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Amon Duul is German prog. This might seem scary at first and you’re right. This is some scary music. The first song Surrounded by the stars sets the tone: industrial clanging guitars, a monotonous female voice that sounds slightly deformed and very scary violin sounds make this song something you do...

The title refers to the fact, explained in the liner notes, that the band ‘self-destruted halfway during the tour, and did not ever finish it. It’s also indicative of the quality Frank knew he had when he assembled these musicians. From a technical perspective these are some of the best players in t...

Neil Young is one of our last troubadours, together with Bob Dylan (who is even more of a poet and an equal or better composer but technically not a great guitar player and hardly a singer). Neil Young wants to reach you on an emotional level. He wants to convert you (still a hippy in most respects)...

XTC is Andy Partidge, or rather, XTC came to be Andy Prtidge. Starting in the late 1970’s as a punkish pop group, they soon became somewhat more pretentious. Their earlier hit, Making plans for Nigel is the kind of nervous hit single often associated with English pop music of that period. Its urgenc...

On this album Ween use better production methods (no longer recording to DAT and no longer in their garage but in a full blown studio). The effects are manifold, but the main conclusion must be: hell, this is one album with a lot of variety! Problem is, you may not like all the genre hopping if you ...

This album is the least famous album by a seminal rock group. Other (studio) albums are: Velvet Underground and Nico, White light / White Heat and Velvet Underground , plus Live in Max’s Kansas City and two compilations from studio leftovers released during the 1980’s). This band generated the clich...

The 60s had the Beatles, the 70s had Abba, the 80s probably had U2. A phenomenon because of three things: the stage presence and voice of Bono, the interesting guitar noices of the Edge and their position as moral crusaders which is/was probably sincere as hell, but did not harm their record sales. ...

10cc in its heyday (1972 – 1976) consisted of four capable singer/songwriters, literally: they could all compose, play several instruments and they could all sing. Usually (but not always) they operated in teams, Lol Creme / Kevin Godley and Graham Gouldman / Eric Stewart. The first team left in 197...

These days, Elliott Smith is mostly famous for being dead, having committed suicide at the tender age of 34. One could argue that the lines “Everything means nothing to me”, repeated several times in the song of the same name is a bit of a giveaway, but at the time this album was quite well received...

Lou’s first solo album never gets the credit it deserves. Mostly because album # 2 and 3 ( Transformer and Berlin ) are much more famous. While this makes sense to a certain extent, both Transformer and Berlin are in a way more dated than this, his debut album. Transformer has the decadent (Am I gay...