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[myrecordcollections]

A selection from Portishead debut 

[myrecordcollections]

Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson exploded onto the pop radar screen with Look Sharp!, which spawned four big hits: the bright, shiny “The Look,” the punchy, hopeful “Dressed for Success,” the A/C-leaning “Dangerous,” and the bland, overproduced “Listen to Your Heart.” The cuts that weren’t released as singles aren’t necessarily filler, but they also aren’t as strong as many of the cuts that made up Roxette albums that followed, particularly Joyride and Tourism (Songs From Studios, Stages, Hotelrooms & Other Strange Places). The non-releases are nothing memorable, and they don’t age well, “Paint” and “Dance Away” in particular being pretty average in terms of production and melody. Only “Chances” and “Shadow of a Doubt” show glimmers of the skills the duo would soon flourish. Gessle and Fredriksson became artists at crafting superb pop melodies and surrounding them with amazing production, so think of this album as basic training.

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Live & Unreleased: The Radio Show is a posthumous compilation box set by Jimi Hendrix, released in France only by Castle Communications on November 20, 1989. The tracks included were originally broadcast as a six-hour radio show in the United Stateson September 2 and 3, 1988, and as such feature original narration. Live & Unreleased was released as a 5-LP set and a 3-CD set in the same year. Featuring rare songs and outtakes, some still not released through “Experience Hendrix”

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The Singles: 1969–1973 is an album by the brother/sister pop duo the Carpenters. A greatest hits collection, it topped the charts in the United States and the United Kingdom and became one of the best-selling albums of the 1970s. Features of this compilation include a newly recorded version of “Top of the World”, “Ticket to Ride” and a number of musical introductions and segues between the songs “Superstar”, “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “Goodbye to Love”, the latter two were sped up in pitch, much to the regret of Richard in subsequent years. It has been certified 7× platinum in the US alone. In the UK, the album reached number 1 for 17 (non-consecutive) weeks.

Richard gave the album this title because he doesn’t like the term “greatest hits” because he felt it was “an overused thing”. He continues:

Individuals and groups with two or three hits all of a sudden put them on an album, use filler for the rest and title it “greatest hits”. This album contains eleven true hits and it just wasn’t slapped together. We’ve remixed a few, re-cut one and joined a couple of others. It’s simply something I believe we owe our audience and ourselves.

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Actaully all songs from this album are classics…

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The One’s for You – the fourth album from Barry Manilow – contained four Top 30 hits including Randy Edelman’s stunningly significant “Weekend in New England” (Top Ten towards the end of 1976), and another Number One – “Looks Like We Made It” cowritten by “Mandy” cowriter Richard Kerr and “Somewhere in the Night” cowriter Will Jennings – a fact that begs the question – why didn’t Barry Manilow cowrite with the bevy of major songwriters who penned his major hit recordings? The most consistent of his albums up to this point in time – a big improvement over his Tryin’ to Get the Feeling LP – there are still lyrics that initiate “the cringe factor,” words so uncool they no doubt participated in keeping Barry Manilow from enjoying the chic appreciation Middle of the Road predecessors Ferrante & Teicher and their contemporaries were blessed with years after heavy chart activity. A song with science fiction overtones like “Riders to the Stars” comes off as tacky, Adrienne Anderson and Manilow dripping with excess, though they find redemption in penning the singer’s ninth hit, “Daybreak,” a strong and bouncy number in the “It’s a Miracle” category, but even better. And the team that brought you “It’s a Miracle,” lyricist Marty Panzer and showman Manilow create the title track, “This One’s for You,” the song with the weakest showing of Barry’s first 16 Top 30 hits. With great orchestration from Gerald Alters, Charles Calello, Dick Berkhe, and Van McCoy, a touch of class permeates the Manilow/Ron Dante production. The first five songs flow better than the second half, but three of the four hits are very, very special – further cementing this artist as a major force – those hits keeping him on the charts from October of 1976 to October of 1977 – as a huge radio presence keeping the audience primed for the next studio disc and its four more hits.

