The Country Music Association of Australian and EMI Music have enjoyed a long and prestigious relationship for close to 20 years, with the annual release of the "Winners" compilation, collecting together the finalists from the Tamworth Golden Guitar Awards every year. Now comes this stunning double CD collection of timeless favourites from the superstars of the local country music scene, featuring Lee Kernaghan, Slim Dusty, Adam Brand, Adam Harvey, Beccy Cole, James Blundell, Kasey Chambers, Troy Cassar-Daley, Gina Jeffreys, John Williamson and many more.
There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.
Disco and funk combine on Phat Trax: The Best of Old School, Vol. 2, which pays tribute to the sounds that inspired hip-hop. Rolling, voluptuous basslines, uptight guitars, and vibrant brass sections drive tracks like Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove," Fatback's "Backstrokin'," and Tom Browne's "Thighs High (Grip Your Hips and Move)," bridging the gap between funk and disco and providing countless rap and hip-hop artists ample material for sampling. Sun's "Sun Is Here," Faze-O's "Riding High," and T.S. Monk's "Bon Bon Vie" are among the other highlights of this funky, stylish compilation, which also documents just how integral these songs were to hip-hop's development.
A good Christmas compilation should contain the following things: a selection of old classics to warm your cockles by the fireside, some of the classic pop titles that people always seem to find themselves singing along to in the pub on Christmas Eve, some carols and a handful of oddities to keep everyone on their toes. The Best Christmas Album in the World Ever manages to fulfil all these criterias.