Saga - Worlds Apart (81)

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01 On The Loose
02 Wind Him Up
03 Amnesia
04 Framed
05 Time's Up
06 The Interview
07 No Regrets (Chapter V)
08 Conversations
09 No Stranger (Chapter VIII)

Saga's first major-label release was also the band's commercial breakthrough; the single "On the Loose" was not only a radio hit, but one of the first videos to be featured on the fledgling MTV network.

Fortunately, the rest of the album holds up nearly as well as that fine single; fleshing out the songs' arrangements with lots of interesting instrumental detail, the band manages to maintain their progressive rock roots while producing strong, effective pop tunes.

The lyrics are interesting and intelligent without being pretentious or eggheaded. World's Apart is the work of a band at the peak of its skill and inspiration, and may be Saga's best album.

Pink Fairies - Kings Of Oblivion (73)

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1 City Kids
2 I Wish I Was a Girl
3 When's the Fun Begin?
4 Chromium Plating
5 Raceway
6 Chambermaid
7 Street Urchin

Fleetwood Mac - Kiln House (70)

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01 this is the rock
02 station man
03 blood on the floor
04 hi ho silver
05 jewel eyed judy
06 buddy's song
07 earl gray
08 one together
09 tell me all the things you do
10 mission bell

Cars - Panorama (80)

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01 - Panorama
02 - Touch And Go
03 - Gimme Some Slack
04 - Don't Tell Me No
05 - Getting Through
06 - Misfit Kid
07 - Down Boys
08 - You Wear Those Eyes
09 - Running To You
10 - Up And Down

Wishbone Ash - Argus (Remastered 02) with bonus tracks

Parte 1

Parte 2


01 - Time Was
02 - Sometime World
03 - Blowin' Free
04 - The King Will Come
05 - Leaf and Stream
06 - Warrior
07 - Throw Down the Sword
08 - Jail Bait (Live)
09 - The Pilgrim (Live)
10 - Phoenix (Live)

Alan Parsons Project - Stereotomy (85)

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1 Stereotomy
2 Beaujolais
3 Urbania [instrumental]
4 Limelight
5 In the Real World
6 Where's the Walrus? [instrumental]
7 Light of the World
8 Chinese Whispers [instrumental]
9 Stereotomy Two

Blackfoot - Medicine Man (91)

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01 - Doin' My Job
02 - The Stealer
03 - Sleazy World
04 - Not Gonna Cry Anymore
05 - Navarre
06 - Soldier Blue
07 - Runnin' Runnin'
08 - Chilled To D'bone
09 - Guitar Slingers Song And Dance

Tom Petty - Full Moon Fever (89)

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01 - Free Fallin'
02 - I Won't Back Down
03 - Love Is a Long Road
04 - A Face In The Crowd
05 - Runnin' Down A Dream
06 - Feel A Whole Lot Better
07 - Yer So Bad
08 - Depending On You
09 - The Apartment Song
10 - Alright For Now
11 - A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own
12 - Zombie Zoo


Although Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) found the Heartbreakers regaining their strength as a band and discovering a newfound ease at songcraft, it just didn't sell that well.

Perhaps that factor, along with road fatigue, led Tom Petty to record his first solo album, Full Moon Fever. Nevertheless, the distinction between "solo" and "Heartbreakers" is a fuzzy one because Full Moon Fever is essentially in the same style as the Heartbreakers albums; Mike Campbell co-wrote two songs and co-produced the record, and he, along with Benmont Tench and Howie Epstein, all play on the album.

However, the album sounds different from any Heartbreakers record due to the presence of former Electric Light Orchestra leader Jeff Lynne.

Queen - Greatest Hits III (99)

Parte 1

Parte 2

01 - The Show Must Go On
02 - Under Pressure
03 – Barcelona
04 - Too Much Love Will Kill You
05 - Somebody To Love
06 - You Don't Fool Me
07 - Heaven For Everyone
08 - Las Palabras De Amor
09 - Driven By You
10 - Living On My Own
11 - Let Me Live
12 - The Great Pretender
13 - Princes Of The Universe
14 - Another One Bites The Dust
15 - No-One But You
16 - These Are The Days Of Our Lives
17 - Thank God It's Christmas

Peter Gabriel – So (86)

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01 - Red Rain
02 – Sledgehammer
03 - Don't Give Up
04 - That Voice Again
05 - In Your Eyes
06 - Mercy Street
07 - Big Time
08 - We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)
09 - This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)

King Crimson – Red (74)

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1 Red
2 Fallen Angel
3 One More Red Nightmare
4 Providence
5 Starless


King Crimson falls apart once more, seemingly for the last time, as David Cross walks away during the making of this album.

