Welcome to the Planet is the next studio album by Big Big Train and comes six months after the release of the band’s critically acclaimed top 40 album ‘Common Ground.
Mostly Other People Do the Killing (yes, that's the name of the group) are mainly inspired by towns or villages in the state of Pennsylvania, and the music of Ornette Coleman. This is evident when you look at the cover art of this CD, a direct reference to Coleman's legendary album This Is Our Music. Nicely dressed young men in suits and ties, MOPDTK look only slightly like mad jazz pioneers, but in fact they seize the precepts of Coleman and are making inspired new music beyond others in their peer group. Moosic is also the name of a city in Pennsylvania, and there are others to which the band dedicates these selections. The stars of the group are trumpeter Peter Evans and saxophonist Jon Irabagon, both leaders in their own right and contributing exponentially to the brash soul and extroverted solos that identify the group sound.
Double disc reissue collection of their three demo releases and their lone full length release "From Within" (1994). All 26 tracks have been remastered for this collection. This compilation features all new artwork, extensive liner notes, full lyrics, and enhanced live concert footage.
Aaron Randall advises his listeners to prepare for attack, but by then the battle has already commenced, as guitarists Jeff Waters and Goldberg roll out the usual power chords and the rhythm section of Wayne Darley and Mike Mangini piledrive every beat. Annihilator bring a certain efficiency to garden-variety speed metal, never wasting time, which, in a genre defined by excess, gives them a certain elegance.
Retro-rock was once thought of primarily as merely a bunch of shtick. But with the sound of a good old-fashioned rock band letting it rip in the studio (without a hint of ProTools foolery) becoming increasingly harder to come by during the early 21st century, retro-rock may be looked upon in a different light. Take for instance, Bigelf. If you take a gander inside the 2007 reissue of their 2003 release, Hex, you'll see four impressively hairy gentleman, striking a pose (in front of a mammoth cross, no less) straight off the back cover of an early-'70s Black Sabbath record. As a result, it may be tempting to pass off Bigelf as one of the countless doom metal bands that have made a career out of merely copying Master of Reality…
Why aren't there more recordings like Fly Away Little Bird? Perhaps it's because there aren't more musicians of this stature. The studio reunion of the legendarily experimental Jimmy Giuffre 3 in 1992 was reissued in 2002 on the French Sunnyside label and is a radical departure from anything the trio had done in the past. These studio apparitions of the band are their most seamlessly accessible while being wildly exploratory. In addition to the consummate improvisations and compositions by Giuffre (title track, a redone "Tumbleweed"), the tender meditations by Steve Swallow ("Fits" and "Starts"), and the bottom-register contrapuntal improves by Paul Bley ("Qualude"), this is a trio recording that uses standards such as "Lover Man," a radically and gorgeously reworked "I Can't Get Started," "Sweet and Lovely," and "All the Things You Are" to state hidden textural possibilities inside chromatic harmony. There is never the notion of restraint in the slow, easy, and proactive way these compositions are approached.