From its brown-toned cover to its contents, Loggins & Messina's fourth studio album is a sober, low-key, reflective affair. The band's music, with its single flute, violin, and horn lines, directed by Messina's intricate guitar and mandolin playing, serves a series of mid-tempo tunes expressing a lot of quiet dissatisfaction signalled…
While the conventional wisdom in Michigan has it that the City of Detroit is slowly but surely making a comeback, Andre Williams isn't quite having that. Heading back to his old home town, Williams discovered the former home of Fortune Records, the Motor City label where he cut his first hits, was now an overgrown empty lot. Struck by this, Williams began writing lyrics about what Detroit was, is, and could be, and these tunes dominate 2016's I Wanna Go Back to Detroit City. The almost-80-year-old R&B wildman actually sings more about life on the mean streets than about sex this time out, limiting most of his obsessions about the opposite sex to the tune "Mississippi Sue" (who turns out to have passed on, making the finished product a bit less than lascivious).
Band of the moment, the saviours of rock'n'roll… something to write about in an age of musical mediocrity?
The White Stripes can be seen as all of the above. The hype around the release of this fourth album has gone on and on, the critics' saliva abundant. Finally it's here. Can it really change the course of mankind as we know it? Let's see.
Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a newly re-mastered and expanded edition of the classic 1972 album by Renaissance, "Prologue". Formed in 1969 by former Yardbirds members Jim McCarty and Keith Relf, Renaissance had by 1971 undergone a series of line-up changes and had evolved into a completely different band from the one that had recorded the albums "Renaissance" and "Illusion". By June 1972 Renaissance had settled into a line-up featuring the highly gifted vocalist Annie Haslam, John Tout (keyboards, vocals), Jon Camp (bass, vocals), Terry Sullivan (drums, percussion) and Rob Hendry (guitar, mandolin, vocals). The album "Prologue" was recorded in June and July 1972 and featured material written by Michael Dunford (a member of the group who had decided to eschew performing with the band to concentrate on song writing) and lyricist Betty Thatcher. Featuring such classic material as the album title track, 'Kiev', 'Spare Some Love' and the epic 'Rajah Kahn', "Prologue" was also notable for the presence of guest musician Francis Monkman (of Curved Air) who would play VCS 3 synthesiser on 'Rajah Khan'.