Electric Roller

On the heels of their excellent Family Album, the new Agriculture shows again that the Wentus Blues Band deserves greater attention. With a snappy version of Lonnie Brooks’ “Brand New Mojo Hand” the lone cover amid 11 originals that span upbeat shuffles (“Moonshine”), push-pull soul (“Take It Away”), slow-drags done Muddy Waters-style (“Passenger Blues”), roots rock (“Love Bug”), uptown slow blues (“Here in the Night”), and raging country-blues boogies (“Biscuit Roller”), these Finns play an electrifying brand of blues not far from Omar & the Howlers. Juho Kinaret’s vocals are appropriately wild, and the guitars of Niko Riippa and Kim Wikman are crisp, clean, and penetrating.

As MCA reconfigures their Chess catalog, this 20-track single-disc compilation now takes the place of their original 12-track Best of Little Walter collection, a landmark blues album which had remained in print for over three decades. His Best (Chess 50th Anniversary Collection) reprises ten of those seminal tracks (leaving off the echoey "Blue Light" and "You Better Watch Yourself," the latter being available on the two-disc anthology The Essential Little Walter) and brings ten others cherry-picked from the catalog to the mix. If you've never experienced the innovative instrumental genius of Little Walter, classics like "Juke," "Off the Wall," "Mean Old World," "Sad Hours," "Blues with a Feeling," "My Babe," "Boom Out Goes the Light," "Last Night," "Mellow Down Easy" and "Roller Coaster" (written by Bo Diddley, who also guests on guitar) will come as a major revelation.

Uriah Heep's by-the-books progressive heavy metal made the British band one of the most popular hard rock groups of the early '70s. Formed by vocalist David Byron and guitarist Mick Box in the late '60s, the group went through an astonishing number of members over the next two decades – nearly 30 different musicians passed through the band over the years…

''Good Time Warrior'' is the sixth album by Lucifer's Friend, an album in which Mike Starrs, formerly of Colosseum II, replaced John Lawton on vocals for the first time. This album and the following Sneak Me In (1980) were an attempt at a more commercial, mainstream style which met with limited commercial success. Starrs was eventually replaced by the returning Lawton for 1981's Mean Machine.

Sessions is Union Square Music’s 2CD urban and dance music range. Aimed at both the hardened dance music fan and the impulse purchaser, each Sessions title is packed full of hit singles, big club tracks and a choice selection of forgotten gems and underground classics picked out by our expert crate-digging compilers. Strong generic packaging including an outer slipcase, informative sleeve notes and a low price in the shops have made Sessions one of our most popular labels.

It is no exaggeration to call Little Walter the Jimi Hendrix of the electric harp: he redefined what the instrument was and what it could do, pushing the instrument so far into the future that his music still sounds modern decades after it was recorded. Little Walter wasn't the first musician to amplify the harmonica but he arguably was the first to make the harp sound electric, twisting twitching, vibrant runs out of his instrument; nearly stealing the show from Muddy Waters on his earliest Chess recordings; and so impressing Leonard Chess that he made Muddy keep Walter as his harpist even after Waters broke up his band. Chess also made Walter into his studio's house harpist and started to release Little Walter solo records with the instrumental "Juke" in 1952. "Juke" became a smash hit and turned Little Walter into a star, making him a steady presence on the '50s R&B charts.