Big Beat Schallplatten & CDs

Review: The Prisoners' 1985 third album 'The Last Fourfathers' gets a proper first-time reissue on transparent blue vinyl, carefully cementing the four horsemen of UK soul's reputation as one of the country's best and greatest. It wasn't long after the release of this album that the band, ahem, disbanded... but their reforming in 1994 proved the album to be an influential hit among heads, with 'Nobody Wants Your Love' and 'Whenever I'm Gone' standing out as fan highlights.

Review: Tacoma garage rock legends The Sonics are revisited here across seven 7" singles, covering their key material from 1964 to 1966. The set includes foundational tracks from the Etiquette years - 'The Witch', 'Psycho', and 'Strychnine' - alongside Jerden-era cuts like 'Head On Backwards' and 'Like No Other Man', all remastered and sequenced with clarity. It's the first time material from both periods has been presented together on vinyl. 'Keep A Knockin' and 'Louie Louie' sit comfortably beside the band's originals, which are leaner, noisier, and often more aggressive. 'Boss Hoss', 'Cinderella', and 'Shot Down' showcase the group's punchy rhythm section and blown-out recording style, while 'Have Love Will Travel' and 'High Time' ride the line between r&b cover and full distortion assault. 'Maintaining My Cool', long circulating in other formats, makes its vinyl debut here in its rare Audio Recording version. The pressing includes a booklet with photography by Jini Dellaccio, but the real appeal is in the sequencing - no filler, no novelty, just the most direct catalogue survey of a band that never needed polishing.

Review: This collection focuses in an era of Japanese music in which fashion, glamour and kitsch collided to create an addictive sound that morphed Westernized shapes into something kaleidoscopic and unique; the GS (or Group Sounds) phenomenon had seen Japanese artists attempting their own take on the high-energy onslaught of the Beatles and the British invasion, but elsewhere the female artists of the era were crafting a sound that tipped its hat to bossa nova, psych-pop and French ye-ye whilst maintaining a distinctly Japanese approach. Vibrant, eclectic and shot through with an insouciance and style rich even for this era, this is a compilation that sounds as exotic today as it did in the '60s.