Vinyl Reviews
Musical analysis, pressing history and buying guide. Every record reviewed as it deserves.
A voice that wasn't seeking recognition — which is probably why no one who heard it ever forgot it.
The moment a pop idol chose Bergman over the charts and never looked back.
A twenty-year-old, a studio, every instrument. The future of soul recorded in the silence of Los Angeles.
Mayfield wrote against his own film — and the tension between the music and the image is where the masterpiece lives.
The record where Sly Stone dismantled everything he'd built — and the wreckage turned out to be art.
This is not a psychedelic record. Not folk-rock. Not even a work of art in the conventional sense. Forever Changes is something rarer: a prophecy pressed into vinyl by a man who believed he was about to die.
When a band stops making records and starts building cathedrals. Seventy-six minutes in which Led Zeppelin set themselves no limits whatsoever — and it shows.
When the silence between notes begins to weigh as much as the notes themselves.
Thirty-six minutes to redefine what a pop song can be. Then the break-up. Then silence.
Five people doing harm to each other — and making the most beautiful thing of their lives.
A record that never learned to lie — and has never stopped hurting.
A record cut in someone's living room in 1974. Nobody knew. Very few still do.
February 1978, Basing Street Studios, London. Four musicians who didn't shout in an era that was all about shouting.
Jazz that sounds like prayer — or like the moment just before you fall asleep among the stars.
The record that taught silence to become music.
Two guitars that don't play together — they play around each other, like snakes that never quite touch.