Criminal Cbr

Within the same year of re-joining Yes for 1977's Going for the One, Rick Wakeman released yet another solo instrumental (mostly) concept album. Criminal Record, Wakeman's sixth album in five years, involves six tracks that instill Wakeman's keyboard wizardry to both fictional and historical accounts of punishment, villainy, and crime. With help from both Chris Squire and drummer Alan White, Wakeman managed to land the album within the U.K. Top 30 before the year's end, even though it fell well beyond the Top 100 on the U.S. album charts. Wakeman does a great job at sketching each theme with an appropriate dose of keyboard fire, with "Judas Iscariot" and "Crime of Passion" arising as two of the album's most potent tracks…

‘Criminal’, The Soft Moon's fourth studio album, is a confessional work. Through the stark lens of shame and guilt that has followed Luis Vasquez since a violent childhood growing up within the humming ambient sprawl of 80s Mojave Desert, here he documents the gut-wrenching sound of going to war with himself. Battling with his own sanity, self-hatred, insecurity, self-entitlement and grappling with the risk of these things transforming him into a person he despises, Vasquez has laid his feelings bare with this: his confession and most self-reflective work to date.

Arriving on the heels of two best-selling memoirs, Jimmy Barnes’ 17th solo album continues that unflinching self-examination. Personally as well as musically: The Aussie icon reconnects with his hard-hitting past—including his Cold Chisel collaborator Don Walker, who co-wrote half the songs here—for a robust bout of dark and stormy heartland rock. Written for Barnes by country star Troy Cassar-Daley, the lead single “Shutting Down Our Town” is a swaggering blue-collar lament, while “My Demon (God Help Me)” finds his grainy, full-bodied singing at its fieriest as a rusty-sounding slide guitar hammers home the mournful message.