Review: The Beatles' 'The Anthology Collection'

And so we come to that time of the year when Camp-Beatles releases its annual big vinyl box. For those who have been (im)patiently waiting for that long-rumored Super Deluxe Edition of Rubber Soul, 'tis once again the season for frustrations. 

I'm not one of those though. The remixes of half of Rubber Soul's tracks on 2023's revised edition of 1962-1966 scratched whatever itch I had to hear anything from that album remixed. It has also long been my understanding that there isn't a ton of supplementary recordings from the month-long Rubber Soul sessions. The tastiest items were a fairly different first take of "Norwegian Wood" and a very different one of "I'm Looking Through You", and both of those had already been released three decades ago on The Beatles Anthology 2. 

Review: John Williams's 'Jaws: (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)' "Blood in the Water" Vinyl

It was fifty years ago that a certain movie swam up to make people afraid to go in the water and movie execs afraid to not end their blockbusters with a big explosion. Jaws altered the face of cinema in many ways, some great and some not so great, but I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that at least one element of the film is unassailable: that John Williams score (okay, the dialog, acting, and directing are unassailable too). 

Review: The Creation's 'Biff Bang Pow: The Singles'

Some bands were born to make artful albums. Some were singles acts through and through. Monster mods The Creation were the latter, slamming out one killer seven inch after another from 1966 through 1968. Their one LP, We Are Paintermen, was basically a singles comp, and not an especially well programmed one. Filling out the platter with middling covers of "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Hey Joe" that made no one forget Dylan or Hendrix didn't help either.

Review: The Rolling Stones' 'Black and Blue' Super Deluxe Edition

After the Stones machine had ground down Mick Taylor enough for him to finally quit the band, they once again had to find a second guitarist. The process amounted to a series of jammy auditions with such axemen as Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel of Canned Heat, Robert Johnson (no, not the Robert Johnson...don't be daft), and one Ronald David Wood. We all know who got the job.

Not ones to miss a trick, The Rolling Stones decided to build a whole record around these auditions. Consequently, Black and Blue is the jammiest of Rolling Stones records, although it yielded a couple of their songiest songs: the lightly jazzy "Melody", featuring Billy Preston, and the wistful and cleverly structured "Memory Motel", which is long without ever getting indulgent. The record also boasts a couple of pleasingly concise rockers in the standard Stones mode: "Crazy Mama" and"Hand of Fate". 

Review: 'Wings'

The band Wings was an entity distinct from Paul McCartney the solo artist, but a lot of retrospective stuff released under the guise of Wings wasn't too dogmatic about that. 1978's Wings Greatest included a couple of singles released before Paul and Linda started playing with Denny Laine, the only other consistent member of the group. 2001's Wingspan included songs from before and after the actual Wings era. Even the recent Wings oral history plays loose with that distinction. 

Review: Jimi Hendrix Experience's 'Bold As Love"

The last note recorded for Are You Experienced had barely decayed before The Jimi Hendrix Experience were back in the studio to begin work on their second album. Any other group might have been creatively spent after making a debut as consistently spectacular as the Experience's, but the Experience seemed even more fired up on their second album, not just to play with their usual exuberance and imagination but to fully explore the possibilities of the studio. They still mostly kept the arrangements down to the usual power-trio stuff, but the tape and effects manipulations on things like "If Six Was Nine", "Castles Made of Sand", and the daffy "EXP" showed how much Hendrix enjoyed playing the mixing board like a fourth instrument. 

Review: 'George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door'

John may have been the one who sang "I got a chip on my shoulder that's bigger than my feet," but that line could have just as easily applied to George. Why was he so sour? George Harrison hadn't tragically lost a parent at an impressionable age, as John Lennon and the far more affable Paul McCartney had. He did not spend his childhood fatherless and infirm, as Ringo Starr had. Little George was loved by a doting family. He was not well-to-do, but he did not want either. He was a healthy, happy kid, and one who genuinely seemed to look up to his future bandmates John and Paul.

Reviews: The Cramps' 3 Vinyl Reissues

According to the mass of oversimplified punk histories, punk was the oversimplified backlash against the overcomplicated progressiveness that grew out of late sixties rock. It brought it all back home to a pre-Dylan/pre-Beatles age when words were monosyllabic, melodies were mono-melodic, and singers had mono. A lot of punk bands made the connection explicit, whether it was the rockabilly wallop underlying a bunch of Clash classics or the pre-British Invasion pop songs The Ramones chose to cover. But few bands of the punk era were as indebted to the garage spirit of early rock and roll as The Cramps. Head honcho Lux Interior swept his mane up into an altitudinous pompadour to hiccup trash about gooey monsters, human flies, voodoo, werewolves, and cavemen. But this was no Famous Monsters of Filmland-fit horror show for the kids. There was also real danger in the sex and drugs swamp all those creeps cavorted in. And with the swaggery rhythms that eschewed punk's usual sixteenth note onslaught, twang-a-billy guitars, and the total lack of a bassist to drive the whole mess forward, The Cramps were really their own thing, a sort of bespoke branch of the punk tree.

Review: 'Alternative for the Masses: The '90s Alt-Rock Revolution '

2025 has been a pretty good year for acknowledging that the nineties alternative rock scene was something that actually happened. In previous years (and this year) publishers couldn't pump out enough pages about sixties rock, seventies rock, and Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. Meanwhile the era of Nirvana mostly boiled down to, well, Nirvana. But what about Shudder to Think? What about Helium? What about Belly and Urge Overkill and Primus and Arrested Development and Throwing Muses and Pixies, Pixies, Pixies?