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Just as the title implies, Raw is Bobby Rush at his most elemental: a man, his acoustic guitar, and his foot stamping out a beat on an amplified board. A little harmonica now and then, and a Dobro played with a bottleneck slide on the rollicking "Glad to Get You Back," but that's it for ornamentation. Although most of 13 songs are Rush originals, he also essays three standards, Larry Williams' early rock classic "Boney Maroney," Muddy Waters' "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl," and – fearlessly – "Howlin' Wolf" itself, which he slows down into a funereal dirge. Rush calls his music "folk funk," but in reality, Rush is the modern equivalent of the first country bluesmen, before the moves to Memphis and Chicago added full-band arrangements and electricity. But Rush isn't a hidebound traditionalist attempting to resurrect a past form for its own sake; Raw crackles with the energy of a musician who knows that he's working in the style that best suits his own personal gifts. This is a hundred times more listenable than yet another blues band plodding through a set of tenth-generation rewrites of "Sweet Home Chicago," and could well be the blues recording of 2007.

The only real downside of this record is its length. But everyone is ON, right on, and the energy is remarkable. For Kaiser fans this will be a revelation. He's channeling Cosey, McLaughlin, and Sharrock (each of whom shaped Miles's sound from this period), but also doing his own Kaiser-effects. And they don't sound out of place! Smith sounds much closer to Miles than I would have expected. This isn't a bad thing of course. The other players here are fantastic, too, especially the bass clarinetist Oluyemi Thomas. John Medeski, the ROVA quartet, Greg Goodman, and Nels Cline are also here. It's a fine group of musicians lovingly indulging in the many sounds of Miles's 1970–1975 performances.

Released in 1969 to an almost total lack of critical acclaim or consumer interest, the Velvet Underground's third album may well be the finest record of the band's career. Without the sonic terrorism of The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat or the ill-conceived commercial concessions that marred Loaded, the album's songs are free to stand on their own merit…

VU features tracks recorded mostly between THE VELVET UNDERGROUND and LOADED which were never released until they were rediscovered in the 80's.
One of two volumes of previously unreleased Velvets tunes, VU consists of songs that were discovered in the early-'80s when preparations were being made for reissue of the band's first three records. A few of the songs ("I Can't Stand It," "Lisa Says," "Ocean") can be heard elsewhere in different versions, but most had never seen the light of day before in any form. Nine of the ten cuts feature the celebrated 1969 version of the band, with Reed, Tucker, Morrison and Yule, while "Temptation Inside Your Heart" is a Cale-era gem from 1968…

Sometimes referred to as "VU 2", ANOTHER VIEW is a second collection of previously unreleased Velvet Underground recordings.
ANOTHER VIEW works as that one final glimpse at the Velvet Underground– another insight into the various aspects that made the band great, and another pang of regret that they were never given their due in their time…

Collection includes: A Dead Horse (1989); Drunk With Passion (1991); This Is How It Feels (1993); Pure (1994).