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Camber Sands
In techno music, a remix can be either a rebirth or a waste of good studio time. There's more of the former on these three EPs of reworkings of stuff from Fatboy Slim's 2000 CD Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. The standouts include Timo Maas' breakdown of "Star 69," which he reimagines as […]
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Finally The Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid 1983-88
Follow these fearless alterna-rockers on their path from Eighties weird to pop bliss few would have thought in the late Eighties that the Flaming Lips, a crazed and beautiful psychedelic band from Oklahoma City, would survive the fall of alternative rock, then actually flourish in the Nineties. These two recollections of previously out-of-print Lips music […]
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The Essential Leonard Cohen
The dark, poetic music of Leonard Cohen should be listed on the table of periodic elements — when you discover it, it suddenly seems as necessary as oxygen. This collection spans his thirty-five-year career, and it doesn't leave out much. Originally a Canadian poet and country-music fan, Cohen moved to New York in the late […]
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Trans-Europe Express
With their 1974 international smash hit "Autobahn," Kraftwerk had coolly demonstrated that an experimental electronic group from Dusseldorf, Germany, could kick out perfect pop on par with anything by the Beach Boys. In fact, Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, the band's creative nucleus, were huge fans of Brian Wilson and loads of other American music. […]
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Songs To No One: 1991-1992
In the early nineties, two restlessly inventive musicians, Jeff Buckley and Gary Lucas, both haunted by phantoms from the Sixties, crossed a generation gap and made a ghostly sound together. Lucas had been a guitarist for blues freak Captain Beefheart; Buckley was the immensely talented singer-songwriter son of the late, great singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. These […]
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Pixies
In 1987, back when alt-rock was called "college rock," the Pixies loomed large, like a bizarre crossbreeding of pop sensibilities, art-rock conceptualism and nasty guitar riffs. The elements of their sound — songwriter Black Francis' shrieking vocals, bassist Kim Deal's predatory bass lines, guitarist Joey Santiago's piercing leads and drummer David Lovering's unforgiving beats — […]
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Let Go
For anyone who's already screaming "Enough!" whenever Avril Lavigne's supernaturally catchy single "Complicated" comes on the radio, the news is all bad. Let Go, the debut album from Ontario's tiny terror, comes fully loaded with another dozen infectious hymns of Total Request angst. Although it's the only track with a definable style other than "pop […]
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The Great Divide
Sunny and uplifting are not words generally associated with Willie Nelson, but that's not the only reason some will be surprised by his new album. Organized loosely around duets with younger stars and a Cyndi Lauper cover, The Great Divide is glossy, tuneful and turned up to ten — which would constitute a triumph for […]
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Morning View
For a new-metal band competing in a field of alpha males with pierced, sloping brows, the supple, even delicate Incubus have an awful lot of yin in their yang. Unlike Staind, who require a suspension of disbelief that they are, essentially, macho crybabies, and Crazy Town, who probably tinge their mook-hop with Orientalism so they […]
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White Blood Cells
The White Stripes play gothic garage punk strictly by all the best and baddest rules. Detroit's Jack and Meg White, allegedly brother and sister, look like they haven't been out of their apartment in six years, and like the Ramones, they named themselves after their band (or vice versa). Best of all, they fuse inescapable, […]
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