Linda.com 2003

Not wanting to leave a good thing behind, Moore reprises Still Got the Blues on its follow-up, After Hours. While his playing is just as impressive, the album feels a little calculated. Nevertheless, Moore's gutsy, impassioned playing makes the similarity easy to ignore.

The original Affinity essentially survived for just one album, a superb, jazz-tinged effort released on the Vertigo label in 1971, and subsequently reissued on several occasions since then – a cottage industry that seems to have spawned more interest in the band today than they ever attracted during their career. Certainly few people were aware that the group continued on following the departure (for a solo career) of vocalist Linda Hoyle later in 1971, but this set – aptly titled for the timespan it covers – not only documents the band's further activities, it also suggests that their ultimate demise was far from timely. With Vivienne McAuliffe proving a more than ample replacement, Affinity continued both gigging and recording, and this collection of previously unreleased demos and outtakes finds the band in excellent form. One can only imagine how great they might have been, had they had a full studio (and a recording budget) at their disposal!

Sundazed have done a fantastic job in reissuing the lost 1960s folk rock gem that is The Gentle Soul. Thriving in the vibrant mid to late 1960s folk rock movement, Pamela Polland and Rick Stanley of The Gentle Soul hung out with the likes of Neil Young, Jackson Browne (there's an early tune written by him as one of the bonus tracks here), The Byrds, and Tim Buckley, and worked with the likes of Terry Melcher, Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder (whose incredible guitar playing is throughout this cd), Van Dyke Parks, Larry Knechtel, Jerry Cole and Hal Blaine. Amongst this incredible scene of creativity, The Gentle Soul released one album and a handful of singles, but never had the push they needed or any luck with sales. Their recordings became more and more scarce through the years, the album even becoming a collector's item with a 3 figure price tag.

Sundazed have done a fantastic job in reissuing the lost 1960s folk rock gem that is The Gentle Soul. Thriving in the vibrant mid to late 1960s folk rock movement, Pamela Polland and Rick Stanley of The Gentle Soul hung out with the likes of Neil Young, Jackson Browne (there's an early tune written by him as one of the bonus tracks here), The Byrds, and Tim Buckley, and worked with the likes of Terry Melcher, Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder (whose incredible guitar playing is throughout this cd), Van Dyke Parks, Larry Knechtel, Jerry Cole and Hal Blaine. Amongst this incredible scene of creativity, The Gentle Soul released one album and a handful of singles, but never had the push they needed or any luck with sales. Their recordings became more and more scarce through the years, the album even becoming a collector's item with a 3 figure price tag.

Although volume four of RPM's Dream Babes series of 1960s British girl group sides gets further into obscure flops than its predecessors, there's barely any drop in the quality, which remains good, though hardly great. And as with most of the rest of the songs on this series, the production's better than the singers or the material. That's not to say there aren't some pretty good cuts on this 22-song anthology, some of them explicitly derivative of the American girl group sound (like the Chantelles' cracking "I Want That Boy," a cover of an obscure U.S. single by Sadina), others taking a pop-soul approach, others mixing in some British beat music.