Euphoria

It's almost astonishing that it took until 2012 for Strange Euphoria, the first multi-disc retrospective box set of Heart's five-decade-plus career, to arrive. The set contains three CDs and a live concert DVD entitled "The Second Ending," shot between February and March of 1976 for Washington State's KSWU-TV. Strange Euphoria is nearly everything a retrospective like this should be…

The sounds of Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa are a coalescence of the complexities of life, with the sheer joy of imaginative creation. Are Euphoria continues to dive deeper into the dreamlike technicolor tapestries their songs have always explored, blossoming forward with each cycle of loops. Completely characteristic of their style, Wong and Minekawa achieve a density of textures, timbres, beats, and harmonies while remaining totally weightless, suspended in the air.

After the awesomeness that was Spreading the Disease and Among the effing Living, Anthrax really set the bar pretty darn high. They had established a unique, heavy, and humorous thrash formula that they used to put out some of the best songs of the genre…

Even though Slang successfully revitalized Def Leppard, it didn't become a huge hit, which was a disappointment, considering that the band adjusted their sound to fit the times. Taking that into account, Def Leppard set out to make a classic Def Leppard album with Slang's successor, Euphoria. And, surprisingly, that's exactly what they've delivered. From the outset, it's clear that Euphoria finds the band returning to the glam-inflected, unabashedly catchy, arena-ready pop-metal that made them stars – and it's also clear that they're not concerned with having a hit, they just want to make a good record.