High Betcover!!

This compilation, released in 2000, is a nice collection of unreleased and new material from the masters of heavy prog, High Tide. While some of the tracks appear on their later albums, this one is mostly full of rarities which automatically makes this attractive to High Tide fans and people who like their prog with a distorted guitar. In terms of style, this is a mostly instrumental album wrought with heavy, distorted guitars and fast pacing.

High Tide is completely ahead of its time. On their first album, Sea Chanties, they combine their folkish influences with a more harsh, aggressive sound. Sometimes sounding jazzy, and one of the first, if not the first prog-metal album. The key here is the battle, the rivalry between the electric guitar of Tony Hill and the excellent playing of Simon House on his electric violin. From the first second we feel something is ahead of its time. A huge guitar riff starts off the album, and the great rythm section soon come along. The violin adds up to the unique sound and forms a melodic mess. Throughout the album, there are a lot of excellent guitar moment and as many violin ones. Diverse, but always true to their roots, High Tide delivers. The only problem may be the vocals, wich do not fit with the intensity of the music. Still, this is heavy stuff for the time and still today, it sounds like a ton of brick.

High Tide was a highly underrated British band that played psychedelic progressive rock when the genre was in its infancy. "Precious Cargo" is seven tracks of live in the studio slices of hauntingly beautiful yet terrifying soundscapes. Their sound is one that should have been playing in the background of an Alfred Hitchcock film or more recently, a Wes Craven production comes to mind. What made their sound so eerie was the violin of Simon House. Much in the same way Jean Luc Ponty used his instrument, House used his violin as more of a lead instrument and the rest of the band fell in line to fill in the layers to make one impressive wall of sound that would wake up the spirit and startle the thought process; their music was very potent.

Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks scores music for Claire Denis' film 'High Life'. 'High Life' was written and directed by Denis and stars Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche in the lead roles. It focuses on a group of criminals who are tricked into believing they will be freed if they participate in a mission to travel on a spaceship towards a black hole to find an alternate energy source while being sexually experimented on by the scientists on board. ‘Willow’ performed by tindersticks and featuring guest vocals from Robert Pattison was written for the final scene of the film.

Arguably the greatest Jamaican vocal group to emerge on the reggae scene during the latter half of the Seventies, the Joseph Hill-led trio Culture wrote and performed some of the finest roots music of the era, initially making their mark with producer Joe Gibbs before joining the revered roster of Sonia Pottinger’s High Note Records.

Much like the band name anagram that provides its title, High-tails' debut album "A Slight Hi" is a consciously coltish set of shapeshifting guitar-pop, frisky dance-funk and whimsical wordplay. It's the sound of four Wagga-via-Sydney boys having the time of their lives, and you're invited - "A Slight Hi" is a gregarious how-do that'll put a smile on your dial, a wriggle in your hips, and some songs in your heart all at the same time.