This blog has reached the end of Thanks all friends for all the years we have traveled in the world of music together. Goodbye!!!

Δευτέρα 9 Ιανουαρίου 2017

Τετάρτη 4 Ιανουαρίου 2017

JEFF BUCKLEY - Grace (1994)





Jeffrey Scott "Jeff" Buckley (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997), raised as Scott "Scottie" Moorhead,[1] was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. After a decade as a session guitarist in Los Angeles, Buckley amassed a following in the early 1990s by playing cover songs at venues in Manhattan's East Village, such as Sin-é, gradually focusing more on his own material. After rebuffing much interest from record labels[2] and his father Tim Buckley's manager Herb Cohen,[3] he signed with Columbia, recruited a band, and recorded what would be his only studio album, Grace, in 1994. In 2004, Rolling Stone listed him at number 39 on their list of greatest singers of all time.[4]

Over the following two years, the band toured widely to promote the album, including concerts in the US, Europe, Japan, and Australia. In 1996, they stopped touring[5] and made sporadic attempts to record Buckley's second album in New York City with Tom Verlaine as producer. In 1997, Buckley moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to resume work on the album, to be titled My Sweetheart the Drunk, recording many four-track demos while also playing weekly solo shows at a local venue. On May 29, 1997, while awaiting the arrival of his band from New York, he drowned during a spontaneous evening swim, fully clothed, in the Mississippi River when he was caught in the wake of a passing boat; his body was found on June 4.[6]

Since his death, there have been many posthumous releases of his material, including a collection of four-track demos and studio recordings for his unfinished second album My Sweetheart the Drunk, expansions of Grace, and the Live at Sin-é EP. Chart success also came posthumously: with his cover of Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" he attained his first number one on Billboard's Hot Digital Songs in March 2008 and reached number 2 in the UK Singles Chart that December. Buckley and his work remain popular[7]and are regularly featured in "greatest" lists in the music press.



Track listing
Original track listing
1. "Mojo Pin"  5:42
2. "Grace"  5:22
3. "Last Goodbye" Jeff Buckley[42] 4:35
4. "Lilac Wine" James Shelton 4:32
5. "So Real"  4:43
6. "Hallelujah" Leonard Cohen 6:53
7. "Lover, You Should've Come Over" Jeff Buckley 6:43
8. "Corpus Christi Carol" 2:56
9. "Eternal Life" Jeff Buckley 4:52
10. "Dream Brother" 5:26

Δευτέρα 2 Ιανουαρίου 2017

In The Woods...- Pure (2016)





When I saw that I had a promo from a band called In The Woods I scarcely dared to believe that it could be from the legendary dark prog metallers behind releases like Strange In Stereo, and yet it was. Not only that, but these long time heavy metal heroes were able to put together an album that wasn't just impressive and immaculately constructed but also the sort of record that transcends many of the genre's paradigms in order to refine something grandiose and epic in scale. Pure is the sort of album that takes the modern prog polemic and runs it through its own ideas to create something truly beautiful. It's an album that understands the all encompassing glory of this kind of music and gives you a chance to sit back, chill out and light one up. In The Woods have come back from the grave to show that they are still the masters of forward thinking and elegantly pieced-together progressive metal with one of their strongest artistic statements to date.

Pure takes all that has made the band great over the years and brings it to its logical extreme. A particular shining star is James Fogarty, whose potent vocals, with their booming sense of bombast, is endlessly exciting to listen to, and gives the whole album a sense of NWOBHM magic. Pure offers a window to a brave new world, one where every small victory is a glorious triumph and any setback is the sort of struggle that leaves you shaking in your boots. In other words Pure is exactly that, an album that captures the purity of the genre. Of course, it's not without its faults. Being as over the top as they are the band occasionally runs into roadblocks. They've been away for a while and some of their execution doesn't quite do justice to the grandiose nature of the compositions. This is just a brutal reality but one that I think the band could rapidly move past with another album or two under their collective belts. There is definitely a sense of getting back on their feet… but the flashes back into old glories make the entire thing worth revisiting time and time again.

Ultimately a lot of my favorite bands have a direct lineage back to In The Woods, so it's hard for me to totally write off anything they do. Of course even without the context of their legend, Pure is an absolute motherfucker of a record. It's the kind of prog that I love: willing to embrace the silliness of the genre and full of epic arrangements that you will want to go back and pour over. These guys know exactly what they are doing and when they are on top of their game they write some of the most compelling prog that I have heard in years. Watching them grow, if they are truly back, is going to be a pleasure because as this record shows, In The Woods are still one of the great unknown bands of heavy metal history and are uniquely positioned to take the world on by storm.

Score: 8.5/10



1. Pure 07:21 Show lyrics
2. Blue Oceans Rise (Like a War) 05:41 Show lyrics
3. Devil's at the Door 05:47 Show lyrics
4. The Recalcitrant Protagonist 05:43 Show lyrics
5. The Cave of Dreams 04:55 Show lyrics
6. Cult of Shining Stars 05:55 Show lyrics
7. Towards the Black Surreal 07:01 Show lyrics
8. Transmission KRS 10:46 instrumental
9. This Dark Dream 07:18 Show lyrics
10. Mystery of the Constellations 07:02 Show lyrics