The 5 AM Miracle

To the outside observer, Looking Glass were one of the luckiest bands to come up during the early '70s – and doubly so, coming out of New Jersey in 1972 with a number one hit, three years before anyone was thinking about Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, and getting radio play on the song that has carried over into the oldies and '70s nostalgia boom over the decades since. Ironically, the bandmembers were never entirely happy with either the hit or the nature of the success that it brought them, mostly because it didn't represent what Looking Glass actually sounded like.

This entry into the Japan-only Premium Best series highlights the recordings of composer/performer Laura Nyro. Unlike other single-CD North American compilations, this 16-track disc gives sufficient time to her tragically underappreciated post-Smile recordings. Several of these titles are not even available on CD in the States, which is perhaps correlated to the seeming lack of interest. There are actually numerous advantages to this collection – not the least of which is the artist-sensitive track list. Presumably the Premium Best series is aimed at the casual enthusiast, as the hardcore collector would either already own the contents or buy it anyway if they were a completist. By including seminal album sides such as the imperially haunting "New York Tendaberry" and "Upstairs by a Chinese Lamp," a more accurate overview of Nyro's career is presented here.

Another in the long line of soundtracks by Tangerine Dream is actually one of the strongest in concept for any film they have done. The movie has a high degree of tension and the score by T.D. does just the trick. They use mostly hard driving sequencer rhythms to maintain the tension of the film. Listeners will find that this is nearly how all of the music is composed. There is very little melody within the structures of the music. But even with this lacking, the score is very well suited and very listenable. A couple of nonsequencer tracks are also on the album and break up the hard rhythms pieces.

Roger Waters' tours of the U.S. during the summers of 1999 and 2000 were a pleasant surprise, since the reclusive rocker had not toured since 1987. In his liner notes to this two-CD set drawn from those performances, Waters does not shy away from discussing his antipathy to big concert venues. But he makes a distinction between stadiums and arenas, and he also notes that he found himself becoming more comfortable in the role of a frontman. This more personable Roger Waters isn't what comes across on the album, but the closer relationship he perceives to his audience is nevertheless palpable. As the man who wrote Pink Floyd's lyrics, he is far more concerned with their meaning than his old bandmates, and his singing is emphasized without robbing the music of its magisterial power. In fact, with a band boasting several guitarists to make up for the lack of David Gilmour, Waters effectively re-creates the sound of his Pink Floyd work, which dominates the set list…

Limited 29 CD box set. From their debut Just Ear-rings from 1965 till the tribute to their hometown The Hague from 2015 - all 26 studio albums by Holland's most legendary rock band are collected in a monumental box Complete Studio Recordings, augmented with no less than three CD's full of non-album tracks…