Tag: rock
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Lou Reed – The RCA & Arista Album Collection 17CD box set
The thing which really set Lou Reed apart from the other stars he was grouped with in the Seventies (including David Bowie, Iggy Pop and so on) is that he never once considered pandering to his audience – he always made them work for their enjoyment of his music. It could be said that making…
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Mike Doughty – Haughty Melodic (reissue)
I must preface this review by saying that I have been a Mike Doughty fan for an incredibly long time. I first became a fan when I discovered Soul Coughing; at that time, I had grown tired of grunge’s (by then) floundering, poor self-image (the genre as a whole really had difficulty regaining its strength…
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Crobot – Welcome to Fat City
Does mainstream hard rock even still exist? It seems you hardly hear anything new on the radio nowadays—mind you, I stopped listening to radio back when the CRTC took my baby away. But I know that everyone from Staind’s Aaron Lewis to Default’s Dallas Smith is cutting country-music records now, and judging by the bill…
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David Bowie – Let’s Dance LP
To begin with, I have to confess that I disliked Let’s Dance from the time I first heard it until early 2016 – right around the time I first saw the Five Years documentary. In Five Years, both Let’s Dance and the album’s producer, Nile Rodgers, played significant roles and seeing that presentation was what…
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David Bowie – David Live 2LP
It’s incredible how good, interesting, revealing and even informative an album can be, while simultaneously being critically abhorred. How such things happen is anyone’s guess, but they do – a perfect example is the live album that David Bowie released in 1974, David Live. David Live was Bowie’s first official live album. The album compiled…
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David Bowie – Diamond Dogs LP
While it might not sound like the greatest endorsement of an album’s quality or of the creative foresight possessed by an artist on the surface, the adage that Diamond Dogs exemplifies first is “Just because an idea doesn’t work out in its intended manner does not mean it should be thrown away and forgotten.” The manner…
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The Bar Stool Preachers – Blatant Propaganda LP
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Blatant Propaganda LP by The Bar Stool Preachers. It’s pretty incredible how much a band seems to change as soon as people start paying attention to them and their fanbase swells. History is littered with bands who seemed not to change for years as they attempted…
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Castle – Welcome to the Graveyard
As far as the female-fronted occult acts are concerned, I’ve always found Castle to be a cut above the fray. Granted, they’ve always had a bit of a harder edge, a more metallic sound than many of the Jex Ceremony clones—likely due to guitarist Mat Davis’ formative years in the Toronto thrash scene. Owing to…
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Comet Control – Center of the Maze
This is the second release from Toronto psych rock outfit Comet Control, following their self-titled debut in 2014. A couple of these guys have some history with Tee Pee stalwarts Quest for Fire, although I found their new outfit to be a little more structured and poppy than its predecessor. Before I give that one…
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Throttlerod – Turncoat
These Virginia veterans and Small Stone mainstays have just put out their first album in almost seven years. Turncoat is album number five from this heavy-rock outfit, and their fourth for the Detroit label, to which they’ve been signed almost since the turn of the century. (They have the distinction of covering “Black Betty” on…