Rhythm And Sounds

Tony Joe White's Hard to Handle album is built around a concert recording made in 1969 or 1970. It features White swaggering through a clutch of tough-as-rock blues and soul covers like Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go," Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle" and Jimmy Reed's "You Got Me Runnin'," as well as some originals. "I Want You" is a sludgy, nasty groover that has some truly scuzzy guitar solos and sounds like it could have come off a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion record, one of White's trademark swampy story songs "Roosevelt & Ira Lee (Night of the Moccasin)," and "When You Touch Me," a slight and uninteresting jam. Too bad the whole concert sounds like it was recorded through a wall of steel wool. The vocals are muffled at times; the sound cuts in and out and generally sounds no better than a hastily made bootleg. A couple of the songs ("I Want You" in particular) show White to be a dynamic performer with a lot more guts than one might imagine.

For whatever reason, Delaney Bramlett is a marginal figure on the music scene, a figure with a great and very influential past whose present is almost never acknowledged - at least in America. Sounds From Home is a case in point. The man who is responsible for virtually creating Eric Clapton's sound in the 1970s and bringing the great southern R&B traditions together with hard rock and rambling country-soul (how many records did Gram Parsons and Duane Allman appear on together? One: Delaney & Bonnie's Motel Shot in 1971) is creating some of the finest music in his life, when most of his contemporaries settled for far less artistically, though they have reaped far more material benefit and historical recognition (Clapton's musical laziness is a case in point)…

Cornell Campbell - Sweet Baby (1977) {Burning Sounds BSRCD957 rel 2017}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 154 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 73 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 59 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1977, 2017 Secret Records / Burning Sounds | BSRCD957
Reggae / Roots Reggae / Ska / Rocksteady

Cornell Campbell is one of an elite group of Jamaican reggae singers who’ve weathered the changes throughout the music’s development – in his case, from the ska era to right up to date – whilst retaining their relevance. Witness his recent alliance with UK Afrobeat / reggae band The Soothsayers or Jazmine Sullivan’s R & B hit Need U Bad, which sampled his classic 'Queen Of The Minstrel' – a song that still sounds fresh more than thirty years later.

Simon & Garfunkel's second album, Sounds of Silence, was recorded 18 months after their debut long-player, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM – but even though the two albums shared one song (actually, one-and-a-half songs) in common, the sound here seemed a million miles away from the gentle harmonizing and unassuming acoustic accompaniment on the first record. In between, there had been a minor earthquake in the pop/rock world called "folk-rock," which resulted in the transformation of their acoustic rendition of "The Sound of Silence" into a classic of the new genre, complete with jangling electric guitars and an amplified beat that helped carry it to the top of the charts…