Carl Smith - Complete Us Hits 1951-62 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Red Sovine - Gone But Not Forgotten [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/01/2013

Ernest Tubb was one of biggest and most influential stars in the history of country music, his hit-making career covering nearly four decades as he racked up around 90 country and pop chart entries, beginning with his landmark InchWalking The Floor Over YouInch in 1941, which effectively pioneered the honky-tonk sound in commercial country music. He was known as InchThe Texas TroubadourInch, a name he also gave to his band, which always comprised the cream of Nashville's musicians, notably, in the early days, Jimmy Short, who developed the single-string picking style that characterised Tubbs' recordings. His many hits included the original versions of songs that became iconic country standards, such as InchBlue ChristmasInch, popularised by Elvis Presley, and InchI Love You BecauseInch, later a huge hit for Jim Reeves. This great value 71-track 3-CD collection comprises every Ernest Tubb's record which featured in the US country or pop charts during the two decades and more which it covers, including his hit duets with Red Foley, The Andrews Sisters and The Wilburn Brothers. It's a definitive snapshot of the core hit career of one of the true pioneers of modern Nashville country.

In Pond's universe nothing stays still for long. Although no one who heard 2019's InchTasmaniaInch could possibly describe it's pulsating psych-pop as straight, Pond wanted to try a more spontaneous way of working for their next record.Taking a leaf out of krautrock outliers Can's book, at the start of 2020, Pond embarked on a series of totally off-the-cuff jam sessions from which songs and ideas could be pulled out. Given the pace at which ideas whizz past your head, it makes for a dizzying listen. Opener Song For Agnes explodes out the speakers like an intergalactic rock opera, running a synapse-tingling gauntlet through bubbling synth pop, 80s hair metal and blissed out saxophone before you know what's hit you.It's an apposite curtain-raiser for an album that can encompass pounding techno (Human Touch), elastic hipped robo- funk (America's Cup), tripped out motorik (Czech Locomotive) and acres more besides without even topping for breath.Take lead single Pink Lunettes, which opens up thumping like ESG eight hours into a session at Berghain before climbing aboard a gargantuan synthship and disappearing off over the horizon.Lyrically, too, 9 takes Pond into uncharted territory. Allbrook's songs here take a more impressionistic tack than before, resulting in both the hilarious one-liners within Human Touch's gonzoid thrash (sample lyric Inchshe was jacking a car but she seemed quite nice so I let her use the toilet in my placeInch) and the social and environmental concerns of blissed out closer Toast, which addressed both last year's bush fires and the appalling wealth divide in Allbrook's childhood home in Western Australia.Above all though, what you get from Inch9Inch is a sense of creative abandon and just plain fun. If it was only a fraction as enjoyable to make as it is to listen to then they must have been having a hoot.