Candy Dulfer - Right In My Soul (2003)

Candy has had featured guest appearances with Prince, Dave Stewart, Van Morrison and Maceo Parker. Candy's career has continued with four more hit albums and a live CD/DVD along with a hectic touring schedule throughout Europe, Japan and the USA. Her US Soundscan numbers to date are 1,360,998!

In the summer of 2002, with the help Eagle Records - Candy was given total creative freedom to create the CD of her dreams, giving her the opportunity to push the boundaries with her seamless fusion of R&B, Drum `n Bass, Funk, Jazz and Ambient sounds. Right In My Soul marks Dulfer's first studio album in four years.

Right In My Soul has all the trademark riffs, solos and that fit in with the new Candy Dulfer but still instantly recognizable to her legions of fans.

Candy also shows a new side of her talent, singing for the first time!

Ash Ra Tempel - Ash Ra Tempel (1971)

Ash Ra Tempel was a German krautrock group active from 1970 to 1976, Manuel Gottsching's first prominent musical output. Ash Ra Tempel featured revolving members. Gottsching retired the use of the Ash Ra Tempel name after he became the sole remaining member. His first solo album Inventions for Electric Guitar was the last album to bear the Ash Ra Tempel name. Gottsching later used the name Ashra for his solo output as an homage to his former group. Ashra eventually evolved into a full band and continued along with Gottsching until 1998.

Sarah Connor - Green Eyed Soul (2001)

Green Eyed Soul is the debut album by German recording artist Sarah Connor. It was released by X-Cell Records and Epic Records on November 26, 2001, in German-speaking Europe. Connor worked on the majority of the album with Bülent Aris and duo Rob Tyger and Kay Denar, all of who would become frequent collaborators on subsequent projects. She also collaborated with American rapper TQ as well as producers Adam Charon, Mekong Age, and Rufi-Oh. Green Eyed Soul is predominately a pop album with major influences of contemporary R&B, hip hop and soul music. The album's lyrics explore the complexities of romantic relationships and stages of love.

Green Eyed Soul received a generally mixed reception from professional music critics, who declared it a mixed bag but considered it a solid career launcher. Upon its release, it opened at number two on the German Albums Chart, and within the top five in Austria, Finland and Switzerland. Ranking among Connor's biggest-selling international efforts, the album eventually reached gold status in Austria, Czech, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland and was certified platinum by the Musiikkituottajat (IFPI Finland) and triple gold by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie (BVMI). In 2002, it ranked number twenty-eighth on the German Albums year-end chart.

Altogether Green Eyed Soul spawned three singles, including "Let's Get Back to Bed – Boy!" featuring TQ, "French Kissing" (based on a sample of Blackstreet's "No Diggity"), and the ballad "From Sarah with Love", Connor's first number-one hit and breakthrough song. A fourth track, "If U Were My Man", received a limited promotional release in Eastern Europe, but failed to chart anywhere. In support of the album, Connor embarked on the Green Eyed Soul Tour in 2002.

Laibach - Laibach (1985)

Laibach's self-titled 1985 debut was regarded as an early industrial album, you can definitely hear where future alterna-electronic stars (Nine Inch Nails, Prodigy, etc.) learned their stuff. Since the band hailed from a small industrial town in Yugoslavia, it was only natural for their music to reflect their surroundings (look no further than the repetitive, pulsating factory-clang of the track "Battles"). But the band was also bent on incorporating politics into the mix, with songs like "Panorama," which cuts up a speech by a Yugoslavian president, and re-arranges it as a nonsensical narrative. The band also caused a stir visually by wearing traditional Alpine outfits and using the anti-Nazi art of Jon Heartfield (many people, especially outside Europe, mistakenly interpreted the band as a bunch of neo-Nazis). The music is consistently dark, creepy, and stark, which shows that Laibach were extremely cutting edge, and sadly far ahead of their time.

Laibach - Nova Akropola (1985)

Laibach - Krst Pod Triglavom - Baptism (1987)

Hawkwind - Take Me To Your Leader (2005)

Hawkwind's latest was eagerly anticipated after a long and turbulent few years since the band's previous studio release. Most latter-day Hawkwind studio albums have been patchy affairs and now the euphoria has died down, Take Me To Your Leader proves to be much the same. The band that invented spacerock has long left full-on blanga behind, at least in the studio, in favour of a cold and rather sterile techno-rock hybrid that sometimes has psychedelic tendencies but only ventures into space on synth-based ambient pieces.

Too much of this album passes in an impenetrable cocoon of blandness - the vague and meandering 'Out Here We Are', an average heavy riffer in 'Greenback Massacre', jazzed-up techno of 'Take Me To Your Leader', the repetitious 'Digital Nation' and its annoying drum pattern, the short interlude of 'Sighs', and Arthur Brown's uninteresting techno-backed 'A Letter To Robert' monologue which doesn't bear more than a single hearing. None raise a flicker of emotion in the listener, and none displays much in the way of inspiration. Fortunately, the remaining tracks provided adequate compensation ....

