To Our Children's Children's Children is the fifth album by The Moody Blues, released in November 1969. It was the first album released on the group's newly formed Threshold record label, which was named after the band's previous album from the same year, On the Threshold of a Dream…
After two albums that downplayed their penchant for gothic sounds and mystical lyrics, Uriah Heep brought these elements back to the fore on 1975's Return to Fantasy. The resulting album retains the musical experimentation that marked Sweet Freedom and Wonderworld, but has an overall harder-rocking feel that makes it more consistent than either one of those albums…
By the release of their third album, 1975's Dressed to Kill, Kiss were fast becoming America's top rock concert attraction, yet their record sales up to this point did not reflect their ticket sales. Casablanca label head Neil Bogart decided to take matters into his own hands, and produced the new record along with the band. The result is more vibrant sounding than its predecessor, 1974's sludgefest Hotter Than Hell, and the songs have more of an obvious pop edge to them…
Barclay James Harvest had streamlined their sound considerably after leaving the Harvest label, culminating (so many felt) in the mellifluous music of Gone to Earth. Their pretensions to progressive rock all but abandoned, BJH here invites comparison to contemporaries like Supertramp, REO Speedwagon, and Fleetwood Mac (some of whom were similarly tagged with the prog rock label early on)…
The departure of Ronnie James Dio gave Ritchie Blackmore a chance to reinvent Rainbow, which he does to a certain extent on Down to Earth. Adding former Deep Purple colleague Roger Glover as bassist and Graham Bonnet as vocalist, Blackmore tones down some of the excess of the Dio years, particularly in terms of fantastical lyrics, and turns to straight-ahead hard rock, only occasionally adorned by prominent synthesizers…
Chrissie Hynde took a long, hard road to rock & roll stardom, but when her band, the Pretenders, finally broke through in 1979, they wasted no time, growing from promising newcomers on the British music scene to major international stardom with a pair of smash albums to their credit in a mere three years. But the Pretenders' meteoric rise came to a crashing halt in 1982, when drug abuse claimed the life of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and forced Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers to dump bassist Pete Farndon, who would also succumb to an OD in April 1983…
Though he had already cut a single, "So Much Love," for Magnet Records in 1975, this was Chris Rea's first full-length album. While "So Much Love" had basically disappeared quickly upon its release, the song "Fool (If You Think It's Over)" from Whatever Happened to Benny Santini? became his largest hit, especially in the U.S., where it was nominated for a Grammy (though it didn't win)…