Amos Twersky

The Cause of It All is The Revs' new stripped-down collection of blues classics, forged in quarantine with longtime guitarist Chris “Doctor” Roberts. The timing couldn’t be better. Pared down to their essence, these songs speak to our shared sense of vulnerability and isolation, but with the joyful, contagious swagger that has long borne bluesmen – and their listeners – through trouble, into the light.

Tori Amos'second full-length solo effort has often been considered a transitional album, a building on the success of Little Earthquakes that enabled her to pursue increasingly more adventurous releases in later years. As such, it has been unfairly neglected when in fact it has as good a claim as any to be one of the strongest, and maybe even the strongest, record she has put out. Able to appeal to a mass audience without being shoehorned into the incipient "adult album alternative" format that sprang to life in the mid-1990s, Amos combines some of her strongest melodies and lyrics with especially haunting and powerful arrangements to create an artistic success that stands on its own two feet. The best-known tracks are the two contemporaneous singles "God," a wicked critique of the deity armed with a stiff, heavy funk-rock arrangement, and "Cornflake Girl," a waltz-paced number with an unnerving whistle and stuttering vocal hook.

First Key (1974). For the first time as a reissue on CD. The first and eponymous album of classical rock influenced great German krautrockers Amos Key. Amos Key owed great debts to Bach, Beethoven and Schumann, adding a heavy krautrock twist to a music closely resembling the Nice or Egg, full of angst and weird psychedelic and space-rock touches (Freeman Brothers: In A Crack In The Cosmic Egg). Amos Key lived in Munich and consisted of great organ-player Thomas Molin, congenial bass-player Andreas Gross and superb drummer Lutz Ludwig. This fairly competent outfit recorded the album on label 'Spiegelei' just after they recorded their radio sessions (Amos Key, Keynotes, The Lost Tapes, SWF Session 1973). Sadly bandleader and organ-player Thomas Molin passed away in the 90ies but bass-player Andreas Gross tells the band story in a very vivid and funny way…

With her haunting solo debut Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos carved the template for the female singer/songwriter movement of the '90s. Amos' delicate, prog rock piano work and confessional, poetically quirky lyrics invited close emotional connection, giving her a fanatical cult following and setting the stage for the Lilith Fair legions. But Little Earthquakes is no mere style-setter or feminine stereotype – its intimacy is uncompromising, intense, and often far from comforting. Amos' musings on major personal issues – religion, relationships, gender, childhood – were just as likely to encompass rage, sarcasm, and defiant independence as pain or tenderness; sometimes, it all happened in the same song.