Category: Reviews – Classics
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Rush – Signals LP
Just one year after they began to challenge both themselves and their audience with new songwriting ideas and compositional presentations on Moving Pictures, Rush elected to ride that wave of inspiration with Signals – their ninth LP and second of a new era. Right off, there’s no question that Signals takes its lead from Moving…
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Judas Priest – Painkiller 10” single
Hey – remember that period of time when the lights went out in Judas Priest? There have been a few reasons for the stall proposed over the years, but the truth is that it really needed to happen. Painkiller (the band’s twelfth studio album) was a portrait of a band running on creative fumes and on…
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Rush – Moving Pictures LP
It is often regarded as an inconvenient truth, but the fact is that it becomes increasingly difficult for a band to change or take artistic risks as they get further into their career. A lot of that difficulty may come from the band’s perceived responsibility to their fans; the people watching and listening were the…
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The Descendents – Milo Goes To College
Fans and critics have been arguing which punk band has been the most influential for decades, but the decision has yet to be made. Claims have been made that The Clash are the most important group to punk because they made so many crossovers into the mainstream, while others contend that punk rock would not…
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Van Halen – s/t
The thing about albums which are truly progressive (to be clear, I’m referring to albums which break new ground – not necessarily prog rock albums) is that their impact on pop music as a whole takes a bit of time to really register. Sure, there’s a chance that they might break through, win fans and…
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Ozzy Osbourne – Blizzard Of Ozz LP (revisited)
“Is the reissued release of an album ALWAYS superior to the original?” Such a question is valid – particularly when one takes the recent proliferation of reissues from both major and indie labels into account. In nearly every case, a “new” re-examination of an old title comes with many sound and production renovations courtesy of the…
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Rancid – …And Out Come The Wolves (5 x 7” vinyl set)
It sounds a little sensationalist to make this declaration but, of the albums which really sparked the punk revival of the 1990s (including – but certainly not limited to – Punk In Drublic by NOFX, Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion, Dookie by Green Day and Smash by the Offspring), it was Rancid who ran…
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The Ramones – s/t (vinyl reissue)
How long does a band require in order to change the world? How fast can they affect that change? The Stooges managed to change a lot (in the styles which were called the norm in rock) in their time together; in their first seven-year run, they laid out the groundwork that much of both punk…
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Bachman Turner Overdrive – Not Fragile (1974)
Fuck you, I like Bachman Turner Overdrive. At least, just as much as the next guy, anyways. Although I still can’t stand it when “Takin’ Care of Business” blasts outta every junior-hockey rink across the country, these guys actually wrote a few decent tunes in their time, aside from the overplayed hits. Besides, I figured that if anyone…
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Aerosmith Record Store Day Reissues
It is sort of unbelievable when one thinks about how successful Aerosmith got and how fast it happened – especially given the time at which it happened. While it’s totally believable (de rigueur, even) that a band is able to become “the only band that matters” in really short order in the twenty-first century (especially…