Savvy From May 2016

Despite benefiting from the expert assistance of legendary producer Martin Birch (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, later Iron Maiden) Whitesnake's early studio albums all tended to sound unexplainably flat. Their fourth effort, 1980's Ready an' Willing, was no exception, but it did make up for this somewhat with solid songwriting…

Originally, Café Del Mar was a bar located in Sant Antoni de Portmany, a town on the western coast of Ibiza. The collections of the music played at the bar were first sold on cassette at the end of the 1980s. In 1994, the first official "Café del Mar" CD was released on React.
The best Cafe Del Mar albums date mostly from DJ Jose Padilla's time as curator of the series (1994-1999) and they remain essential snapshots of warm, tech-savvy, post-dance chillout music… an oasis of old-school ambient, warm Arabian strings, liquid dub, Latin melodies, nu jazz and lounge. Each is spread over a wide, blissed-out canvas that's as bright as a sunny day.

Where Pyromania had set the standard for polished, catchy pop-metal, Hysteria only upped the ante. Pyromania's slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sellout (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit). But Def Leppard's music had always employed big, anthemic hooks, and few of the pop-metal bands who had hit the charts in the wake of Pyromania could compete with Leppard's sense of craft; certainly none had the pop songwriting savvy to produce seven chart singles from the same album, as the stunningly consistent Hysteria did…