Tommy Keene is one of America's two great practitioners of power pop along with Matthew Sweet. Yet while the latter, as befits his name, anticipates the best is yet to come, there's an ironic contrast with Keene’s moniker: his tunes carry an ever so slight but nevertheless palpable air of melancholy.
Through an endless string of personnel shifts in the early to mid-Seventies, the Welsh band Man grafted progressive elements onto their earthy pub-rock roots that, combined with their penchant for extended improvisation, inspired rabid devotion in their fans.
The Collector’s Edition of Warren Zevon's debut album has all the pristine clarity of most 70's California rock. But the shadowy blue tones of the front-cover photograph suggest how deceptively arresting the music is inside.
Time Out Take Five lets Glide contributor Doug Collette takes a pick at five recent jazz releases,
Recorded in the informal atmosphere of a home studio, Already Free effectively extends the sound of The Derek Trucks Band on stage without a conscious attempt to replicate the live experience. While the album doesn't focus on the instrumental aspect of the group’s music like 2003's Soul Serenade, it never for once ignoresTrucks' exquisite guitar work.
Because Boulderado: Live at the Fox 2008 comes so closely on the heels of 2007's splendid live document Keep on Marchin', both casual listeners and died-in-the-wool fans may question the validity of another double-CD live set from The North Mississippi Allstars.
Approximately a month after returning from the historic adventure to the Great Pyramid (captured on Rocking the Cradle Egypt 1978), the Grateful Dead staged a grand gesture of homecoming in the form of a three-night run at Winterland Arena. Little did they know at the time, these shows would be their last at the venue until they closed it at the end of the year or that these recordings of the October performances, thirty years later, would form the basis for the fourth installment of Road Trips.
When is a reinvention not a reinvention? It can happen when you are Tom Petty and you act on the impulse to reform the band you fronted prior to becoming the rock icon you are now.
Hard as it is to imagine, when Sugar Mountain Live was recorded in 1968, Neil Young was no more or less than a virtual unknown anxious to gauge the acceptance of both his music and performance months after leaving Buffalo Springfield.Live At Canterbury House is a seventy-minute composite of stereo recordings taken from both nights of solo acoustic performances that constitutes a declaration of purpose and an artistic statement that resonates to this day.
If you heard Rose Hill Drive tear their vicious way through “Communications Breakdown,” you’d be convinced there is no need whatsoever for a Led Zeppelin reunion.