It became Robert Fripp's last thoughts on this version of the band, a bit noiser overall but with some surprising sounds featured, mostly out of the group's past — Mel Collins' and Ian McDonald's saxes, Marc Charig's cornet, and Robin Miller's oboe, thus providing a glimpse of what the 1972-era King Crimson might've sounded like handling the later group's repertory (which nearly happened).

Indeed, Charig's cornet gets just about the best showcase it ever had on a King Crimson album, and the truth is that few intact groups could have gotten an album as good as Red together.

The fact that it was put together by a band in its death throes makes it all the more impressive an achievement.

Indeed, Red does improve in some respects on certain aspects of the previous album — including "Starless," a cousin to the prior album's title track — and only the lower quality of the vocal compositions keeps this from being as strongly recommended as its two predecessors.

Red was reissued on CD in the summer of 2000 in a remastered edition that features killer sound and an excellent booklet, containing a good account of the circumstances surrounding the recording of this album.

King Crimson – Beat (82)

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1 Neal and Jack and Me
2 Heartbeat
3 Sartori in Tangier
4 Waiting Man
5 Neurotica
6 Two Hands
7 The Howler
8 Requiem


Beat is not as good as its predecessor (1981's Discipline), but it's not too shabby, either.

The '80s version of King Crimson (Robert Fripp, guitar; Adrian Belew, vocals/guitar; Tony Levin, bass; and Bill Bruford, drums) retains the then-modern new wave sound introduced on Discipline.

The band's performances are still inspired, but the songwriting isn't as catchy or strong.

The moody love song "Heartbeat" has become a concert favorite for the band, and contains a Jimi Hendrix-like backward guitar solo.

Other worthwhile tracks include "Waiting Man," which features world music sounds (thanks to some stunning bass/percussion interplay), and "Neurotica" does an excellent job of painting an unwavering picture of a large U.S. city, with its jerky rhythms and tense vocals.

With lots of different guitar textures, bass explorations, and uncommon drum rhythms present, King Crimson's Beat will automatically appeal to other musicians.

But since they're fantastic songwriters as well, you don't have to be a virtuoso to feel the passion of their music.

Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick (72)

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1 Thick as a Brick 22:37
2 Thick as a Brick 21:03


Jethro Tull's first LP-length epic is a masterpiece in the annals of progressive rock, and one of the few works of its kind that still holds up decades later.

Mixing hard rock and English folk music with classical influences, set to stream-of-consciousness lyrics so dense with imagery that one might spend weeks pondering their meaning — assuming one feels the need to do so — the group created a dazzling tour de force, at once playful, profound, and challenging, without overwhelming the listener.

The original LP was the best-sounding, best-engineered record Tull had ever released, easily capturing the shifting dynamics between the soft all-acoustic passages and the electric rock crescendos surrounding them.

Pretenders - Learning To Crawl (84)

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1 Middle of the Road
2 Back on the Chain Gang
3 Time the Avenger
4 Watching the Clothes
5 Show Me
6 Thumbelina
7 My City Was Gone
8 Thin Line Between Love and Hate
9 I Hurt You
10 2000 Miles

Chrissie Hynde took a long, hard road to rock & roll stardom, but when her band, the Pretenders, finally broke through in 1979, they wasted no time, growing from promising newcomers on the British music scene to major international stardom with a pair of smash albums to their credit in a mere three years.

But the Pretenders' meteoric rise came to a crashing halt in 1982, when drug abuse claimed the life of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and forced Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers to dump bassist Pete Farndon, who would also succumb to an OD in April 1983.

Hynde was forced by circumstance to reinvent the Pretenders for their third album, 1984's Learning to Crawl, but if the new edition of the group lacked some of the spark of the band that made the first two LPs, through sheer force of will Hynde created a masterpiece.

While Hynde hardly held back in her emotionally potent songwriting in the Pretenders' early work, on Learning to Crawl there's a gravity to her lyrics that blended with her tough but wiry melodic sense and streetwise intelligence to create a set of truly remarkable tunes.

