Music Reviews: Boxing Up the Bangles, plus Rock the Plaza and Kim Wilson’s Slow Burn It’s about time we had a box set from the Bangles, whose well-hooked, harmony-drenched tunes provided some of the brightest moments on Top 40 radio in the 1980s. Emerging from the West Coast’s Paisley Underground movement, the group featured four […]
Though Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series began in 1991 and has embraced well over 50 discs, it is only now, with its 18th volume, that it is getting around to the first chapter of its subject’s story. And what a chapter it is. Granted, the period covered by Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series, Vol. […]
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How on earth did the Beatles progress from songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” in only a little more than three years? The sparks that ignite artistic growth can be enigmatic, but the Fab Four’s Anthology album series, released in the mid-1990s, did help to flesh […]
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BENTLEY’S BANDSTAND: November 2025 Al Basile, BLUES IN HAND. Lock up the blues crew, because Al Basile is on the lurch and recorded what is the best album of his celebrated career. He’s grabbed the uptown blues by the horns and is more than ready to kick up some naugahyde action through the window. This […]
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Neil Finn’s Crowded House wasn’t the first New Zealand band to make a mark beyond the southern hemisphere. That distinction goes to the experimental art-rock group Split Enz, which Neil’s older brother, Tim, and fellow songwriter Phil Judd formed in 1972. The group, which experienced numerous personnel and stylistic changes over the years, broke up […]
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Music Reviews: Jimi Hendrix’s ‘The Axis: Bold as Love Sessions,’ plus Bobby Charles, Dr. John, and Nina Simone “Well, I got this guitar, and I learned how to make it talk,” sings Bruce Springsteen in his iconic “Thunder Road.” No knock on Bruce, who plays his instrument masterfully, but if that line applies to anyone, […]
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The Rich-R-Tone Folk Star Story, plus Willie Nelson, Jeb Loy Nichols, and Jonathan Richman Germany’s Bear Family Records deserves plaudits for compiling and releasing exhaustive box sets from some of the best-known figures in early country and rock music. But the reissue label warrants at least as much praise for unearthing and taking a chance […]
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Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska ’82,’ plus Diane Hubka, the Kasambwe Brothers, and Terry Klein Hot on the heels of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the movie about the making of 1982’s Nebraska, comes a greatly expanded edition of that LP. Called Nebraska ’82, this release includes four CDs and a Blu-ray disc. Much of it constitutes […]
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Think of French chanteuse Françoise Hardy as her country’s answer to England’s Marianne Faithfull. Like Faithfull, Hardy, who died last year, possessed an alluring, angelic voice and had a penchant for moody pop/rock songs. She also had a visual presence and sense of style that turned heads. Mick Jagger, Faithfull’s boyfriend in the late 1960s, […]
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Bentley’s Bandstand: October 2025 Queen Esther, BLACKBIRDING. There hasn’t ever been an album quite like Queen Esther’s BLACKBIRDING. It’s an emotional study of events at Gettysburg during the Civil War, and how it turned historial times into an era that never really allowed Blacks to get past the ramifications which occurred then. Queen Esther’s absolute […]
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