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Forget its relationship with the film. This songs alone reminded a good atmosphere in the 70s.

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Again, this song need no introduction.

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With well-constructed arrangements, strong soloing, and catchy melodies, Brecker knew he was onto something, and this album was the first of several successful ventures.

[myrecordcollections]

The titles of “Plan Eden”, out in 1987, refer to Doris Lessing, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Anton Wilson and Harth himself. It’s another “separated at birth” statement: the first side is Harth solo on the tenor sax, playing a series of short improvisations whose atmosphere changes like tropical weather: a serene reverb-drenched meditation one moment, a torrent of multiphonic schizophrenia a minute later, and the firm reminder that what we currently worship in the so-called “reductionist” movement had already been tackled by Mr.23 at least a decade earlier. The second side features a clutch of duets with Lindsay Cooper - on bassoon and sopranino, while Harth uses clarinets - and a furious one with John Zorn, plus a three-minute improvised “mini opera” with Phil Minton gurgling his tonsils out and a pre-iPod, pre-electronics Günter Müller on drums among the others. In this album, just like in “Anything goes”, the composer also took good care of the cover artwork; the LPs include inserts with Harth’s drawings, and the nostalgic collector who replaces my good self every once in a while is still moved by the carton’s smell of his treasured copies. Sniff….Aaaahhh….

Touching Extremes

[myrecordcollections]

The titles of “Plan Eden”, out in 1987, refer to Doris Lessing, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Anton Wilson and Harth himself. It’s another “separated at birth” statement: the first side is Harth solo on the tenor sax, playing a series of short improvisations whose atmosphere changes like tropical weather: a serene reverb-drenched meditation one moment, a torrent of multiphonic schizophrenia a minute later, and the firm reminder that what we currently worship in the so-called “reductionist” movement had already been tackled by Mr.23 at least a decade earlier. The second side features a clutch of duets with Lindsay Cooper - on bassoon and sopranino, while Harth uses clarinets - and a furious one with John Zorn, plus a three-minute improvised “mini opera” with Phil Minton gurgling his tonsils out and a pre-iPod, pre-electronics Günter Müller on drums among the others. In this album, just like in “Anything goes”, the composer also took good care of the cover artwork; the LPs include inserts with Harth’s drawings, and the nostalgic collector who replaces my good self every once in a while is still moved by the carton’s smell of his treasured copies. Sniff….Aaaahhh….

Touching Extremes

[myrecordcollections]

This version is taken from the 1st Singapore Pressing Stereo Copy of Sgt Pepper.

[myrecordcollections]

Kontsert (/kɒntˈsɛərt/) (Russian: Концерт, [kɐnˈt͡sɛrt], commonly read as Kohuept or Kohliept, English: Concert) is the second live album by Billy Joel, released in 1987. The album was recorded during the Soviet leg of Joel’s 1987 The Bridge tour. This album was co-produced by Jim Boyer and Brian Ruggles, and mixed by Jim Boyer.

[myrecordcollections]

Lennon wrote the song to confuse people who “read in” to Beatles songs, searching for a hidden meaning, which annoyed him. “I don’t know what Helter Skelter has to do with knifing someone. I’ve never listened to it properly, it was just a noise.” With this in mind, the lyrics are intended to confuse the listener. Most lines refer to earlier Beatles songs, including “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Lady Madonna”, “The Fool on the Hill”, and “Fixing a Hole”. The song also refers to the “Cast Iron Shore”, a coastal area of south Liverpool known to local people as “The Cazzy”. Lennon dismissed any deep meaning to the mysterious lyrics:

I threw the line in—"the Walrus was Paul"—just to confuse everybody a bit more. It could have been “the fox terrier is Paul.” I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledygook about Pepper—play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.

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The song is written and arranged by Quincy Jones, that match quite closely the then popular soul funk blaxploitation theme.

The voice, belongs to Little Richard!

[myrecordcollections]

This is another song back from the western cover tunes in HK. Interesting rendition of a Bee Gees song