Review: RSD Edition of the Rolling Stones' 'Beggars Banquet' on Colored Vinyl

When last ABKCO reissued The Rolling Stones'  Beggars Banquet on stereo vinyl, the record arrived as the usual black plastic disc but with a sly slipcover depicting the bowdlerized white-invitation cover and a bonus twelve-inch single featuring "Sympathy for the Devil" in its rare mono mix. That was for the LP's fiftieth anniversary. For its fifty-fifth, ABKCO is rolling the Stones' best out again but without the slipcover, the single, or the blackness.

Review: Paul McCartney and Wings''Red Rose Speedway' RSD Half-Speed Mastered Vinyl

Paul McCartney was the most exacting Beatle, the guy who wrote such classically structured perfections as "Yesterday" and "Martha My Dear" and such imaginative yet insightful lyrics as "Eleanor Rigby" and "You Never Give Me Your Money", and the guy who steered the band's most classically artful production, Sgt. Pepper's. So it was certainly more than a shock when he began his solo career with the utterly offhand McCartney and decided to cut his first album with his new band, Wings, without getting together many actual songs first. 

Review: Howlin Wolf's 'Howlin' Blues: Selected A & B Sides, 1951 - 1962'

Sometimes I get a bit concerned that regular Psychobabble readers might be under the impression that I'm so dazzled by free records that I tend to go easy on them when it comes time to write my reviews. The truth is, most of my reviews skew toward the positive because I almost always review records by artists I really like and I've rarely encountered bungled pressings. Some mastering jobs may be too bass- or treble-heavy, or may feature some unwanted distortions, but such problems are rarely egregious, so I'll mention them in my reviews but refrain from harping on them.

Review: RSD Picture Disc Edition of 'Violent Femmes'

Violent Femmes managed to find an unexplored nook of punk's potential when they filtered Buzzcocks sexual angst and attitude through a sieve of gauzy acoustic instruments. The sound was invigorating and fierce but also deeply textured and quite beautiful, spectacularly new yet antiqued. Plus bassist Brian Ritchie proved that punk and virtuosity were not mutually exclusive. Few debut albums are better or more fully realized than Violent Femmes, and forty years down the road, I still can't think of too many bands with the audacity to cop its "folk-punk" sound (although you could probably convince me that Belle & Sebastian would never have existed without "Good Feeling"). 

Review: 50th Anniversary edition of Elton John's 'Honky Château'

Tumbleweed Connection was Elton John's most thematically strong, beautifully written and produced album, but it didn't have any hits. With Honky Château, he got pretty damn close to that level of quality while also serving up two sizable smashes, one of which was probably his best song and possibly the best song about being a rocket man ever written (one must also give Bowie his due credit). Not every one of the album tracks was a genuine stand out, but the jauntily sexy "Hercules", the mellowly sexy "Mellow", the dreamy "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters", and the outrageous "I Think I'm Gonna Kill Myself" (not quite as hilarious as Queen's "Don't Try Suicide", but much quicker on the draw to find the humor in one of the most tragic things imaginable) are some of the best album cuts of John's career. 

Review: 'AC/DC at 50'

Martin Popoff is pretty up front about the difficulty of writing a book about Australia's favorite sons of school-boy-clad hard boogieing. The Young family is apparently notoriously private, so little is known about Angus and Malcolm aside from the big events that make big news, such as Malcolm's struggle with dementia and eventual death in 2017. This must have made fulfilling the assignment of writing AC/DC at 50 (and Popoff is also up front about the fact that he was assigned this project) a challenge. Motorbooks' (Fill in the Blank) at 50 books are illustrated histories dominated by photos of the featured artist and related memorabilia, and they tend to come in under 200 pages, so they aren't exactly text heavy. Still, how do you write a book of even that length about a clan as tight-lipped as AC/DC?

Review: 'Inland Empire' Blu-ray

Whether they were loved (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet) or loathed (Dune), David Lynch's films always had a rich, textured quality that made them more like worlds to inhabit than stories to watch on a screen. Even his first foray into network television, Twin Peaks, looked unusually deep and cinematic for an age of flat video images and 25-inch screens. 

Review: 'BFI Film Classics: Eraserhead'

For her entry in the British Film Institute's series of paperback monographs, Claire Henry has selected Eraserhead, a quintessential cult classic perennially ripe for analysis. Henry supplies the analysis but in a much more measured way than overzealous film professors usually bring to David Lynch's Rorschach Test. Aside from opining that the picture is most convincingly an expression of paternal fears (an opinion I personally share), she mostly collates the theories of other scholars to show how ripe the film is for all kinds of theories, and, either intentionally or unintentionally, to show how those theories cancel each other out to a certain degree. Because Eraserhead is better to experience, to live in, than to overthink, and Lynch is nothing if not an intuitive rather than intellectual filmmaker. 

Review: 'Pink Floyd- The Dark Side of the Moon: 50th Anniversary'

In the fiftieth year since the release of the album that basically defines the art of LP-making, a proliferation of commemorative releases is to be expected. Yet another hefty box set devoted to The Dark Side of the Moon is the most obvious and expected item, and, yes, that is on its way. There are also the Dark Side T-shirts, sweatshirts, glasses, and mugs for imbibing some mind-altering Sanka. Plus there are the books. Recently I reviewed Martin Popoff's Pink Floyd and The Dark Side of the Moon: 50 Years, which tells a tidy history of the album's genesis, recording, release, and legacy with lots of pretty color pictures to complete the package. 

Review: 'The Harder They Come: Original Soundtrack' 50th Anniversary Vinyl Edition

Although ska had been quite popular in the UK, and Millie Small even managed to get a stateside hit with "My Boy Lollipop" in 1964, reggae wasn't very well known outside Jamaica until the first Jamaican-made film, Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972), introduced it to midnight movie audiences in 1973. Although sweet-voiced Jimmy Cliff, who starred as singer-turned-robber Ivanhoe Martin in the film, was the dominant artist on the soundtrack, The Harder They Come: Original Soundtrack served as a handy and consistently superb various artists primer for listeners unfamiliar with reggae and ska.