Music and Soundtrack Features

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Music and Soundtrack Features
Remaster Class: Chicago Transit Authority
Mike Mettler  |  Apr 15, 2022  | 
The seven-man band then known as Chicago Transit Authority were at the forefront of the horn-driven jazz-rock movement when they emerged in April 1969 with their self-titled double-length debut album, thanks in no small part to the knob-turning efforts of their semi-Svengali producer James William Guercio.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
Remaster Class: Deep Purple: Machine Head
Mike Mettler  |  Jun 03, 2022  | 
Fifty years on, Deep Purple's March 1972 masterstroke Machine Head remains a clarion call for hard rock fans the world over. Stamped onto polished metal, the band name/album title stack appearing atop a funhouse-mirrored image of the five-man group on the cover is the perfect visual representation of in-tune artists at the nexus point of transitioning from their late-1960s blues psychedelia phase into a signature sound clearly on the cusp of birthing heavy metal.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
Remaster Class: Roxy Music: Avalon
Mike Mettler  |  Nov 12, 2021  | 
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.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
Remaster Class: The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies & Everybody's In Show-Biz
Mike Mettler  |  Dec 20, 2022  | 
The Kinks were at a crossroads. As they entered the 1970s, the British pop/rockers hadn't yet ascended to the next toppermost level, even after achieving new heights following the songwriting leap Ray Davies took with the still poignant 1967 track, "Waterloo Sunset." It took two critical back-to-back albums, November 1971's Muswell Hillbillies and August 1972's Everybody's in Show-Biz, to fully get them there—and then they never looked back.
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Music and Soundtrack FeaturesThe S&V Interview
Robbie Robertson: When I Paint My 5.1 Masterpiece
Mike Mettler  |  Jun 04, 2021  | 
Whenever we talk about artists who changed the course of rock history who aren't The Beatles, one group with perhaps the most unassuming yet wholly appropriate name tops the bill: The Band. Their homespun July 1968 debut Music From Big Pink literally turned the rock world on its collective ear to such a degree that contemporaries like Eric Clapton instantly renounced their virtuosic "look at me" playing styles and adjusted their thinking toward creating more organic and more authentic music truer to their essential selves.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
Roland Orzabal on How Tears For Fears Elevated The Tipping Point in the Atmos Universe
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 11, 2022  | 
Tears For Fears have always been a band who have worn their hearts on their sleeves. And when I say band, I'm really referring to the push-pull creative synergy between the pair of British childhood friends at the core of TFF—i.e., Roland Orzabal (guitars, vocals, and keyboards) and Curt Smith (bass, vocals, and keyboards).
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Music and Soundtrack FeaturesSpecial Features
Runnin’ Into the Great Wide Open
Mike Mettler  |  Jun 26, 2024  | 
50 years ago, Tom Petty and his soon-to-be Heartbreakers were on a crash course for success or bust. What these rebels with a clue achieved over their rightfully acclaimed multi-decade career stands as a benchmark for how to match universally appealing songwriting with uncompromising sound quality.
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Music and Soundtrack FeaturesThe S&V Interview
Steven Wilson Is a Hi-Res Man of the People
Mike Mettler  |  Jan 29, 2021  | 
"I like to upset people, because it means I'm doing the right thing."

And that, my friends, is Steven Wilson for you in a nutshell. The once and future king of surround sound has taken yet another giant creative leap forward with his new solo album, The Future Bites (Arts & Crafts), which, after a pandemically induced half-year deferral, is finally being released on January 29, 2021.

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Music and Soundtrack Features
The Atmos Branch
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 01, 2022  | 
Porcupine Tree returns after a decade-long hiatus to deliver a career benchmark, Closure / Continuation. All three bandmembers give us the scoop on how it all took root, and Steven Wilson takes us inside the making of the album’s truly stunning Dolby Atmos mix.
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Music ReviewsMusic and Soundtrack Features
The Beatles: Let It Be Super Deluxe Edition
Mike Mettler  |  Nov 19, 2021  | 
Performance
Sound
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.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
The Creation of The Beatles’ Last Song and the Rebirth of Red and Blue
Matt Hurwitz  |  Feb 09, 2024  | 
How does the most popular band in rock music history both close out their recording history and celebrate their iconic legacy at the same time? Well, in early November, The Beatles accomplished both by releasing their last new recording, “Now and Then,” and reissuing their ever popular catalog compilation albums, The Beatles 1962-1966 and The Beatles 1967-1970—known informally as the “Red” and “Blue” albums (Apple/Capitol/UMe), augmented with dozens of new tracks and completely remixed in stereo. “Now and Then” was accompanied by both a 12-minute documentary about its creation, by filmmaker Oliver Murray, and a joyous, fun music video by director Peter Jackson.

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Music and Soundtrack Features
The Making of All Things Must Pass
Matt Hurwitz  |  Aug 05, 2021  | 
George Harrison had a stockpile—fantastic compositions overlooked by his bandmates over the years, along with some written more recently following The Beatles' official breakup. The band's final album release, Let It Be, came on May 8, 1970. But by that time, George had already put the ball in motion to begin recording his first true solo album later that month: All Things Must Pass. The triple-album set would join Paul's McCartney LP as the first Beatles solo albums to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
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Music and Soundtrack Features
The Making of John Lennon's Gimme Some Truth. The Ultimate Mixes
Matt Hurwitz  |  Oct 23, 2020  | 
When Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon set out to create a music collection to honor the late John Lennon's 80th birthday, they knew that another greatest hits collection wasn't something fans needed or wanted. Instead, together with the core team that crafted 2018's highly successful Imagine The Ultimate Collection box set, they delivered John Lennon. Gimme Some Truth. The Ultimate Mixes. Released by Capitol/UMe on October 9, Lennon's actual birthday, this box set includes not only new stereo mixes drafted from the original multitrack session tapes, but also high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz stereo, 5.1 surround, and Dolby Atmos mixes of each, available on an additional Blu-ray audio disc in the album's deluxe box set.
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Music ReviewsMusic and Soundtrack FeaturesStreaming Movies and TVSpecial Features
The Making of The Beatles' Let It Be and Peter Jackson's Get Back
Matt Hurwitz  |  Dec 03, 2021  | 
1968 was a busy year for The Beatles. They had traveled to India to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, launched their own record label, Apple, and spent months at EMI's studios at Abbey Road recording their mammoth double-album, The Beatles (aka The White Album). But even before that album was released, they were planning what would end up as their post-breakup album and film, Let It Be. That disc was recently reissued by Apple/Capitol/Universal in a super deluxe edition, remixed by Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell, complete with previously-unreleased bonus tracks, and the film has now been given a reimagining by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson, in the form of The Beatles: Get Back on the Disney+ streaming service.
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