Review: 'Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard (Updated and Revised Edition)'

While many have accused Jaws of wrecking the serious "New Cinema" of the seventies, many others have celebrated it as the movie that rescued the decade from relentless downbeat antihero drabness. They're both pretty right, though you can hardly say Jaws made cinema dumber, what with its superb script, directing, and acting. The film was so story, dialog, and character conscious that barely anyone noticed or cared that the shark looked like a giant rubber pool toy.

Review: 'A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap'

This year marks the historic forty-first anniversary of This Is Spinal Tap, and as everyone knows, the forty-first anniversary is always the most special. So what are we getting from team Spinal Tap this milestone year? What aren't we getting is more like it![?] There will be a new Spinal Tap movie, a 4K Criterion reissue of an old Spinal Tap movie, a new Spinal Tap album, a reissue of an old Spinal Tap album, and a reissue of another old Spinal Tap album. That's a lot of Spinal Tap!

Review: Chuck Berry's 'St. Louis to Liverpool' Vinyl Reissue

The old line is that the fifties ended when Buddy Holly died, Elvis was drafted, Little Richard found Jesus, and Chuck Berry went to jail. Once The Beatles landed, there was nothing left for rock and roll's original guard but Vegas, the oldie's circuit, or in Chuck's case, a late career number one hit with an awful song about his penis.

Review: The Cranberries' 'No Need to Argue' 30th Anniversary 2xLP

The Cranberries were probably the smoothest band to get swept along in the post-grunge alternative tide of 1993, so they naturally became one of the most successful. In a year with several great debut albums (opening salvos from Liz Phair, Belly, Grant Lee Buffalo, Björk...), Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? was a nice one, going 5x platinum on the strength of its Cocteau Twins-lite love songs. 

Review: 'Elton John With Ray Cooper – Live From The Rainbow Theatre'

It's hard to imagine two more dissimilar pop figures than Elton John, sometimes known to don a Donald Duck costume before pounding his Steinway to bits, and Ray Cooper, that guy often spied hypnotically pumping an egg shaker from behind Invisible Man shades in the stage's deep shadows. But the two shared the spotlight for a historic gig at London's Rainbow Theatre in May of 1977. 

Review: 'The Godfathers of Horror Films'

I've read biographies of Boris Karloff and Peter Cushing. I've read a book about the professional and personal relationship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. But I've never read a book like Jennifer Selway's The Godfathers of Horror Films. 

Selway attempts to do a lot in just two-hundred pages. At its most basic, The Godfathers of Horror Films is a triple-duty biography of Karloff, Cushing, and Lee. While the three stars have several significant things in common—they're all British, they all became stars by making Frankenstein movies after many years of toiling away as bit players, they all had major and prolific careers as horror stars thereafter, they were all the faces of studios intrinsically associated with horror, they all fought in world wars—their careers overlapped infrequently enough to make weaving their stories together a challenge. 

Review: 'Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster'

Dracula may be sexier, but Frankenstein is the king of the monsters. His power, pathos, versatility, metaphorical possibilities, and iconic looks are all larger than manmade life. The story of his literary creation is much more legendary than that of Dracula's, and the subsequent tales he has inspired more profound. So it's only natural that this unnatural character has been the topic of many books.

Review: 'The Who Album by Album: Listening to You'

A few decades ago, The Who easily floated in the same atmospheric level as The Beatles, the Stones, and Led Zeppelin. They seem to have spent the subsequent years drifting back to Earth despite the tremendous quality of Pete Townshend's songs and the utter power and uniqueness of his, John Entwistle's, and Keith Moon's musicianship. So it's nice that a fan such as Dante DiCarlo still cares enough to devote a book to the albums this top-tier band made.

Review: Deluxe Edition of Elliott Smith's 'Figure 8'

One of the most subtly interesting things about his thoroughly fascinating career was how Elliott Smith gradually built up his sound from album to album. From the bare-bones guitars of Roman Candle to his additional embellishments of drums and bass on a few tracks of his eponymous sophomore album to the more consistent use of such band-like arrangements on Either/Or to the full-blown Revolver's-been-turned-over sound carnival of his masterpiece and Dream Works debut, XO. 

Smith's second album for Dream Works was even bigger and more polished than XO. Yet, as extroverted as it sounded, Figure 8 continued to express the inner life of a troubled and deeply introverted artist. That push-and-pull is what makes Smith's "big-production" period so appealing. Many artists make deliciously enjoyable music and many plumb the depths of their souls and dredge up dark stuff. Very, very few are capable of or willing to do both simultaneously. 

So, even more so than XO, Figure 8 is a record that's just as appropriate to blast at a barbecue as it is to meditate on through headphones by candlelight. And though the nearly hour-long album feels a bit like it should have been trimmed down, there's not too much any reasonable editor could justifiably cut. Even something as seemingly slight as "Everything Means Nothing to Me" is sweeping and grand and overwhelmingly moving (and it's my personal favorite track on the album).

Review: 30th Anniversary Vinyl Edition of the 'Clueless' Soundtrack

Saturday Night Fever's pivotal spot in the seventies notwithstanding, the nineties was the decade in which soundtrack albums really became as important as the visuals they accompanied. Chuck five seconds of a sellable pop song in a film, dump the entire song on a five-inch plastic disc, and a label just might move a metric ton of CDs. If those five seconds belong to an alternative rock group, you might even sell discs to kids who wouldn't be caught dead watching the visuals in question. No joke: Melrose Place may be stupid, but the Melrose Place soundtrack is unironically awesome!