Wally

While much of the sixties were marked by the British invasion of America and all points west and east of Liverpool, there seem to have been some points in time where the influences flowed the other direction, if only in isolated pockets. Wally are one of those rare examples of this phenomenon…

Wally´s second album is considerable better than their debut. Their odd mix of symphonic rock and country music is much more even here and although it is hardly great, it showed they were developing their very own sound and maturing…

The story of Wally is one of those strange convoluted and rather heart-warming tales which surface once in a while in the rock 'n' roll multiverse. The band was formed in Harrogate and in the early to mid-1970s and quickly built themselves quite a reputation…

Rice Miller (or Alec or Aleck Miller – everything about this blues great is somewhat of a mystery) probably didn't need to take the name of the original Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee Williamson) to get noticed, since in many ways he was the better musician, but Miller seemed to revel in confusion, at least when it came to biographical facts, so for whatever reason, blues history has two Sonny Boy Williamsons. Like the first Williamson, Miller was a harmonica player, but he really sounded nothing like his adopted namesake, favoring a light, soaring, almost horn-like sound on the instrument…

Michael Crétu's attempt at fusing everything from easy listening sex music and hip-hop rhythms to centuries-old Gregorian chants couldn't have been more designed to tweak the nose of high art, a joyously crass stab straight at a mainstream, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The result is something that shouldn't exist, but in its own way results in as much of a cultural scramble and explosion as anything Public Enemy were doing around the same time, crossing over the Euro-disco and new age spheres with style…

Michael Crétu's attempt at fusing everything from easy listening sex music and hip-hop rhythms to centuries-old Gregorian chants couldn't have been more designed to tweak the nose of high art, a joyously crass stab straight at a mainstream, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The result is something that shouldn't exist, but in its own way results in as much of a cultural scramble and explosion as anything Public Enemy were doing around the same time, crossing over the Euro-disco and new age spheres with style…

Essentially country music welded to jump blues, rockabilly was rock & roll’s first clear shot at the world in the late '50s, and for every huge star like Elvis Presley who passed through the genre and took it onto the charts, there were hundreds – if not thousands – of singles by likeminded artists released in the rockabilly era that vanished without much impact or became, at best, only regional successes. This two-disc, 50-track set collects some of these rare releases, and includes sides by footnote musicians like Al Epp, Jimmy Patton, Jimmie John, Jimmy Lloyd, Benny Joy, Benny Ingram, and many others with similar fame pedigrees…

The Babys generated extensive hype upon formation in 1976 as one of mainstream pop/rock's brightest hopes for the future. While competent, their music never broke away from its Raspberries-meets-AOR style and developed its own distinctive sound…