Great albums most often prick at you and provoke you. Great albums challenge you by not being exactly what you’d expected. Unfortunately, sometimes bad albums do exactly the same thing. You May Also Like: Toto, “Hash Pipe” (2018): One Track Mind The Young Rascals – Groovin’ (1967): On Second ThoughtRead More

For Killing Joke fans, 2007 was a pretty cool time. First, there was Inside Extremities, which offered a previously unreleased 1991 concert, and then there are these releases: two three-disc sets (at a very low price-point) of live material from the band’s career throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. OfRead More

I remember one of the fundamental disappointments when getting into Led Zeppelin was, sadly, this live album. It was just a mess. Sprawling, rambling, incoherent, it just didn’t jell, and there was good reason: it had been chopped up to fit on two pieces of vinyl and was never readjustedRead More

It wasn’t enough that we got not only the amazing Blackfield II album, and one great album and an equally great EP from Steven Wilson’s main band, Porcupine Tree (Fear of a Blank Planet and Nil Recurring, respectively) in 2007, we then got this live DVD to sate the desiresRead More

Best-of albums are starting to make sense to me. Is that nostalgia? Or perhaps I’m just getting old. You May Also Like: When Peter Gabriel Suddenly Decided to Open Up on ‘Us’ How Tesla’s ‘Real to Reel’ Set Redefined the Classic Rock Cover Album Robbie Dupree, Chicago, Yes’ Peter BanksRead More

After the blast of intensity and creativity of Remission, fans expected nothing less than more of the same. Oddly, Leviathon does not deliver and listeners are the better off for it. Instead of continuing where the last album left off, with an apocolyptic, dense roar, Mastodon opted for variety andRead More

I think it’s pretty cool that the band opted to not carry the Black Sabbath moniker for their tour in support of the material Ronnie James Dio, Tony Iommi and Co. recorded as Black Sabbath in the early 1980s, then again in the early 1990s, and once again this yearRead More

The secret of the Machines is that they have an addictively fun, poundingly-heavy beat that is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin, and they have a penchant for really stretching out their compositions for texture and emphasis. It’s prog-rock without the slightest hint of twee frilliness. Road was an EP with aRead More

After Frances the Mute, I honestly wasn’t sure if I particularly cared where the Mars Volta was going next. I found the album completely misguided — or maybe unguided is a more fitting word — and a sonic mess, as if the band simply threw together every chord progression andRead More

Brian Eno’s first vocal, “pop”-based album since 1990’s overlooked classic (in my opinion) Wrong Way Up with John Cale and also to Nerve Net, Another Day On Earth found Eno in much more ambient territory than one might expect from the description. Comparisons to 1992’s Nerve Net are likely moreRead More