It took me awhile to really warm up to The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees, which was not only the band’s fifth studio album but their last commercially successful one. Their previous two records, Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., showed that they weren’t just pretty pusses plastered onto prepackaged product for…
The Kinks’s 1979 album Low Budget remains their highest-charting US non-compilation album, and a validation of sorts for the band. It continues the mainstream AOR vein that began with Sleepwalker and Misfits, their first two Arista albums — aka the band’s so-called “Arena Rock” period. The album was a big commercial success for the band,…
Pound for pound, I’d say Love Gun is probably my favorite Kiss album, or at the very least in my Top 3. Everything about it screams quintessential Kiss. First there’s that cover. Look at that thing. Beautiful. Artist Ken Kelly painted it (he had done the Destroyer cover as well) and that is some buttkickin’…
Your enjoyment of the live, 3-LP Wings Over America will largely rest upon your affinity for the mid-1970s Wings era. But it remains a strong live release from a tight rockin’ band.
As strong as an album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. really is, it still represents something of a step backward for the band. While their previous album Headquarters (released earlier that very same year) represented an assertive statement of individuality and liberation of The Monkees as a self-sustaining band, PACJ has the band relying…
Misfits was another commercial success for The Kinks, following the same trajectory as their previous album, but this time they even managed to score a Top 40 single (and sometime AOR-radio staple) A Rock & Roll Fantasy. Their label Arista was probably moderately pleased with the results; RCA, their previous label, must have been FUMING! I…
Attention Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and Dan Fogelberg: lock up your slick mid/late ’70s production values, because The Kinks are gonna ape the hell outta them. Well by 1976, RCA had just about had it with The Kinks: six albums of diminishing returns, both commercially and critically, and several outright flops. Once the contract was…
So their previous album The Kinks Present: A Soap Opera represented The Kinks at their absolute lousiest. Crappy album, crappy critical reception, crappy sales. If the previous two albums — the ambitious, sometimes entertaining but ultimately unsatisfactory Preservation Act I and Preservation Act II — didn’t drive away most of their 60s fans, Soap Opera…
The film was a disaster, but the soundtrack album consisting of re-recordings of Beatles and Wings tunes and a few new tracks definitely has its moments.
Yet another trip down The Beatles and their American LP mystery trip… and yes, this one takes a bit of context. So we’re now in the late 1960s. After the release of the seminal 1966 Beatles album Revolver, the band has decided to assert more control over their music, business ventures, touring (i.e. ceasing touring entirely),…