Oct 10 2025
Moving Pictures
Rush
A huge concert draw since the mid-1970s, Rush were
one of the few progressive-rock acts to successfully
respond to new wave. In 1980, the Ontario trio
streamlined their sound with seventh studio LP
Permanent Waves, which reflected influences such as
The Police, Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel's solo work.
It featured “Spirit Of Radio,” an exuberant blend of pop,
metal, and ska which showed that lyricist and drummer
Neil Peart could write songs with universal themes.
The band were also experimenting with nonstandard instrumentation. High-pitched singer and
bassist Geddy Lee was now credited with Mini Moog,
Oberheim polyphonic, and Taurus pedal synthesizers.
He would multitask onstage, using all his limbs to
recreate the record’s technological advances. The followup was even more accomplished—notwithstanding
the lame visual pun uniting its title and cover photo.
Moving Pictures opens with the FM radio staple
“Tom Sawyer.” This anthemic ode to individualism
stacks virtuoso guitarist Alex Lifeson’s heavy riffs
against a gleaming electronic backdrop, while Peart
fires off rapid percussion rolls in support. Lee’s melodic
vocal illuminates the plea for privacy “Limelight,” while
“Vital Signs” marries a dramatic refrain to futurist
reggae.” The Camera Eye” sees a return to winding epic
mode, but with an urban rather than fantasy setting.
Moving Pictures has now been certified quadruple
platinum, the biggest selling album of their 30-plus
years (and counting) career.
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Oct 11 2025
Blonde On Blonde
Bob Dylan
Bizarrely, in the aftermath of the infamous Manchester
Free Trade Hall “electric” concert on May 17, 1966
(erroneously bootlegged as “The Royal Albert Hall
Concert”), at least two people claimed the voice that
infamously branded Dylan “Judas” was theirs. It seems
strange anyone is proud of the attack because, on
hindsight, it was horrifically misguided.
If 1965's Highway 61 was the impressive rock ‘n’ roll
debut, then this album, which followed six months later,
was no simple consolidation; it was Dylan providing the
new genre with its first masterpiece.
Blonde On Blonde’s wild blues establishes a sense of
late-night rants, reflections, and desperation. The direct
rock 'n’ roll songs such as “| Want You” switch in a
heartbeat into heartbreaking ballads such as “Visions
Of Johanna” or the touching melancholy of “Just Like A
Woman,” while closer “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”
is a manifesto for the lovelorn.
Surreal yet perceptive, Dylan’s poetic observations
suggest that the “voice of a generation” tag is more
deserved for charting an age’s inner feelings rather
than protesting its political beliefs.
This was rock's first double album and its success
helped ensure that progression, experimentation, and
excitement became key to rock ‘n’ roll’s outlook. Little
wonder, then, that the cover photo is blurred. In 1966,
Bob Dylan was, in creative terms, moving so fast that
the rest of the world was struggling to catch up. In
many ways, it never did.
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Oct 12 2025
Rain Dogs
Tom Waits
If the crash and honk of 1983's Swordfishtrombones
upset Tom Waits fans weaned on beat poetry and piano
ballads, then Rain Dogs had them crying into their
bourbons. Musically, Swordfishtrombones was Waits
arriving in a new town and trying to find his place; by
Rain Dogs, he had made himself at home, albeit in a
battered tin shack a long way out by the freeway.
Whether the romantic boozehound Waits played in
the 1970s was born from autobiography or imagination
has long been a matter for conjecture, but he is certainly
in character here. Rain Dogs tells of a demimonde
populated by Chinese barflies, blind firemen, one-
armed dwarves, a slaughterhouse boss named Uncle
Vernon, a Puerto Rican mistress with a wooden leg—
and that is just the first three songs. It is a song cycle
about life on the fringes of society, were a society this
unbalanced ever likely to exist.
The dementia of the lyrics finds echo in the music, a
rag-and-bones, Weillian clatter of thumped percussion
and parping horns, beer-hall pianos, and twitchy guitars (played chiefly by Marc Ribot, though Keith Richards guests), accordions, pump organs, and banjos. The fragile “Time” evokes Seventies Waits,”Blind Love” is
as close to country as he has ever come, and “Downtown Train” was tamed by Rod Stewart, but Rain Dogs is defiantly liberated from compromise and
convention. Naturally, it turned into his biggest selling record, since when it has become a staple in press surveys listing the best albums of the 1980s.
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Oct 13 2025
Songs For Swingin' Lovers!
Frank Sinatra
By the mid-1950s, Frank Sinatra was back on top of
both his game and the charts, bringing the lie to
F, Scott Fitzgerald’s credo that “There are no second
acts in American lives.”
Regrouping with Nelson Riddle late in 1955, Sinatra mapped out a record with avery different flavor. What emerged from these sessions, held a month after Sinatra’s 40th birthday, was day following night.
Next to In The Wee Small Hours’ scotch-soaked, 2 a.m. atmospherics, the euphoric Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! is a sunny summer afternoon walk in the park, positively skipping with joie de vivre. Sinatra never sounded more
at ease, breezing giddily around “You Make Me Feel So Young,” delivering “How About You?” as though it is one long marriage proposal, and practically winking his way through “Makin’ Whoopee.” But it would all be
wasted without Riddle’s glorious scoring. Legend has it that his unsurpassable arrangement for “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” hurriedly completed the night before the session, was greeted with spontaneous applause by the musicians who played it on January 12, 1956.
The resulting album is the closest any artist has come
to defining the Great American Songbook.
However, keen-eyed students of pop music may also notice the symmetry in the 15-cut, 45-minute track listing. Truly, the art of the three-minute pop song begins and ends here.
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Oct 14 2025
Superunknown
Soundgarden
3
Oct 15 2025
Juju
Siouxsie And The Banshees
5
Oct 16 2025
Treasure
Cocteau Twins
3
Oct 17 2025
Smokers Delight
Nightmares On Wax
2
Oct 18 2025
Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)
The Kinks
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