Meet me The Lake

A good-time workout with the Bluegills backing up McCray. The record grew out of a friendship between McCray and Bluegills leader Charlie Walmsley, and while the result isn't the most stunning blues disc on the market, it's quite enjoyable and good-natured. There's also some nice lead guitar work to recommend it.

William "Bootsy" Collins cut his teeth playing bass with the James Brown band in 1970, but when he landed in George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic crew in the mid-70s, he quickly became a figurehead of Clinton's messier, trippier cartoon funk. Throughout the 1976-82 period condensed into this two-disc set, Bootsy and his Rubber Band were essentially P-Funk for kids. His records had all the stage-crowding chaos of the Mothership, with the politics and priapism replaced by goofy spiels about the excellence of, well, Bootsy, plus squelchy, googly sounds and his infamous star-shaped shades. The tone he got out of his star-shaped bass, like huge bubbles surfacing from the bottom of a lake, was heavy enough that he could slow things way, way down–"Jam Fan (Hot)" crawls like no other hard-funk record. That, in turn, let him be the half-serious love-man Clinton couldn't risk being (check out the wacky, spacey slow jam "Munchies for Your Love"). Glory B mostly collects unedited album tracks, though it also throws in 1980's lost demi-hit "Freak to Freak" (credited to Sweat Band) and the 1982 single "Body Slam!".

The Minstrel's Ghost is the 2012 sensation, a fabulous musical creation that has all the hallmarks of a classic prog album, where old school symphonics meet the new pristine university. American multi-instrumentalist Blake Carpenter has smartly surrounded himself with some seriously gifted players most notably Hungarian Zoltan Csorsz (still the best Flower Kings drummer ever), who positively explodes here, as well as gifted guitarist Colin Tench (of the thrilling Corvus Stone, Colin Tench Project and Bunchakeze). Others include Marco Chiappini of Gandalf's Project (a close relative in this semi-medieval-pop-prog genre) who shines on devastating organ and assorted ivories. .Bassist Troy James Martin holds it all down with muscular proficiency .And of course main man and master musician Blake Carpenter, who has really carved himself a name for himself with this magnificent opus!

Sounds of the Seventies was a 38-volume series issued by Time-Life during the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, spotlighting pop music of the 1970s. Much like Time-Life's other series chronicling popular music, volumes in the "Sounds of the Seventies" series covered a specific time period, including individual years in some volumes, and different parts of the decade (for instance, the early 1970s) in others; in addition, some volumes covered specific trends, such as music popular on album-oriented rock stations on the FM band. Each volume was issued on either compact disc, cassette or (with volumes issued prior to 1991) vinyl record.