pop Archive

In 2005, Concord Music Group brought together all of the music Tony Bennett cut for his own label and issued a sprawling, four-plus-hour box set called The Complete Improv Recordings. That set included five reissued albums plus an assortment of previously-unreleased material. For serious Bennett fans, it’s clearly an essential purchase. For more casual fans

Being of a certain age, I remember the short-lived exotica revival of the nineties. If you blinked, you might’ve missed it: for a brief few moments in 1994, the pre-Beatles hi-fi-centric craze was all the rage. The fleeting revival had as its exemplar a band named after a cocktail, Combustible Edison. Fronted by a female

Chris Stamey has been an important – if ever-so-slightly underground – part of the American music scene for decades. An early post-Big Star collaborator with Alex Chilton, he went on to create some of the best and most timeless music in rock/pop as a member of Sneakers, The dB’s, and as a solo artist. He’s

As baseball boffin / bowtied blowhard George Will likes to begin especially forceful pronouncements, “It is axiomatic.” What exactly is axiomatic in this case? That big-label backing does not always equal quality music, and that indie- or self-released label product isn’t always unworthy of national attention. I mention this not only to get in a

The Waterboys are that curious band about which the critics and cognoscenti fall all over themselves raving (and for good reason), but that doesn’t make large ripples in the commercial music pond/marketplace. For decades now, The Waterboys – singer/songwriter Mike Scott and assorted auxiliary musicians – have made winning albums that do more than merely