Eight years form a huge gap in an artist’s discography, especially when the artist in question is a septuagenarian, yet it makes their new album an event of sorts. Not that Steve Ellis is touting his latest platter so much, but still, “Baby Faced Assassin” that was issued last week – sadly, only on digital platforms, although there’s always a chance for a physical media variant – looks like a great follow-up to "Boom! Bang! Twang!" from 2018.
When THE PRETTY THINGS transitioned from their original rhythm-and-blues to fanciful psychedelia of “S. F. Sorrow” in the late ’60s and then heavy glam of “Silk Torpedo” in the following decade, they more than ensured the ensemble’s immortality, and yet there are many obscure corners in their oeuvre. Much has been made to shed a light on those reaches, and aficionados eagerly snatched various box sets which charted the band’s official trajectory. Some of the reissues came augmented with previously unheard tracks – but not on the scale that the forthcoming twelve-CD offering titled “Pretty Rare” will achieve.
By 1976, Billy Joel was a star; in 1976, he surpassed that status. “New York State Of Mind” may have never been released as a single, but this number gave a mighty heft to the “Turnstiles” album it arrived on, and there was no filler on the record which is being celebrated now with a box set, where all the songs of the classic platter are placed in a neat context. Out on December 11th, the four-CD-and-Blu-ray collection feels perfect.
It doesn’t happen too often – but it does happen. All of YES members issued solo platters back in 1975-1976, and then everyone in KISS put out their eponymous individual debuts in 1978, but none of those seemed as experimental as four albums released on September 25th by the surviving players of FAUST. Fairly active for the last two decades, which followed a score of years spent in limbo, they decided to go one step further, and now Hans-Joachim Irmler, Jean-Hervé Péron, Zappi W. Diermaier and Gunther Wüsthoff made forays into their respective archives to unearth a plethora of ideas that the Krautrock veterans reworked and brought to fruition now.
Inexplicably, and unfairly, less celebrated than his colleague Bert Jansch, John Renbourn‘s career was every bit as interesting, and when the famously acoustic guitarist plugged in and increased the rock component in his oeuvre, primarily in the ’70s, things became even more arresting. This is what a three-disc collection titled “Kokomo Blues: Gone Electric 1970-1979” and scheduled for release on December 4th concentrates on.
