Flowers Miku

This album is a Rachmaninoff piano duo album by Miku Omine, who has made Rachmaninoff his life's work and whose performances and album are highly acclaimed, and Takako Takahashi, who won 5th place at the 12th International Chopin Piano Competition. In a live recording held at Tokyo Bunka Kaikan on October 20, 2023, two suites by Rachmaninoff, which can be said to be the pinnacle of two-piano works, and a suite of Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty" arranged by Rachmaninoff for duet were recorded.

Brandon Flowers' solo debut, 2010's Flamingo, seemed to make the case that the line between a Killers album and a Flowers album was blurry at best. Largely a continuation of the anthemic Springsteen-influenced sound of the Killers' 2006 effort Sam's Town, Flamingo also revealed Flowers' inclination toward glossy, synth-heavy, '80s adult-contemporary productions. For his sophomore solo outing, 2015's The Desired Effect, the line between the man and his band begins to sharpen. Produced by Ariel Rechtshaid (Madonna, Vampire Weekend, HAIM), the album finally finds Flowers achieving an unmistakable sound of his own, with the kind of effortless sophistication that a seasoned musician hopes for.

Both of Young Flowers' studio albums (1968's Blomsterpistolen and 1969's No. 2) are included in their entirety on this two-CD compilation, which also has a 1967 non-LP single and the three songs they contributed to the 1970 Quiet Days in Clichy soundtrack, as well as three live September 1969 recordings. With English-language liner notes, it's the definite collection of this Danish psychedelic group. As the back cover points out, they were "the first Danish hippy band, the first home-grown rock band to sing in Danish (though the majority of their recordings were in English), and the first to play the States." These are substantial achievements, so it makes a reviewer feel like a party pooper to point out that in many respects, they were a run-of-the-mill late-'60s act. Their debts to Jimi Hendrix and Cream, in both the song structures and the guitar distortion…

Most of the material from both of the late-'60s albums by this Danish group was combined into one release on this 1997 CD reissue. It shows a band extremely influenced by heavy psychedelic blues-rock in general, and by Jimi Hendrix and Cream in particular, though without the songwriting excellence that those two acts often brought to their recordings. Blomsterpistolen in particular has some of the surface trappings of late-'60s records featuring Hendrix and Clapton in the squealing distorted guitars, phasing, and overall transmutation of the blues to a hard rock format. The opening "Overture - Take Warning" alone sounds like it's determined to stretch the white noise effects that Hendrix used to open songs with a flourish to full-track length…