Jeff Beck Group

Continuing with the same group lineup as on Rough and Ready, Jeff Beck Group was slagged off by critics for the admittedly lazy production. However, several of the songs hold up masterfully.

Rough and Ready

Recouping after a car crash and faced with the loss of Rod Stewart and Rod Wood, Jeff Beck redefined what the Jeff Beck Group was about, deciding to tone down the bluesy bombast, adding keyboardist Max Middleton for a jazz edge, then having Bob Tench sing to give it an overblown early-'70s AOR edge.

Beck-Ola

When it was originally released in June 1969, Beck-Ola, the Jeff Beck Group's second album, featured a famous sleeve note on its back cover: "Today, with all the hard competition in the music business, it's almost impossible to come up with anything totally original. So we haven't. However, this disc was made with the accent on heavy music. So sit back and listen and try and decide if you can find a small place in your heads for it." Beck was reacting to the success of peers and competitors like Cream and Led Zeppelin here, bands that had been all over the charts with a hard rock sound soon to be dubbed heavy metal, and indeed, his sound employs much the same brand of "heavy music" as theirs, with deliberate rhythms anchoring the beat, over which the guitar solos fiercely and the lead singer emotes. But he was also preparing listeners for the weakness of the material on an album that sounds somewhat thrown together.

Truth

Despite being the premiere of heavy metal, Jeff Beck's Truth has never quite carried its reputation the way the early albums by Led Zeppelin did, or even Cream's two most popular LPs, mostly as a result of the erratic nature of the guitarist's subsequent work. Time has muted some of its daring, radical nature, elements of which were appropriated by practically every metal band (and most arena rock bands) that followed. Truth was almost as groundbreaking and influential a record as the first Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Who albums.

Let It Be...Naked

Of all the Beatles albums, none has garnered as much controversy and speculation as Let It Be. Released as their final album in May 1970, the record began its life as a back-to-basics affair called Get Back, which was intended to show the Beatles as a stripped-down rock & roll band after the excesses of Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album. This is an interpretation of the Let It Be sessions, which has been marred by various producers. Let It Be...Naked is the stripped down version of it.

1

If there's any complaint, it's that even if it's nice to have something like this, it's not really essential. There's really no reason for anyone who owns all the records to get this too -- if you've lived happily without the red or blue albums, you'll live without this. But, if you give this to any six or seven year old, they'll be a pop fan, even fanatic, for life. And that's reason enough for it to exist.

Anthology 3

The final installment of the Anthology series has two discs of previously unreleased material from the White Album era through the group's demise in early 1970. In terms of sheer listenability, this may be the strongest volume of the three, if only because it focuses almost solely upon studio recordings rather than mixing live concerts/broadcasts and outtakes. Also, by this time The Beatles had perfected their approach to recording, meaning that even the early/alternate versions of many of their cuts were often of outstanding quality.