Showing posts with label Pop. Show all posts

Saturday, July 18, 2026

Various Artists

Vaultage 79

[Another Two Sides Of Brighton]

(1979)

320

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Monday, July 13, 2026

Young Marble Giants – Colossal Youth 1980 (40th Anniversary Edition 2020) 320😎

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Thursday, July 09, 2026

Elvis Costello 2023 - The Songs Of Bacharach & Costello (Super Deluxe)

Elvis Costello 2023 - The Songs Of Bacharach & Costello (Super Deluxe) @320*
* 4 live tracks have lower bitrate

Elvis Costello had been writing songs and performing them in public long before he became the most gifted Angry Young Man of the New Wave Class of 1977 with his debut album My Aim Is True. While plenty of punk and new wave acts espoused a Year Zero attitude about rock & roll, Costello obviously had a strong working knowledge of pop songwriting past and present, though it wouldn't be until he made 1981's Trust and 1982's Imperial Bedroom that he was willing to reveal just how firmly rooted he was in pop classicism. Years later, Costello and Burt Bacharach teamed up to write "God Give Me Strength" for Allison Anders' 1996 film Grace of My Heart, a pairing that seemed like an amusing mismatch only to people who hadn't paid much attention to Costello's career since 1979's Armed Forces. The song was a brilliant evocation of Bacharach's sweetly melancholic tunes of the '60s, with lyrics from Costello that were thoughtful, mature, and fully worthy of the gravity and craft of Bacharach's melody. "God Give Me Strength" was good enough that Bacharach and Costello chose to write and record an album together, and 1998's Painted from Memory was a master class in pop songwriting for grown-ups, informed by Bacharach's salad days without betraying the least bit of nostalgia, and featuring some of the finest, most well-considered vocals Costello ever committed to tape.

Bacharach and Costello extended the collaboration to pen a number of songs for a projected Broadway musical (conceived by, of all people, Chuck Lorre, the sitcom titan behind Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory), and The Songs of Bacharach & Costello is a box set that combines a remastered version of Painted from Memory with 16 performances of songs either written for the uncompleted musical Taken from Life or adapted from tunes on the album. The Taken from Life material is splendid and should please any fans of the collaborators, though the performances by Cassandra Wilson, Jenni Muldaur, Audra Mae, and others point out how specifically these songs seem to fit Costello's voice, and that they were crafted to suit a narrative that was never fully resolved. Rounding out the set is a collection of live performances of the Bacharach/Costello numbers and a final disc of Costello singing Bacharach/Hal David classics on-stage. The sizable majority of this has been previously released, but the material here has been packaged and presented with consummate care, and Costello penned a fascinating 10,000-word essay on his work with Bacharach for this release.

As fate would have it, The Songs of Bacharach & Costello arrived less than a month after Bacharach died on February 9, 2023 at the age of 94. This collection wasn't intended to be a memorial, yet the deep dive into one of his last major collaborations pays worthy homage to his skill and dedication to craft, and every moment testifies to Costello's towering respect for the great man. (AllMusic)

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Weekend – La Varieté (1982) Cherry Red Remaster & Expanded version 2006 320😎

Weekend were a Welsh band formed by Alison Statton in 1981, following the split of Young Marble Giants. The band was a merger between two projects. Statton began writing with Spike of Z Block Records and Reptile Ranch in Cardiff, Wales in the summer of 1981, before moving to London where she teamed up with Simon Emmerson (at that time using the name Simon Booth) of Methodishca Tune. The band signed to Rough Trade Records in December 1981, but recorded only one studio album, La Variete.

La Variete was released in 1982 on the Rough Trade label and made it to no. 4 in the UK Indie Chart staying there for 15 weeks. It was revered by critics on release as a bold new departure from the prevailing post-punk ethos, and served as a major influence on Saint Etienne, the Sundays, Belle and Sebastian and many others.

According to Cherry Red, La Variete is: "A beautifully realised and delicate collection of songs set against a jazz backdrop, it switches across myriad musical settings including samba, cabaret, Afrobeat and highly personal, confessional pop."

After splitting up in 1983, members Simon Booth and Larry Stabbins formed the more jazz orientated Working Week. The other members later reunited as a duo under the name "Alison Statton and Spike", issuing the albums Tidal Blues (1994), The Shady Tree (1997) and Bimini Twist (2018).

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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) – Complete Service = コンプリート・サーヴィス 1992 320

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Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Lira

Soul In Mind

(2009)

320

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Kelly Khumalo

Back To My Roots

(2014)

320

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Monday, June 22, 2026

Randy Newman – 2011 - Live In London

Randy Newman – 2011 - Live In London (Flac)

Through most of his first decade as a recording artist, Randy Newman was a critics' darling known to the mainstream pop audience only through the songs he wrote that were recorded by artists such as Dusty Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Harry Nilsson, his own records often being too lyrically blunt (and his vocals too froggy) for radio. Newman finally scored a hit of his own with "Short People" in 1978, but his greatest success came in the 1990s; his profitable sideline in writing film scores eventually grew into his primary occupation, and the theme songs he wrote for movies like Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Cars, and The Princess and the Frog earned him a reputation for composing warm but clever pop tunes that overshadowed his more personal work in the public eye. In recent years, Newman appears to have gone on a low-key campaign to remind folks about the music he made before hitting pay dirt with Pixar and Disney; he's recorded two volumes of The Randy Newman Songbook in which he revisits gems from his back catalog with only his piano accompanying his vocals, and now he's released Live in London, which documents a show from a 2008 British tour in support of the album Harps and Angels.

The 22-song set list spans the whole of Newman's recording career, including one tune from his 1968 debut LP ("Love Story") as well as several selections from Harps and Angels, and while Newman performs eight numbers solo at the piano, on the rest he's accompanied by the BBC Concert Orchestra, offering a generous reminder that Newman's skill as an arranger is on a par with his gift as a composer. Newman has never possessed a traditionally "great" voice, and his instrument wavers a bit on several of these selections, but his sense of phrasing and his ability to inhabit a character is still impressive, and his piano work, perhaps the only thing Fats Domino and Aaron Copland will ever have in common, is excellent. The tone of Live in London is relaxed but confident, and Newman's between-song patter offers a witty look into the wealth of ideas and influences that inform his songwriting, from America's stature in the eyes of the world to his son's report cards. Live in London doesn't quite catch Randy Newman at his best as a performer, but he clearly knows how to make his great songs connect with an audience, and as an overview of his career as one of America's best and most intelligent songwriters, it's well worth investigating for longtime fans as well as those who know little of him beyond "You've Got a Friend in Me." (AllMusic)

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