la Piscine 1969

Of all the strange records this French vanguard pop chanteuse ever recorded, this 1971 collaboration between the teams of Brigitte Fontaine and her songwriting partner Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago - who were beginning to think about returning to the United States after a two-year stay - is the strangest and easily most satisfying. While Fontaine's records could be beguiling with their innovation, they occasionally faltered by erring on the side of gimmickry and cuteness. Here, the Art Ensemble provide the perfect mysterious and ethereal backdrop for her vocal explorations. Featuring the entire Art Ensemble of that time period and including fellow Chicago AACM member Leo Smith on second trumpet, Fontaine and Areski stretched the very notion of what pop had been and could be…

The Happy Prince is a studio album by the New Zealand rock band The La De Das, released in June 1969. It was the third album from the group and is often cited as the first Australian and New Zealand concept album…

The hugely well-respected and historically important Kinks seventh studio album Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire was released on 10th October 1969, and celebrates its 50th anniversary on 2019. 'Rock musical' in style and one of the most effective concept albums in rock history, the album was constructed by Kinks' frontman Ray Davies as the soundtrack to a subsequently cancelled Granada Television play. The album receiving almost unanimous acclaim upon its release. Rolling Stone 1969 - "Arthur is a masterpiece on every level, Ray Davies' finest hour. The Kinks' supreme achievement and the best British album of 1969".

Recorded quickly during Led Zeppelin's first American tours, Led Zeppelin II provided the blueprint for all the heavy metal bands that followed it. Since the group could only enter the studio for brief amounts of time, most of the songs that compose II are reworked blues and rock & roll standards that the band was performing on-stage at the time…

Originally recorded in 1969 for Orfeon Records in Mexico, this unbelievably awesome set of psychedelic rock was shelved for decades, due in large part to its fantastic (though probably poorly chosen from a commercial standpoint) title Society Is a Shit. With the exception of a humorous, traditional-sounding acoustic number presenting the record in Spanish, this record is 100% pure, mind-expanding psychedelia sung mostly in English. It's got all the factors you'd expect from a psych record of the period, like the glorious fuzz guitar and organ, but this is a far more creative and strung-out record than most. For instance on the second track, the epic "Tlatelolco," which condemns the deadly repression of a protest by government forces, the group drifts from one bizarre part to the next with strange sound effects and varied instrumentation…