Alphaville's second album, produced for the most part by Peter Walsh, found the group creating something close to a concept record, in overall atmosphere and structure if not in specific storyline. That Alphaville wanted to aim high can be gauged from the credit list – the three core members "composed" the album, while no less than 30 musicians and singers helped perform it.
The album title refers to the Victorian house where four Scots took refuge during his exile in London becoming the mansion into a genuine commune dedicated to music, art and God knows what else in the early 70s. A pleasant surprise, it is true that there were thousands of bands like this at the time but Writing on the Wall is at hand now…
Beat music, British beat, or Merseybeat (after bands from Liverpool and nearby areas beside the River Mersey) is a pop and rock music genre that developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll (mainly Chuck Berry guitar style and the midtempo beat of artists like Buddy Holly), doo-wop, skiffle and R&B. The genre provided many of the bands responsible for the British Invasion of the American pop charts starting in 1964, and provided the model for many important developments in pop and rock music, including the format of the rock group around lead, rhythm and bass guitars with drums. The Beat Of The Pops - excellent selection of beat tracks.
Aptly titled, 'The Great Vocalists Of Jazz & Entertainment', culls 748 of the absolute finest recordings by top singers of the pre-rock era of the '30s, '40s & '50s.
The soundtrack to Frank Zappa's strange early-'70s film 200 Motels was always doomed to be a peripheral entry in his discography. The movie's story was not easy to follow, and neither is the record (not that plot was ever a big focus of the production). It's typically wacky Zappa of the era, with unpredictable sharp turns between crunchy rock bombast, orchestration, and jazz/classical influences, as well as interjections of wacky spoken dialogue. Those who like his late-'60s/early-'70s work – not as song-oriented as his first albums, in other words, but not as "serious" or as silly as his later records – will probably like this fine, although it's not up to the level of Uncle Meat.
The Marshall Tucker Band is an American rock band from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Noted for incorporating blues, country, and jazz into an eclectic sound, the Marshall Tucker Band helped establish the Southern rock genre in the early 1970s. While the band had reached the height of its commercial success by the end of the decade, it has recorded and performed continuously under various lineups for 45 years. Lead vocalist Doug Gray remains the only original member still active with the band…
After the enormous global success of their debut album FOREVER YOUNG (1984), German trio ALPHAVILLE set off to write another successful chapter in their career with the release of their second studio album AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA (1986). The album reached Top 20 positions in five European countries and featured the singles “Dance With Me,” “Universal Daddy,” and “Jerusalem.”