Blues From The Inside Out is the most expressive project of Dave Specter’s 35-year career. Featuring his debut as a vocalist, the album is an exciting and timely celebration of blues, soul, jazz, funk and gospel. These are fine times to hear Specter, an evolving artist who embraces growth and discovery.
When Duster were recording their space rock mini-epics on wobbly four-track in a makeshift San Jose home studio in the late '90s, it's likely they weren't imagining that their records would someday be fetching exorbitant prices and that a classy reissue label would someday issue a box set. No doubt they were just having fun making music, expressing themselves, and exploring sound for its own sake, but history has a way of taking strange turns, and in 2019 the Numero Group's Capsule Losing Contact was released. The lavishly packaged set gathers the two albums (1998's Stratosphere and 2000's Contemporary Movement) and one EP (1999's 1975) they released for Up Records and adds the Transmission, Flux EP, the Apex, Trance-Like single, and a handful of rare and previously unreleased tracks. The collection finally restores the music of Duster to people who can now afford to own it and every fan of slowcore, lo-fi space rock and unassumingly brilliant indie rock should plunk down their money and get this set.
At the time Philip Bailey persuaded Phil Collins to produce his second solo album, Chinese Wall, Collins was among the hottest pop stars in the world. The advantage to that, of course, is the exposure it affords, and after the merely modest success of his debut solo album, Continuation, Bailey needed the reflected glory. On the other band, it's hard to shine yourself in such a glare, and although Bailey's name was on the gold-selling hit single "Easy Lover," a duet with Collins that helped the album take off, it's Collins' singing and drumming that one remembers. Elsewhere, tunes like "Photogenic Memory" and "Walking On The Chinese Wall" better represent Bailey's ability to handle a variety of material from ballads to techno dance tracks with his elastic falsetto. Still, Chinese Wall was a gold-selling standoff that made Bailey a solo hitmaker without really establishing him on his own.