Although Steve Hackett had made several albums under his own name since his departure from Genesis, 1981's Cured was the closest thing yet to a true solo Hackett album. Having disbanded the group with whom he's recorded two successful solo albums – Spectral Mornings and Defector – Steve retained only keyboard player Nick Magnus to help out on this effort. Magnus played keyboards, Hackett handled guitar and bass, and the drums were provided by a drum machine. But the most noticeable change was in the vocals…
All right, he's made a record with his wife and a record with his pickup band where democracy is allegedly the conceit even if it never sounds that way, so he returns to a solo effort, making the most disjointed album he ever cut. There's a certain fascination to its fragmented nature, not just because it's decidedly on the softer side of things, but because his desire for homegrown eccentricity has been fused with his inclination for bombastic art rock à la Abbey Road…
Out of the Tunnel's Mouth is the 20th studio album by musician Steve Hackett. It is his first album on his new label Wolfwork after leaving his previous label Camino. The album was announced on 30 October 2009 for sale via his website and live shows…
The concept of this album is about the relation between human and the Wolf. Also important is the hours before dawn, because it's the time that the wolf are hunting and that Steve Hackett like to write his songs. It's a unique time to let things comes naturally without any distractions…
When Paul McCartney returned to the studio a year after his wife Linda's death, he wanted to cut loose and have a good time. He gathered a bunch of friends, most notably guitarist David Gilmour, with the intention of cutting a collection of rock & roll oldies with minimal rehearsal and a handful of takes. On the surface, that makes Run Devil Run like Choba B CCCP, but there are subtle differences that make Devil a far superior effort…
At its quietest moments, 2007's Memory Almost Full played like a coda to Paul McCartney's illustrious career; he seemed comfortable residing in the final act of his legend, happy to reflect and riff upon his achievements. Such measured meditation is largely absent from 2013's New, the first collection of original material he's released since 2007. New lives up to its title, finding McCartney eager, even anxious, to engage with modern music while simultaneously laying claim to the candied, intricate psychedelia of latter-day Beatles…
Although it ironically coincided with the compact disc format's slow but inexorable march toward likely extinction, the third millennium's first decade witnessed an incredible boom in CD reissues of obscure ‘70s hard rock bands; bands whose careers quickly floundered or never even took off due to any number of reasons, like the subject of this review, London's Steel Mill. Like many of these commercially failed entities, Steel Mill made the fatal mistake of attempting to partake in the relatively isolated worlds of both progressive and heavy rock, instead of committing to just one or the other, and so their sole LP, 1972's Green Eyed God, fell through the cracks of consumer tastes and wasn't even released in the U.K. until 1975, three years after the group's demise. Be that as it may, few heavy prog bands favored such a dramatic clash between their artier musical pretensions and more visceral instrumental instincts than this London quintet, resulting in fascinatingly schizophrenic numbers boasting as much inner city grime and bluster as they do pastoral purity and whimsy…
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London, England, in 1962. The first stable line-up consisted of Brian Jones (guitar, harmonica), Mick Jagger (lead vocals), Keith Richards (guitar, backing vocals), Bill Wyman (bass), Charlie Watts (drums), and Ian Stewart (piano)…
The downside to a success like Thriller is that it's nearly impossible to follow, but Michael Jackson approached Bad much the same way he approached Thriller – take the basic formula of the predecessor, expand it slightly, and move it outward. This meant that he moved deeper into hard rock, deeper into schmaltzy adult contemporary, deeper into hard dance – essentially taking each portion of Thriller to an extreme, while increasing the quotient of immaculate studiocraft. He wound up with a sleeker, slicker Thriller, which isn't a bad thing, but it's not a rousing success, either…
In June 2016, legendary guitarist Ritchie Blackmore made his much-anticipated return to rock music as Ritchie Blackmor' s Rainbow played three concerts in Europe, two in Germany and one in England. Recordings from the two German shows at Loreley and Bietigheim make up this live album Memories In Rock. The setlist, combining classic tracks from both Deep Purple and Rainbow, was exactly what the fans had wished for…