Alex Band

Anyone familiar with the work of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band knows the group had an intriguing penchant for performing odd cover versions from all different areas of popular music. This 1976 album allowed the group to give full vent to this obsession: three of the tracks are band originals, but the rest are a series of covers that hit everything from Irving Berlin to the Osmonds to Alice Cooper. The resulting album has a thrown-together feel that keeps if from cohering properly, but still manages to be a worthwhile listen thanks to a combination of spirited performances and interesting arrangements.

This 1979 outing saw Alex Harvey returning to the rock music world for what would be his final album. It's no big surprise that The Mafia Stole My Guitar sounds a lot like the Sensational Alex Harvey Band: the music remains the same unusual but intriguing blend of prog ambition and punk energy and it also contains a few of Harvey's trademark oddball cover versions (example: his surprisingly straight-faced cabaret version of "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody"). What is a surprise is how consistent The Mafia Stole My Guitar is, especially in light of the uneven final albums of his last band.

Reveal reunites Wiening once again with her longtime working band: tenor saxophonist Rich Perry, pianist Glenn Zaleski, guitarist Alex Goodman, and bassist Johannes Felscher. They are joined on three tracks by esteemed trumpeter and Greenleaf founder Dave Douglas, a fervent supporter throughout Wiening’s career. Multi-faceted and intriguing, moving and exhilarating, the album is ultimately exactly what the title promises: a revelation.

Whoever thought that the surface obsession of glam rock never met the loopy idealism of the hippie movement – at least in the musical realm – has obviously never heard the appropriately titled The Impossible Dream. Recorded, again, appropriately, as the Age of Aquarius was in full transition to the age of the Spiders From Mars and, later, the me decade, The Impossible Dream manages to capture that cultural DMZ in an operatic blast of pub rock-based pomp without circumstance. Harvey is the bacchanalian ringleader, marshalling the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's considerable, flexible resources to the task at hand and providing a damn good listen in the process.

Although the Sensational Alex Harvey Band showed off plenty of sonic firepower on studio outings like Next and Tomorrow Belongs to Me, they were always at their most ferocious in the concert arena. As a result, Live is an especially rousing and engaging addition to the group's catalog. Since the set list is almost entirely composed of time-tested favorites, it also one of their most consistent albums. The album's contents are taken from a single night's performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, and this gives it a sonic coherence that other live albums rarely capture. A totally committed performance from the band seals the album's appeal with its thrilling combination of heavy metal bombast and tight arrangements that carefully deploy keyboard shadings to flesh out the guitar-heavy sound.