Every kind of music under the sun
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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THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME is an interesting proposition. Mainly because we tend to think of Pink Floyd as the definitive album rock band. So, THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME as a feature seems in appropriate. But once again think of THE BEST PINK FLOYD SONGS OF ALL TIME list as an introduction to Pink Floyd and perhaps that makes it more palatable.
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THE BEST PUNK SONGS OF ALL TIME – a potentially divisive and contentious topic to discuss! Probably more so than THE BEST POWER POP SONGS OF ALL TIME that I posted not too long ago. But as usual in order to list down THE BEST PUNK SONGS OF ALL TIME, I need to explain a few concepts first.
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BANDS THAT SOUND LIKE THE KINKS. A list of bands that might possibly be more famous, more well-known than The Kinks. BUT probably owe their success, nay, even their very existence to the brilliance of The Kinks.
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Comfortably Numb might be my favourite song ever. I mean, if push came to shove and I needed to select just one favourite song then Comfortably Numb would be it. Nestled on the end of side three of Pink Floyd’s monster hit album, The Wall, Comfortably Numb is a true highlight in a landmark best-selling (double) LP.
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Prima facie, an article about THE BEST KINKS SONGS OF ALL TIME would seem like a piece of cake. But the opposite is true. The trick was despairing over the songs I had to omit from THE BEST KINKS SONGS OF ALL TIME. In the end, while twenty tracks seems just about right – not too little and not too much. Which is to me, an indication of how much I value Ray Davies as a songwriter.
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When you consider the massive influence that The Beatles has exerted on pop and rock music since they first exploded onto the public consciousness in the early 1960s, it’s seems superfluous to even think of the BANDS THAT SOUND LIKE THE BEATLES!
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THE BEST POWER POP SONGS OF ALL TIME! Now that’s a social media minefield on so many different levels. And it’s not merely about arriving at a consensus as to what are THE BEST POWER POP SONGS OF ALL TIME. Fact of the matter, the first point of contention would be the definition of Power Pop itself!
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Recently, I posted THE BEST WHO SONGS OF ALL TIME and remarked that the seminal music of The Who had spawned numerous rock sub-genres. From pop-rock to melodic hard rock to power pop to punk to indie rock, the fingerprints of The Who’s power chord guitar agenda are clearly discernible. Perhaps to prove my point, it was necessary to provide irrefutable evidence in the form of BANDS THAT SOUND LIKE THE WHO.
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The Who. What more is there to say about The Who? Probably the most influential rock band of all time? And I do mean ROCK! A seminal band in every sense of the word. Think of all the rock sub-genres that have emerged in their wake, and it would be impossible not to trace The Who as the source. So doesn’t it make sense for me to make up a list of THE BEST WHO SONGS OF ALL TIME???
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Diehard fans of the legendary Neil Young will be more than keenly aware of the vast number of unreleased material that the singer-songwriter still holds in his vaults even after over 50 years of recording and releasing music. Thus, Neil Young Archives II is a much-anticipated release after the well-received first volume came out over a decade ago in 2009.
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