Oh My My is a danceable single from Ringo Starr's Ringo album, and features backing vocals from Merry Clayton and Martha Reeves. It hit number five on the U.S. Billboard charts, making it one of the most successful songs of Starr's career. The song was co-written by Starr (credited by his real name, "Richard Starkey"), and Vini Poncia, a frequent Ringo co-writer, who would later go on to produce the rock band, Kiss.
Co-produced by Grammy-nominated mixmaster Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck), "Talkie Walkie" features ten new cinematic pop songs that are direct, intimate and romantic, the band’s most rewarding collection to date. For the first time, the band handles all the vocal duties themselves to great effect, plus there are several trademark instrumentals such as "Alone In Kyoto" which also appeared in Sofia Coppola's recent hit movie "Lost In Translation". The Limited Edition CD comes with a bonus DVD featuring an inventively shot 35 minute film of Air on tour intercut with behind the scenes footage.
Set up by two acclaimed albums and in the past few months playing live to half-a-million fans, American Hi-Fi turns up the volume with its Maverick debut, Hearts on Parade, produced by Butch Walker. Led by Stacy Jones, American Hi-Fi scores the pop big-time with Hearts on Parade and its lead track "The Geeks Get The Girls".
After a five-year absence, Apples in Stereo have returned with a sprawling and lush masterpiece. Their founding principle of the DIY approach to recording has remained in place, but the nearly 15 years of technological progress has made such ways of working yield significantly more robust sounds. Robert Schneider's songs have always harked back to the pop artistry of Brian Wilson and Jeff Lynne, as well as such near contemporaries as Pavement. New Magnetic Wonder offers a more lush sweep of sound. It's varied, dazzling, and full of surprises. There's the keyboard-based pop of "Same Old Drag," the hypnotic muscle of "Sunndal Song" (sung by drummer Hilarie Sidney, who's recently departed to work with her own band), and the sprawling, four-part "Beautiful Machine." Depending on who's listening and what song they're hearing, there are many different ways to describe this band. Ultimately, they gently demand that you take them on their own terms, rewarding handsomely all those who make the glorious plunge. David Greenberger
Montreal's Arcade Fire brings a theatricality, an intensity, an insanity, and a penchant for amazing hooks to their debut full-length. You've never heard such energy, beauty, and emotion from such a young band. Fans of Neutral Milk Hotel, Broken Social Scene, and Roxy Music's first two albums will have a new favorite band. |
Augustana's finely burnished debut again points up the contrast between contemporary American rock's persistent navel-gazing and the vibrant, back-to-the-future vibe of resurgent Britpop. The angst-ridden lyrical pleas of mainstay Dan Layus are often informed by the band's restless westward travels from its Midwestern roots on tracks like the spare "Roosevelt" and lush, mid-tempo gem of a ballad, "Boston." Yet one can almost count the modern rock influences on the album's opening wall-of-guitar conceits, "Mayfield" and "Bullets," and elsewhere, the likely residue of Train and Wallflowers producer Brendan O'Brien's aggressive studio slickery. It's to Layus' and the band's credit that the album's best moments are usually its most emotionally and musically direct, as witnessed by the moody title track, "Boston" and folk-tinged closer, "Coffee and Cigarettes." The soaring drama of "California Burning" throws all those elements firmly against the wall and damned near makes `em stick, ample evidence that the band has the potential to rise above the comfortably safe familiarity that sometimes seems to constrain them here. Jerry McCulley
This re-release was praised by the likes of Rolling Stone, Spin, URB, Blender, and more as "...utterly beyond anything heard to date." Playful, twisted, psychedelic, sampledelic, delirious, and infectious, it's the sound of six men who spent most of adolescence rummaging through bargain bins in Melbourne's record shops, constructing their own post-modern disco-pop amalgam from rubbish 50's rejects and saccharine 60's pap. Also available domestically for the first time on 180 gram double vinyl.
Brian Wilson's brilliance manifested itself in the euphoric, cheerfully square, sun-and-fun stuff heard here early on, before it got darker and more complicated. Endless Summer runs from the beginning of the Boys' pinstriped career to 1965, right before the melancholy of Pet Sounds, but also includes the inescapable "Good Vibrations." You can hear a few hints of adolescent sadness and fear"Help Me, Rhonda" is essentially a kids' sing-along about a wrenching emotional rebound, and the shadow of death is hiding somewhere in "Don't Worry, Baby"but Wilson is mostly concerned with the cars, waves, and girls that made up the Boys' public image, and his ingenious arrangements (coupled with the group's inimitable harmonies) make everything go down as smoothly as lemonade. Douglas Wolk
The classic original Beatles studio albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the Beatles catalogue has seen since its original release.
The classic original Beatles studio albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the Beatles catalogue has seen since its original release. |
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