British heavy metal legends Saxon release a brilliant cover album with the appropriate name Inspirations. Eleven brand new tracks that deliver superb rock classics that influenced Biff Byford & his band. From the melodic paperback writer from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix Stone Free, Saxon show their love and appreciation with their tribute, which are sometimes rough but always loyal to the original song. Constant focus was on the idea of the old school in which they worked with Marshall Cabs, Marshall Amps and a real drums. The whole thing was produced by Biff Byford with Jacky Lehmann, who accompanied and mixed the recordings.
There are two ways to look at keyboardist Roger Powell's debut album, Cosmic Furnace. It is either a visionary work as one of the first rock albums recorded entirely on synthesizer, or it's a prog rock artifact for that very reason. The facts tend support the former – it is based on the ARP synthesizer, which was uncommon for 1973 – but the music itself tends to support the latter, since it's a bunch of spacy, vaguely spooky and mystical art-rock that functions primarily as atmosphere, not as structured compositions. Each of the six cuts establishes its mood immediately and then meanders for upward of eight minutes, never really going anywhere, but treading that same patch of ground rather effectively. In other words, it's not a lost classic – not even for devoted fans of Powell's later group Utopia – but for fans of synths and '70s art-rock, it's a reasonably interesting footnote to electronic rock history.
Here is a portal to a vast and relatively unknown world, the Japanese cyber-occult underground media scene of the early 1990s; our guide is the late Henry Kawahara, a media artist and electronic music producer whose expansive and visionary conception of digital technology merged with a desire to break free of the constraints of mere rationality. This collection, the first-ever archival release of his work, is drawn from recordings released during the period 1991-1996, an exceptionally fertile time for Kawahara. Originally released on CD by a few Japanese independent labels including Hachiman Publishing, a cyber-occult/new-age book specialist, the releases were available mainly in book stores, so this sumptuous and prescient music has remained relatively unknown…
Italy’s finest export SWINGROWERS are back with their fourth album Hybrid. Swingrowers are an accomplished four-piece band from Palermo, Sicily. Made up of Loredana Grimaudo (singer, songwriter), Roberto Costa aka Pisk (DJ, producer), Alessio Costagliola (guitarist, composer), and Ciro Pusateri (saxophonist, composer). The band fuse a multitude of genres from Jazz to hip-hop, electronica to gypsy-swing, and have seen (or heard!) their sound has steadily evolved since their debut into unique electro swing and vintage-inspired pop. They are noted for their irreverent style, which blends the freshness of dance music, with the warm influences of swing from the 20s to 50s.
Belfast-born, London-based duo Bicep (Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson) release their hotly anticipated second album, “Isles”, on 22 January 2021 via Ninja Tune.
Given the disappointing sales of the previous two All-Starr Band live albums, Ringo's star wasn't bright enough to get this release out on a major label or even a conventional label. As a stopgap, it was available only in Blockbuster Music stores for a brief time – at the rock-bottom bargain price of 5.99 dollars – and further volumes were not forthcoming. A shame, actually, for this was the best of the three All-Starr albums up to that point, representing what was probably Ringo's finest all-around group of the 1990s.