The Soft Parade is the fourth studio album by the American rock band The Doors, and was released on July 18, 1969, on Elektra Records (see 1969 in music). It saw the group departing from the material that encompassed their past three albums…

Cut straight on the heels of Bad Company's 1974 debut – just a matter of three months later; not quite long enough to know how big a success the first LP would be – Straight Shooter is seemingly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor…

Brothers Ron and Russell Mael from Los Angeles, USA have been making diverse music since 1969 under various incarnations of Sparks. In 1979 they ditched the guitars and keyboards of glam geek rock and started working with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, beginning a love affair with electronic music. Since then they have worked with a variety of people including Finitribe, Les Rita Mitsouko, Erasure and Faith No More.

Blondie turned to British pop producer Mike Chapman for their third album, on which they abandoned any pretensions to new wave legitimacy (just in time, given the decline of the new wave) and emerged as a pure pop band…

Atomic Rooster experienced several lineup changes during their initial tenure in the early '70s, with Nice 'n' Greasy being the band's last before disbanding. By this time the band's musical direction had shifted from hard rock and progressive rock to a style more closely resembling blues/funk. The addition of Chris Farlowe gives the music an aggressive edge, while John Mandella's guitar work beckons images of John McLaughlin…

The Doors' 1967 albums had raised expectations so high that their third effort was greeted as a major disappointment. With a few exceptions, the material was much mellower, and while this yielded some fine melodic ballad rock in "Love Street," "Wintertime Love," "Summer's Almost Gone," and "Yes, the River Knows," there was no denying that the songwriting was not as impressive as it had been on the first two records…

Released in October 1984, Them or Us is Frank Zappa's last studio rock album (unless one counts Thing-Fish). It contains a little of everything for everyone, but most of all it has that cold and dry early-'80s feel that made this and other albums like The Man From Utopia and Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention sound dated pretty quickly. The record begins and ends with covers…

Many of the songs on Strange Days had been written around the same time as the ones that appeared on The Doors, and with hindsight one has the sense that the best of the batch had already been cherry picked for the debut album…