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1 Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation (Deluxe Edition)
(Geffen)
America's feedback futurists set the stage for the Year Punk Broke
with this 1988 call to fuzz and moral rock action that is still
— with its steel-rail riffs and tightrope walk between studio
rigor and rehearsal-garage improvisation — Sonic Youth's best
album. It was also their first great record of songs, proven by the
way the avant-Nuggets punch of "Teen Age Riot" and "Silver Rocket"
and the haunting clang of "Candle" and "Eric's Trip" glow and soar
in the '88-89 live thrashings on the second CD.
2 Culture
Two Sevens Clash:The 30th Anniversary
Edition (Shanachie)
Armageddon did not come to Jamaica when the sevens collided on
7/7/77, as Culture's lead singer Joseph Hill predicted in this
magnificent album's title hymn. But the lasting power of Hills'
robust incantation, Albert Walker and Kenneth Dayes' Blue Mountain-
Motown harmonies and the Rasta-soldier march of Joe Gibbs'
production in "Pirate Days" and "I'm Not Ashamed" is in the promise
of milk, honey and justice to come. When toaster I Roy grabs the
mike in the bonus mix of "Natty Dread Taking Over," you know to get
out of the way.
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3 Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets
1965-1970
(Rhino)
The prime movers of the Bay Area's acid-ballroom revolt —
Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding
Company, the Grateful Dead and their bar-band incarnation, the
Warlocks — are all here in their exploratory glory. So are
psychedelic foot soldiers such as the Oxford Circle, Frumious
Bandersnatch and Country Weather, whose local-label and privately
pressed records made late-Sixties San Francisco the first great
indie-rock scene in America.
4 City of Dreams: A Collection of New Orleans
Music
(Rounder)
This four-CD box is priced to move — and move you — at
$29.99 (suggested retail). It is also Rounder's party for itself,
drawn from the label's rich Eighties and Nineties catalog of local
funk, soul and piano power. Legends such as singer Irma Thomas and
pianist Eddie Bo are in vintage form, while younger wonders like
singer-pianist Davell Crawford and the ReBirth Brass Band prove
that New Orleans, sorely tested in many ways even before Katrina,
has always been a city of living art — and that we would be a
poorer nation without it.
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5 Sandy Denny
Live at the BBC (Island Remasters)
Sandy Denny was a star of British folk and one of its songwriting
treasures even when she wasn't in Fairport Convention. In this
four-disc set of her solo BBC sessions — three CDs of radio
performances and a DVD with a short, stunning 1971 TV appearance
— the alehouse purity of the public-domain ballads in 1966
and '67 blooms, after her first Fairport stint, into the signature
blend of modernized tradition, acute introspection and bold,
vulnerable voice in "Late November" and the literal, lonely
"Solo."
6 Young Marble Giants
Colossal Youth (Domino)
The only studio album by the Welsh trio Young Marble Giants,
released in 1980 amid the rude noise of British punk, was
masterful, defiantly quiet, searing romanticism built from
bone-treble guitar, deserted-circus organ and Alison Statton's
pure-as-rainwater alto. Colossal Youth's impact long outlived the
band (Hole covered "Credit in the Straight World" on 1994's Live
Through This) — until this year, when the Giants reunited for
a U.K. gig in honor of this maximum-joy reissue fattened with EP
tracks, demos and a John Peel radio session.
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7 Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, James
Cotton
Breakin' It Up, Breakin' It Down (Epic
Legacy)
Muddy Waters was still singing the blues like a young lion when he
made 1977's Hard Again — produced by guitarist Johnny Winter
— then promoted it with a killer live revue with Winter and
harp master James Cotton, recorded along the way but unreleased
until now. The trio makes living Chicago fire together, and I
personally vouch for the tracks taped in Philadelphia, including
Waters' snarling return to his 1948 hit "Can't Be Satisfied." I was
there.
8 Wattstax: Music From the Wattstax Film and
Festival
(Stax)
In 1972, Stax Records threw a daylong black-power Lollapalooza for
100,000 people in Los Angeles, filmed the show — starring
kings and queens of the label including Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas,
his daughter Carla and the Staple Singers — and issued a pair
of soundtracks. This three-CD reissue isn't everything from the
original LPs. But the church and party here are nonstop — up
to a point. By 1976, Stax was bankrupt — with resurrection
three decades away.
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9 Moby Grape
'69 (Sundazed)
Legendary for its psychedelic pow and long legal battles, this San
Francisco band has been screwed again by threatened litigation that
forced Sundazed to pull three of its deluxe Grape reissues: the
classic '67 debut, Moby Grape, and '68's Wow and Grape Jam. Do not
buy substandard editions. Spend the bread on the expanded '69,
still in print. The first of the band's many comeback records, it
is a country-soul and acid-guitar corker that showed, even then,
that no one could keep this great band down.
10 Jazz Icons, Series 2
(Reelin' In The Years/Naxos)
These DVDs of Fifties and Sixties European TV concerts come
individually and boxed (with a bonus disc). Duke Ellington, Sarah
Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Wes Montgomery and Dave Brubeck are all in
their live prime. John Coltrane pursues the love supreme in "My
Favorite Things" and "Impressions." And in April '64, Charles
Mingus makes some of his last fire music with saxophonist Eric
Dolphy, who died that June.