Greg Lake 5x Japanese Limited Reissued Shm CD '2010 (1981 2003) RE UP

Metallica formed in 1981 by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. The duo first met through an ad in a Los Angeles-based music newspaper…

The Alan Parsons Project is a "project" of acclaimed English producer Alan Parsons, best known for his works as an engineer with with names such as the Beatles (Abbey Road, the Get Back roofttop concert) and Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, Atom Heart Mother). Along with songwriter Eric Woolfson, Parsons created a series of 10 (and counting) albums of progressive rock, employing a rotating cast of session musicians to do most of the performing (Parsons does play keyboard and sings on some tracks.). He creates the concept, writes some of the music and hires the artists, while Woolfson writes the lyrics, some of the music and sings on many tracks.
36 tracks are collected on this expansive compilation album from these prog rockers, which is a neat way to review their impressive career.

Popular English progressive rock group formed by members of The Nice (Keith Emerson), King Crimson (Greg Lake) and Atomic Rooster (Carl Palmer). The band are notable for their classical and jazz influenced compositions, virtuoso musicianship and over-the-top live performances.

Okie is the third studio album by J. J. Cale, released in 1974. Several songs from the album were later covered by other artists, including "I Got the Same Old Blues", by Eric Clapton, Captain Beefheart, Bobby Bland, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bryan Ferry; "Anyway the Wind Blows", by Brother Phelps in 1995 and Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings in 1999; and "Cajun Moon", by Herbie Mann on his 1976 album Surprises with vocals by Cissy Houston, by Poco on their album Cowboys & Englishmen, and by Randy Crawford in Naked and True (1995). "I'd Like to Love You, Baby" was covered by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in 2003, appearing on their 2009 album, The Live Anthology.

At a time when pop was dominated by dance music and pop-metal, Guns N' Roses brought raw, ugly rock & roll crashing back into the charts. They were not nice boys; nice boys don't play rock & roll. They were ugly, misogynistic, and violent; they were also funny, vulnerable, and occasionally sensitive, as their breakthrough hit, "Sweet Child O' Mine," showed. While Slash and Izzy Stradlin ferociously spit out dueling guitar riffs worthy of Aerosmith or the Stones, Axl Rose screeched out his tales of sex, drugs, and apathy in the big city…

J.J. Cale drifts toward a more pop approach on this album, starting with the lead-off track, "City Girls," which could almost but not quite be a hit single. The usual blues and country shuffle approach is in effect, but Audie Ashworth's production is unusually sharp, the playing has more bite than usual, and Cale, whose vocals are for the most part up in the mix, sounds more engaged. It's not clear, however, that this is an improvement over his usual laidback approach, and, in any case, it shouldn't be over-emphasized – this is still a J.J. Cale album, with its cantering tempos and single-note guitar runs. It's just that, when you have a style as defined as Cale's, little movements in style loom larger.

When Udo Dirkschneider sang lead with the West German metal band Accept, it was clear that AC/DC's Bon Scott was his primary influence. And the headbanger took his love of Scott with him when he departed Accept and formed his own band, Udo, in 1987. Though not as strong as his work with Accept, Faceless World is a decent album that employs mildly gothic imagery at times. Not content to simply crank up the volume and hit us with power chords, Dirkschneider and friends make melody a priority on "System of Life," "Stranger," "Blitz of Lightning" and other songs on this exuberant CD. Faceless World may not be Balls to the Wall (one of Accept's best releases), but it isn't anything to be ashamed of either. Who could have predicted that only three year's after Faceless World came out, this type of rock would have lost so much ground to alternative rock?

J.J. Cale's debut album, Naturally, was recorded after Eric Clapton made "After Midnight" a huge success. Instead of following Slowhand's cue and constructing a slick blues-rock album, Cale recruited a number of his Oklahoma friends and made a laid-back country-rock record that firmly established his distinctive, relaxed style. Cale included a new version of "After Midnight" on the album, but the true meat of the record lay in songs like "Crazy Mama," which became a hit single, and "Call Me the Breeze," which Lynyrd Skynyrd later covered. On these songs and many others on Naturally, Cale effortlessly captured a lazy, rolling boogie that contradicted all the commercial styles of boogie, blues, and country-rock at the time. Where his contemporaries concentrated on solos, Cale worked the song and its rhythm, and the result was a pleasant, engaging album that was in no danger of raising anybody's temperature.

Voyage is the ninth and final studio album by Swedish group ABBA, released on 5 November 2021. It is the group's first album of new material in 40 years following The Visitors (1981), and contains 10 songs all composed by ABBA's songwriters, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. The album was supported by a double A-sided single release, "I Still Have Faith in You" and "Don't Shut Me Down", released alongside the album announcement on 2 September 2021. A digital concert residency, also called ABBA Voyage, will take place in London beginning May of 2022.