Album Review: “Unmasked” — Kiss (1980)

By the time 1980 rolled around, Kiss was in a really strange space. For them, anyhow. The mid-to-late 1970s had been their playground: Platinum records, hit songs, massive tours, constant exposure on both TV and radio… the world was not just their oyster, it was an entire raw bar and the cigarette machine down the…

Album Review: “More Of The Monkees” — The Monkees (1967)

Released three months after their debut album, More of the Monkees continues the band’s trend of crafting catchy pop tunes written by a host of great songwriters and… wait, doesn’t that album cover just REEK of being a photo from a Sears catalog? Well, you’d be close. It was taken from a J.C. Penney clothing ad.…

Album Review: “The Monkees” — The Monkees (1966)

The 1966 debut release of The Monkees is an oddity, not so much because of the quality of its contents, but in its overall creation and “purpose” as an album. It all depends on how you look at it. Is it a “band” effort? Not in the strictest sense of the word, as the assembled…

Album Review: “Help!” — The Beatles (1965)

Help! kicks off a period of unparalleled creativity, innovation, songwriting and musicianship in The Beatles’s history. The dark, folksy yearnings of the previous (and wholly underrated) Beatles For Sale lead to more experimentation with Dylanesque folk, country, and balladeering, while not sacrificing the pure pop craftsmanship that has earmarked much of The Beatles sound up to this point. 1965 was in…

Album Review: “Everybody’s In Show-Biz” — The Kinks (1972)

Call it Muswell Hangover… You know, the first time I listened to Everybody’s In Show-Biz, I was right in the middle of my Kinks “discovery phase”, a time during which I made it a habit to dive deep into the, shall we say, “less than classic” albums in the band’s catalog. Upon first listen, in an…