Flic ou Voyou Cop or Hood (1979)

"No Mercy," with special effects recorded at Madison Square Garden, has the sentiment of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer." The double entendre being the rock musician oftentimes works on the same stage as the fighter, of course, punching away in the ring of life. Nils Lofgren is a veteran who has performed with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and so many others, working here with producer Bob Ezrin who helped create Pink Floyd's The Wall. As with any great artist, Ezrin brings in his various contacts which color the recordings he makes, insuring a product that is as much the producer's as it is Nils Lofgren's. Dick Wagner co-wrote the hits "Only Women Bleed" and "You And Me" with Alice Cooper…

It even looks like something classic, beyond its time or place of origin even as it was a clear product of both – one of Peter Saville's earliest and best designs, a transcription of a signal showing a star going nova, on a black embossed sleeve. If that were all Unknown Pleasures was, it wouldn't be discussed so much, but the ten songs inside, quite simply, are stone-cold landmarks, the whole album a monument to passion, energy, and cathartic despair. The quantum leap from the earliest thrashy singles to Unknown Pleasures can be heard through every note, with Martin Hannett's deservedly famous production – emphasizing space in the most revelatory way since the dawn of dub – as much a hallmark as the music itself.

After releasing a debut album that was considered perfect, packed with hits from beginning to end, the Cars faced an interesting dilemma on Candy-O. Should they make an exact replica and rake in the bucks? Or fool with the formula just enough to keep it interesting (while still emptying the tillers)? Working again with producer Roy Thomas Baker, the band wrote an almost entirely new batch of songs that captured the same pop highs as The Cars while sounding different in some important ways…

Victim of Love, released in 1979, is the thirteenth studio album release for Elton John. It is a disco album, released shortly after the peak of disco's popularity. It was not critically or commercially well-received, and is Elton John's third lowest charting album to date in the US, after 1986's Leather Jackets and 1985's Ice on Fir…

Rushed out less than nine months after the surprise success of Dire Straits' self-titled debut album, the group's sophomore effort, Communiqué, seemed little more than a carbon copy of its predecessor with less compelling material…

Victim of Love, released in 1979, is the thirteenth official album release for Elton John. It is a disco album, released shortly after the peak of disco's popularity…

Stormwatch is the album that they often call the third of the Tull folk rock trilogy and after Songs From The Wood and Heavy Horses (and their subsequent five star extended version in this series) it has a hard job to do…

Great news for people who love morbid, mordant, sci-fi-inflected synth music: Infiné Music label is reissuing Zed's (aka Bernard Szajner) awesome imaginary soundtrack LP Visions of Dune (1979). Created over eight days on a borrowed Oberheim sequencer and an Akaï four-track, the music here represents some of the deepest, most intense evocations of alien atmospheres ever waxed. It's a claustrophobic and expansive collection of dystopian tone poetry and ominous electro rock that will appeal to fans of Heldon, Magma, and first-half-of-the-'70s Tangerine Dream. Szajner, now 70, told The Vinyl Factory that he conceived a series of what he called “mental impressions of a character, a situation or a concept” from Frank Herbert’s novel.