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Blood Mountain
Metal excess is back: exhibit A this month is Blood Mountain, the follow-up to Mastodon's 2004 breakthrough, Leviathan, which took Herman Melville's Moby Dick and refashioned it into one hell of a heavy sea chantey. The Atlanta band consists of four guys who look like tattooed auto mechanics, but they sound like they should be […]
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Half Smiles of the Decomposed
Half Smiles of the Decomposed is reportedly the final Guided by Voices studio album, and like many of the band's best, it's packed to bursting with sometimes inscrutable pleasures: melodies with the whiff of half-remembered classics, misbegotten home-taping experiments, arrangements that appear to collapse before resolving in brave choruses and, in "Window of My World," […]
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Singles 1965-1967
With the eleven A sides and fourteen B sides collected on Singles 1965-1967, the Rolling Stones outgrew their blues roots to become genius pop craftsmen who ran neck and neck with the Beatles. (That's despite the occasional dud: See Bill Wyman's homely, harpsichord-laced "In Another Land.") The era is a tour de force for Keith […]
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Rockin’ The Rhein With The Grateful Dead
The most obsessively documented band in rock history uncorks yet another piece of live testimony from its 1972 European tour, already the subject of the definitive Europe '72 and the tightly edited Hundred Year Hall. A little editing would've helped Rockin' the Rhein, a nearly-four-hour performance from Dusseldorf, Germany, that doesn't merit the every-note-counts treatment. […]
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Anthology: The Sounds Of Science
Visionaries? Once it didn't seem possible. No joke was too low, no music (hardcore punk, hip-hop, metal) above ridicule. The Beasties rode their often wickedly funny bad taste to the bank, only to later explore subject matter and craft music beyond the world of bongs, beer and groupies that made them early role models for […]
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18 B Sides
Into the soundtrack for the chill-out generation, blending gospel vocals and blues hollers with down-tempo rhythms and glacial keyboard textures. But 18 B Sides + DVD finds the grandmaster of bedroom-recording melancholy turning his inspired approach into a formula. None of these tracks break any new ground. The pretty slow-glides blend almost too seamlessly, which […]
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Skull Ring
Iggy Pop may have taken up golf in Miami, but when properly motivated, he's still plenty capable of sounding like the original dead-end kid wriggling out of a straitjacket. On Skull Ring, motivation arrives in the form of Ron and Scott Asheton, the two surviving members of Pop's pioneering protopunk band the Stooges, who reunite […]
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Youth And Young Manhood
Preacher's sons who grew up on the road and laid down the holy-roller boogie in churches across the South, Kings of Leon come by their scuffed, scruffy sound honestly. But the title of their debut album, Youth and Young Manhood, is slightly misleading. One would expect these little red roosters, who range in age from […]
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How The West Was Won
What has been the Achilles' heel in Led Zeppelin's otherwise formidable catalog? The lack of a killer live album — something on par with the Who's Live at Leeds or the Rolling Stones' Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The soundtrack for Zep's 1976 concert documentary, The Song Remains the Same, doesn't hold up without the movie's […]
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No Exit
In the New-Wave era, Debbie harry was so much the celebrity focal point of Blondie's charge up the pop charts that the group's record label took pains to point out, "Blondie are a band." Harry deserved her props — she was a bleached-blond bombshell with a drop-dead attitude and a deadpan delivery who put a […]
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