Review: 'Bronco Bullfrog' Vinyl Reissue

Lest you worry Bronco Bullfrog's unabashedly retro melange of Beatle-esque harmonizing, Beck-esque feedbacking, and Moon-esque drum-pummeling is a bit too calculatedly retro, dig into chief songwriter Andy Morten's way with words. Even Townshend would have stayed his pen before scribbling anything as grungy as "I can smell the shit baking in the sun," and Petey certainly wouldn't have had the expectation-scrambling audacity to sneak it into a genuinely sweet and nostalgic ode to summertime that would make Brian Wilson weep. 

Review: Vinyl Edition of The Animals' 'Retrospective'

Last spring ABKCO reissued The Animals' first four U.S. LPs with excellent mono sound, and the excellence of most of those albums rebutted any notion that The Animals were never much of an album group. As essential as those LPs are for British blues fanatics, The Animals were mostly a singles group who did their best work when slathering some Newcastle grit and growl over Tin Pan Alley tunes. One of their very best single sides, Atkins and D'Errico's "It's My Life", was not on a proper LP, so the first release of the 2004 compilation Retrospective would be a crucial compliment to those four proper LPs if "It's My Life" was its only track. 

Review: 'Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years'

If one album is deserving of an entire book honoring its fiftieth anniversary, that album might as well be The Dark Side of the Moon. With it, Pink Floyd redefined the LP as something that could be cinematic yet personal, flaunted the state of recording art, and shifted more units than those guys who wrote the Bible. Unlike much of Floyd's post-Syd Barrett work, The Dark Side of the Moon also manages to be arty without being insufferably boring, so why not celebrate the damn thing by giving it a spin while reading Martin Popoff's Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years?

Review: 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' Blu-ray

Terry Gilliam found the perfect vehicle for his peculiar brand of weirdness and silliness, as well as his 17th-century-engravings aesthetic, when he decided to adapt Rudy Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The time period and oddness of Munchausen's fish stories were right up Gilliam's alley and perfect for providing some shape for his fancies.