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Spotlighting the impact of cultural landmarks
Joni Mitchell's sixth album was a change of gear, coming deep from within the ME decade, its romantic entanglements dissolving to reveal a deeper search within but far from being solipsistic Mitchell’s rumination strikes a universal chord, says Matthew Lindsay
On its 40th anniversary, Eden Tizard explores The Fall’s Perverted By Language, an album where Mark E. Smith turns his focus to the suburbs and its inhabitants. A key record in The Fall saga, featuring a group at a crossroads, on the hunt for a new mode of attack
Forty years ago this week Marc Almond released the album that almost finished his career. Derided at the time as an overblown, self-obsessed indulgence, Torment and Toreros is now considered a flawed masterpiece in the lineage of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Big Star’s Third, and Nick Cave’s Your Funeral…My Trial. Here the people who made the record tell its story in their own words.
You can call it post hardcore if you like or you can refer to it as an essential corner stone of first wave emo; Noel Gardner just wants to celebrate an essential underground album seeing the light of day for the first time in a quarter of a century
Recently there has been much ado about Dark Side Of The Moon, but significantly less fuss made about The Final Cut. David Bennun examines how we got from one to the other in a single decade and how the current split at the heard of Pink Floyd represents the divide between crank leftism and centrist Dadism
Richard Foster considers Marvin The Paranoid Android, the charnel house-like plays of Jacobean England and the owl of Athena (and speaks to Will Sergeant) while writing about Echo & The Bunnymen's oft-misunderstood third long player
30 years on, Matthew Barton explores how Erotica changed the game for mainstream pop stars, an album that traded Madonna’s imperial pop for deep bass, vinyl crackles, chilly house and spoken word
40 years since the first album was released on CD, Daryl Worthington pays tribute to the unique experimental potential of the format, explores how it changed the parameters of the album itself, and wonders why it’s still not thought of as fondly as cassettes and LPs
To create the future, you have to imagine the future. You have to take that potential and extend its possibilities – sonically, mechanically, literally – through time. Jude Rogers speaks to co-producer Pete Bellotte and a host of famous fans about one of the all time great singles
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