Led Zeppelin had a fully formed, distinctive sound from the outset, as their eponymous debut illustrates. Taking the heavy, distorted electric blues of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Cream to an extreme, Zeppelin created a majestic, powerful brand of guitar rock constructed around simple, memorable riffs and lumbering rhythms…

The Man in Black: 1963-1969 is Bear Family's fourth box set of Johnny Cash recordings and the third in The Man In Black series. 1963-1969 picks up where the previous Man In Black box left off – in the beginning of the '60s, after Cash established himself as a hitmaker for Columbia…

This was the debut album for Smokie, an English quartet who were a pet project for legendary English pop producers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. Although their unique blend of country-rock and pop would soon make Smokie a big success in Europe, their style comes off as tentative and unfocused on Pass It Around…

The essential substance of a Rock band begins to materialize only over a number of years. The frequently quoted 'test of time' indicates whether a group is capable of regularly producing great albums over an extended period of time and surviving also the difficult phases. Pink Cream 69 from Karlsruhe have supplied plenty of evidence to this effect, presenting a striking contrast to today's media landscape with it's tons of talent-free one-hit wonders….

These are live or redone versions of Eric Burdon's solo hits and the hits he did with his 1960s group, the Animals

Formed as far back as 66, this group recorded their wild debut album (between Zappa, Soft Machine, Crimson and Purple, if you can picture that) as a fairly international quintet (4 different nationalities between the five of them) before breaking up the following year, with their sax player, John Earle joining Gnidrolog for their classic Lady Lake. Singer-drummer Seyffer then joined the group Medusa, which soon became the second line-up of NDW and by the start of 73, they were recording their "We Never Lost Control", which was more conventional prog (Nektar comes to mind). NDW stayed a very unstable unit with their straight rock album "Only The Dancer" recorded as a quartet in England..

Jerry Goldsmith has always scored well with ethnic settings and a chance to play to the grand vista's of the African wilderness was an opportunity not to be missed. Congo, the movie, was an attempt to cash in on Crichton mania after the massive success of Jurassic Park. But Congo, the book was not a major success and a movie version had been talked about before back in the early eighties under the direction of Crichton himself and with Goldsmith scoring. This was aborted and some would say Congo still hadn't improved enough to warrant a major summer movie event in 1995. Congo wasn't that well received by critics but it didn't stop it from going on to make some good international box office though. Goldsmith begins with a celebratory opening for the plains of Africa introducing an enthusiastic African vocal from group Lebo M. Goldsmith has always done well with instrumental support to vocal arrangements and this is no exception.