Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The band Missouri and their debut album

Missouri
The band Missouri is named from the state that it hails from and they only released two albums. They toured up until 1984, but money was getting scarce and a new record deal could not be found so they packed it up.
The first side starts with a nice intro to their one hit song, "Movin' On". It has a nice moderate beat with good lyrics and it can still be heard on radio stations in the Midwest. "Got That Fever" steps up the beat but then it is slowed down by the next track, "I'm Still Tryin". When I listed to "You're Alright", I could hear the influence of Creedence from the vocals to the rhythm guitar and I found it to be a pleasant diversity from the preceding songs. The first side ends with, "Really Love You" which I found to be a good upbeat song with decent lyrics and melody.
Side two starts with "Hold Me" which is just a plain good rocking tune then things get funky with "I Know Its Love". "Come On Move" is aptly named 'cause this song's got rock and it is followed by "Goin Home", which I found had nothing special about it, just good music. "Mystic Lady" brings more of the keyboards upfront and that gives the album more variety to put a nice ending to the album.
All said and done there is enough good music on this album to entice me to find a copy of their second album and give it a spin on the turntable.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Alvin Lee Is Gone But His Music Isn't

I remember the first song that I heard by Ten Years After was, "I'd Love To Change The World", from, "A Space In Time", album. I knew then that I had to get more of their albums and soon after I heard their performance at Woodstock and Alvin Lee became one of my guitar heroes.
His style was one of the inspirations that drove me to learn how to play guitar.
A while ago, at a previous job, one of my co-workers was boasting that he had filled his ipod and that a lot of it was music from the 70's. I asked him what songs did he have from Ten Years After, and he said, who! I was very surprised and commenced to tell him all about Alvin Lee and my favorite Ten Years After albums. I hope he took my advice and made some room on his ipod.
I was saddened when I heard of Alvin's passing as yet another music icon leaves us their legacy in vinyl, video and CD.