On Version, British-born, New York-bred DJ Mark Ronson cocks a sideways glance at some of the bigger UK chart hits of the last few years, plus a couple of old favourites. Formerly producer for an all-star cast that includes Lily Allen, Christina Aguilera, Robbie Williams, and Amy Winehouse, here Ronson has cajoled some of his famous mates into repaying the favour. The result? An album of ...
Manufacturer: Columbia
Manufacturer: Sony BMG
Respect features all the classic songs by the original Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Rooted in a gospel tradition that was to inform her soul-charged sound, her impact on pop music, and in particular American pop music was profound. It was the run of late-60s Atlantic hits featured here ("Respect", "Chain of Fools", "I Say A Little Prayer") that made her a star but as this "best of" ...
Manufacturer: Atlantic
Michael Jackson's Thriller is the bestselling album of all time, with 45 million worldwide sales powered by eight Grammy Awards. The 1982 album was also a success from which the pop superstar never really recovered--subsequent albums seemed to have no other goal than to beat the records set by Thriller. The highly- polished sound of Quincy Jones's production sounds almost ...
Manufacturer: Epic
Managing--sort of--to keep within the Pet Shop Boys tradition of one-word album titles, the moniker of this latest best-of, PopArt, is typical of the band--arrogant and somewhat pretentious yet also tongue-in-cheek and slyly self-aware. All the 35 tracks on these two CDs are indeed both pop and art and rather than being in chronological order have been split in fairly arbitrary fashion ...
Manufacturer: Parlophone
Manufacturer: XL
Moon Safari, the first album proper by this pair of middle-class Frenchmen, easily survives unscathed from its billing as that most deadly of sub-genres: dinner party music. True, Moon Safari, with its blatant bliss-provoking easy listening chimes, sits well beside Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded or Portishead's Dummy, but the album is steeped in too much ...
Manufacturer: Virgin
Manufacturer: Polydor Group
Enya's 1988 recording, Watermark, achieved landmark success with her groundbreaking use of multi-tracking technology to fuse new age and Celtic themes and instrumentation. The meticulous production defines her sound and achieves continuity even while weaving together tender ballads, piano pieces, massively layered vocal harmonies and symphonic synthesizer movements. Although Enya's ...
Manufacturer: Warner