"Back on the Chain Gang" is a touching tribute to her fallen comrades that still sounds bitterly rueful, "Middle of the Road" is a furious rocker that explores the emotional and physical toll of a musician's life, "Time the Avenger" is a taut, literate examination of a businessman's adulterous relationship, "My City Was Gone" deals with the economic and cultural decay of the Midwest in a manner both pithy and genuinely heartfelt, and "2000 Miles" is a Christmas number that demonstrates Hynde can be warm without getting sappy.

As a guitarist, Robbie McIntosh brought a simpler and more elemental style to the Pretenders than Pete Farndon, but his tough, muscular leads fit these songs well, and bassist Malcolm Foster's solid punch fits Chambers' drumming perfectly.

Three albums into her recording career, Chrissie Hynde found herself having to put the past to bed and carve out a new beginning for herself with Learning to Crawl, but she pulled it off with a striking mixture of courage, strength, and great rock & roll; with the exception of the instant-classic debut album, it's the Pretenders' finest work.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery (73)

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1 Jerusalem
2 Toccata
3 Still...You Turn Me On
4 Benny the Bouncer
5 Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 1
6 Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, Pt. 2
7 Karn Evil 9: 2nd Impression
8 Karn Evil 9: 3rd Impression


Emerson, Lake & Palmer's most successful and well-realized album (after their first), and their most ambitious as a group, as well as their loudest, Brain Salad Surgery is also their most electronic sounding one.

The main focus, thanks to the three-part "Karn Evil 9," is sci-fi rock, approached with a volume and vengeance that stretched the art rock audience's tolerance to its outer limit, but also managed to appeal to the metal audience in ways that little of Trilogy did.

Indeed, "Karn Evil 9" is the piece and the place where Keith Emerson and his keyboards finally matched in both music and flamboyance the larger-than-life guitar sound of Jimi Hendrix.

Pete Sinfield's lyrics, while not up to his best King Crimson-era standard, were better than anything the group had to work with previously, and Greg Lake pulled out all the stops on his heaviest singing voice in handling them, coming off a bit like Peter Gabriel in the process.

The songs (except for the throwaway "Benny the Bouncer") are also among their best work — the group's arrangement of Sir Charles Hubert Parry's setting of William Blake's "Jerusalem" manages to be reverent yet rocking, while Emerson's adaptation of Alberto Ginastera's music in "Tocatta" outstrips even "The Barbarian" and "Knife Edge" from the first album as a distinctive and rewarding reinterpretation of a piece of serious music.

Lake's "Still...You Turn Me On" is his last great ballad with the group, possessing a melody and arrangement sufficiently pretty to forgive the presence of the rhyming triplet "everyday a little sadder/a little madder/someone get me a ladder."

Doobie Brothers - Takin' It To The Streets (76)

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1 Wheels of Fortune
2 Takin' It to the Streets
3 8th Avenue Shuffle
4 Losin' End
5 Rio
6 For Someone Special
7 It Keeps You Runnin'
8 Turn It Loose
9 Carry Me Away

The group's first album with Michael McDonald marked a shift to a more mellow and self-consciously soulful sound for the Doobies, not all that different from what happened to Steely Dan — whence McDonald (and Jeff Baxter) had come — between, say, Can't Buy a Thrill and Pretzel Logic.

They showed an ability to expand on the lyricism of Patrick Simmons and Baxter's writing on "Wheels of Fortune," while the title track introduced McDonald's white funk sound cold to their output, successfully.

Simmons' "8th Avenue Shuffle" vaguely recalled "Black Water," only with an urban theme and a more self-consciously soul sound (with extraordinarily beautiful choruses and a thick, rippling guitar break).

"Rio" and "It Keeps You Runnin'" both manage to sound like Steely Dan tracks — and that's a compliment — while Tiran Porter's hauntingly beautiful "For Someone Special" was a pure soul classic right in the midst of all of these higher-energy pieces.

Tom Johnston's "Turn It Loose" is a last look back to their earlier sound, while Simmons' "Carry Me Away" shows off the new interplay and sounds that were to carry the group into the 1980s, with gorgeous playing and singing all around.

