Album Reviews

We like promoting independent vinyl projects so when Nova Social’s Thom Soriano contacted Analogplanet about a review of their new album For Any Inconvenience we bit.

The Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey" was a spirited 1987 marching order to an aging Baby Boomer generation to "get by" and its assuring affirmation that "we will survive" was a stroke of timing and musical genius. The song became an unlikely hit for a group that didn't have or need hits and helped propel the band to further heights of both popularity and creativity.

Why listen to "purist" British blues bands recreating what they've heard on record or in clubs, when you can hear the real thing? That's how I've always felt about it. This album by the British blues band Ten Years After is something else and perhaps in retrospect it's unfair to tag TYA as a "purist blues band."

Starting in 1954 the late veteran DJ William B. Williams hosted a long-running radio show on WNEW-AM called "Make Believe Ballroom" (a name, coincidentally, we also used at summer camp for kids who prematurely wore jock straps before they really had a need to).

There was no "sophomore slump" for Bob Dylan. Quite the contrary. His first album brought promise, but it was an album of covers with but two originals and it hardly sold. Some at Columbia called signing Dylan "Hammond's Folly," and the lackluster sales for Dylan's debut seemed to back them up.

Do you really need a musical discussion at this point in time? All I can say is that in the "Summer of Love" of 1967, all you could hear coming from car radios, and open windows was the edited version of "Light My Fire." It defined that summer for most of my peers and was the perfect calling card with which to beg for some action from a date. Hard to believe that was 45 years ago.