Blow by Blow typifies Jeff Beck's wonderfully unpredictable career. Released in 1975, Beck's fifth effort as a leader and first instrumental album was a marked departure from its more rock-based predecessors. Only composer/keyboardist Max Middleton returned from Beck's previous lineups. To Beck's credit, Blow by Blow features a tremendous ...
Ever since his thrilling 1994 debut with Mellow Gold, each new Beck album was a genuine pop cultural event, since it was never clear which direction he would follow. Kicking off his career as equal parts noise-prankster, indie folkster, alt-rocker, and ironic rapper, he's gone to extremes, veering between garishly ironic party music to brooding ...
Unlike Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, the indie albums that followed his debut Mellow Gold by a mere matter of months, Odelay was a full-fledged, full-bodied album, released on a major label in the summer of 1996 and bearing an intricate, meticulous production by the Dust Brothers in their first gig since the Beastie Boys' ...
Jeff Beck's Truth -- which was already regarded as the pioneering heavy metal blues album of its era, beating Led Zeppelin to the punch by about six months -- got a lot better with this British import remastered reissue, which puts all prior editions of the CD to shame. EMI Records have remastered the original LP in 24-bit digital, which puts Beck ...
When it was originally released in June 1969, Beck-Ola, the Jeff Beck Group's second album, featured a famous sleeve note on its back cover: "Today, with all the hard competition in the music business, it's almost impossible to come up with anything totally original. So we haven't. However, this disc was made with the accent on heavy music. So sit ...
According to party line, neither Beck nor Geffen ever intended Mutations to be considered as the official follow-up to Odelay, his Grammy-winning breakthrough. It was more like One Foot in the Grave, designed to be an off-kilter, subdued collection of acoustic-based songs pitched halfway between psychedelic country blues and lo-fi folk. The ...
From its kaleidoscopic array of junk-culture musical styles to its assured, surrealistic wordplay, Beck's debut album, Mellow Gold, is a stunner. Throughout the record, Beck plays as if there are no divisions between musical genres, freely blending rock, rap, folk, psychedelia, and country. Although his inspired sense of humor occasionally plays ...
Beck began work on 2006's The Information after Sea Change but before he reunited with the Dust Brothers for 2005's Guero, eventually finishing the album after Guero was generally acclaimed as a return to Odelay form. So, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that The Information falls somewhere between those two records, at least on sonic terms. ...
Beck has always been known for his ever-changing moods -- particularly since they often arrived one after another on one album, sometimes within one song -- yet the shift between the neon glitz of Midnite Vultures and the lush, somber Sea Change is startling, and not just because it finds him in full-on singer/songwriter mode, abandoning all of ...
Although he's not as well known outside music circles as Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, the early death of Gram Parsons was arguably just as great a loss. Parsons' country-rock hybrid became a touchstone for artists from the Rolling Stones to Elvis Costello to the '90s "alternative country" giants Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. In addition to his ...
Released almost immediately after Beck's first album Mellow Gold, Stereopathetic Soul Manure is a noisier record than his debut, flaunting the experimental rock influences that Mellow Gold only hinted at. For the most part, the record is a nonstop attack of noise and fragmented songs, recalling the mid-'80s records of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, ...
A telling thing about Robert Plant at his peak is how he would sneak on-stage with Rockpile and sing Elvis songs, or how Swan Song signed Dave Edmunds when his retro-rock was about the furthest thing from the monolithic Zeppelin of Physical Graffiti. Plant always harbored deep, abiding love for early rock & roll, a fact that was often obscured by ...
These two guitarists, seemingly dissimilar in style, are in lockstep throughout this recording. Bruno plays most of the lead lines, with Beck comping behind him on the alto guitar he invented. Long one of the best-kept secrets in jazz, Beck had a couple of minor hits (his album with David Sanborn on CTI in the '70s comes to mind), as well as ...
The majority of music fans are familiar with the legendary Ohio Players through such mid- to late-'70s pop-funk hits as "Love Rollercoaster," "Fire," and "Fopp." What many don't realize is that the band had been around since the '60s, and released a trilogy of hard funk records from 1972-1973 on the Westbound label -- Pain, Pleasure, and Ecstasy - ...
Having played on hundreds of hit records, it was only fitting that this Oakland-based group of studio hornmen should strike out on their own and this two-disc anthology from Rhino captures the ups, downs, ins, and outs of T.O.P.'s 30-year career. In many ways, the group retrospective is not just a document of the group's evolving sound, but a ...
There and Back, Jeff Beck's first new studio album in four years, found him moving from old keyboard partner Jan Hammer (three tracks) to new one Tony Hymas (five), which turned out to be the difference between competition and support. Hence, the second side of this instrumental album is more engaging and less of a funk-fusion extravaganza than ...
Usually, it's not a good sign if a band is generally known for augmenting artists instead of their own records, but Tower of Power was really a very good horn section, and they did make records that held their own. Of course, "What Is Hip?" was the biggest single they ever had, but they also had several other smaller hits that captured their sleek ...
It had to happen sometime, and after about 30 years of piecemeal Yardbirds compilations, here it is: a lengthy best-of anthology that manages to cross-license material from the Clapton, Beck, and Page eras. The result is a two-CD, 52-song anthology that includes all of their big hits, most of their outstanding albums tracks and non-hit singles, ...
Destination: Beautiful is an earnest and honest expression from the New England five-piece Mae. Honed on classics of the 1980s (the Police, Depeche Mode, U2), Mae's confidence soars throughout the entire 11-song track listing, going for large soundscapes of layered guitars and rolling percussion. They're a bit too brash to be exclusively pop, but ...
When all is said and done, Beck's Guero might be the quintessential album of 2005. Not the best, nor the one that captured the sound of the year, but the album that illustrates that in 2005, there was no such thing as a finished album -- that a set of songs could be packaged and repackaged in so many forms, it never really seems to exist as a ...
Basically The Best of Beck exists because the record company wanted to have some product on the shelf while the guitarist was touring. The 14 tracks do contain some of his most often-played (by radio, at any rate) recordings, including "Shapes of Things," "Plynth," and "Beck's Bolero" from the original Jeff Beck Group days in the late '60s, and ...
Neil Young and his wife Pegi established the Bridge School -- an organization designed to help develop communication for children who have severe speech and physical disabilities -- in the mid-'80s and every year, they held a fund-raising acoustic concert for the foundation. These concerts became famous for the richness and diversity of artists, ...
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