Music Reviews

Love: Forever Changes - 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Mike Mettler | Aug 31, 2018 |

Performance
Sound

Always the pauper, never quite the prince. Such was the case for Love, the racially integrated Los Angeles psychedelic/folk-rock hybrid who were always on the cusp of breaking through the ether during those heady revolutionary times of the late 1960s, but just couldn’t totally get there. While the sounds of other SoCal Sunset Strip brethren like The Doors and The Byrds made the leap into mass consciousness, Love’s impact initially came at more of the cult-favorite level—though their multicultural influence has only grown over the ensuing years, especially within the British alternative scene of the early ’90s.

Music Reviews

Marillion: Misplaced Childhood: Deluxe Edition

Mike Mettler | Nov 29, 2017 |

Performance
Sound

I hate to admit it, but I didn’t “get” Marillion when I saw them open for Rush at the Rosemont Horizon just outside of Chicago on March 21, 1986, playing their 1985 breakthrough album Misplaced Childhood in its entirety. While I was properly enamored with the uplifting performance of their touchingly seductive FM hit “Kayleigh,” I just wasn’t able to connect with the rest of the set for some reason. Apparently, I wasn’t alone in that feeling, since I also heard a good bit of the crowd boo/catcall Marillion throughout their performance, the first time I had heard such a thing occur at a live show.

Music Reviews

Marillion: Sounds that Can’t Be Made — Special Edition

Mike Mettler | Apr 23, 2014 |

Performance
Sound

Some bands sputter and wither after major personnel changes, and then there’s Marillion. The British neo-progressive collective’s first incarnation crested with 1985’s concept-driven Misplaced Childhood, which featured original mercurial lead singer Fish and the hit guitar-driven lament, “Kayleigh.” Act II commenced with 1989’s transitional Seasons End, featuring new vocalist Steve Hogarth (a.k.a. “h”), who has since helped fuel the band to greater compositional heights over the last two decades.

Music Reviews

Mark Knopfler: Privateering

Mike Mettler | Jan 02, 2014 |

Performance
Sound

Finally seeing a stateside release after being available internationally for over a year, Privateering, Mark Knopfler’s seventh solo offering (and first double album of all-original material) is a showcase of Americana, as innately authentic as anything produced by any artist born on U.S. soil. Somewhere, Chet Atkins, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters are all picking, grinning, and haw-haw-hawing their collective approval. (Me, I suspect Knopfler was spiritually born on the Mississippi Delta and then transplanted to the moors of his native Scotland.)

Music Reviews

Marshall Chapman: Big Lonesome

Steve Simels | Mar 02, 2011 |

Tall Girl

Music •••• Sound •••

Music Reviews

Mastodon: Crack the Skye; Lamb of God: Wrath

Jeff Perlah | Apr 22, 2009 |

Reprise

Music ••••^½ Sound ••••

Epic

Music Reviews

Maximum Impact

Mike Mettler | Jul 07, 2011 |

Dave Grohl and I are crouched together on

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PerformanceSound “Best guitar player I ever heard.”

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PerformanceSound It was one of the most galvanizing live

It was in the late 1970s when Noel Lee,

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PerformanceSound How do you make a perfect album even more

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a hot blacktop driveway that encircles the SoCal locale where the photo session for this exclusive S+V cover story is taking place. To the onlookers who shuffle past us and sometimes hover at a respectful distance, it appears as if these two hunched, animated, close-talking bearded longhairs are plotting to take over the world — and perhaps that’s not an entirely wrong assumption.

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Music Reviews

Michael Bloomfield Mike Mettler | Apr 10, 2014 |

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Some hip muso waxing on about the next Hendrix? Nope, that’s Bob Dylan on the late Michael Bloomfield, and the Bard’s ears are some damn fine arbiters. This three-CD/one-DVD Bloomfield box set reclaims a master guitarist’s legacy that’s as deep as the Delta, by way of the Windy City and the City by the Bay. Disc 1, subtitled Roots, sets the tap. The instrumental take on Dylan’s iconic “Like a Rolling Stone” is revelatory, keeping the focus on the as-it’s-happening creation of the now-familiar melody via Bloomfield’s chiming Telecaster riffs intermingling with Al Kooper’s wheedling Hammond B3.

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Music Reviews

Midnight Oil: Full Tank: The Complete Album Collection Mike Mettler | Aug 23, 2017 |

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experiences of my life. The instant WNEW-FM announced Midnight Oil would be performing live on a flatbed truck on Sixth Avenue in the heart of New York City in front of the Exxon Building around noontime on May 30, 1990 to protest the mishandling of the March 1989 Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in Prince William Sound, Alaska, three colleagues and I sprinted the entire length of the two long city blocks from the Stereo Review and Audio offices at 50th and Broadway to get as close as we could. Success! Each of us wound up standing no more than 10 people deep from the flatbed’s perch upon our out-of-breath Sixth Avenue arrival.

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Music Reviews

Monster Music Steve Guttenberg | Aug 16, 2006 |

It's not just cables anymore. a laser-fusion design engineer, started a little company, Monster Cable, which soon spawned, well, the entire high-end audio-cable industry. Over the decades, Monster maintained their dominance in the cable market as it branched into power conditioners and M•Design home theater furniture. Now, with Monster Music, they're jumping into the record business with a line of High Definition Surround SuperDiscs. Noel Lee's passion for multichannel music—and frustration with the stillborn SACD/DVD-Audio formats—pushed him to extract the best sound from Dolby- and DTS-encoded music. Monster Music claims that the SuperDiscs are the first music releases certified by THX for sound quality.

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Music Reviews

Moondance Deluxe Edition Mike Mettler | Nov 25, 2013 |

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perfect? In the case of Van Morrison’s seminal 1970 neo-rock Caledonian masterpiece Moondance, you compile a 70-track deluxe edition that includes three discs of sessions, outtakes, and alternate mixes, in addition to a separate Blu-ray Audio disc with a long-lost surround sound mix done by one of the album’s original engineers. Yes, as any good Van the Man fan knows, it’s too late to stop now.

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Music Reviews

Morrissey: Years of Refusal Rob O'Connor | Mar 10, 2009 |