After playing a major role in five positively classic heavy metal albums of the late '70s and early '80s (three with Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and two with Black Sabbath), it seemed that singer Ronnie James Dio could truly do no wrong. So it wasn't all that surprising – impressive, but not surprising – when he struck gold yet again when launching his solo vehicle, Dio, via 1983's terrific Holy Diver album. Much like those two, hallowed Sabbath LPs, Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, Holy Diver opened at full metallic throttle with the frenetic "Stand Up and Shout," before settling into a dark, deliberate, and hypnotic groove for the timelessly epic title track – a worthy successor to glorious triumphs past like Rainbow's "Stargazer" and the Sabs' "Sign of the Southern Cross."
The Best Of Manfred Mann's Earth Band is a compilation album released in 1993 by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. After a very successful period in the 60's with the pop group named after him and a much less successful intermezzo in Jazz with Chapter Three, the South-African born keyboardist Manfred Mann turned towards Rock music. In 1971 he formed Manfred Mann's Earth Band (MMEB). Mann's use of the Moog synthesizer was key to the sound of this band. MMEB had a very successful area during the mid 70's and early 80's but was disbanded by Mann in 1987 after being fed up with trying to produce hit records. He started a project which was based mostly on the music of Native American Indians named Manfred Mann's Plain Music and which released one album. After this Mann reformed the MMEB in 1991 and was starting again to release records with them occasionally but also to be a regular live band with extensive tours mostly in Europe until today.
After playing a major role in five positively classic heavy metal albums of the late '70s and early '80s (three with Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and two with Black Sabbath), it seemed that singer Ronnie James Dio could truly do no wrong. So it wasn't all that surprising – impressive, but not surprising – when he struck gold yet again when launching his solo vehicle, Dio, via 1983's terrific Holy Diver album. Much like those two, hallowed Sabbath LPs, Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, Holy Diver opened at full metallic throttle with the frenetic "Stand Up and Shout," before settling into a dark, deliberate, and hypnotic groove for the timelessly epic title track – a worthy successor to glorious triumphs past like Rainbow's "Stargazer" and the Sabs' "Sign of the Southern Cross."
The Future Sound of Jazz series is an underated collection of the finest leftfield jazzier flavours from the West German label Compost Records. After the collections trips recently through all areas of dance music , and the most recent messy excursion to disco on volume 11. For volume 12 it's back to a jazzy edge. For FSOJ 12 there's a concoction of future be-bob, house, drum and base, hip -hop, pop, afro- funk, African drum beats,to Nordic Electronic jazz , chilled electronica vocals to Blue note flavoured bossa nova and disco, what a sizzling amalgamation! The collection is on the downtempoe scale of predominantly instrumentals that may take some time to digest.