Every kind of music under the sun
Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969–1971 is the latest retrospective collection of Beach Boys albums which features new track remasters, rare tracks and outtakes from a specific time frame. This time round, the focus is on the two Beach Boys albums that ushered in the Seventies viz. Sunflower and Surf’s Up.
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The Best Queen Songs of All Time functions – as usual – as our introduction to the music of legendary pop-rock band, Queen. Queen rose out of the ashes of Smile – which Brian May (guitar) and Roger Taylor (drums) formed in university – with Freddie Mercury (vocals, piano) and John Deacon (bass) joining the line-up in 1970 and 1971 respectively.
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The Best ELO Songs of All Time is our concise introduction to the music of the Electric Light Orchestra (aka ELO). The Electric Light Orchestra was formed in 1970 by songwriters-multi-instrumentalists Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood with drummer Bev Bevan. The band was effectively spun out from the final incarnation of the 1960s psych-rock band The Move.
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All Things Must Pass (50th Anniversary) is a reissue celebrating 5o years of the release of George Harrison’s debut solo album in 1970. It is amazing to think that it seems like yesterday that we were reviewing the 30th anniversary reissue of the album twenty years ago. Times flies!
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Subtitled the Best of the Oddfellows (For Now), Up in the Clouds is the long-awaited appearance of the Oddfellows’ music on streaming platforms. The Singapore indie rockers – which formed around singer-songwriter Patrick Chng – first came to prominence in the local music scene 40 years ago, with its debut album, Teenage Head.
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What’s the point of a fucking rule if it’s not there to be broken, eh? Glad to make an exception for a review of beabadoobee Our Extended Play the new EP from our favourite new singer-songwriter. Anyone who is able to bring guitar pop back with proper big choruses deserves to have her name shouted from the rooftops! And that describes beabadoobee to a T!
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beabadoobee is the first artist under this fresh continuing series (hopefully) covering young bands/artists making new music that qualifies as Power Pop Rock N’ Roll. Yes, despite our protestations to the contrary, it does seem that there are young people out there still stubbornly utilising guitars, bass, drums (and keyboards) to write and record music. Not a review so much as a discovery feature that will shine a spotlight on deserving bands/artists who produce the kind of music that Power Pop Rock N’ Roll fans of all ages will enjoy and appreciate.
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1971 : The Year That Music Changed Everything is a music documentary based on Never a Dull Moment, a book written by David Hepworth. The documentary’s premise is that 1971 was a watershed year where rock and pop music exerted great influence on culture in the USA, the UK and the rest of the world.
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No, this isn’t a review of Causeway Youth – This Isn’t Where I Want To Be. Think of this as more of a personal reflection.
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Made You Look is an American crime documentary about the largest art fraud in American history set in the super rich, super obsessed and super fast art world of New York. Written and directed by Barry Avrich, Made You Look is an intriguing exploration concerning the dichotomy between the perceived value of art and the twisted narcissistic behaviour wrapped up in the ownership of art pieces.
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Continuing our look back at Power of Pop posts published before our move to WordPress in 2008. Here’s a review from 2006 featuring the wonderful David Gilmour solo album, On An Island.
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A Robyn Hitchcock interview to promote Moss Elixir back in 1996. Originally conducted for BigO magazine, this is the full transcript.
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Wingspan: Hits and History is a greatest hits compilation album by Paul McCartney released in 2001. The contemporaneous review follows :
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A review of U2 The Best of 1990 – 2000 published in 2002.
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What follows is a 2006 review of Bee Gees Studio Albums 1967-68 boxset. This review was published at one of the previous incarnations of Power of Pop.
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Your Honor Part 8 is the latest instalment of a ten-part drama miniseries set in New Orleans. The series is adapted from the Israeli TV series Kvodo. The premise of Your Honor concerns Michael Desiato (Bryan Cranston), a judge who has to take drastic action in order to safeguard his son Adam, after the latter kills the scion of a mob boss in a hit-and-run accident.
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Best Genesis songs (with Phil Collins) is a listicle idea that has been stuck in my head for a while now. There is a common misconception amongst progressive rock fans that when Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, it was all downhill from that point. This perception has hardened against the band especially in the 1980s when Genesis (Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford) become a genuine commercial success.
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Rene Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. Magritte is one of my favourite artists of all time. He is famous for creating a number of thought-provoking, incongruous images. Rene Magritte depicted ordinary objects in an extraordinary context, the premise of his work being the presentation of things that do not belong together. This unique ability is borne from Rene Magritte’s fecund imagination.
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The Best David Bowie Songs of All Time. Now it does not get more poignant than this one. Bowie’s birthday is 8th January. He would have been 74 years old this year. The fact that he passed away two days later five years ago is still heart-wrenching. It’s no exaggeration to declare that Bowie is one of my favourite artists and his art will certainly live forever.
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We continue our look back at the classic albums of rock lore with Mountain and its 1971 album, Nantucket Sleighride. Mountain was a rock band that formed in 1969 in Long Island, New York and consisted of vocalist/guitarist Leslie West, bassist and vocalist Felix Pappalardi, keyboardist Steve Knight and drummer Corky Laing.
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When I opined that Classic Rock had lost its relevance and significance in the contemporary music industry, it does not mean that Classic Rock is no longer important. In fact, Classic Rock is a critical asset to film and TV producers as directors utilise Classic Rock to create a vibe in film and TV series that contemporary pop music just cannot replicate. Which brings me to The Best Classic Rock Film and TV Scenes.
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It has been more than 25 years since the death of Kurt Cobain, the last rock iconoclast that had a major impact on popular music before the rise of hip-hop. That is a generation ago and since then, Classic Rock as we understood the genre in the last forty years has declined to insignificance as a cultural force.
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Station to Station is the opening track on David Bowie’s classic 1976 album of the same name. Clocking in at over 10 minutes, Station to Station is Bowie’s longest studio recording and is seen as a pivotal landmark in Bowie’s musical development in the 1970s. That decade was a seminal epoch for many influential rock genres and Bowie had his finger on the pulse of most of them!
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The Bee Gees : How Can You Mend A Broken Heart is a music documentary directed by Frank Marshall about the Gibb Brothers viz. Barry, Robin and Maurice. The documentary basically focuses on the two main eras in which the trio were at their most successful i.e. the late 1960s and a decade later in the late 1970s. There are also cursory examinations of their fallow periods in between and after these phenomenal heights but nothing much in depth.
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All Right Now is the ultimate British expression of the blues-rock explosion of the late 1960s and the hard rock movement of the early 1970s. Arguably, All Right Now is also the signature tune of Free, consisting of Paul Rodgers (vocals), Paul Kossoff (guitar), Simon Kirke (drums) and Andy Fraser (bass).
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