Gary Burn

East Texas has produced yet another formidable young guitar player with award-winning, Ally Venable on her newest Connor Ray Music release, Puppet Show. Powerhouse singer and guitar player, Ally Venable was the 2014 and 2015 East Texas Female Guitarist of the Year, and the Ally Venable Band won 2015, 2016, and 2017 honors as East Texas Blues Band of the Year. Ably backed by drummer Elijah Owings and Bobby Wallace on bass, along with some thrilling and enthusiastic guest appearances by guitarists Gary Hoey and Lance Lopez, and Eric Steckel on keys, Puppet Show features eight originals and two covers. It is another solid step forward in the early stages of what will likely be a long and interesting career for the still teenage blues sensation, Ally Venable Band.

Scraping the Barrel, 12 hours of music, compiled, cleaned and edited by dedicated Gentle Giant fan & friend Dan Bornemark between 1998 and 2004. As the title indicates, this is it, the best of the rest. The box-set contains 3 CD's and a data disc, a good solution even so my personal choice which tracks to put on the data disc (128 K/bit for the majority) would have been slightly different…

"Chasin' Wild Trains" is the thirteenth studio album by Kim Carnes, released in 2004. It was Carnes' first full-length album since 1991's "Checkin' Out the Ghosts" which was released only in Japan and her first to be released both in the U.S. and internationally since 1988's "View from the House". "Chasin' Wild Trains" was originally released by the Sparky Dawg Music label in the U.S. and later re-issued internationally by Dutch label Corazong. The album did not chart, however.

Parish Hall was a power trio from the California Bay Area. The band consisted of Gary Wagner (guitar, piano, vocals), John Haden (bass), and Steve Adams (drums). Specializing in a hard rock/blues rock sound, their album was originally released near the end of 1970 on a small local California record label…