Bad Company - Holy Water (90)

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1 Holy Water
2 Walk Through Fire
3 Stranger Stranger
4 If You Needed Somebody
5 Fearless
6 Lay Your Love on Me
7 Boys Cry Tough
8 With You in a Heartbeat
9 I Don't Care
10 Never Too Late
11 Dead of the Night
12 I Can't Live Without You
13 100 Miles



Bad Company's last platinum album, Holy Water is a formulaic yet reasonably engaging collection of AOR hard rock.

Although the only original members on Holy Water are guitarist Mick Ralphs and drummer Simon Kirke, the band does a fair job of approximating the sound of classic Bad Company while adding enough elements of '80s pop-metal to make the record appealing to teenagers who grew up on power ballads.

And the band does turn in a first-rate power ballad with "If You Needed Somebody," which rose all the way to number 16 on the singles chart. Surprisingly, that was one of three hits from the album — "Holy Water" and "Walk Through Fire" also received a fair amount of airplay.

What that success signals is not a creative rebirth for Bad Company, but that the group knew how to follow a formula very well.

Holy Water hasn't aged as well as their original hit albums — instead of the clean, ballsy attack of Bad Company and Straight Shooter, it's awash in echo and synths — but it is a finely crafted, big-budget record of the late '80s and early '90s.

It's just as indicative of its era as Bad Company is.

Amboy Dukes - Journey To The Center Of The Mind (68)

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1 Mississippi Murderer
2 Surrender to Your Kings
3 Flight of the Byrd
4 Scottish Tea
5 Dr. Slingshot
6 Journey to the Center of the Mind
7 Ivory Castles
8 Why Is a Carrot More Orange Than an Orange
9 Missionary Mary
10 Death Is Life
11 Saint Philips Friend
12 I'll Prove I'm Right
13 Conclusion
14 You Talk Sunshine, I Breath Fire [*]

Long before Ted Nugent made his name as a mighty crossbow hunter, there was this heavy Detroit band in which he was content to play lead guitar, something he does very well and with much less threat to the Midwest's deer population.

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The Nuge shouldn't try to take all the credit for this band, because the other members such as vocalist John Drake and rhythm guitarist Steve Farmer contributed with great aplomb, the latter writing much of the material on the second side's ambitious suite as well as co-writing the title hit with Nugent.

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This is some hard-hitting, well-done psychedelic music, recorded with taste by a producer known much more for his work with mainstream jazz artists, Bob Shad.

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One thing that made the Amboy Dukes special was the amount of power and drive in their playing, something lacking in other psychedelic outfits that take a more airy-fairy approach. The Nuge's guitar sound is recorded as if this was a mainstream jazz album by Harold Land, and it helps.

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Survivor - Survivor (79)

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1 Somewhere in America
2 Can't Getcha Offa My Mind
3 Let It Be Now
4 As Soon as Love Finds Me
5 Youngblood
6 Love Has Got Me
7 Whole Town's Talkin'
8 20/20
9 Freelance
10 Nothing Can Shake Me (From Your Love)
11 Whatever It Takes

Survivor - Caught in the Game (83)

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1 Caught in the Game
2 Jackie Don't Go
3 I Never Stopped Loving You
4 It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
5 Ready for the Real Thing
6 Half-Life
7 What Do You Really Think?
8 Slander
9 Santa Ana Winds


Caught in the Game had Survivor focusing on a harder rock & roll sound, with greater emphasis stemming from the guitar and percussion, but this new formula didn't fare well commercially and the band failed to put any of the album's songs onto the charts.

With Frankie Sullivan finally expressing himself with his guitar playing, the album does manage to establish a vibrant and dominant punch through most of the cuts, but because of this, there's a shortage of musical flow and melodic consistency that becomes apparent after the first few tracks.

Efforts such as "What Do You Really Think" and "I Never Stopped Loving You" are Survivor's best examples of their straight-ahead rock fair, but they're canceled out by non-abrasive fillers like "Slander" and "Santa Ana Winds," which have the band playing well below their capacity.

After this album, Survivor replaced vocalist Dave Bickler with the more inspired-sounding Jimi Jamison.

The album that followed, 1984's Vital Signs, had the band playing clean-cut radio-friendly rock, and two of the three singles released from the album made it into the Top Ten.

Survivor encountered further success with their new vocalist and their future albums had more of a congenial pop/rock flair to them, which was apparent even on the releases that didn't net the band any charted singles.

None of Caught in the Game's tracks appear on Survivor's most thorough hits package entitled Fire in Your Eyes: Greatest Hits, an essential 18-track compilation released in 2001.