Everything you need to learn to play five great AC/CD hits!
There was a time when you could walk into your average record store and find the singles section by spotting the big block of black rows. These rows signaled the whereabouts of the Ds and tended to eat up a disproportionate space of the singles section. In 2004, the Mute label condensed all of these releases into Remixes 81-04, which itself was ironically (or fittingly) presented in multiple versions. This particular version is a triple-disc set that attempts to function as a representative sampling of Depeche Mode's innumerable remixes. It does an admirable job, making a point to highlight glorified extended versions and radical reworkings alike.
Culled from the same European tour dates as Abnormal and The Highway Kind, this set of minimal live performances features a number of true Van Zandt classics, including "Snowin' on Raton," "To Live's to Fly," "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold," and "You Are Not Needed Now." The man's in fairly decent voice, too, given how many of his later recordings betrayed the ravages of his hard-scrabble life. But even with his voice on his side, Van Zandt sounds as if he's trying to fend off death with a joke and a song – and not necessarily succeeding. Though hardly the place for neophytes to begin, In Pain is a fitting and aptly named epitaph for this beloved singer/songwriter.
Bossa nova is not unfamiliar to Diana Krall, but 2009's Quiet Nights is her first record devoted to the gently swaying rhythm. Teaming up again with arranger Claus Ogerman, who last worked with Krall on 2001's The Look of Love and who also frequently collaborated with bossa nova godfather Antonio Carlos Jobim, Krall winds up with a mellow, lazy album that recalls the relaxed late-night sophistication of Jobim's duet album with Frank Sinatra, which Ogerman also happened to arrange and conduct. It's not just the sound, it's the songs: how '60s standards like Bacharach/David's "Walk on By" sit next to three Jobim tunes, a song by Marcos Valle ("So Nice"), and a few American Songbook standards placed at the beginning, the better to ease listeners into purer bossa nova at the end.
AC/DC are an Australian rock band, formed in Sydney in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. A hard rock/blues rock band, their music has also been called heavy metal, although they refer to themselves as "a rock and roll band, nothing more, nothing less"…
Allusion to the digital world though it may be, there's a sweet, elegiac undercurrent to the title of Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, an acknowledgement that it was written and recorded when McCartney was 64, the age he mythologized on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released almost exactly 40 years before Memory…