The Beatles E.p. Collection

The younger pop-influenced and tabloid-friendly Katherine Jenkins might have recently stolen her thunder, but Lesley Garrett was the first, and some would say most authentic, contemporary British female soprano to crossover to the mainstream. While she's recently gained more attention for her appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and Comic Relief Does Fame Academy, and her Classic FM radio show, The Very Best of Lesley Garrett is the chance to remind everyone of the hugely powerful vocals which propelled her from the English National Opera's principal soprano to chart-bothering operatic superstar.

How does an instant multimillion-selling album become an underrated minor masterpiece?

In most bands, there's someone who saves everything – the set lists, the fliers, the photos, the board tapes (or CDs), the T-shirts, and the minutiae that add up during a group's career. In the Beatles it was Ringo Starr, in the Velvet Underground it was Sterling Morrison, and while playing drums with Cheap Trick throughout most of their history, Bun E. Carlos was also the band's pack rat, keeping track of the group's artifacts and holding onto copies of their demos and outtakes. Carlos helped annotate and provided the tapes for many of the tracks on The Epic Archive, Vol. 1, a collection of odds and ends from Cheap Trick's peak creative period of 1975 to 1979. The set opens with three songs from a demo the band cut at Memphis' Ardent Recording in 1975 (power pop devotees can pause to wonder if they bumped into Alex Chilton, who was recording Big Star's 3rd that same year), while also delivering a handful of session outtakes and demos, live tracks from a 1977 gig at the Whisky, a clumsy single edit of "Ain't That a Shame" from At Budokan, rude alternate versions of "I Dig Go-Go Girls" and "Surrender," and three tracks from their 1979 return to Budokan.

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry - Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad (2016) {Cooking Vinyl COOKCD623}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 271 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 102 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 156 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Billy Bragg / Cooking Vinyl | COOKCD623
Acoustic / Folk / Blues / Americana

In March 2016 Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, guitars in hand, boarded a Los Angeles-bound train at Chicago’s Union Station looking to reconnect with the culture of American railroad travel and the music it inspired. Winding along 2,728 miles of track over four days, the pair recorded classic railroad songs in waiting rooms and at trackside while the train paused to pick up passengers.