Dead Ground

Ohio rockers Doctor Smoke have returned with their second slab of goodness - seven years after their debut ‘The Witching Hour’. An eclectic mix of styles, this is at its core a sludge/doom album but Doctor Smoke are difficult to put into a pigeon hole as they deftly switch genres across the album, and often within songs…

When Paul McCartney finally released his first proper '90s studio album, it turned out to be his Greenpeace/Earth Firststatement. The songs on this collection reflect Macca's philosophy regarding ecological awareness ("C'Mon People", "Cosmically Conscious"), the evils of animal testing ("Looking For Changes"). There are also love songs for wife Linda, who shared Paul's beliefs ("Golden Earth Girl", "I Owe It All ToYou"). OFF THE GROUND also reunited the songwriting team ofMcCartney and Elvis Costello on the ocarina-spiced "Mistress and Maid" and the tale of unrequited love that is "The Lovers That Never Were"…

A British dance-pop group which found fame thanks to the antics of androgynous frontman Pete Burns, Dead or Alive formed in Liverpool in 1980. Burns first surfaced three years prior in the Mystery Girls, later heading the proto-goth rockers Nightmares in Wax; he founded Dead or Alive with keyboardist Marty Healey, guitarist Mitch, bassist Sue James, and drummer Joe Musker, debuting in 1980 with the Ian Broudie-produced Doors soundalike "I'm Falling." "Number Eleven" followed, but just as the group was gaining momentum, they were swept aside by the emergence of the New Romantic movement, with Burns subsequently charging that fellow androgyne Boy George of Culture Club had merely stolen his outrageous image.