Far and away the prettiest record Jethro Tull released at least since Thick as a Brick and a special treat for anyone with a fondness for the group's more folk-oriented material. Ian Anderson had moved to the countryside sometime earlier, and it showed in his choice of source material…

When The Temptations left Motown in 1977 the group weighed offers from Warner Bros. and Philadelphia International before settling for Atlantic. The album seemed doomed from the start. Temptations lead Dennis Edwards had already left the group and was replaced by Louis Price. This album was released in late 1977 and was a fixture of the cutout bins by the early '80s. Ron Baker, Norman Harris, and Trammps member Earl Young, collectively known as Baker-Harris-Young, produced this album. They were known for their grittier variant of Philly soul/disco but often they play it too safe here. The fact that The Temptations did their vocals in New York rather than Philadelphia does diminish the Philly credentials a bit.

Overview A legendary event in the incredible 60-year history of the Rolling Stones is being released in full for the first time on Friday, April 29th. Live At The El Mocambo marks the first official appearance of the group's two famous secret concerts at the 300-capacity Toronto club in March 1977. It features the Stones' full set from the March 5 show, plus three bonus tracks from the March 4 gig, newly mixed by Bob Clearmountain. Only four of the performances found their way onto the Love You Live album that followed in September 1977, which was dominated by tracks captured on the band's 1975 and '76 tours, with the full set having never been heard before. As the Stones took to the stage of the “El Mo,” a fixture of the Toronto music scene since the 1940s, punk and disco were both rearing into full view, supposedly ready to see off a band who had already been at the top of their game for 15 years.

Tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims recorded quite a few albums with pianist Jimmy Rowles during his Pablo years; all are recommended. Rowles assisted Sims in coming up with obscurities to interpret, and this CD reissue is highlighted by such little-performed songs as "If I'm Lucky," "Shadow Waltz," "Gypsy Sweetheart" and "I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone." The lead voices are backed ably by bassist George Mraz and drummer Mousey Alexander on this enjoyable straight-ahead date.

Cherry Red affiliate Superbird pairs Bar-Kays' first two albums for Mercury, the label to which the band defected after a long and productive run with Stax. Both recordings reached the Top Ten of Billboard's R&B albums chart. Too Hot to Stop, released in 1976, features the singles "Shake Your Rump to the Funk," "Too Hot to Stop," and "Spellbound," while Flying High on Your Love spawned "Let's Have Some Fun" and "Attitudes." Comparable to what their P-Funk brothers and sisters were releasing at the time, these are two of the band's most enjoyable albums, though they're not without a fair amount of filler. This is a straight-up two-for-one compilation with no bonus tracks.

Dexter Wansel's first two albums as a leader (recorded for Gamble & Huff's Philadelphi International label in the mid-'70s) Life on Mars and What the World Is Coming To were collected on this single CD in the '00s.

Stone cold classic Ethiopian cross over album. A hybrid of Ethiopian traditional music intermixed with jazz and funk.
Mind you this was recorded in a country that was going thru a major political strife when socialism had taken a stronghold of almost every aspect of Ethiopian society so Hailu had to tip toe thru very treacherous social waters in order to get his art across to his listeners. What you get is some very sincere organ(think Farfisa) based full band instrumentals featuring funky guitar licks, congas and horns. Hailu's band is tight yet slinky with a very velvet like rhythmic and textural under tone.
Afro-pop music of its time but a unique almost "alien" in form it is music drawn on Northern Africa but not in any way an emulation of what many people might perceive as African pop music. Review is drawn on a western perception of this music not something easy to do but it IS something special and worth seeking out.

Proof that punk was more about attitude than a raw, guitar-driven sound, Suicide's self-titled debut set the duo apart from the rest of the style's self-proclaimed outsiders. Over the course of seven songs, Martin Rev's dense, unnerving electronics - including a menacing synth bass, a drum machine that sounds like an idling motorcycle, and harshly hypnotic organs - and Alan Vega's ghostly, Gene Vincent-esque vocals defined the group's sound and provided the blueprints for post-punk, synth pop, and industrial rock in the process. Though those seven songs shared the same stripped-down sonic template, they also show Suicide's surprisingly wide range. The exhilarated, rebellious "Ghost Rider" and "Rocket U.S.A." capture the punk era's thrilling nihilism - albeit in an icier way than most groups expressed it - while "Cheree" and "Girl" counter the rest of the album's hard edges with a sensuality that's at once eerie and alluring…

Suspiria[Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] Review by Donald A. Guarisco
This stunning soundtrack from 1977 is the favorite of many a Goblin fan because it represents their sound carried to its most powerful and intense extremes. Suspiria was another score for their cinematic alter ego, director Dario Argento, and backed up the story of a girl who enrolls in a German dance academy only to discover it is a cover for a powerful coven of witches. The music is just as scary as the film itself, blending wailing electric guitar, whooping synthesizers, and screaming wordless cries into a spooky, bombastic sound that manages to be terrifying even without the benefit of the film's gruesome images. Suspiria has long been popular with heavy metal fans because it sports a hard-rocking edge equal in intensity to the scariest works of Black Sabbath or King Diamond: the title theme slowly builds a spooky riff on bells, acoustic guitar, and synthesizer until it erupts into a hard-rocking mid-section where nimble synthesizer solos spar with ghostly cries of "Witch! Witch!," and "Sighs" mixes panting, wordless vocals with an array of furious power chords to create an unbearably high level of suspense. Even when the score downplays the gothic rock theatrics on subtler tracks like "Black Forest" and "Blind Concert," the group's members still manage to create an intensely creepy atmosphere. The end result is an album that is guaranteed to please Goblin fans and is highly likely to appeal to fans of gothic and heavy metal sounds.[Collector's note: the 1997 CD reissue of Suspiria sports four bonus tracks, consisting of three alternate version of "Suspiria" and a slightly different version of "Markos."]

After the guest-star-drenched No Reason to Cry failed to make much of an impact commercially, Eric Clapton returned to using his own band for Slowhand. The difference is substantial – where No Reason to Cry struggled hard to find the right tone, Slowhand opens with the relaxed, bluesy shuffle of J.J. Cale's "Cocaine" and sustains it throughout the course of the album…

Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 rounds up the handful of singles that weren't included on Elton John's first Greatest Hits collection ("Levon," "Tiny Dancer") and adds the highlights from Caribou, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and Rock of the Westies ("The Bitch Is Back," "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," "Island Girl," "Grow Some Funk of Your Own," "I Feel Like a Bullet [In the Gun of Robert Ford]"), plus two non-LP hit singles ("Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Philadelphia Freedom") and John's version of "Pinball Wizard," taken from the soundtrack to Tommy…

Depending upon your point of view, Genesis in 1976/1977 was either a band ascending toward its peak commercially, or a group crippled by the departure of a key member, and living on artistic borrowed time. In reality, they were sort of both, and fortunately for the members, their commerciality was more important than their artistic street cred, as their burgeoning record sales and huge audiences on tour during that period attested…