Aside from the venerable opening riff of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets,” there may be no more recognizable melody in thrash than the main riff of Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” the sort-of title track of their landmark Reign in Blood album.

From San Diego, California came the Monroes, whose impossibly infectious “What Do All The People Know” stalled at the #59 spot on the national charts in the spring of 1982.

Guitarist Neal Schon is returning to some familiar 1980s-era musical associations — though neither of them are Journey. Instead, he’s rekindling associations from the days of HSAS, and Schon and Hammer.

This is the Almost Hit from Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust, which is primarily remembered for the Top 20 smash “Beds Are Burning,” but in many ways “The Dead Heart” always felt like the better song to me.

As he awaits the April 30, 2013 release of his first solo album, The Way Life Goes, Cinderella frontman Tom Keifer took some time out of his latest tour to discuss some of our favorite tunes off the new record and some Cinderella classics

In searching for forgotten gems from Journey, we left aside arena-filling efforts from Escape through Trial by Fire — which combined sold some 18 million copies. Been there, done that, right?

The story of Quartets, the new ECM box set covering five of Charles Lloyd’s albums, isn’t a sweeping career retrospective; it would take at least twenty discs to sufficiently do that for this tenor saxophonist whose become a lion in jazz over a fifty year span. Instead, this is about a second act.

By the time Paul Motian had passed away in November of 2011, he had established a legacy that reaches far beyond a couple of historical evenings at the Village Vanguard in late June of 1961. But becoming known as something much more than Bill Evans’ drummer within arguably jazz’s greatest trio didn’t happen overnight.

Tony Banks reissues his rare soundtrack for the 1983 Faye Dunaway vehicle The Wicked Lady today, the first of a series of solo albums the Genesis keyboardist will revisit — including Bankstatement and Strictly Inc.

Though it was only then just beginning to hit the mainstream, looping and sampling by the ’80s was becoming old hat for the New Music/Minimalist guys.