Review: Yet Another 3 Motown Reissues

This month Elemental Music is wrapping up their long and fruitful Motown reissue campaign of 2025 with three lesser known titles, two of which are by a couple of the label's key artists and one of which is by one-hit-wonders The Undisputed Truth. That group's self-titled debut sports the recording with the longest legs on any of these three albums because The Undisputed Truth is the album with "Smiling Faces (Sometimes)". This stone-classic established a new strain of sinister soul that would reach fruition with the following year's "Papa Was a Rolling Stone", which UT would record and release before The Temptations had their hit. Ashford and Simpson's "California Soul" worked in a similar mode, though the majority of the album is comprised of covers of established pop hits, like "Aquarius", "Ball of Confusion", "Ain't No Sunshine", and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", that make the record feel a little like a throw-back to those covers-heavy Motown LPs of the sixties. Ultimately, what stands out most on the record is the heavy and sweet see-saw between Joe Harris's deep baritone and the lighter vibes of Brenda Joyce Evans and Billie Rae Cavin, The Undisputed Truth being the rare Motown act with male and female singers sharing leads.

Review: Stevie Wonder's 'Definitive Collection' on Vinyl

Stevie Wonder was one of Motown/Tamla's key pop hit makers in the sixties. When he followed a far more personal path in the seventies, he became the label's most innovative artist, while still racking up a slew of hits. 

However, there are precious few compilations that encompass both of these phases, at least for vinyl enthusiasts. In 2020, there was Number 1's, but that double-LP was slightly hampered by its concept. Indisputable classics like "Hey Love", "For Once In My Life", and "My Cherie Amour" didn't hit number one on any charts, so they weren't included. Strangely, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day", which did top the US R&B charts, weren't present either. Those errant number ones hadn't made the party for 2002's The Definitive Collection CD either, but the three aforementioned classics did. Maybe that's why The Definitive Collection became Wonder's biggest selling hits comp, and it's certainly why it's the one that's being reissued on vinyl this year. 

Review: 'Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1'

As we've recently seen right here on Psychobabble, the Star Wars universe continues to pump out more and more stuff, often at the expense of the original trilogy's sense of whimsy and fun. That's why S.T. Bende and Iris Compiet's new book Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1 is such a breath of fresh, Endor-scented air. This book is all fun and whimsy, a pseudo-space zoologist's (plus robot buddy) star-field book logging all the weird beasties populating Tattooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Jakku, Mandalore, and all those other far-flung locales. 

Review: 'Superman: The Definitive History'

It has been 90 years since writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster adapted their bald, hyphenated super villain Super-Man from an illustrated sci-fi pulp mag prose story into the spit-curled, milk-wholesome, unhyphenated superhero who is now more recognizable than Santa and Jesus put together, and a thousand times more powerful than either of those guys.

Review: 'Star Wars Encyclopedia'

Once nothing more than a single extremely, extremely popular space-fantasy flick, Star Wars soon expanded into a line of Marvel comics, then a funky TV holiday special, then a sequel, and then another sequel. Read-along records and Dixie cups aside, that basically brings us to 1983. Over the following four decades, what it means to be Star Wars would continue to swell, ultimately encompassing eight more feature films, numerous cartoons and live-action TV series, countless comics, novel series, and games, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It's only a matter of time before Guerra de las Galaxias: La Telenovela debuts.