Fat Joe

The Elephant in the Room is the eighth studio album by American rapper Fat Joe. The album was released on March 11, 2008, by Terror Squad, Virgin Records and Imperial Records. Production for the album was done by Scott Storch, Cool and Dre, Danja, DJ Khaled, DJ Premier, Swizz Beatz, The Alchemist, Streetrunner & The Hitmen, and guest contributions came from artists like Beatz, Plies, Lil Wayne, J. Holiday and KRS-One.

It is so cool to find an album that was cut by professional musicians that sound like they are having a blast and doing what they were born to do, and a perfect example of this is Smokin’ Joe Kubek and Bnois King’s Fat Man’s Shine Parlor, a killer disc from their recent return to the venerable Blind Pig Records label!

Barnstorm, Joe Walsh's first solo album after leaving the James Gang, garnered him fame not only as a guitarist but also as a songwriter. While it's true that Walsh established himself as a late-'60s/early-'70s guitar hero on the Gang's more boogie-oriented rock numbers, it's Walsh's love of lushly textured production and spacy, open-ended songs featuring both acoustic and electric guitars that is showcased here on this wildly adventurous and forgotten, unqualified masterpiece. Recorded at the Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado, Barnstorm reflects the big sky and wide-open spaces.

As the 70s drew to a close, the roots and dub sounds that had dominated the Jamaican music scene for much of the decade gave way to dancehall, a style that continued to find favour with reggae fans until the onset of the digital revolution of the mid-1980s. Aimed squarely at satisfying the demands of live audiences, songwriters largely abandoned the conscious lyrics that had typified the music of the preceding years, focusing instead on subjects which with their Jamaican audiences could readily identify.

Revered as one of the originators of swamp rock, Tony Joe White has recast a number of his classic songs on Deep Cuts, proving that time has no jurisdiction over funky. His signature groove, starting from his 1969 hit "Polk Salad Annie," is what he uses to paint a vivid picture of the world he experienced growing up, where poverty provided unity between otherwise divided races and bad-news women were sometimes too good to pass up. Tony Joe cut the tracks with his son Jody providing a rich palette of beats and loops, utilizing both digital and live drums, strings, organs, and the unmistakable timbre of his guitar. White's time-worn baritone is positively haunting, like a restless spirit conjured by the funk that was always the core of his music.

Time Clocks slowly comes into focus after the short atmospheric instrumental "Pilgrimage" sets the stage for a moody, cinematic record. In its brief minute, Joe Bonamassa plays a fat, melodic phrase that sounds uncannily like David Gilmour, a tone and aesthetic he'll return to throughout Time Clocks. Other blues and classic rock greats are alluded to on the album – the winding riff propelling "Notches" harkens back to Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, Clapton is always lurking around the corner – but at this stage of his career Bonamassa is a stylist, tying together recognizable influences into something distinctively his own. Here, he's leaning toward somber introspection, filtering his musings on life and society through a Pink Floyd prism.