Lauren Landish Club X

This aptly titled release from '80s art rockers and Talking Heads side project Tom Tom Club is indeed good, bad, and funky. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz have explored a stunning amount of musical styles within the confines of this album, with every song sounding like it was produced by a different group. The use of a variety of vocalists, including Weymouth, who at times sounds like a 16-year-old Japanese girl instead of her more mature self, as well as Mystic Bowie and Charles Pettigrew only seems to heighten the variety of sounds offered. The lyrics are simple, yet clever, and laid over a variety of sampled tracks, scratching, and other turntablism and live instrumentation. The resulting sound ranges from dub to dance-pop to spacy funk. The variety does allow for some unevenness, however, though duds like the repetitive and spare "Time to Bounce" are more than balanced by gems like "Happiness Can't Buy Money" and the instrumental cleverness of "Lesbians by the Lake," among others.

Although as one rock critic points out "the blood of Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Tull, Pink Floyd and others floods their veins", Dead Heroes Club manage to achieve an original and inventive approach to their music. DHC offer modern melodic and passionate music & songs that deal with themes rooted in the modern world.
Irish outfit Dead Heroes Club was formed sometime after the millenium, when Gerry McGerigal (guitars, vocals), Liam Campbell (vocals, guitars) and Mickey Gallagher (drums, percussion) decided to form a band of their own. They all had previous experience in different bands, and all of them had become tired of playing only plain mainstream-oriented pop and rock music - and all shared a passion for progressive rock from the 70's and 80's…

Life was a long time coming. Culture Club began work on a reunion album in 2014, recording a bunch of tracks with Youth, but that project was scrapped by 2016. Instead, the group decided to retain some of the songs, pluck a few tunes originally planned for a Boy George solo record, add some new cuts, and record all of them as Life, their first album in nearly 20 years. Two decades is a long time and that distance seems even greater thanks to how Culture Club faded after 1983's Colour by Numbers, scoring some hits while George and the rest of the crew figured out how to navigate their seismic international fame. The remarkable thing about Life is how doubt never seems to be part of their equation, either in the composition or the recording.