Nick Cave Goes All Reflective

For their 10th album – and follow-up to the cheery Murder Ballads – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds explored more redemptive qualities. Originally released in 1997, gone were the menacing, troubled tunes of yore; instead, here was a selection of graceful, minimal, melancholic numbers that saw Cave reflect on spirituality, loves past and present, and almost atoning for past indiscretions. These are ...

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Physical Graffiti - Led Zeppelin's monumental double album serves as a primer of the band's entire oeuvre

By 1975 no one was bigger or heavier than Zeppelin. America was punch drunk after the quadruple whammy of their first four albums, each supported by tours that went from scene-stealing support slots to stadium-filling three-hour marathons, almost overnight. Even the slightly below average (ie. one or two sub-par tracks) Houses Of The Holy (1973) hadn’t dented their reputation one jot. The world, ...

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Trees On The Shore - Definitely At The Rock End Of The Folkrock Spectrum

Trees released two records in 1970, The Garden Of Jane Delawney and On The Shore and that was about it for them. The effort and exuberance needed to record two LPs (neither bad) in the same year can be felt all through On The Shore: Their record company CBS applied pressure but not much money and so, due to lack of rehearsal and studio time, some of the musicianship suffers, and the original material ...

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Between The Concrete and The Kinetic - Glyphic Bloom by James Joys

For those who can't quite make out the characters on the classy looking cover the name of the album from Belfast musician and sound artist James Joys is Glyphic Bloom. I'm not sure what it means but it seems to be a perfect title; the music within starts out glyphic and litreally blooms before your ears into something of rare beauty. In eight relatively short tracks Joys covers a huge amount ...

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Hewn From The Catskill Mountains - Yonder Is The Clock by The Felice Brothers

The fifth album in three years from the Felice Brothers offers more of the same deliriously coruscated Catskill Mountains-rooted, folk-edged alt country. Happily unlike anything to come out of the States in recent years, the five-piece outfit (only three of whom are siblings) boast a distinctively muscular, rough-hewn, dirt-under-the-fingernails sound. It seems drawn not so much from grass roots ...

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Time To Visit The Bar Again - With The Felice Brothers

Hailing from upstate New York's Catskills Mountains, the Felice Brothers look like their entire approach was based on staring long and hard at the Band's second album cover: Beards, white shirts, hats and ill-fitting suits. The comparisons to Big Pink/Basement-era Dylan are also inevitable. Yet this second album proper from the three siblings and their bass player Christmas (an ex-travelling dice ...

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The Velvet Underground's Loaded - Much Better Than the Banana One!

Much less celebrated than their famous banana covered debut, Loaded is often dismissed by die hard Velvet fans as not sounding like The Velvet Underground, which ironically is not necessarily a bad thing for many listeners!  Indeed by the release of this, their fourth album in late 1970, mentor Andy Warhol and his out of tune chanteuse Nico had both moved on, and drummer Moe Tucker was on maternity leave. ...

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A Journey to Rockpommel's Land

I first heard this stupendous album at school; the cool guys were into Pink Floyd and Genesis, the even cooler ones were discovering Marillion and King Crimson, and then... there were the ones that went that little bit further! One such excursion (along with I remember Nektar's Journey to the Centre of the Eye) was a visit to Rockpommel's Land with German prog rockers Grobschnitt (there, I've ...

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Water Music From The Rain Forest

The much maligned term “world music” is entirely apt for Baka Beyond’s The Meeting Pool which records the coming together of a wealth of musical cultures. The group take their name from the Baka rainforest people of Cameroon with whom band leader Martin Cradick struck up a fruitful musical partnership following a visit to the region in 1992. Field recordings provide much of the music’s African ...

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