The.burning.1981

Wishbone Ash, one of Britain's most enduring and best-loved rock acts, are to release a comprehensive deluxe 30 CD box set, The Vintage Years, through Madfish. Loaded with rarities, memorabilia, a new interview and a lavish 156-page hardback book, a third of this new collection features previously unheard & unreleased material. The contents of The Vintage Years box set include: Brand new cover artwork designed by Colin Elgie, the original designer behind the award-winning Live Dates sleeve artwork. All 16 studio albums, featuring bonus material including rare album outtakes, B-sides and 12 previously unreleased studio tracks, presented in mini-gatefold sleeves. Three of the 16 albums are currently out of print on CD from I. R. S. : Nouveau Calls, Here to Hear and Strange Affair.

Hardware is the fifth album by the Swiss hard rock band Krokus. It did not match the success of their previous album, Metal Rendez-vous, going only Gold in Switzerland. However, the album entered the charts in the US, UK and other European countries…

John Hammond has kept the blues flame burning steadily for over three decades. His interpretations of songs from the traditional blues repertoire, whether played Delta-style solo acoustic, or with a citified electric band, ring with passion, power, and commitment. On this 1981 album, he is accompanied on the band tracks by a topshelf New York group, including bassist Sherman Holmes and drummer Charles Otis.

Swedish Thrashers F.K.Ü. are back with their fifth album 1981 and it’s a doozie, chock full of their brand of classic ’80s Thrash mixed with the full on gruesomeness of their favourite classic horror movies. The 15 tracks on here are fast and furious and before you know it you are transferred back to the ’80s and feeling like you are about to be butchered by some freak in a hockey mask.

Tangerine Dream scored director Michael Mann's film debut, Thief (released as "Violent Streets" outside of the U.S. market), adding their patented pulses, blips and whooshes to the film's highly stylized visual scenes. While TD's electronic music is a natural fit for soundtracks, it doesn't bring out the best in the band; for the most part, this soundtrack contains swatches of a larger canvas, building up a small head of steam in the span of four or five minutes but not raising the musical discussion above the level of mere mechanical chitchat. Most of the songs follow a set pattern, with Chris Franke slurring his sequencers under a thin fog of synthesizers, topped by a piercing and pithy melody. An engaging melody on "Beach Theme" makes it one of the album's better tracks, while "Trap Feeling" has a delicacy that compares favorably to Brian Eno's Music for Films…

The collection features seven of the band's classic albums: 1974's Todd Rundgren's Utopia , 1975's Another Live , 1977's Ra and Oops! Wrong Planet , 1979's Adventures in Utopia , 1980's Deface the Music and 1982's Swing to the Right . It also includes 15 bonus tracks, plus new written commentary from Rundgren, Wilcox, Sultan and Powell.

The title of Rarities 1971-2003 is a little misleading, as is the cover photo of the Stones in prime late-'70s form: both suggest that this long-awaited trawl through the Rolling Stones vaults, released in conjunction with Starbucks' Hear Music label but available in all conventional retail outlets, will be heavy on '70s material. That's certainly not the case. There are just three '70s cuts here, actually – four if you count the live "Mannish Boy," which appeared on the 1977 double live album Love You Live and the 1981 odds-n-sods collection Sucking in the Seventies, which was reissued earlier in 2005, the same year Rarities 1971-2003 came out…