The So-Called "Great" Live Albums

I've personally had a love/hate relationship with the idea of the live album.

The live albums that critics love to cite as "essential" are ones that I tend to think are overrated. As much as I am a Kiss fan, "Kiss Alive!" was to me poorly recorded to the point of stripping the excitement from the music. I found "Frampton Comes Alive" was overblown and bland. "Live at Leeds" just doesn't truly capture the raw energy of the Who (although the reissue with the full concert on double cd in 1996 the true awesomeness of the concert is finally confirmed).

I intend to showcase some live albums on the blog this year that have escaped the radar of the music writers and compilers of "best of" lists.

Starting with....

The Sound and the Fury's Best of 2014

Welcome to 2015. 2014 was an interesting year in music, with heaps of great new music and lots of new discoveries. And a lot of sad departures to the great gig in the sky as well.

I'm not about to summarise the year or post the 10 best albums or whatever.

I'll let the playlist below do that for me. Where Frank Zappa once said "Shut Up and play your guitar", we'll let the music do the talking.

Here is the highlights of all our playlists from 2014. 256 tracks to highlight all the great music and classics from artists who have moved on from this life.

Turn it up and play it loud.

Enjoy!

Our 300th Post! The Best of 2013

Image with thanks to Michele Woodward

Wow! Our 300th post!

Who'd have thought we'd make it this far?

It's been a hectic year thus far and I've been a bit behind the 8-ball in getting this blog updated, but hopefully we'll be back in the swing of things shortly.

To celebrate, here is a belated playlist of the best tunes from 2013, with lots of great new music from the year, including the latest from Hottest 100 winner Vance Joy and heaps of other great stuff.

Get into it!

TSATF Best of the 2012 Playlists

As you may or may not know, I really hate writing end-of-year wrap-up columns, and this one is similarly painful for me to write.  However, this is no ordinary wrap up - this is just a brief summary of what happened this year that caught my eye and changed my world if ever so slightly.

Firstly, Spotify finally launched in Australia this year and the way I discovered new music has been turned on it's head.

Pandora also launched this year and that will also add some interesting dimensions to music listening.  It'll be interesting to see what happens with that one.

We all sat and held our breath as US President Obama was re-elected.  Whatever your opinion on the man and his presidency, he was re-elected, and there's no escaping that fact.  Now in 2013 we have to stomach our own federal electoral circus in Australia.  The mud-slinging hasn't started yet, but I'm sure it won't be long...

The family of the late John Peel started scanning in the covers of the first 100 LPs of each alphabetical letter of his 26,000+ record collection on their site this year, and it was a revelation.  Plus there were links to a lot of the records on Spotify which made for some very interesting musical discoveries.  Plus, it was a lot of fun. Check it out here.

Bob Dylan, Bob Mould, Best Coast, Band of Horses, Mystery Jets, Jack White, Trail of Dead, The Evens and Alabama Shakes all released some pretty decent music this year.

On the local front: Cactus Channel released one hell of a killer record in the form of "Haptics", Drawn From Bees released some great music this year too.  Other great local releases this year include albums from Alpine, Something For Kate, Tame Impala, Jonathon Boulet, The Jezabels and San Cisco.

Some of the bands I had never heard of previously, but nonetheless blew my mind at times this year were: Parry Gripp
Heywood Banks
Frank Turner
Jake Bugg
Best Coast
Arbouretum
Slobberbone
Cowpuncher
A Rocket To The Moon
Skipping Girl Vinegar
Rob Clarkson
Dale Hawkins, whose original version of "Suzy-Q" blows the crappy Creedence version out of the water

and of course: RASTAMOUSE!


The RIP list is exhaustive, but we lost
Dave Brubeck,
Ravi Shankar,
Frank Sidebottom,
Fontella Bass,
Jon Lord (Deep Purple),
Charles Durning (aka "Doc Hopper" in the Muppet Movie),
Johnny Otis
Etta James
Whitney Houston
Davy Jones (The Monkees)
Levon Helm (The Band)
Adam Yaunch (aka MCA, The Beastie Boys)
Donald "Duck" Dunn
Donna Summer
Chuck Brown, go-go-pioneer
Robin Gibb (The Bee Gees)
Hal David, songwriter
Daryl Cotton (Zoot)

Apologies if I have missed anything.

Here, for your listening pleasure is a best-of playlist of the Sound and the Fury Spotify playlists from 2012 featuring a selection of all the cool music we have championed on the site this year, and on our Twitter feed.  Here's to a great 2013 for everyone.