Out of The Past 1998

Well into his 30th year of recording, Eric Andersen picks up where his 1989 masterpiece Ghosts upon the Road left off. His 15th album was eight years in the making, pieced together from collaborations with Rick Danko, Richard Thompson, Benmont Tench, Howie Epstein, and Bob Dylan bassist Tony Garnier. It demonstrates the virtues of patient songwriting in sensual love lyrics, sprawling wanderer's laments, and Beat-poetry-inspired litanies of sins and ecstasies. "He thought of his mother / He thought of the automat / The space shuttle / Jersey cows and poison lollipops / As the dry heaves rose in his chest," he intones over a smoky, funky groove. Of all the folksingers to find their way out of the '60s, only Dylan and Joni Mitchell have remained as restless and provocative as Andersen. His imagination has grown ever more sure, his voice has become an unearthly, stately whisper, and his songs are still shapes by a singular, exceptional artistic will.

"Out Of The Long Dark" is the last album of the second full- fledged stable lie-up Nucleus group (one that had started with Under The Sun) and we're still finding keyboardist Geoff Castle and drummer Roger Sellers, and returning to the fold, woodwind player Brian Smith. Only bassist Billy Kristian is new, replacing the usual Sutton.
"Old Heartland" was only the second album under his own name proper (no link with Nucleus) after 1971's Belladonna, but if his first try was much in the group's soundscapes, "Old Heartland" steps away from it. The album is broken down in two parts, the Third Stream suite and the shorter tracks on the flipside, which still features some Nucleus pillars like Geoff Castle and John Marshall and has Colosseum's Hiseman engineering it on the Abbey Road studios.

After being the leader of Harmonia (post Neu! project), the legendary krautrocker Klaus Dinger formed La! Neu? This mid 90's musical excursion is an obvious reference to Neu! and La Düsseldorf. The group released a few albums for Captain Trip Records. Klaus Dinger's La! Neu? practice a positive, pulsating and improvised kraut electronica.
After the brief intro, in which Klaus Dinger's La! Neu? work themselves up into a kind of punk-meets-world music lather courtesy of Bluepoint Underground, Year of the Tiger settles into more familiar territory. The two remaining tracks combine for over an hour of piano and sampler noodling by Dinger cohorts Rembrandt Lensink and Rudiger Elze - Dinger's own drum work is also featured…

This box set is the ultimate pop collection, 43 albums featuring many of the biggest hits performed on the legendary pop music chart BBC TV programme Top of the Pops, which ran for a record shattering 42 years from January 1964 to July 2006! The show totalled an amazing 2205 episodes and at its peak attracted 15 million viewers per week! This complete set features a total of 875 tracks, including over 600 top ten hits and over 150 number one's!

With their 1998 comeback disc, The Last Wave of Summer – their first album of new material since 1984's Twentieth Century – Aussie rock legends Cold Chisel proved that they still had "the stuff." A tad shy of the standard of their heyday albums of the '70s and '80s, Summer is still formidable rock & roll. As the band's first release in the CD age and, at just under an hour running time, LWOS was considerably longer than their previous studio albums. Hence the makeup is a little different. There is more down-tempo and lighter fare here, which shifts the feel from the usual short sharp-shock of a Chisel disc to a quite different type of listening experience.

Which brings us to Norwegian Grammy-winning pianist and composer Wesseltoft's latest for his own Jazzland label. Halfway between the lounge lizard irony of Dimitri from Paris and the lyrical quartet settings of Dave Brubeck or the acoustic Herbie Hancock, Sharing is one of those mould-breaking sets that tend to outlast the vagaries of musical fashion.

The Lemon Pipers were somewhat of an anomaly in the 1960s bubblegum community because the group actually had creative aspirations. Unfortunately, their high-water mark came with their first single, the infectious "Green Tambourine" (written by the team of Paul Leka and Shelley Pinz), which hit the number one spot on the pop charts in 1968. The follow-up singles (also written by Leka and Pinz) "Rice Is Nice" and "Jelly Jungle" added in interesting orchestrated Baroque pop elements, but ultimately failed to attract much attention. This compilation from Camden Records includes the Lemon Pipers' only two albums, Green Tambourine and Jungle Marmalade, and is the most complete single-disc collection of the group available (the Lemon Pipers recorded 26 tracks in their short history, and 20 of them are here).

Philippe Herreweghe and the Choeur et Orchestre du Collegium Vocale 1998 recording of Purcell's celebratory masterpiece may be more a Vivat! Radieuse Cecile, Vivat! than Hail, Bright Cecilia, but it is still one of the all-time great recordings of the work. Herreweghe more than almost any other conductor of the past 20 years captures the heights and depths of the music.