Vinyl Release

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Vinyl Release
Spirit: Twelve Dreams...
Steve Sutherland  |  Jun 11, 2019
Part concept album, part concoction of West Coast rock and jazz... Steve Sutherland hears the 180g reissue of an LP from 1970 with lessons we can learn from today

If there's a lazier fellow on the face of God's green earth than Jimmy Page, boy, I'd sure like to meet him. Yes, that Jimmy Page, guvnor of Led Zeppelin and hitherto legendary guitar god – it's the 'hitherto' bit that gets my goat.

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Vinyl Release
Steely Dan: Can't Buy A Thrill
Steve Sutherland  |  Apr 07, 2023
Musically accessible, lyrically inscrutable, and buoyed by stellar session work, this 1972 debut ensured Steely Dan weren't buried by Bowie et al, says Steve Sutherland

What's the greatest guitar solo ever? Well, off the top of my head I'd say Jimi Hendrix on his version of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower', where he makes a number of miraculous stylistic changes and creates mysterious sounds never heard on this planet before or since. Then I'd go for Frank Zappa just letting rip on his dope-growing satire 'Montana' from Over-Nite Sensation. And thirdly I'd plump for Jimmy Page ascending into the stratosphere on Led Zeppelin IV's 'Stairway To Heaven'.

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Vinyl Release
Suede: The London Suede
Steve Sutherland  |  May 18, 2021
Steve Sutherland looks back to the '90s and a group heralded before they'd even released a record. Some thirty years on, their debut LP is reissued on 180g vinyl

It's April 1992 and Suede are the cover stars of the (now defunct) weekly music paper Melody Maker which is running a headline that heralds them as 'The Best New Band In Britain'. This is about to cause quite a hullabaloo, not only because most people have never heard of Suede but also because the band hasn't even released a record so far.

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Vinyl Release
Symarip: Skinhead Moonstomp
Steve Sutherland  |  May 14, 2020
A song with a kick, but for all the wrong reasons, as Steve Sutherland reassesses a ska album from 1970, which has recently been re-released on 180g vinyl

We could begin with Plato, or even Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde it is. In his 1889 essay, The Decay Of Lying, the great man took umbrage with the Greeks' philosophy of mimesis which said that all true art mimics nature. On the contrary, quoth Oscar, 'Life imitates art' and that is roughly how it felt – very roughly as it happens – one sunny Saturday lunchtime in April, 1972, when I got my head kicked in.

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Vinyl Release
T. Rex: Electric Warrior
Steve Sutherland  |  Sep 09, 2022
Marc Bolan gave kids of the '70s a new exciting sound with this chart-topping LP, now reissued on 180g vinyl. Steve Sutherland celebrates the 'rock 'n' roll poet'

It might not have been as seismic, say, as Judas dobbing Jesus in to Pontius Pilot, or Bob Dylan hitching his wagon to The Band and suddenly turning electric, but a betrayal's a betrayal, right?

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Vinyl Release
Teardrop Explodes: Kilimanjaro
Steve Sutherland  |  Feb 12, 2020
He just couldn't cope, says Steve Sutherland as he counts out the 'aha's and listens to the recent 180g reissue of the Liverpool band's post-punk debut LP

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha aha…'

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Vinyl Release
The Bar-Kays: Soul Finger
Steve Sutherland  |  Jul 20, 2020
Steve Sutherland relives the fateful night when four of The Bar-Kays flew with Otis Redding in 1967, the plane diving into icy Lake Monona. The album is on 180g vinyl

The next thing he knew he was floating. Freezing cold and floating. His head hurt. There was blood. He heard a noise. Then another. Cries in the distance. Cries for help. He began to go under and he splashed around, found a seat cushion and desperately clutched it to his chest to help stay afloat – he'd never learned to swim.

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Vinyl Release
The Beatles: Revolver (180g)
Steve Sutherland  |  Feb 07, 2023
Featuring sitar, violins, backwards recordings and some sage words from Peter Fonda, this 1966 album found the Fab Four firing on all cylinders, says Steve Sutherland

I coulda been a contender, but Revolver did me in. There I was, nine-and-a-half years old, living the high life – well, as high as life could get for a small boy in Salisbury, Wiltshire – and in a band called The Little Beatles. I was Ringo, my friend Keith McArdle was John, Kirsteen, his sister, was George, and Robert 'Bo' Parr was Paul. We wore home-made Beatles suits and Beatles wigs and mimed behind toy instruments to Beatles hits.

