by Something Else Reviews Perhaps Todd Rundgren’s own restive muse — he’s dabbled in every major rock subgenre over the past four decades — simply makes him too difficult to categorize. Maybe Rundgren never stuck with one thing long enough. Somehow, this pop music maverick hasn’t consistently found the widerRead More

by Mark Saleski We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. During the late 1970’s, my hormone-addled adolescent brain held a few things dear: my girlfriend, my Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath and Kiss records and my copy of Fear andRead More

Yes has taken more twists and turns than the fantastical lettering created for its album covers by Roger Dean.

by Something Else Reviews Call them a guilty pleasure. (We have.) But the truth is, there’s more to Hall and Oates than the sum of their blow-dried caricature. So, we set about looking for tunes that made some points: That they brilliantly connected the dots between new wave and andRead More

by Something Else Reviews We attempted to give ourselves some cover by assuring one another that Spyro Gyra started out more in the vein of Weather Report than, say, David Sanborn. We really did. But, after pulling out the actual albums, it didn’t take long to see how baldly ridiculousRead More

by Mark Saleski Just sitting around yesterday, worn out from the events of Saturday (plus some sort of oncoming bug that appears to be draining all of my energy)…so I decide to watch Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I’ve never been able to put my finger on the reason before…why is itRead More

by Tom Johnson Every year I start out thinking that I have a feeling what album is going to ride high on my year end list, and more often than not I’m surprised by so many other things that the album in question may not even register. This year’s victimRead More

by Mark Saleski This is the amazing, hilarious and true story of Sue Carpenter, a woman who gave corporate radio and the FCC the big ‘ef U’ by starting her own pirate radio station — right out of her apartment atop a hill in San Francisco. A career opportunity (writingRead More

by S. Victor Aaron “Catalyst” is not just the name of the album, it’s also the name of the band sax/flute player King leads, and this is their debut album. This band which features King, Luis Deniz (saxes), David Braid (piano and keyboards), Rich Brown (bass), Joel Haynes (drums), haveRead More

by S. Victor Aaron So often in recent years we’ve heard jazz played in a traditional Jewish style, aka “Klezmer” jazz. Arranger/composer and keyboardist Eugene Marlow puts this idea in reverse: taking traditional Jewish songs and playing them in mainstream, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and even contemporary jazz styles. The second HeritageRead More