The recorded legacy of Elvis Presley continues to be discovered by new generations that never saw him or heard him perform live. It's hard to appreciate that he started so much of what we take for granted now in popular music. Until 1956, the teenagers of suburban America, and the rest of the world, had to endure ditties by Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como but everything was about to be tossed upside down. On January 28 on a cold night in New York, Elvis took America by storm as he appeared on CBS-TV's Stage Show hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. On February 4 for his second appearance he sang a song that literally changed the world of popular music "Heartbreak Hotel". Its unique sound and style literally blew everything before it away while at the same time inducing the blueprint for everything that was to come; by April, it would be #1 on Billboard.
With Destroy Erase Improve, Meshuggah shattered any preconceived notions about what death, thrash, and prog metal could be with one astoundingly accurate, calculated blow. The Swedish outfit managed to surpass their startlingly original, if relatively immature debut, Contradictions Collapse, with a record so pure in concept and execution, it borders on genius. Lyrical themes visualize the integration of machines with organisms as humanity's next logical evolutionary step, while the music backing it up is mind-bogglingly technical, polyrhythmic math metal - the work of highly skilled men with powerful instruments. While the idea looks unwieldy on paper, Meshuggah handles it with a balance of raw guts and sheer brainpower, weaving hardcore-style shouts amongst deceptively (and deviously) simple staccato guitar riffs and insanely precise drumming - often with all three components acting in different time signatures…
Despite the bald-faced references to bootlegs in the title, this is a totally legit four-CD box set release of live 1967-1970 Doors from numerous shows, all of it previously unissued…
Of all the few truly innovative bands in the realm of extreme metal, few are as exciting to follow from a chronological standpoint as Napalm Death. Beginning with their roots in the mid-'80s as a mutated hardcore punk band with a tendency to detune their guitars, growl their vocals, and play at apocalyptic levels of intensity, the band soon went through many phases that have been nearly as influential: by the late '80s they were the world's definitive grindcore band; at the dawn of the '90s they integrated the complexities of death metal into their grindcore; then in the early '90s they began experimenting with different mutations of post-grindcore metal; and finally in the late '90s they began playing a unique style of metal that blended together the best elements of grindcore, death metal, and mainstream metal…
There was a time when you could walk into your average record store and find the singles section by spotting the big block of black rows. These rows signaled the whereabouts of the Ds and tended to eat up a disproportionate space of the singles section. In 2004, the Mute label condensed all of these releases into Remixes 81-04, which itself was ironically (or fittingly) presented in multiple versions. This particular version is a triple-disc set that attempts to function as a representative sampling of Depeche Mode's innumerable remixes. It does an admirable job, making a point to highlight glorified extended versions and radical reworkings alike.