Welcome back my friends, to the column that never ends—but in our case, that’s a good thing indeed. Yes, it’s Week Two here in the wide world of the Spatial Audio File—and rather than just ramble on, I’m instead going to get right into our choices for this week’s pick-six of great Dolby Atmos mixes Made for Spatial Audio on Apple Music. Happy Spatial Listening, everybody!
Welcome one and all to the inaugural weekly installment of Spatial Audio File. Some people call me the Spatial Audiophile—some people call me Maurice, though I advise against it—but at any rate, each Friday in this space, I will be reviewing select Spatial Audio releases on Apple Music by vetting and recommending key individual tracks and (occasionally) full albums via listening sessions on my home system and headphones alike.
Ian Anderson has never taken his foot off the creative gas when it comes to both producing new music and harvesting the wealth of catalog material from Jethro Tull, the groundbreaking prog/folk hybrid band he co-founded in 1967. That said, considering just how active an artist Anderson has been over the past six-plus decades, it might surprise you to learn the stalwart British collective's latest release, The Zealot Gene (InsideOut Music) is in fact the first new Tull studio album in more than 19 years.
By the time November 1980's Gaucho rolled around, Steely Dan were more than ready to close up shop and take a self-imposed two-decade hiatus. Indeed, Gaucho's sparkly veneer was a fitting then-final coating on the acclaimed jazz-leaning but genre-defying band's first decade, fully encapsulating the dark-humored observational worldview of its principal creators—bassist/ guitarist Walter Becker and keyboardist/vocalist Donald Fagen—to a literal T.
Like many of the great bands from the classic rock era of the latter half of the 20th century, British hard-rock stalwarts Deep Purple cut their teeth with an uncanny ability to turn cover songs into original statements. If it pleases the aural court, may we present the Rod Evans/Ritchie Blackmore era of the band's trippy, deeply shaded 1968 bookend renditions of Joe South's "Hush" and Neil Diamond's "Kentucky Woman" as prime evidence? (Case closed.)
"I heard a bunch of things in it I had never heard before."
That's Rob Baker, guitarist of Canada's still-favorite sons The Tragically Hip, recounting the feelings he experienced upon hearing the recent, fully completed Dolby Atmos mix of his band's seminal February 1991 release, Road Apples for the very first time.
Three years ago, French upstarts Qobuz made quite a splash upon entering the U.S. streaming market. What has happened with the high-res service in the interim?
Could May 1970's Let It Be possibly be The Beatles' most underrated core studio album—and is such a thing even possible? To be sure, when Let It Be initially dropped as the free-thinking 1960s gave way to the much grittier 1970s, the album was seen as an imperfect endpoint for a once-in-a-lifetime epoch in popular music—whereas September 1969's Abbey Road, which was actually completed after the Let It Be sessions but was still released eight months ahead of that album, actually serves as a better-suited final exclamation point and nod to their fans as the final, definitive statement of the fully active Beatles era.
Considering how much Roxy Music were deemed outliers in the 1970s as a band pioneering the blend of glam jams with progressive elegance, Avalon, their May 1982 masterpiece of rock chic, is truly a musical entity unto itself. Avalon lays bare the aural tenets of the très-cool Roxy aesthetic, taken to their most go-for-baroque extremes—all of it in the most ear-pleasing of ways.
As someone nicknamed "Almost Famous" by the road crew of a band I've been embedded with on scores of their North American tours over the past two decades, I can attest firsthand to the accuracy of every backstage moment seen on unadulterated display in director/screenwriter Cameron Crowe's film of the same name. Indeed, Almost Famous is Crowe's love-letter depiction of his early/ mid-1970s zeitgeist years spent as a geeky teenage scribe desperately trying to act cool while seeking to chronicle the true essence of rock & roll and life on the road.