Late Lady

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett sang before 2014's Cheek to Cheek – she popped up on his 2011 collection Duets II – so this standards album isn't exactly out of the blue. Furthermore, the two aren't such an odd pair…

Lady Lake is a Dutch band formed at the beginning of the Seventies, and whose name was inspired by the title of an album by Gnidrolog. Generally speaking, the whole Canterbury school seems to be the source of inspiration for the band, Camel and Caravan coming first. Its sole album "No Pictures" had already been re-issued in 1997 on the Musiphyle label. On this occasion, Lady Lake had reformed in order to record the bonus tracks included on the CD. And some eight years later, the Musea label eventually releases the second album of the trio: "SuperCleanDreamMachine" (2005). With an excellent clear and deep sound, these eight new compositions invite us to a delightful moment of vintage Progressive rock…

Never Too Late is best remembered today as drummer John Coghlan's final album with the band he'd served since the early '60s. The bulk of the set, however, was actually cut during the same sessions that produced the previous year's Just Supposin', although it's a struggle to say which of the two came out with the better songs. Neither is what one would describe as a classic Quo disc, but nor are they as disposable as some of the band's later releases. Indeed, any record that includes the bright bonhomie of "Something 'Bout You Baby I Like," the new album's biggest hit, is sure to have a few things to recommend it.

With the arrival of Delta Lady: The Rita Coolidge Anthology, one can only remark: what took so long? No other singer – not Maria Muldaur, Bette Midler, Bonnie Bramlett, Carly Simon, or Linda Ronstadt – more perfectly embodied the wide range of changes that popular music underwent from the late '60s through the mid-'80s, and continues to seek new means of expression today. This two-disc anthology on Hip-O offers the first complete portrait of this complex and multivalent talent on CD (though a box set would have been nice). Rita Coolidge scored her first chart hit with friend Donna Weiss' "Turn Around and Love You" in 1969. That song earned her a studio spot where she fell in with Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell, and a huge cast of musicians. Being a background vocalist on Delaney & Bonnie's classic Accept No Substitute earned her a place on Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen revue and the rest is history, including a handful of chart hits and guest appearances that stagger the mind.