• Music

    Wara – El Inca

    Bolivia is a country who rarely pop up on my radar.  Thankfully, today we have a hard-rock/psychedelic gem to present to you.  Wara were influenced by hard-rock giants like Uriah Heep and Deep Purple, but they also added touches of their own Bolivian heritage to their music. Straddling the borders of psych, hard rock and prog, this album is considered to be one of the holy grails of South American rock music.

  • Music

    Dead Gallery – Dead Man’s Theme (Full Album)

    Stoner rock is a genre that always surprises me (in a good way, mind you).  Dead Gallery, for example, are a heavy stoner/psychedelic blues band out of Austria, and the music they make reminds me of really old rare hard rock albums you would find in collector fairs (think of bands like Black Widow as an example). Musically, the guitar playing is great, the vocals are raw and loud, and the production is surprisingly clean without sacrificing the power of the tracks.

  • Music

    Marin Škrgatić – Dawn of the Yugoslavian Prog​-​Rock Era Unreleased radio recordings 1970​-​1976

    Marin Škrgatić was a singer and bandleader of Croatian extraction whose work here should have been given a wider audience during the 1970s.  If you can believe it, according to Everland Music’s Bandcamp site, some of these songs were too progressive, if such a thing could ever exist.  The tracks are not only influenced by prog, but you can hear jazzy and operatic elements in some of the tracks.  This is an undisputed gem of Yu-Rock.

  • Music

    Golden Hands – Golden Hands

    Sdban Records, a magnificent Belgian imprint I came across recently, is releasing some absolute bangers in the field of jazz, library music and funk.  This particular album, which has its roots in Morocco’s hardly-ever-discussed funk scene, was first available as a cassette in 1978 on Disques Gam. The reissue is lovingly done with crisp cover art, but the music is what wows me.  This isn’t merely a funk album.  There are tracks here, like My Story With Mrs. Life, are beefy rock tracks with gritty vocals you know you loved hearing on AM radio in the 70s.  Another gem, Love…