compilation Archive
12 May 2014
Album Review: The Mamas & The Papas – A Gathering of Flowers
By my rough count, there have been more than twenty – yes, twenty – compilations attempting to distill the catalog of The Mamas & The Papas down to a disc […]
06 May 2014
Album Review: Speed the Plough – The Plough & the Stars
Here’s a career retrospective from a band that had up to now escaped my notice, despite having a highly-regarded career that spans more than three decades. A gentle folk-laced sound […]
01 May 2014
Album Review: Various – A Psych Tribute to The Doors
Tribute albums can go any number of ways: they can showcase new takes on old music, they can provide a way for young or relatively unknown bands to use classic […]
29 Apr 2014
Album Review: David Ruffin – My Whole World Ended / Feelin’ Good
Sure, everybody knows The Temptations, and their many hits, including “My Girl,” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” both featuring lead vocals of David Ruffin. But fewer – especially those […]
28 Apr 2014
Album Review: Blood Sweat & Tears – The Complete Columbia Singles
For some years there, BS&T was a true hitmaking juggernaut. And a lot of their music was – for whatever reason – the kind of thing that your parents might […]
20 Mar 2014
Album Review: Dave Van Ronk — Inside Dave Van Ronk
I’m not a folkie. When it comes to acoustic based music of the folk sort, my tastes are fairly limited: I own a decent-sized stack of Bob Dylan albums, that […]
18 Mar 2014
Album Review: Various — The Del Shannon Tribute: Songwriter Vol. 1
The history of rock’n’roll is littered with artists who — for one reason or another – never quite got their due. Del Shannon is on that list. Best known as […]
07 Mar 2014
Hundred-word Reviews: Deluxe Packages
Each of these is a multi-disc set collecting archival (and sometimes previously-unreleased) music, but other than that, there’s little to connect these releases in any stylistic fashion: Celtic soul, proto-funk/pop, […]
21 Feb 2014
Here Come the Small Faces, Part Three
Continued from Part Two… Ian McLagan relates an amusing story, one that illustrates his old band’s far-reaching influence. “When working on The Small Faces DVD a few years ago, I […]
20 Feb 2014
Here Come the Small Faces, Part Two
Continued from Part One… Kenney Jones believes that The Small Faces‘ four-way collaborative process affected the songs to a large degree. “A lot of ideas…if I was saying something, it […]