Reviews music

'Metal Horse' from Billy Nomates is an album that will probably fly under most people's radars but it's also one that needs to be listened to.

Exemplary, living Bach from musicians with few equals at the repertoire; sensitive violin performances of Poulenc transcriptions and sonatas

The title piece is a set of variations on a theme from the Irish folk song "Shule Agra." The lyrics to a version known in English as "Johnny Has Gone for a Solider" are hopeful but uncertain. But that doesn't take away from this colorful album's predominantly upbeat feel.

Adam Duritz is still singing about loneliness, dislocation, alienation, and the pitfalls of stardom, but he remains an intense, attention-grabbing vocalist, and these nine tracks are up to the high standards that the group established early in its career.

This new box includes three CDs, a Blu-ray, and a copiously illustrated hardcover book that features reminiscences by all the group’s members.

“Buck took the shuffle beat and he took the lyrics and the style of honky-tonk, and he added the spunk, the vitality of rock and roll to his sound.”

As Darryl W. Bullock writes in 'Love and Fury: The Life, Death and Legacy of Joe Meek,' the producer was a “pioneer, genius, maniac, naif…all of those things…and more.”

Bruce Springsteen's Tracks II: The Lost Albums includes 83 performances, many as good as those on his well-known CDs.

The Wandering Hearts do stick close enough to CSNY's 'Déjà vu' arrangements to give fans of the original album a bit of the feeling named in its title.

Gene Wilson (aka Gene Forrest) and Eunice Levy, a married couple, scored several hits in the 1950s but dented the pop charts only once, with “Poco Loco.” But the songs collected here are almost uniformly excellent.