Coming Down Hard

We'll Bring the House Down marks the beginning of a four-album resurgence for Slade. Released on the heels of their most triumphant moment as a band, the 1980 Reading Festival (see Slade Alive at Reading '80 EP for more on that), Slade made a powerful statement with We'll Bring the House Down: "We're back." What the band did was to take the best five songs from the previous platter, Return to Base (no one had heard that album anyway, they correctly figured), and mix them in with great new material for a killer album that wouldn't take forever to make. Simple logic will tell you that when you get rid of the worst songs and replace them with great songs, the album's gonna be a lot better.

Collection of rare material from Earth (Pre - Black Sabbath) and Flying Hat Band (Pre - Judas Priest) Earth are no others than the previous incarnation of Black Sabbath in 1969! The Flying Hat Band is the band Glenn Tipton had before joining Judas Priest in 1974. The Earth demo sessions are comprised of 3 heavy bluesy numbers and one cover of "Blue Suede Shoes" already when they changed their name to Black Sabbath. The F.H.B. have a similar sound to Sabbath but also makes remember other bands of the time like Horse, Fuzzy Duck or even Hard Stuff. Four songs were recorded with good quality sound as a demo in 1973 featuring the heavy blues guitar wailing of this later-to-be Metal master.

In the '70s, there was no shortage of posthumous Jimi Hendrix releases. Reprise and other labels knew that Hendrix's fans were an incredibly loyal and devoted bunch, and they knew that serious collectors would snag any Hendrix LP they could get their hands on…

A coupling of the harpist's first and third LPs for Stax's Enterprise subsidiary and the best spot to inaugurate a Little Sonny CD collection. 1970's New King is mostly instrumental and places Sonny in a funky, contemporary setting; 1973's Hard Goin' Up was his best album for the firm, benefitting from excellent material spotlighting his vocal talents in a soul-slanted format.

The set is built around the A and B sides of singles, with album cuts salted in between. This is effective in charting the band's progression from melodic popsters to hard rockers and back to the pop-inflected music that closed out their career. The highlights are scattered throughout – "American Woman," of course; "Rain Dance," with its unnerving echoes of American massacres, the funky, improvised live "Truckin' Off Across the Sky," even the goofy "Clap for the Wolfman," which came when the Guess Who were all but finished. The Ultimate Collection works well as an introduction to the Guess Who, but will not gratify anyone with more than a basic need to know. On a sonic level, the set sounds good, however.