Glove

This one-off collaboration between the Cure's Robert Smith and Siouxsie & the Banshees' Steven Severin resulted in an eccentric, and at times incompatible, mix of psychedelic sounds wrapped around alternative '80s pop. Writers Smith and Severin's more eccentric tendencies are as likely to evoke pictures of a carnival as a funereal march, but the backbone rests largely on tightly constructed tunes with occasional forays into the experimental. Jeanette Landray sings the majority of the tracks, while Smith takes the lead twice amongst a smattering of instrumentals. Standout tracks include the Middle Eastern-twinged "Orgy" and the more conventional "Mouth to Mouth." Smith's distinctive warbling on the first-class "Perfect Murder" takes the album directly into Cure territory, as do the instrumentals which could equally find a home on Seventeen Seconds…

Yet another in a string of late-career retrospectives, Steel Glove focuses on the early period of Accept's development into the second-greatest German metal band of all time. Tracks from each of the group's first four records are combined in this anthology covering the years of 1979-1993, in which Accept developed from amateurishly goofy hard rockers to Teutonic metal pioneers…