There have been dozens and dozens of Motörhead compilations released over the decades, but the first one remains definitive, even if it's not perfect. Released in 1984 as a gap-filler - for Motörhead were regrouping in the wake of the bandmember shuffling that followed the odd Another Perfect Day album - No Remorse compiled two-dozen songs across two discs (latter-day editions adding a good serving of bonus tracks, too). Many of the band's best songs to date are here, like "Ace of Spades," "Stay Clean," "Overkill," "Bomber," and "Iron Fist." There are also four new recordings that were cut exclusively for No Remorse: "Killed by Death," "Snaggletooth," "Steal Your Face," and "Locomotive." These four songs were cut by the newly instated four-piece lineup that would go on to record Orgasmatron (1986): guitarists Michael Burston and Phil Campbell, drummer Peter Gill, and of course, bassist/vocalist Lemmy…

With this album, Oldfield began to make an attempt to break down his extended structures into a more commercially acceptable format, with the side-long title track being separated into four sections. Early versions of the album included "Sally," Oldfield's paean to his partner Sally Cooper, while later pressings include "Into Wonderland."

After years of playing a dispiriting game of musical chairs with various lead singers during the early '80s, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi finally stumbled upon a dependable frontman when he admitted relative unknown Tony Martin into the fold, thereby initiating the original heavy metal band's long awaited return to respectability - if not chart-topping success. Martin joined the oft-interrupted sessions for what would become 1987's The Eternal Idol album already in progress, stepping in for an unreliable Ray Gillen when the latter moved on to Jake E. Lee's Badlands, and helping Iommi rescue an astonishingly solid long-player from the jaws of complete and utter chaos. As it turned out, Martin's powerful, muscular voice - though bearing more than a passing resemblance to former singer Ronnie James Dio - was ultimately the perfect foil for full-bodied heavy metal anthems like "Hard Life to Love," "Glory Ride," and "Born to Lose"…

Another underrated work, characterized by a lot of interesting keyboards and his usual talent as well… sometimes closer to such classic "Light Prog". In other circumstances it's more in the vein of such Ambient/Acoustic New Age, but always filtered through his versatility and huge important music experience, in the course of his long career.

Six years after the classical Music of the Spheres, Mike Oldfield returns to his version of rock. Man on the Rocks is a slick production that recalls the AOR sounds of the late '70s and early '80s. He plays many instruments here but concentrates mainly on guitar. Among his collaborators are bassist Leland Sklar, keyboardist Matt Rollings, drummer John Robinson, guitarist Michael Thompson, and the Struts' vocalist Luke Spiller. Though these songs are housed in tightly written, hooky pop/rock melodies with conscious source checks from Queen and Toto to the Rolling Stones and the Steve Miller Band, they are among - if not the - most deeply personal entries in his catalog. Opener "Sailing" contains pained, troubled lyrics, yet its Celtic-flavored singalong chorus and ringing slide guitar solo add contrast and elevation. "Moonshine" is a poignant Irish immigrant's song…

By the end of the '70s, drug abuse and interpersonal turmoil had completely unraveled Black Sabbath. After straying from the sludgy intensity of their early records for a string of increasingly experimental and commercially underperforming releases, original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne left the band during the first round of recording sessions for ninth album Heaven and Hell. Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio stepped in, transforming the group's sound completely by replacing Osbourne's idiosyncratic evil whine with a vocal style that was both more theatrical and technically controlled. The stylistic shift from heaviness to more intricate hard rock that had floundered on Osbourne-led albums like Never Say Die seemed perfectly fitted for Dio's driving vocals, with tracks like the high-tempo "Wishing Well" pushed forward by his soaring self-harmonizing and Geezer Butler's distinctive bass playing rolling strongly along…

Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this musical revolution - the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial nightmare of Birmingham; guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of two fingertips, which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath's signature style. These qualities set the band apart, but they weren't wholly why this debut album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more…

1965 marks the starting point of one of the most successful rock bands of our time. Hailing from Hannover, Germany, the Scorpions embarked on a journey that would lead them around the globe and would establish them as one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
The Scorpions' two previous releases, Blackout and Love at First Sting, were mostly successful due to the band's ability to adjust with the times; with Blackout, they used the classic power rock introduced by bands like Van Halen, and for Sting they used similar melodies, but with a harder, tighter sound akin to the work of such bands as Dokken and REO Speedwagon. With Savage Amusement, the group's first studio recording in almost four years, the Scorpions experimented with more polished pop melodies that Def Leppard and the like had made popular…

Mike Oldfield was back into the extended composition game with Five Miles Out, continuing the "Taurus" series with the mammoth "Taurus II," an entertaining enough romp with references to Irish music, brass bands and Oldfield's beloved Morris. The true standout, though, was the title track, a paean to flying in bad weather that could easily double for Oldfield's feelings about the sort of monumental critical drubbing he was accustomed to receiving. "Family Man" became a huge worldwide hit for Hall & Oates.

