As The Light Goes Out (2014)

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set The Girl from Detroit City. Quatro is a rocker but she's also a showbiz lifer, and the music spread over these four discs is the work of someone up to do a little bit of everything, and along with Chapman/Chinn thunderboomers like "Can the Can," "49 Crash," and "Daytona Demon," you also get vintage garage rock (three numbers from Quatro's first band, the Pleasure Seekers, including the gloriously snotty "What a Way to Die"), easygoing pop numbers like "Stumblin' In" (her hit duet with Chris Norman of Smokie)…

Thanks to a roster including Cocteau Twins and Pixies, UK imprint 4AD has maintained its status as a force in independent music for more than 30 years. Author Martin Aston talks about his exhaustive new history of the label.

Even in Michael Chapman’s vast and wildly diverse catalog of releases, Playing Guitar the Easy Way is an outlier. Issued in 1978 during his association with Criminal Records, this is the innovative and storied guitarist’s instructional album. Like all things Chapman, this one has a twist or two. For starters, it can be listened to on its own. The music is played on acoustic six- and twelve-string guitars—there is even an electric piece in “English Musick”— that come off as standalone originals and/or original derivations on folk standards. This is also one of (if not the) very first guitar instruction recordings—with an accompanying booklet of tablature—to showcase the use of different tunings such as the now ubiquitous DADGAD.

Stanley Brinks & The Wave Pictures - Gin (2014) {Fika Recordings FIKA036CD}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 156 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 93 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 86 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2014 Fika Recordings | FIKA036CD
Alternative Rock / Indie / Pop Rock / Indie Pop / Antifolk

Stanley Brinks is joined by The Wave Pictures for their third album together; their first since 2010’s ‘Another One Just Like That’. Recorded entirely live in the studio, without headphones or overdubs, and with a good deal of improvisation, ‘Gin’ is a modern-sounding, in a way avant-garde, old school recording of text-driven songs. The Wave Pictures didn't get a chance to learn the songs before the session, Stan having forgotten to put a stamp on the demo tape he'd sent them from Berlin.

Innovative record producer and orchestra leader Enoch Light produced a string of hit stereo percussion albums including Persuasive Percussion, Provocative Percussion and Stereo 35/MM, all of which reached the Top 3 in the US best-selling albums chart. Big Bold and Brassy (1960) & Vibrations (1962) follow the series of thrilling albums that cover the whole spectrum of percussive sound resulting in a kaleidoscope of rich contrasts that gives the tunes here a new sheen of excitement.
Personnel in the Light Brigade include Doc Severinsen on trumpet and Tony Mottola on guitar, solo stars in their own right. First time on CD and re-mastered in glorious Stereo.

Henry Mancini - Eight Classic Albums (2014) [4CD Set] {Real Gone Music Remaster}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.52 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 642 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 106 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2014 Real Gone Music | RGMCD097
Jazz / Easy Listening / Stage & Screen / Light Jazz / Soundtrack

This set contains eight Henry Manicini albums, all from his jazz period. Six of these albums were soundtracks written for either television series or for movies. All of the albums, except Hatari, contain twelve tracks. The album identifications and track listings for each CD appear below. The sound quality of this set is fantastic. Mancini recorded over 90 albums, in styles including big band, jazz, light classical and pop. Eight of these albums were certified gold by The Recording Industry Association of America. He had a 20-year contract with RCA Records, resulting in 60 commercial record albums that made him a household name among artists of easy-listening music. Mancini's earliest recordings in the 1950s and early 1960s were of the jazz idiom; with the success of Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, and Breakfast at Tiffany's, (all included here)Mancini shifted to primarily recording his own music in record albums and film soundtracks.

The Velvet Underground's classic self-titled third album, released in March 1969, by MGM, was a departure from the band's first two albums in more ways than one. Gone was co-founding member John Cale, and in his place was a 21-year-old with Long Island roots named Doug Yule, who stepped right in. The record was also a stylistic leap, as Lou Reed describes it in Rolling Stone editor David Fricke's liner notes, 'I thought we had to demonstrate the other side of us…

French guitarist/producer U-Nam is again standing tall and looming large on the smooth jazz scene with another creative gem called C’est Le Funk. In addition to dazzling us with his graceful and funky instrumental work (and one funky delivery with vocals from Tim “TiO” Owens), the album is loaded with strong production and presence. Wasting no time putting the groove into high gear from the start, the guitarist leads off with a driving track called “Smoovin’,” continues plowing ahead with the party groover “Something’s Up” and strutting right through the super-funky, hook-rich title track which features Nivo Deux (Nivo Deux is actually a project organized by U-Nam and wife Shannon Kennedy focusing on the incorporation of 80’s Pop, Smooth Jazz, and Electro-Funk).