Contraband is the debut studio album by American hard rock band Velvet Revolver, released on June 8, 2004 by RCA Records. A commercial success, Contraband debuted at number one on the American Billboard 200 chart and was certified double platinum by the RIAA. Velvet Revolver is an American hard rock supergroup consisting of former Guns N' Roses members Slash, Duff McKagan, and Matt Sorum, alongside Dave Kushner formerly of punk band Wasted Youth. Original vocalist Scott Weiland formerly of Stone Temple Pilots left the band in 2008. In 2004, the band achieved commercial success with their debut album, Contraband. With their single "Slither", they won the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance.
An early entry in Bernard Haitink’s Shostakovich cycle, this winning performance of the Fifteenth Symphony promised much for what was eventually to become a series greatly varied in quality and inspiration. It may be asking too much for a Western conductor to perform all of these symphonies with the same intensity and passion as might be shown by any of several Soviet counterparts, who were, after all, living and working under the same system that had so oppressed and threatened the composer. As for Symphony No. 15, its lesser degree of brutality than most of its predecessors makes it a good match for Haitink’s tidy conducting style.
Farout is a progressive/jazz rock band from Lappeenranta, Finland. It was founded in 1977 and was active until 1982 with various setups. Farout was the progressive rock champion in the Finnish Rock music contest in spring 1978. The band recorded their only LP-record so far for Kompass Records at Birdland Studios, Mellunmaki, Helsinki, in 1979. The creditable record engineering was done by Dan Tigersted, the studio guru of those days. He recorded the material on an 8-track recorder during five long working days.
The tenor saxophone and flute player, late Pekka Poyry guest starred on the record. Poyry, who died in 1980, became well known for his credits with e.g. Tasavallan Presidentti and Jukka Tolonen Band among numerous other recordings…
Badfinger completed their best album in 1975, then had it pulled from the shelves in a haze of managerial misdeals and contractual screw-ups. They were good soldiers, at least for a while, heading into the studio (without Joey Molland, who bailed at the last minute) to bash out another album for Warner, completing it in two weeks. Warner rejected the effort, lead songwriter Pete Ham committed suicide not long afterward, and the album sat in the vaults until late 2000, when Artisan/Snapper released Head First as a double-disc set (the second disc consisting of demos and outtakes). Head First confirms that Badfinger had settled into a groove with Wish You Were Here, finding an effective middle ground between their pop gifts and hard rock inclinations, with both Ham and Tom Evans contributing equally strong works.
Bob James H was released in 1980 on his Tappan Zee imprint during his great run that began with Touchdown in 1978. Its immediate predecessor is the One on One duet album with Earl Klugh. James recorded it in the same way he'd been making records since joining CTI in the early 1970s: with a large, all-star studio group paired with a couple of top-flight soloists. The former group included trumpeter Jon Faddis, Randy Brecker, and Eddie Daniels; the latter features Grover Washington, Jr., Hiram Bullock, Airto Moreira, and Buddy Williams. Of course, hovering over everything is James' trademark piano, full of lovely if rote grooves and fills. The music revolves around breezy, easy themes and colorations, where the new contemporary (later, "smooth") jazz met lithe cinematic-style orchestral themes with some neat and tidy funk overtones. "Brighton by the Sea," with a tough soprano solo by Washington is a great example. Airto's hand percussion plays counterpoint to Williams drums, Gary King's deep, fretless, funk bassline holds the groove and Grover moves right into it, and then soars above it.
Universal Music pay tribute to the short but prolific musical life of enigmatic Glasgow blues-rocker Alex Harvey with the biggest-ever, career-spanning, cross-label collection of his work. A total of 217 fully remastered tracks (with much of the material from the original master tapes) includes 21 that are previously unreleased, and a further 59 that are appearing officially on CD for the first time.