After a two-year pause following the release of Boxed, Mike Oldfield returned with a new epic project, this one spread over four vinyl sides and devoted to Native American themes rather than hewing once more toward the Celtic end of the spectrum. Included was Oldfield's musical adaptation of "The Song of Hiawatha," grandiose but empty; there was a nice sense of the dramatic when it came to dynamic range, but no sense of time – the piece ran far too long as Oldfield searched for enough musical ideas to prop the whole thing up. After this, Oldfield avoided album-length concepts for quite some time.

Although it features the beautiful recorder of Leslie Penny and the Chieftains' Paddy Maloney playing the uilean pipe, Ommadawn didn't gain Mike Oldfield the success he was looking for. The album was released in the same year as the David Bedford-arranged Orchestral Tubular Bells and nine months after Oldfield picked up a Grammy award for the original Tubular Bells album. The most pleasing attribute of Ommadawn is its incorporation of both African and Irish music in its symphonic rock & roll mainframe. Boosted by a hearty amount of different horns, piano, cello, trumpet, and synthesizer, the album has its moments of rising action, but the whole of Ommadawn fails to keep its lovely segments around long enough, and there are some rather lengthy instances that include bland runs of unvaried music…

1965 marks the starting point of one of the most successful rock bands of our time. Hailing from Hannover, Germany, the Scorpions embarked on a journey that would lead them around the globe and would establish them as one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
Although the Scorpions had already achieved fame after 1982's Blackout, Love at First Sting brought them their biggest single of the decade, the slick anthem "Rock You Like a Hurricane," with some greatly underrated songs to back it up. The album opens with the hair-raising "Bad Boys Running Wild" and continues with songs such as the memorable "Big City Nights" and the half-ballad, half-powerhouse rocker "Coming Home." The record also contains what just may be the band's best ballad ever, the tear-jerking "Still Loving You"…

Klaus Schulze staged two legendary concerts in 1994. They were on the 27th and 31st of May respectively. At that time, Schulze's fans were clamoring for a CD of remixes of his older material. He gave them something different. Das Wagner Desaster: Live is a double CD from those concerts. The source material for each show is the same, but the mixes are different. CD one is "The Wild Mix" and CD two is "The Soft Mix." The music is pure Schulze. It is classic Berlin school electronica by a master practitioner of the style. Schulze surrounds his deep sequences with vast atmospheres and dramatic melodies. This CD is important for e-music fans. For Berlin school collectors, it is essential.

Released as another lengthy composition, Hergest Ridge was the album that followed Mike Oldfield's momentous Tubular Bells release, with many of the same instrumental elements and methods employed throughout its two sections. Because of the time of its release, Hergest Ridge was overshadowed by the effects of Oldfield's first album for Virgin, but even so he manages to invoke some interesting patches of music by using instruments like the glockenspiel, sleigh bells, the Lowrey organ, oboes, and a variety of mandolins and guitars to maintain the same type of diversity as Tubular Bells. Symphonic throughout most of the album's two parts, the highlight of Hergest Ridge is Oldfield's use of 90 multi-tracked guitars clustered together to create one of the most unique sounds ever to surface on his albums. Actually, Hergest Ridge entered the British charts in the number one spot in the fall of 1974, but Tubular Bells finally took its place only three weeks later…

As one of the artists who defined the sound of German electronic music in the 1970s and '80s, Klaus Schulze has a rich legacy, and in the early 2000s he released two sizable Contemporary Works box sets. Virtual Outback, a disc consisting of the hour-plus "Rhodes Elegy" (so named, seemingly, for the Rhodes electric piano) was initially available only as part of Contemporary Works II, which quickly went out of print. Now it can be heard on its own in all its spacey, ambient glory, with the 15-minute bonus cut "Chinese Ears" for company.