Dukes Hardcore Honeys

The most prominent feature of Migration (the Amboy Dukes' third recording, originally released on Mainstream records) is the lack of a spaced-out follow-up to the group's biggest hit, "Journey to the Center of Your Mind." Perhaps "terrible" Ted Nugent was starting to win the drug war that was beginning to wage within the band, a war that would ultimately claim more than a few key lineup casualties…

As Ted Nugent's dominant persona took over the sound as well as the band name, Tooth, Fang & Claw brought his Amboy Dukes concept a step closer to the stadiums than its predecessor, Call of the Wild. The bandmembers don't get photos on the back this time, it's just Nugent being a madman up against some Fender and Marshall amps. The songwriting credits on the originals are all his now as well. "Lady Luck" plays as if the "American Woman" riff by the Guess Who got inverted, placed upside down in the middle of the song, and then finds itself coated in Ted Nugent's flashy and glitzy guitar work. The instrumental "Hibernation kinda touches upon the "Journey to the Center of the Mind" riff just for a moment and veers off into points unknown.

Chandos releases premiere recordings of Geoffrey Burgon’s viola and cello concertos, alongside the song cycle Merciless Beauty, all performed by the City of London Sinfonia under Rumon Gamba. For a generation and more of television watchers and filmgoers with even a passing interest in music, the name of the British composer Geoffrey Burgon is associated with a string of successful soundtrack scores: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Chronicles of Narnia and many others. His masterful score for Brideshead Revisited, described as ‘the greatest score ever written for television’, earned him an Ivor Novello Award.

Long before Ted Nugent made his name as a mighty crossbow hunter, there was this heavy Detroit band in which he was content to play lead guitar, something he does very well and with much less threat to the Midwest's deer population. The Nuge shouldn't try to take all the credit for this band, because the other members such as vocalist John Drake and rhythm guitarist Steve Farmer contributed with great aplomb, the latter writing much of the material on the second side's ambitious suite as well as co-writing the title hit with Nugent. This is some hard-hitting, well-done psychedelic music, recorded with taste by a producer known much more for his work with mainstream jazz artists, Bob Shad…

'Transcendental Blues Live' is a no-holds-barred, shot-from-the-hip rock-fest from the old-school rocker, Steve Earle. If this DVD is any indication, Earle hasn't lost any of his drive over the years, as he burns into his set with the agility of a 20-year-old.He hammers through the songs one after another, blasting through a full 16 song set in barely more than an hour. The bulk of the tracks are new ones, as Earle has obviously sought to reinvent himself in the present instead of relying on old classics to carry him into the new millennium.

Responsible for two of the strangest, most beguiling acid folk albums of the early 1970s, jan dukes de grey have long been a legendary name on the prog/folk/psych collector circuit. When cherry tree reissued sorcerers and the extraordinary mice and rats in the loft on one handy double cd last year (to widespread acclaim, we might add), it seemed to be the final word on the band. However, during conversations with arch-duke derek noy the bands founder, guitarist, singer and songwriter it transpired that jan dukes had actually gone on to record a third album, strange terrain, that had failed to appear at the time, largely due to the emergence of punk and the ensuing collapse of western civilisation as we know it.