Placebo Never

Dave Grohl’s six-piece finds common cause between gaudy disco-pop and willfully absurd arena rock on an album-length collection of Bee Gees covers and live-in-studio Medicine at Midnight cuts.

Dave Grohl’s six-piece finds common cause between gaudy disco-pop and willfully absurd arena rock on an album-length collection of Bee Gees covers and live-in-studio Medicine at Midnight cuts.

Limited edition of 500. Tone Set (Galen Herod and Greg Horn) was an Arizona minimal synth duo that existed from 1981 to 1983. Their early sound mixed analog synthesizers and gritty drum machines with tapes of found speech. This was the sound of their first release, a 1982 cassette called Cal's Ranch recorded with almost no vocals at The Center for Advanced Studies and released through the Zia record store in Tempe, AZ. In 1982, Tone Set contributed the track "Out! Out! Out!" to Placebo Records' Amuck compilation (PLA-103), which also featured Meat Puppets, and Sun City Girls (the duo also contributed a track called "Happy People" under their Happy People alias). Vocals started to become a more prominent part of their sound by the time they recorded their Calibrate EP, released in February 1983 on Pegna Records (peg one). The first side featured three pop songs – "Life is Busy" and "Slim," both sung by Herod, and "Living In Another Land," sung by Horn.

David Bowie One of the greatest stars of the rock & roll era, David Bowie evaded easy categorization throughout his career, operating as the artiest rocker within the mainstream and the most accessible musician on the fringe. Bowie may have trafficked in ideas cultivated in the underground, but he was never quite an outsider as far as rock & roll was concerned. From the outset of his career in the 1960s, he attempted to break into the Top 40, playing British blues, mod rock & roll, and ornate pop before finally hitting paydirt as a hippie singer/songwriter. "Space Oddity" gave Bowie his breakthrough in the U.K., reaching the Top Ten in the summer of 1969 – the summer of Apollo 11 – and it belatedly performed a similar feat in America, giving him his first Top 20 hit early in 1973. By that point, Bowie had traded his folkie persona for the glam-rock alien Ziggy Stardust, one of the many shifts of sound and image that came to define his career.

Incredible four CD box set filled with influential and diverse U.K.-based Indie Pop and Rock acts that emerged from Great Britain in the broad wake of '80s Post-Punk. The Brit Box features all of the styles that wormed their way into the hearts of the music lovers during the late '80s, all through the '90s and beyond including Indie, Shoegaze, Baggy and Brit-Pop. While many artists featured here enjoyed superstar status in Mother England, their impact on U.S. charts was more peripheral but their stylistic imprint and collective uber-hip peer-pressure on late 20th century popular music overall is undeniable. With the respect given the '60s-era British Invasion in countless other compilations, Rhino's new trans-Atlantic ocean liner-sized box shaped to resemble a vintage UK phone booth with real flickering lights champions close to 80 independent acts that didn't so much reject mainstream musical sensibilities as spin it in their own fashion for hits that defined cool. Lovingly compiled with true oh to be in England spirit, Rhino hails Britannia with over five hours of tastemaker tracks.