The Minute I Saw You

This exemplary four-disc box takes the high road, attempting nothing less than an honest reconstruction of the Who's stormy, adventurous, uneven pilgrimage. While offering an evenhanded cross-section of single hits and classic album tracks, 30 Years garnishes the expected high points with B-sides, alternate and live versions of familiar tracks, and the quartet's earliest singles as the High Numbers…

Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat (after bands from Liverpool and nearby areas beside the River Mersey) is a pop and rock music genre that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll (mainly Chuck Berry guitar style and the midtempo beat of artists like Buddy Holly), doo-wop, skiffle and R&B. The genre provided many of the bands responsible for the British Invasion of the American pop charts starting in 1964, and provided the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, including the format of the rock group around lead, rhythm and bass guitars with drums. The Beat Of The Pops - excellent selection of beat tracks.

Everybody loves a good ol’ dumping on bedroom projects. Ain’t nuthin like tearin’ instrudjental solo guitarists a new one for how generic their riffs are, and repeating for the thousandth time that soloing dost not the songwriting maketh (think, djenter, think!). On the flipside though, whenever a solo artist does come out with something worthwhile, it becomes all the more impressive. Enter The Vicious Head Society, a solo project by Graham Keane. Now to call this an actual solo project may be a bit of a stretch given the plethora of session musicians featured on this, but all the writing and composing is done by Keane. This band has been on my radar for a while since they were featured on a Reddit series for underrated prog metal artists, so I was excited to finally have an excuse to listen to them as I saw that they had a new one coming up. So the perennial question is of course, does it live up to my own personal hype?

California Dreamin' reminds us that '60s pop paragons The Mamas & The Papas had an appealing new sound, made some terrific records, and left behind a legacy that lives on more than 35 years after they called it quits. This hour-long documentary, originally aired on PBS, has all the standard elements of the genre: interviews (including some from 2004 and '05 with surviving members Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty, as well as 1986 recollections by John Phillips, who died in '01, and a few brief words from Cass Elliot, who passed away in '74), photos, home movies, and a generous helping of music clips…