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Vinyl Release
The Everly Brothers: The Everly Brothers
Steve Sutherland  |  Nov 01, 2018
Steve Sutherland tells how the duo tweaked their covers, wrote some originals but finally fell out by the 1970s as he hears the 180g reissue of their debut LP

So many stories, where-oh-where to begin? Maybe we could start on the 14th of July 1973 at that fateful gig at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, when Don's so hammered that he's butchering the songs and Phil smashes his guitar in frustration, tells the crowd he's tired of being an Everly Brother and says that they, in fact, died as a meaningful entity ten years before – thus revealing the fraught fabrication behind all those celestial harmonies. It was an acrimony so strong that it kept them full-on apart for the entire next decade.

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Vinyl Release
The Modern Lovers: The Modern Lovers
Steve Sutherland  |  Nov 11, 2019
There's not a dud among all nine tracks here, declares Steve Sutherland as he listens to the recent 180g reissue of Jonathan Richman's proto-punk debut LP

According to that top old egghead Brain Eno, 'The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band'. One of those is a weird young man from a place called Natick, some 17 miles West of Boston, Massachusetts. The little guy's name is Jonathan Michael Richman and he was once so obsessed with The Velvet Underground that he quit school and skipped off to New York to seek them out.

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Vinyl Release
The Original Cast West Side Story
Steve Sutherland  |  Apr 19, 2022
Sondheim and Bernstein's 1957 musical has been reborn as a new Hollywood blockbuster – and a 180g reissue of the original recording. Steve Sutherland reports

The twenty seventh of September 1957, the morning after the night before, and the reviews are in... 'The most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons... a profoundly moving show that is as ugly as the city jungles and also pathetic, tender and forgiving... flaring scores that capture the shrill beat of life in the streets... The astringent score has moments of tranquillity and rapture, and occasionally a touch of sardonic humour… This is a bold new different kind of musical…'

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Vinyl Release
The Pentangle: Basket Of Light
Steve Sutherland  |  Aug 22, 2019
This band of talented '60s musicians were one of those rare breeds – a British folk supergroup. Steve Sutherland revisits their hit LP from 1969, reissued on 180g vinyl

Way back in the mists of time, before every rapper and R&B star worth his, or her, ice degraded it all by cottoning on to the commercial boost of cramming all their releases with famous guests, there was this strange and rare phenomenon called The Supergroup.

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Vinyl Release
The Rolling Stones Satanic Majesties
Steve Sutherland  |  Sep 11, 2024
Often seen as an attempt to ape The Beatles’ mystical magic, this 1967 oddity, now reissued on 180g, is The Stones at their most ragged, says Steve Sutherland

Following on from last month’s Vinyl Release about brilliant records that nobody else likes but you, I bet I’m not the only one who has an album that, although you’ve played it on and off down the years, even the decades, you can’t decide whether it’s any good or not. On one occasion it may sound great. Significant even, a landmark piece. Other times it just sounds... well, rubbish.

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Vinyl Release
The Rolling Stones: It's Only Rock 'N' Roll
Steve Sutherland  |  Sep 15, 2020
Their 1974 riposte to criticism, which Steve Sutherland finds a mixture of downright goodies with a sprinkling of duds is remastered on 180g vinyl from pure analogue

The Rolling Stones have just released their first original track for eight years. 'Living In A Ghost Town', started some time ago when the band could convene together in a swanky recording studio and hastily rounded off with isolated overdubs. It's getting a bit of a pasting from the online community who are having a lot of fun mocking Mick Jagger and Co for moaning about being stuck at home when they live in mansions with acres of land, hot tubs and snooker rooms, etc.

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Vinyl Release
The Ruts: The Crack
Steve Sutherland  |  Jul 14, 2023
The anger-filled debut from the English punk/reggae group sparked fans far and wide, and a near 30-year search for the original cover art, says Steve Sutherland

Occasionally I get asked who was the most unpleasant rock star I encountered during my decades writing for the music press. That's a toughie, although Robert Palmer and Phil Lynott hover near the top of the pile. Far easier to say who was the scariest. Answer, without doubt: Henry Rollins.

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