Eagle Drums by Nasugrap

After recording four fine studio albums in three years, Saxon had catapulted to the top of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal heap alongside Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, neither of which had released their American breakthroughs yet (The Number of the Beast and Pyromania), putting all three bands on pretty much even footing. Certainly, the release of Saxon's first live album – named The Eagle Has Landed after the gigantic eagle-shaped lighting truss that illuminated the band on-stage – should have been a crowning achievement for the hard-working quintet from Barnsley…

Steve Miller had started to essay his classic sound with The Joker, but 1976's Fly Like an Eagle is where he took flight, creating his definitive slice of space blues. The key is focus, even on an album as stylishly, self-consciously trippy as this, since the focus brings about his strongest set of songs (both originals and covers), plus a detailed atmospheric production where everything fits…

Tangerine Dream experiments with an ever-widening lexicon of sound on White Eagle, though the arrangements tend to suffer for it. The album's principle work is "Mojave Plan," a four-movement, 20-minute song that represents some of the darkest music they've recorded in a while…