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Music

Bass is Loaded: Kid Sensation on His Bass Music Classic, 'Rollin' With Number One'

Electricity and simplicity are the two prime characteristics which drive Kid Sensation's debut.
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Music

The Misfits' American Psycho (1997)

This Danzig-less "reunion" album from the most recognized brand in horror rock isn't nearly as bad as you'd expect.

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Judgment Night: Music from the Motion Picture (1993)

A look at the album that may have spawned rap rock and that supplies the missing link between Biohazard and Emilio Estevez.

James Greene, Jr.
Music

Youngblood Brass Band: Center:Level:Roar

As a new generation continues to reshape traditional ensembles from big band to chamber and play it punk by adopting pop, it's useful to go back and marvel at one of the albums that truly innovated in this new-jack band geek era.

Thomas Hauner
Music

Marillion, Afraid of Sunlight

Having made a name as prog-rock revivalists in the '80s, Marillion then lost its singer and slid slowly into semi-obscurity, the band responded with a dark album that assessed the fallout of fame.

Bob Short
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Souled American, Around the Horn (1990)

Chicago’s Souled American's album, Around the Horn, may be the most uniquely beautiful alt-country album you’ve never heard.

Zach Schonfeld
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Al Kooper, New York City (You're a Woman) (1971)

This album features some of the best of Kooper's original compositions and is free of his tendency to include reinterpretations of over-familiar songs.

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Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper, Bo-Day-Shus!!! (1987)

Two decades later, Bo-Day-Shus!!! stands as the ultimate musical document of America's '80s love affair with redneck culture.

James Greene Jr.
Music

Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief

Humor is a funny thing. Here to prove it are three Monty Python albums, revealing the revolutionary constructs of their work, the dangers of self-parody, and, well, something completely different.

Music

Losing California

After the Mamas and the Papas, unheralded songwriter John Phillips released one perfect solo album before disintegrating into addiction and self-recrimination.

Music

Fire Engines: Hungry Beat

Cowbell-crazed, no-wave noised, robot-funk grooves from the short-lived Scottish band best known for inspiring Franz Ferdinand. Even the most cursory listen provides that they were much, much more interesting than that.

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Reg King: Reg King

One of the great lost '60s pop and soul also-rans, Reg King's only solo album is a murky snapshot of the dissolution of musical promise as an industry rolled on by, but remains a rawly emotional experience.

Music

Howard Devoto: Jerky Versions of The Dream

Erudite perspectives on the romantic dream from a shape-shifting man-insect who left punk before we knew it existed. Awkwardness has never sounded so varied, cinematic, stupid and sexual.

Music

Alice Cooper, Love It to Death

Love It to Death is the beginning of Alice Cooper as we know him, with his storytelling bent and Ezrin's drapes of the epic. From there Cooper got more external about the nature of evil in his stage shows and symbols.

Paul Pearson
Music

Robyn Hitchcock: Storefront Hitchcock / Jewels for Sophia

These reissues of two late '90s Robyn Hitchcock albums find the surrealist singer-songwriter in prime form.

Music

Karen Dalton: In My Own Time

Just as the ambiguous details surrounding Nick Drake's death led people to exhaustively make his sorrow sacred, Karen Dalton was soul country's undiscovered Ophelia.

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Hall & Oates, Abandoned Luncheonette (1973)

Before their string of ubiquitous 1980s hits, this songwriting duo wrote surprisingly strange and pleasantly unpretentious soft rock.

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The Only Ones, Special View (1979)

The Only Ones' Peter Perrett was power pop's Baudelaire, assailing city life with delirious, love-struck curses.

Julia Yepes
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Boz Scaggs, Silk Degrees (1976)

The former Steve Miller Band sideman teams up with the musicians who would become Toto to enact the birth of the smooth.

Paul Pearson
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Iggy Pop and James Williamson, Kill City (1977)

This cinematic album, which captures the drugged myopia of the denizens of mid-1970s Los Angeles, nevertheless furthered Iggy’s own convalescence after years of addiction.

Nick Blakey
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The Beach Boys, Love You (1977)

Essentially a Brian Wilson solo effort, on which the ravaged, troubled genius takes a few more painful steps toward a purifying simplicity.

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The Gravel Pit, Silver Gorilla (1999)

Though professedly inspired by polysemy and pretentiousness, this neglected Boston band makes guitar pop that doesn’t require a second thought to enjoy.

Music

The Cut-Out Bin #7: Stan Ridgway, Mosquitos (Geffen, 1989)

The former Wall of Voodoo frontman's noirish solo album is a novelistic suite about the promise and peril of the American West.

Bill Gibron
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #7: Claudine Longet, Claudine (A&M, 1967)

The coy first album by the best of the broken-English chanteuses.

Rob Horning
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #7: 10cc, How Dare You! (1976)

Lurking just below the goofy comedy, the mishmash of genres and the studio gimmickry of this last album by the band's original lineup is a pervasive, inconsolable sense of disconnection.

Dennis Cook
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #6: Too Much Joy, Cereal Killers (1991)

A classic album from a punk power-pop band that made the mistake of making listeners laugh.

Patrick Schabe
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #6: Dennis DeYoung, Desert Moon (1984)

Mock Styx's keyboard-playing frontman as a second-rate Elton John with an unfortunate taste for both bombast and treacle if you must. But his solo record resounds with something even rarer than good songs: humility.

Scott McLatchy
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #6: Bright Eyes, Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (2005)

Generally viewed as a less-than-stellar offering from an otherwise promising young songwriter, the neglected cousin of I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is actually a challenging meditation on the dual nature of time.

Sarah Feldman
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #5: Genevieve Waite, Romance Is on the Rise (1974)

After the Mamas and the Papas, John Phillips found his muse in this South African model-actress and indulged her wish to become a singer. The result? This rarely heard record of campy cabaret.

Charlotte Robinson
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #5: George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 (1990)

After 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go', maybe this record's title asked too much. Still, this song cycle has the ambition of Stevie Wonder's 1970s work and Michael nearly had the talent to pull it off.

Dennis Cook
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #5: The Carpenters, The Carpenters (1971)

Forget horror-core and death metal, the most terrifying and emotionally exhausting album ever made may be this soft-pop classic.

Rob Horning
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Genevieve Waite, Romance Is on the Rise (1974)

After the Mamas and the Papas, John Phillips found his muse in this South African model-actress and indulged her wish to become a singer. The result? This rarely heard record of campy cabaret.

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The Carpenters, The Carpenters (1971)

Forget horror-core and death metal, the most terrifying and emotionally exhausting album ever made may be this soft-pop classic.

Music

The Cut-Out Bin #4: The Psychedelic Furs, Tossed (2000)

Conventional wisdom has it that the Furs failed to recapture the glory of their early sound on this late-career effort. That's true -- they succeeded in creating a different kind of magic altogether.

John Bergstrom
Music

The Cut-Out Bin #4: Dexy's Midnight Runners, Don't Stand Me Down (1985)

His lone American hit 'Come on Eileen' made chief Dexy Kevin Rowland seem a one-note, barefoot-ragamuffin cliché. But his most brilliant work would come after he ditched the rags and the better portion of his fans.

Roger Holland
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Dexy's Midnight Runners, Don't Stand Me Down (1985)

His lone American hit "Come on Eileen" made chief Dexy Kevin Rowland seem a one-note, barefoot-ragamuffin cliché. But his most brilliant work would come after he ditched the rags and the better portion of his fans.


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