Anyone looking for the key to ABBA's enduring appeal should look no further than "Voulez Vous" and "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" for their answer. There was an innocence to the Swedish quartet, even when they were singing about one-night stands and the invitations to them. Gold establishes that the band, while appreciated as campy, were actually multifaceted in their ...
Warning: the Verve’s wittily titled fourth album--the first since their reformation in 2007--is no Urban Hymns Part II. That much is clear from the album’s first single "Love Is Noise," a punchy-yet-addictive propulsive rocker, but it’s a fact underlined several times on the remainder of the album. Taking a determined stroll along the boulevard of experimentalism, the ...
Subtitled "Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006", Tell Tale Signs, the eighth of Dylan's long running Bootleg series of officially approved outtakes, comes in two formats. The two-disc version consists of 27 tracks, including alternate versions of songs from his last three studio sets: Oh Mercy, Time out of Mind and Modern Times. Even non-obsessives will be seduced by the ...
No one ever managed to nail aimless suburban alienation quite like The Cure, so sensitive yet so party-hearty, and 4:13 Dream, their thirteenth studio album and first in four years, lands in a musical landscape presently infested with their descendents. Yet Robert Smith and his old blokes can still show the young shavers how it's done even as they enter their fourth decade as a working ...
In a career spanning four decades Steveland Judkins Morris has been many things: child star, funk hero, political chronicler, the saviour of Motown Records and depressingly, the instigator of the painfully schmaltzy R&B ballad. Thankfully, this exhaustive "Best Of...", timed to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his first appearance as Little Stevie Wonder, focuses mainly on the 1966-1980 glory ...
Ever since they trounced rival boy band One True Voice in the 2002 final of Popstars (The Rivals), Girls Aloud have gone from strength to strength, blasting their way into the charts with every new release, even trashing The Spice Girl's record of 10 Top Ten singles with their own new record of 12 (and counting). The time is thus ripe for a Best Of anthology, which is exactly what The ...