Music Reviews

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Music Reviews
Reference CD: Prince
Brett Milano  |  Sep 02, 2007  | 

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Music Reviews
Reference DVD-A - The Beatles: Love
Ken Richardson  |  Feb 04, 2007  | 

The Beatles: Love (Apple/Capitol). "The first Beatles album in 5.1"? Well, that's a bit misleading. Love isn't one of the Beatles' original releases; it's the "cast album" to the Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas, which does use the band's master tapes not only for full songs but also for new segues and mashups.

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Music Reviews
Reference SACD - Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps
 |  Apr 03, 2007  | 

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon). In January of 2006, I made it my business (literally) to be in Los Angeles for the first performance to be recorded live at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

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Music Reviews
Reissue Roundup: Barleycorn Lives!
Mike Mettler  |  Apr 25, 2011  | 

How much do I love reissues? Let me count the ways. Well, let me NOT do that, else I’ll never get around to the subject at hand…

Anyway, this is the first in a regular series of postings about cool reissues that are coming down the pike — or ones that have already come down the pike and may have passed you by.

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Music Reviews
Reissue Roundup: Barleycorn Lives! Page 2
Mike Mettler  |  Apr 25, 2011  | 

How much do I love reissues? Let me count the ways. Well, let me NOT do that, else I'll never get around to the subject at hand…

Anyway, this is the first in a regular series of postings about cool reissues that are coming down the pike - or ones that have already come down the pike and may have passed you by.

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Music Reviews
Remaster Class - David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Mike Mettler  |  Oct 20, 2022  | 
Just Turn On With Me

"To be played at maximum volume." So went the listening instructions appearing in all caps near the bottom left of the back cover of David Bowie's June 1972 career-defining dystopian space-glam saga, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.

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Music Reviews
Remaster Class - XTC: Nonsuch
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 27, 2023  | 
Any Kind of Love Is Alright

XTC was indeed riding high following the both-sides-of-the-Pond success of February 1989’s psychedelically fulfilling Oranges & Lemons, but far be it from Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, and David Gregory to even think of doing the same thing twice.

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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Alice Cooper: Billion Dollar Babies
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 14, 2024  | 
Upon inception, Alice Cooper was conceived more as a group construct, not just a moniker for one person. The name itself was intended to encompass an all-for-one band concept, but it was also concurrently adopted by lead singer Vincent Furnier, who soon enough embodied the id and ego of Alice Cooper to such a degree that he transmogrified that persona into his fully becoming one and the same. Six-plus decades later, Alice Cooper is still going strong as the king of shock-glam metal to this very day — and his rabid fanbase wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Neil Young: Harvest
Mike Mettler  |  Apr 29, 2024  | 
When I spoke with Neil Young back in April 2014 about his ongoing search for how to share his music in the best resolution possible (Pono, we hardly knew ye), he was laser-focused on what he wanted his audience to experience. “Back when I started recording, we did everything we could so that our listeners could hear the music,” he told me. “The more we presented and the more you were able to hear, the happier you were.” And that brings us to one of the best examples of that superb-sounding emotional uplift impetus — February 1972’s Harvest, Young’s fourth and most successful solo album.
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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral
Mike Mettler  |  Oct 24, 2023  | 
No one does self-loathing, despair, and existential angst quite like Trent Reznor. Right from the outset of his then one-man band Nine Inch Nails’ October 1989 TVT debut album Pretty Hate Machine and the unforgiving, snarling manifesto of its opening track “Head Like a Hole,” Reznor threw down the gauntlet of NIN’s take-no-prisoners aural template. Within NIN, he enmeshed industrial synthesizer clank, metal-riff drang, searing layered instrumentation, and sneering vocals all into an unapologetically abrasive style that came to define one particular slice of 1990s alt-rock culture.
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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Prince: Purple Rain
Mike Mettler  |  Jul 12, 2024  | 
In the summer of 1984, two ascending musical forces vaulted themselves into the megastar stratosphere on a parallel tract that would be virtually impossible to duplicate today. Bruce Springsteen upped his own iconography by touring stadiums in support of Born in the U.S.A., a perpetually catchy album whose underlying message actually served to tear down the tenets of the American mythos. At the same time, Prince and The Revolution dominated the charts with Purple Rain, the ostensible soundtrack to the low-budget box-office phenomenon of the same name that chronicled the rise of “The Kid” and his killer Minneapolis-bred band, despite their respective struggles with a myriad of mental and physical obstacles alike.
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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – R.E.M: Out of Time
Mike Mettler  |  Jul 17, 2023  | 
No one could have predicted how a guitar band from Athens, Georgia would turn into the biggest international alt-rock darlings of the 1990s — and yet, that’s exactly what R.E.M. did. The lo-fi genius of their eternally mumbly/jangly first single, “Radio Free Europe” essentially reset the song-arrangement table for what became known as college rock. Year by year, R.E.M. planted more than enough sonic seeds about where the latest crop of DIY U.S. bands was heading on each of their ensuing mid-1980s LP releases on the indie I.R.S. Records label until they jumped to the majors with their November 1988 effort on Warner Bros., Green. Though Green’s expansive sound palette took full advantage of a much-bigger recording budget, R.E.M.’s world domination vision instead came to fruition on their more refined, more stripped-down second Warner Bros. release, the unequivocal worldwide smash hit, March 1991’s Out of Time.
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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Soundgarden: Badmotorfinger
Mike Mettler  |  Jan 29, 2024  | 

Burning Dinosaur Bones

Soundgarden was catching fire. The proto-headbanging Seattle-bred foursome began to emerge from the misnomered grunge ooze with their second LP, September 1989’s aptly named Louder Than Love, with tracks like “Loud Love” and “Big Dumb Sex” deftly adding observational tact to the band’s already thunderous bouillabaisse. And then, in October of that forever-hallowed alt-rock emergence year of 1991, Soundgarden swerved into even more progressive-leaning hard-metal lanes with the unrelenting Badmotorfinger.

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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Stone Temple Pilots: Core
Mike Mettler  |  Oct 08, 2024  | 

These Are the Eyes of Disarray: S&V music editor Mike Mettler evaluates multiple versions of Stone Temple Pilots’ September 1992 debut album Core, which laid the foundation for a hard-rocking rollercoaster ride steeped in the three G’s—garage, glam, and groove. . .

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Music Reviews
Remaster Class – Tears for Fear: Songs From The Big Chair
Mike Mettler  |  Aug 15, 2023  | 
Tears For Fears vaulted into the international big leagues with the take-no-prisoners layered-sound approach to their February 1985 sophomore album, Songs From The Big Chair. It was a calculated production leap from the aural cocoon of their more minimalistic, electronic-leaning debut, March 1982’s The Hurting — and it was a move that paid off handsomely with multi-platinum sales and upper-echelon chart domination around the globe.
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