1st Press Japan Yngwie Malmsteen Pocp Trilogy

If proof were needed that Roxette are the new ABBA, the lack of critical respect should be enough. Like Abba, Roxette is a masterful pop band (with just the right amount of kitsch in its armor) that routinely gets slagged off for lacking substance, whatever that may be. Room Service showcases a band at the top of its form with its feet firm on the pedal: this album is a case study in songcraft and pop smarts. With its na-na-na choruses and sparkly guitars, Room Service is also trademark Roxette, a mostly no-surprises package that divides its time between the soaring, emotive power ballads and the rife-with-hooks rock-dance stompers that the band pretty much took patents out on back in the '80s and '90s.

Aerosmith prove that a band can be inspired by the blues and play the blues without ever feeling like a blues band. Then again, the nature of the blues is that every musician who plays it stamps his or her own identity on a set of familiar chord changes and songs. While it might not feel like the blues, Aerosmith do indeed stamp their identity on each track on their long-promised blues album, the atrociously named Honkin' on Bobo. Other rockers who have cut full-length blues albums have always played the music with a kind of scholarly reverence, taking care to pay tribute to their influences. Not Aerosmith.

Another Step is the fifth studio album by British pop singer Kim Wilde, released in November 1986. The album contained her comeback worldwide hit "You Keep Me Hangin' On", which reached No.1 in the US, as well as the UK top 10 hit "Another Step (Closer to You)" and "Say You Really Want Me". The album contained 12 tracks (13 on the CD and cassette) and a varied team of songwriters, as well as Wilde herself co-writing more than half of the tracks. The first half was uptempo, whereas the second consisted of ballads. Most of the tracks were produced by Ricky Wilde, but there were also production duties fulfilled by Rod Temperton and Bruce Swedien known for working with Michael Jackson and there were also Reinhold Heil, Richard James Burgess and Dick Rudolph.

La Passione is a novelty in the Chris Rea catalog, but a nice one at that. It’s a film soundtrack to a film he wrote but it sounds like a musical at times. With orchestral string movements mixed between familiar sounding Rea songs the overall is a relaxing lounge affair that even has guest vocals from the legendary Shirley Bassey on two numbers, making one a duet. It’s funny hearing Rea’s bluesy growl amid a sixties style orchestral sweep and although he’s no Tony Bennet it’s still pleasant. If you prefer the more pop/rock Rea then this is not the place to go but if like the cinematic atmosphere then it’s a nice detour and one of the strongest of his nineties albums.

The Cars' disbandment wasn’t necessarily fractious but their afterlife sure was, with the band itching to reunite while their lead voice and face, Ric Ocasek, opted out. Bassist Benjamin Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, but that didn’t slow the desire for a reunion. Guitarist Elliot Easton and keyboardist Greg Hawkes took matters into their own hands in 2005, joining forces with Todd Rundgren and associates for the not-bad-at-all New Cars, and that seemed to be the end of the story until 2010, when all surviving members – Ocasek, Easton, Hawkes, and drummer David Robinson – headed into the studio with producer Jacknife Lee, who also pinch-hit on bass, to cut Move Like This, an album that defies all odds by sounding exactly like a classic Cars album.

Up Against It! is a 1997 album by Todd Rundgren consisting mostly of song demos he wrote and recorded between 1986 and 1989 for the musical theater adaptation of the never-produced screenplay Up Against It. The play was originally written in 1967 by Joe Orton for the Beatles. This album is Rundgren's score to the stage adaptation of playwright Joe Orton's Up Against It, the unfilmed screenplay originally mooted as the third Beatles film (after Hard Day's Night and Help). They declined it, so he reworked it to lessen their presence, successfully sold it to the producer Oscar Lewenstein, and then was violently murdered by boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell in a notorious murder-suicide.

Solo album of instrumental covers by the former member of The Buggles, Asia & Yes. Geoffrey "Geoff" Downes is an English rock songwriter, record producer, keyboardist, icon. Downes created The Buggles with Trevor Horn in 1977. After three years of songwriting and recording process, their first album, The Age of Plastic, was released in 1980. Now recognized as a highly influent album and a landmark of the electropop era, it also spawned the single "Video Killed the Radio Star", that was No. 1 on the singles charts of sixteen countries. The same year, both Horn and Downes joined Yes and recorded the album Drama as a part of the band. The following year however, Yes disbanded.

Ziggy Stardust wrote the blueprint for David Bowie's hard-rocking glam, and Aladdin Sane essentially follows the pattern, for both better and worse. A lighter affair than Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre lounge-jazz flourishes from pianist Mick Garson and a handful of winding, vaguely experimental songs. Bowie abandons his futuristic obsessions to concentrate on the detached cool of New York and London hipsters, as on the compressed rockers "Watch That Man," "Cracked Actor," and "The Jean Genie." Bowie follows the hard stuff with the jazzy, dissonant sprawls of "Lady Grinning Soul," "Aladdin Sane," and "Time," all of which manage to be both campy and avant-garde simultaneously, while the sweepingly cinematic "Drive-In Saturday" is a soaring fusion of sci-fi doo wop and melodramatic teenage glam.