Siamese Dream

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Back into the rock genre with this album from Smashing Pumpkins. As this is the sort of thing I normally listen to, I was aware of SP and this album, but had never actually listened to it before.

The album opens with Cherub Rock, the only track on the album that I knew (from Guitar Hero). And it’s a great introduction into the pretty unique sound of SP. That sound carries on through the rest of the album. It isn’t about being a standard rock style, there’s a lot of melody driven riffs rather than the standard rock riffs. And Billy Corgan has a very unique vocal.

Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Hitting the 70’s with a slab of Southern Rock.

With classics like Simple Man and Freebird, this album was always going to be a bit of a winner in my eyes. And it didn’t disappoint at all. Filled with some of the greatest rock riffs of all time which have seen Lynyrd Skynyrd included on a plethora of greatest rock and air guitar albums and on games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, this album is wall to wall solid.

And you can feel that the album isn’t just about rock, there are huge amounts of blues and country influences throughout the album. Everything just melds together into a great album.

Welcome to the Pleasuredome

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Sticking with the 80s and some pop nostalgia with Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Its a very electronic and very 80s album. Nowadays you can see just how camp and sexual it was, but back then, I vaguely remember dancing to Relax at primary school…but I was very young and innocent too then.

Content wise, once you get past the very well known Two Tribes, Relax and Power of Love, you find some covers (including Springsteen’s Born to Run), and some more atmospheric spoken word tracks. But those big three tracks are key, bringing together the cold war, sex and christmas in that order, these are the songs that people remember. Which is a shame because when you listen to the rest of the album, it is a great album and very much a classic for the era.

RUN-D.M.C.

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Back to some old school Hip Hop and back to what, in my mind, Hip Hop should be, with the debut from Run D.M.C..

Great tracks on this album, good sense of beats mixing and scratching, laced with great lyrics, nothing overly violent or agressive in the content, just great rhymes with some political content, as you would expect. Nice and simple, I like this style much more than the more agressive rap style that came out later.

Obvious stand out tracks include It’s Like That, which was a classic before Jason Nevins got his hands on it to bring it back to a new audience.

Ellington at Newport

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

This was a live album, not sure I’ve had a live one yet on the list.

It’s a nice album to have on in the background, great bit of jazz. I listened to this last week, so it’s been a while, and my recollection of it is going to be sketchy. I know the version I heard was the full concert recording, so not just Duke Ellington, which was great. The only odd but I found was the talking, but then it’s a live album, and they introduced acts/songs/band members, so it was fine, just seemed to be a lot of it.

Having never been really into jazz, it was refreshing and enjoyable to listen to. A great introduction for me.

Tubular Bells

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Aside from having heard some of this in The Exorcist, I’d not heard the rest of it. And I will be honest, I didn’t really like this album. Not sure why, but I really didn’t get into it like I have the other albums from the book. Maybe I was expecting something more from it, maybe I’m just having a bad day. But this left me bored, and I nearly turned off the album halfway through the first track, there are only two tracks on the original album and they are both over 20 minutes.

No picture on this at the moment as I can’t get it to upload.

Honky Tonk Heroes

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Time for a change of pace again, this time to the guy who sings the theme tune for the Dukes of Hazzard, Waylon Jennings.

It’s a short album, with ten tracks and under 30 minutes long. But it’s a nice album, to have on in the background. The country twang and honky tonk vibe is completely uninvasive and weirdly quite calming. There was nothing on the whole album that really stood out, but equally there was nothing that I didn’t like either.

I’ve been listening to more country music over the last year or two and (in some cases) it’s definitely something I can get into. This album has just added to that feeling.

Van Halen

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Time for the debut album by a band who would become hair metal gods, Van Halen.

I knew a few tracks by Van Halen, one of which is the first track Running With The Devil, but the rest weren’t on here.

It was a good mix of styles, showing just how good Van Halen were. There was a little bit of everything from what would become hair metal, through to what sounded like doowop…

It worked for me, short, fun album which is a great intro into both this genre and the band.

School’s Out

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

Ok…I thought I knew Alice Cooper’s style of music, but this really isn’t what I was expecting. I normally associate AC with rock music, and although there was a rock feel to this, it was less rock than I thought it would be, much less… That’s maybe not a bad thing, it’s good to have a new spin on things.

This was a good album, not great, not bad, just good.

There was the rockier feel on a couple of tracks, but a majority of this wasn’t that rocky. There were still guitars and all that, but it almost had more of a rock and roll feel to it and in places it was more country and even pop…

The title track is one that everyone knows, but the other tracks on here are also good and worth a listen.

Southern Rock Opera

~ Pete Cox ~ Leave a comment

There are a lot of albums out there that play on the rock opera concept, with the story running through the album, so given the title of this album, it does exactly what is says on the box.

This was a great album, long, at over 94 minutes, but great. The theme was really good and worked nicely all the way through, as the story unfolds you can see it’s about someone who wants to be a rock legend, and how being from Alabama has influenced them.

With references to Alabama’s history, including Govenor Wallace. There were also so many mentions of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and particularly Ronnie Van Zant, that it was obvious that this was a bit of an homage to them and the influence they had on music from the South.

It was a really great concept album, with some tracks being narrative storylines over music, others from the perspective of different people, including the Devil. I really enjoyed it.