Music Reviews

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Music Reviews
Frank Zappa: Over-Nite Sensation – Super Deluxe Edition Box Set
Mike Mettler  |  Mar 27, 2024  | 
Performances
Sound

Frank Zappa was a master at creating musical Venn diagrams. What do I mean by that? Well, Zappa’s compositional talents stretched well beyond the rock music idiom, so many of his releases would offer a keen intersection of doo-wop, classical orchestration, avant-jazz, progressive jams, country funk, and pure pop sensibilities (for starters). Sometimes he would even incorporate all his artistic powers into all 20-plus minutes of an album side’s lone track.

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Music Reviews
Franz Ferdinand: Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
Parke Puterbaugh  |  Feb 26, 2009  | 
Domino/Epic
Music •½ Sound •••
Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against dance music, party tunes, or any other escapist entertainment.
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Music Reviews
Get Back to Mono
Mike Mettler  |  Oct 15, 2014  | 
“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” John Lennon was referencing a theme from the Tibetan Book of the Dead by way of Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience, but there really was no other way to start “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the pivotal track that ends Side 2 of The Beatles’ groundbreaking August 1966 album release, Revolver. And “Tomorrow”—originally identified on the recording sheet for “Job No. 3009” in Abbey Road Studio Three as “Mark I” when sessions commenced on April 6, 1966—is rife with studio innovations and flourishes only The Beatles and their revolutionary team of Abbey Road engineers could inaugurate as the methodology so many future artists would embrace: Inventing Artificial Double Tracking, a.k.a. ADT, to simulate the natural double-tracking of instruments and vocals (thank you, Ken Townsend).
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Music Reviews
Giveaway: Pat Metheny's The Orchestrion Project on Blu-ray
Michael Berk  |  Oct 19, 2012  | 

Back in June we got to check out the premiere of guitar legend Pat Metheny's unique new concert film, The Orchestrion Project, featuring Pat performing "solo" - with an orchestra of robots, captured in glorious 7.1 (and 3D) by director/producer brothers Pierre and François Lamoreux. 

Well, the film's come to Blu-ray - and not just in Dolby TrueHD 7.1, but with the company's new Advanced 96k Upsampling feature, to deliver lossless audio - no extra hardware required - of the highest possible quality along with the pristine visuals. And we've got a couple of copies to give away.

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Music Reviews
Green Day: 21st Century Breakdown
Jaan Uhelszki  |  May 28, 2009  | 
Review
Reprise
Music ••• Sound ••••½
It's been 5 years since Green Day sounded the alarm wit
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Music Reviews
Guns N' Roses: Chinese Democracy
Brett Milano  |  Nov 24, 2008  | 
Black Frog/Geffen
Music •••½ Sound •••½
It's a pretty decent album.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsMusic Reviews
Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll
Mike Mettler  |  May 15, 2020  | 
Picture
Sound
Extras
It would be easy to characterize Chuck Berry, who passed away at age 90 in 2017, as one cantankerously acrimonious fellow, but after revisiting Taylor Hackford's astute 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll, now available on Blu-ray for the first time via Shout Select, I'm reminded of how captivating, creative, and downright business-savvy the pioneering, guitar-playing singer/ songwriter actually was.
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Music Reviews
Happy Hi-Rez Valentine's Day from S+V and HDtracks!
Michael Berk  |  Feb 14, 2013  | 

We all love music and great sound (I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't). And I'm pretty sure both you and your beloved can appreciate a great bargain - so why not put all three together this long post-Valentine's day weekend? Well, we've partnered with our friends over at HDtracks to bring you a sampler of some of their best-sounding high-resolution files.

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Music Reviews
Hello, Mr. Radio
Mike Mettler  |  Dec 25, 2012  | 

“Jeff has incredible studio I.Q. Ask anyone who makes music: he’s one of the great record producers, period.” So says Tom Petty, and? if anyone should know, it’s him, having worked with Jeff Lynne as a producer on sonic blockbusters like his own Full Moon Fever and the Traveling Wilburys’ Volume? 1.

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Music Reviews
High Fidelity First Class: Immersifying Thyself in Pink Floyd’s Remastered Legacy
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 27, 2011  | 

“This is one case where the record company got it right.”

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Music Reviews
Horn of Plenty: Miles Davis
Francis Davis  |  Oct 16, 2001  | 

Clichés are truisms, Jack Kerouac once reasoned, and therefore true. But maybe not always - or at least not completely. One of the many clichés about Miles Davis is that beginning with cool in the late 1940s and ending with fusion 20 years later, he anticipated nearly every significant movement in jazz after be bop.

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Music Reviews
Ian Anderson, "Brick"layer
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 18, 2012  | 

It’s nice to feel that the music can be improved, and in the case of Aqualung [which saw a 40th anniversary box-set reissue in 2011 with new stereo and 5.1 mixes by Steven Wilson], that wasn’t difficult because it wasn’t a very good recording.

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Music Reviews
Inside the Ultimate Download Experience
Brent Butterworth  |  Jan 24, 2012  | 

What do you want to hear when you listen to music? Do you want a lower-fidelity version of what the artists, engineers, and producers heard in the studio? Or would you prefer to hear exactly what they heard in the studio?

Of course, you'd prefer the latter. But you're probably getting the former - unless, that is, you're listening to high-resolution downloads from HDtracks. If you're listening to CDs, MP3s, or even vinyl records, what you're hearing is not a precise copy of the original digital recording or analog tape. It's downconverted. If it's on CD, the digital resolution has been reduced. If it's on vinyl, the audio has been remastered and the record you're listening to is actually a third-generation mechanical copy.

Sure, it might sound ok. But it's not the best fidelity you can get. HDtracks is. And HDtracks and Sound+Vision have put together an introductory sampler to show you just how good high-resolution listening can be.

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Other TechMusic Reviews
Interview: Carlos Santana
Mike Mettler  |  Oct 29, 2010  | 

To borrow Mick Jagger’s growl from the Rolling Stones’ feisty Tattoo You track “Neighbours”: labels, labels, labels, labels, LABELS! People feel like they have to label just about everything, especially when it comes to music. So whenever I’m asked to describe what Carlos Santana’s music sounds like, my answer is quite simple: “It sounds like Carlos Santana.” In the case of the 63-year-old guitar guru, his name defines his sound. “The majority of the music I play is still African music,” Carlos explains. “I honor that. And it comes through the Delta, and Mississippi.

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Music ReviewsOther Tech
Interview: OK Go on the Rebirth of the Music Video
James K. Willcox  |  Sep 24, 2010  | 

If YouTube page-views were currency, the members of OK Go would be very rich men.

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