Cactus - Bairly Contained: The Studio Sessions (s/t; One Way…Or Another; Restrictions; ‘Ot ‘n Heavy (part))
If Cactus are a generic boogie band, you’d basically be ignoring about 80 percent of the three studio albums, well maybe three and a half, on this collection of music. That’s really the draw of Cactus, a band playing rather close to bands like Cream and Mountain, using blues rock as a launching point for some rather heavy jams. Amazingly, the formula tends to take the band all the way to their fourth album ‘Ot ‘n Heavy, and while Cactus to tend to spatter the paint around the sides, by indulging themselves in numbers that tangent off the style, for the most part this is heavy shit and damn good too. Perhaps they hit the best combination on their first album, although you’ll only agree with that if you can deal with the band’s “Parchman Farm.” The band’s third album, Restrictions, is probably the weakest, in fact it was the only one I had remembered from when I was younger although my impressions weren’t as positive as they are now. Yeah, two CDs of this at once are probably too much of the same sort of thing, it’s probably best playing the albums by themselves (and for …Heavy this means getting the double CD of collected live Cactus), but when this band was on fire, they burned hard. After all having Jim McCarty lay down fire over the bass and drums tandem of Bogert and Appice is hardly much to scoff at. A generic boogie band? Really?
Radio Massacre International - Walking on the Sea
The umpteenth album from the British stalwarts and despite some valleys and a range of CD-Rs that aren’t often up to snuff, the band appears to be on their most recent renaissance and are back to releasing material on par with their first run of gems like Organ Harvest and the like. While Walking in the Sea doesn’t quite hang through it’s five tracks as consistently as some of their most recent material, at least they were prescient enough to lead off with one of their most of obvious tangerine flavored pieces, the mellotron flutes getting one in the mood rather quickly. Later in the album they seem to be exploring the range of music they niched out of the Berliner electronic school, which reminds me more of Borrowed Atoms, although with not quite as spectacular results.