vinyl Archive

I’ve read critical essays that characterize Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man as part of a triptych of albums, one of three soundtrack albums for ‘70s “blaxpliotation” films. Yet against the backdrop of Isaac Hayes’ Shaft and Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, Gaye’s 1972 album is little known and less remembered. Part of the reason for that may

By the dawn of the 1980s, progressive rock was decidedly out of fashion. Neither mainstream radio – which never really embraced the genre, save for free-form FM stations – nor the record-buying public showed much interest in the knotty, ambitious and cerebral sounds that a few years earlier had flourished on the music landscape. The

Using the term krautrock is – at least among those who are familiar with the term – a handy shortcut to explaining that the subject matter is minimalist, droning, sometimes static, often electronic-based and generally noncommercial. Strictly speaking, the label is applied to artists or bands coming out of the German electronic music scene of

When I think of shoegaze, I tend to conjure up thoughts of gauzy, heavily layered music with a somnabulant, faraway vibe. But of course the subgenre has more variety than that. Case in point is the debut album from Bloomington, Indiana’s Early Day Miners, 2000’s Placer Found. The album strikes an intimate vibe not wholly

The influence of American blues forms upon the music of Led Zeppelin is widely acknowledged; though they took it in a heavier direction that sometimes tended to exaggerate its more, shall we say, macho tendencies, Zep undoubtedly helped open a generation’s ears to the style. But it’s unfairly reductive to label the band as merely