The Cars The Cars Anthology: Just What I Needed (Elektra/Rhino) Back in the late Seventies, when record executives and rock critics alike used the term “new wave” to describe the more accessible groups that spun off from the planet of punk, the Cars were the rulers of the new-wave hemisphere…

When musicologists of the future try to reconcile the high and low of late twentieth-century music — the time when avant-gardists dismantled classical convention while rock and rollers assembled a cross-cultural folk idiom A perhaps they’ll find the missing link in Can. Much like the Velvet Underground, this German progressive-rock…

Kristin Hersh The Holy Single (Ryko) On this four-song EP, Throwing Muses singer/songwriter/guitarist Kristin Hersh goes solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar with little additional instrumentation, much as she did on her fine — and overlooked — 1994 album Hips and Makers. Here she applies her clear, unaffected voice to…

Blood, Sweat & Tears The Best of Blood, Sweat & Tears: What Goes Up! (Legacy/Columbia) First, the history. When New York City-based avant-rockers the Blues Project broke up in 1967, the band’s guitarist, Steve Katz, hooked up with jazz drummer Bobby Colomby, and the pair set about welding jazzy big-band…

New Bomb Turks Pissing Out the Poison (Crypt) Before punk rock found new digs on the Billboard album chart, it was the provincial music of outcasts and miscreants who had little interest in (let alone a chance in hell of attaining) the massive fame and success awarded to the likes…