Good Boy 2010

Boy Meets Girl's George Merrill and Shannon Rubicam wrote Whitney Houston's "How Will I Know" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)," so they understand how important a foundation is to adult contemporary pop – without something to pull the listener along, the songs become just flash and keyboard flutter, platitudes about love and loss. And while Reel Life suffers a little bit from the over-synthesized instrumentation of its era, Boy Meets Girl more often than not pushed the right melodic buttons on this, their biggest album. "Bring Down the Moon" and "Stay Forever" are particularly strong, while the hit single, "Waiting for a Star to Fall," is just a classic.

Tape Five is an international studio project based in Germany created by multi-instrumentalist songwriter-producer Martin Strathausen. Tape Five combines a variety of styles and influences: The focus on Swing or Electro-Swing, but also Bossanova, Latin, Soul and NuJazz with their very own vivid retro interpretation in a classy way. For years, Tape Five has expanding global record sales and millions of Spotify streams, it´s albums frequently appear in the top 40 charts of the big international online-retailers… Selected songs can be found on about a thousand compilations (“Café del Mar”, “Campari Lounge”, “Swing Mania” and many more), they can be heard on Ad-campaigns from Spain and Hongkong to the USA and are playlisted on countless radio stations.

Although it ran parallel with the back-to-basics feeling that permeated the early '70s, Good Dog Banned arrived at a distinctive strain of organic rock that was much more joyous and good-timey than many of their musicians-in-arms. Their one stab at rock & roll immortality, Good Dog Banned seems oblivious to any sense of anger at the "failure" of the '60s dream to take complete effect as of 1971. Whereas some '60s expatriates were decrying the cultural revolution, Good Dog Banned were singing "Things Ain't so Bad," heading down to the river and drinking wine. There is no nostalgia, no cynicism present. The band was untethered, ingenuous. Perhaps it could be viewed as rose-colored hippie denial, but in retrospect, the pure, unselfconscious charisma and the lack of piety that Good Dog Banned inject into their only effort makes it seem less of its time than other bands of this ilk…

By time of Kylie Minogue’s eleventh album, 2010's Aphrodite, she had been releasing records for over 20 years. Most artists who’ve stuck around for that long end up rehashing their past catalogs and/or growing stale, but Kylie manages to avoid these fates by constantly working with new collaborators, keeping up on musical trends without pandering to them, and most importantly, never taking herself too seriously. Sure, she’s serious about making great dance music, but she never confuses her status as a pop icon with a desire to send out a message in her music. Aphrodite rarely strays past sweet love songs or happy dance anthems; its deepest message is “everything is beautiful.”

While some hardliners will point to his early 1950s Trumpet recordings as his most undiluted work, Sonny Boy's tenure at Chess Records was his longest and most successful and therefore deserves first look for the novice coming to this remarkable bluesman at ground level. This 20-track collection takes 17 tracks from the excellent two-disc Essential Sonny Boy Williamson collection and adds "Sad To Be Alone," "My Younger Days" and an alternate session-second version of "One Way Out" with Buddy Guy on guitar (yes, this is the version that the Allman Brothers used as the blueprint for their cover version) to the final mix. This is another entry into MCA's Chess 50th Anniversary Series and the digital transfers here are exemplary, making this an automatic audio upgrade for those who already have this material in their collection.