A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Ready Take One LP by Erroll Garner. What do critics really know about jazz? Such was the first question I found myself asking as I wound my way through Popmatters and Jazzwax looking at longer-lead reviews of Ready Take One. Complaints about Martha Glaser’s production styling and the looseness of pianist Erroll Garner’s performances were commonplace, but that really strengthened my resolve to listen closely; any number of things could have...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day release of The Real Royal Albert Hall Concert 1966 2LP by Bob Dylan. It’s incredible how personally fans of folk music took the form in the 1960s. Back then, any new development or movement away from classicism was seen as abhorrent and rejected wholesale by purists. Of course, taking such a rigid stance was akin to inviting some upstart to come along and upset it and, in 1966,...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Record Store Day Exclusive Release pressing of Alice In Chains’ Live Facelift 12” EP. While readers may be familiar with parts of Alice In Chains’ new Black Friday/Record Store Day release, Live Facelift, it’s nearly guaranteed that they don’t know the whole thing. They may know some of the songs – like the performance of “It Ain’t Like That” because it was the song which was playing in the background as...

The Marx Brothers Silver Screen Collection Restored Edition (Blu Ray) I’ve always said I’m late to the game. And as a fan of comedy, one can never be more late to the game than getting into the Marx Brothers now. Oh, of course I’ve known who they are because I’ve been a Warner Bros cartoon fan ever since I was a kid. Those cartoons were full of Groucho cameos and appearances. But it’s only a couple years ago that I...

A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the “Christmas In Hollis” 12″ Picture Disc single coming out on Black Friday 2016 from Run-D.M.C. I must confess that I have never been a fan of Christmas carols and Christmas songs. While I understand the idea of having a song in one’s heart around the holiday season, I’ve always thought that the idea of professional musicians recording albums of the same standards with their own small creative stamp on them pretty...

Mitch Hedberg The Complete Collection One of the great perks of listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast is all the stories you get to hear about Mitch Hedberg. He was unique, absurd, kind, generous, and apparently quite the stud (Janeane Garofalo freaked out when she found out Mitch had a crush on her). It’s fun to hear these stories, because after all these years, I don’t think we’re quite satisfied with the answers we’ve uncovered in the mystery that was...

Artist: David Bowie Album: Legacy (2CD) Label: Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music Over the last forty years, there have been a multitude of “Best of David Bowie” compilations to his new release racks. To date, this critic counts eleven good, sturdy ones, but the methodology for making them has always been the same: “ensure that the core of around ten classic tracks which appeared on ChangesOneBowie (the first Bowie hits comp) are present, then mix and match a list of singles which flow...

Artist: Metallica Album: Hardwired… To Self-Destruct Label: Blackened/ADA/Warner I must confess that it would be very, very easy to find a bigger fan of Metallica than I am. To be perfectly blunt, I haven’t heard a new album by the band that I’ve liked in twenty-five years – and even that was a reach because I thought the Black Album spent more time plodding than rocking. No, I’ve always been a bigger fan of the earlier, “thrash” side of Metallica...

Artist: Pink Floyd Album: Cre/ation – The Early Years 1967 – 1972 Label: Pink Floyd Records/Columbia/Sony Music As every fan of the band knows, there have been three eras in the history of Pink Floyd: the first, Syd Barrett-fronted psychedelic period, the second (epic) Roger Waters-fronted period (which gave us albums like Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, Wish You Were Here and Animals) and the final David Gilmour-fronted incarnation which has produced albums like The Division Bell and...

Artist: Mike Watt Album: “Ring Spiel” Tour ’95 Label: Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music Ever walked into a record store and, digging through a vast and vastly disorganized bin of CDs, come across a genuine treasure of the sort that no one ever expects to find? That was the feeling which overtook me when I opened my copy of “Ring Spiel” Tour ’95. Now, I’m familiar with plenty of the back story behind that period of time in Mike Watt’s life; the bassist...