.... opener, the old classic 'Spirit Of The Age' is rather splendid, generally an improvement on the original though not deviating much from the 1977 arrangement; Brock's 'To Love A Machine' enters Symphonic Prog territory and features some unexpected, but very welcome, acoustic guitar as well as tasty electric riffs; Arthur Brown's bouncy 'Sunray' is a brilliant Roxy Music thrash awash with crunchy guitars; and an infectious 'Angela Android', with an aptly loopy Lene Lovich adding vocals in her inimitable style to a pounding beat.

These four tracks are undoubtedly bright stars in the Hawkwind post-spacerock firmament. Had the remainder been even close then this might have been a stunning album based around a theme of a mechanized future world. The reality is that, once again, a Hawkwind album fails to satisfy in its entirety. If you strip away the contributions of guest performers, you are left with a pretty average bunch of songs that don't stand the test of time. Overall - good, but they have done a lot better.

Laurie Anderson - Big Science (1982)

There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track, which must feature the most deadpan yodeling ever, the album dispenses witty one-liners, perceptive social commentary (the subtext of the album concerns Anderson's own suburban upbringing, which she views with more of a bemused fondness than the tiresome irony that many brought to the subject), and a surprisingly impressive sense of melody for someone who was until recently a strictly visual artist. For example, the marimba and handclap-led closer, "It Tango," is downright pretty in the way the minimalistic tune interacts with Anderson's voice, which is softer and more intimate (almost sexy, in a downtown-cool sort of way) than on the rest of the album. Not everything works -- "Walking and Falling" is negligible, and the way Rufus Harley's bagpipes intentionally clash with Anderson's harsh, nasal singing and mannered phrasing in "Sweaters" will annoy those listeners who can't take either Yoko Ono or Meredith Monk -- but Big Science is a landmark release in the New York art scene of the '80s, and quite possibly the best art rock album of the decade.

Laibach - Nova Akropola (1985)

As Laibach took on more and more of a direct musical identity outside Slovenia, as opposed to being seen as simply part of the Neue Slowenische Kunst, the group's music gained a similar focus, though admittedly one still aimed specifically at an avant-garde level. Nova Akropola readily captures the band's stone-faced fascination with propaganda, fascism, and the implications of rallying and control, while the music was so perfectly on the money with stentorian rhythms, rough chants, and unnerving textures and samples that it almost beggars description. The title track is a perfect example, string-synths and horns slowly, creepily wafting up through the mix before a distorted, strangled voice starts howling over the slowest death-march beat around. There are signs at many points that the group is starting to explore the perversely accessible styles of later years, but it's still early days yet -- the appropriate comparison wouldn't be industrial/dance so much as the first albums by the Swans. "Die Liebe," though, is very much the stomping, riff-heavy semi-dance hit from hell, something of a dry run for the later demolitions of Queen and other groups. "Vade Retro" takes a calmer but not less haunting approach, a mix of keyboards and drums providing rhythms while vocals swirl like disembodied choirs from the mountaintop. The clipped, commanding vocals throughout may only be understandable to those who know Slovenian, but a handily provided translation increases the extreme irony even further -- sample lyric, from "War Poem": "The stronger one will wash our faces and moisten our lips with a rag/and the night with a cold knife will cut us black bread." A couple of older cuts make return appearances on the American issue, including the marvelous "Drzava," Tito sample fully intact.

Laibach - Laibach (1985)

Laibach - Krst Pod Triglavom - Baptism (1987)

Laibach - Krst Pod Triglavom - Baptism (1987)

Laibach's reason for existence has always been an exploration of extremities, but in many ways the group rarely got more extreme than on the soundtrack for the massive Neue Slowenische Kunst stage production Baptism, or Krst Pod Triglavom -- Baptism Below Triglav in full. Triglav itself is Slovenia's highest mountain, while the baptism in question refers to a historical battle between Slovenian pagans and invading Germans who won the day and forcibly converted the losers to Christianity. The parallels between that and more recent examples of military and cultural invasion are not merely obvious but fully intended. Numerous photos of the production are included in the album packaging, showing a compelling design making equal reference to medieval imagery, fascist stylings and Weimar-era experimentalism -- arguably the music and art had rarely been so appropriately matched. That music itself was the most ambitious the group had yet recorded, something which could appeal to the classical music aficionado as much as the industrial/experimental wing, while the humor is of an extremely rarified nature -- a collection of Beatles and Rolling Stones covers this isn't. Wagnerian opera is unsurprisingly a chief reference point, though the group focuses on a mantra-like repetition of musical and lyrical phrases, doubtless the better to draw the parallels to unthinking fascist reactions. Not everything is strings and horns, admittedly -- sometimes it can be as simple as a looped beat and chant with the occasional vocal bark of "Raus!" What sounds like crowd samples and possibly political speeches get mixed with metallic sound snippets and even acoustic guitar, while more than once the band just bodily dropped in extended performances from other operas entirely! With sly, bitter hilarity, Baptism is packaged in an obvious knockoff of the Deutsch Grammophon in-house style for its run of classical music releases -- another example of German cultural colonization, one could argue.

Laibach - Nova Akropola (1985)
Laibach - Laibach (1985)