Though she’s released recordings for over 40 years now, Judy Henske never had that big breakthrough, and the music on this career-spanning retrospective clearly reveals why: Her musical idiosyncrasies made her unclassifiable, and if there’s one thing the music mainstream wants nothing to do with, it’s a performer who can’t be readily categorized. The set [...]

The Pogues were never as popular in the U.S. as in the U.K., where their albums regularly landed in the top 20. Which makes these reissues either a welcome introduction or a bracing reminder of just how well this band took musical elements of the past and present and mashed them together to create something [...]

Rockin’ Bones offers a first-rate look into the wild, wondrous, sometimes wacky world of rockabilly in all its raw, mangy glory. In typically thorough Rhino fashion, the four discs in this set cover territory both expected and unexpected, with extensive liner notes included. Obvious classics such as Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”, Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole [...]

When K.D. Lang’s country-punk act landed her a major-label contract in the late 1980s, it’s safe to say the country music establishment never quite got the joke. “Our music was not well received in Nashville,” Lang says in the Reintarnation liner notes with decided understatement. No, they certainly didn’t know how to take this brash [...]

One of the saddest things about Janis Joplin’s death is that her life and career seemed to be on the upswing at the time. She’d toured successfully with her new backing group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, and she was enjoying working with a new producer, Paul Rothchild, on the album that would be called [...]