1970 effectively locked you in the studio with The Stooges as they burned through, say, 15 consecutive takes of “Down on the Street,” gradually beating the song into fighting shape as if they were enrolled in some merciless rock ‘n’ roll bootcamp. After listening to the song over and over for the better part of an hour…
In celebration of his 80th birthday, Sun Records and Jimmy Webb deliver a collection of previously unrecorded songs and demos that were hiding in his piano bench for decades, Yours for the Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb. Some of these songs were intended for specific artists who passed on them; others remained in the songwriter’s personal archive. Fred Mollin, his longtime producer, safeguarded many of these compositions and worked with Webb to revisit the original material and develop new recordings. There are 11 newly produced performances and a pair of original demos of songs that appear here. The tracks were cut in Nashville, New York, and Los Angeles. Webb’s piano-based compositions provided the foundation for new performances…
Olivia Tremor Control’s 2026 album The Same Place is a melancholy triumph for the always brilliant, now defunct psychedelic collective. After the band reformed in the early 2000’s, they began working on music in fits and starts while never getting to the point of completion and weathering some tragedy along the way. Both guiding lights behind their ambitious, murky, and delightfully hooky sound passed away; Bill Doss in 2012, Will Cullen Hart in 2024, just before this album was finished. Producer Jason NeSmith plus a bunch of band members and others worked together to put the album together the way Hart wanted according to the notes he left behind. Thanks to everyone’s efforts the record works both as a stunning return to form and a tribute to Doss and Hart.
More than three decades into an extraordinary career, Swedish progressive rock pioneers The Flower Kings return with HOPE, their 18th studio album and one of the most ambitious statements of their storied journey. Balancing refined musicianship with fearless creativity, the album is both a celebration of the band’s legacy and a bold leap forward, embracing the grand, cinematic scope and adventurous spirit that have made them one of progressive rock’s most beloved acts.
HOPE features a rich collection of expansive compositions, including the epic 30-minute centerpiece “The Gods of Rome.” Drawing on themes of power, conflict, human ambition, and the state of the modern world, the album reflects on an era marked by division…
The word “dangerous” isn’t one most bands would embrace. That especially concerns any with a handful of popular radio singles. But The Doors not only fit, but celebrated that description.
Look no further than 1967s debut album which included not only the huge hit, and controversial radio track, “Light My Fire” (in edited form) but some truly out-there covers that ranged from Kurt Weill’s 1930s era, quirky, carnival-esque “Alabama Song” to Howlin’ Wolf’s searing and lascivious approach to Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man.” Add the experimental and unsettling, 12-minute disc-closing epic “The End” whose sheer length, dark, even threatening Oedipal theme remains a challenge to delicate sensibilities, and you’ve got an act that defined and even relished…