Elektra US Vinyl & CDs

Review: The Cars' 1987 final album Door To Door was poorly received on release, but revisionist musicologists have not regretted to point out since its no less enduringly electric, new wave wile. Just as loved by fans of the band as any other one of their records was, Door To Door needed no sales pitch despite the name. The Bostonian band began as a vocal synthpop and new wave act, but then later replaced their engine with one that ran on guitar. Having vowed to regain the basic, direct-to-TV pop finesse that had been lost on their more meandering later records, Door To Door returned to a connotatively more down-to-earth, less synthesised and rawer sound, which expressed the band's growing differences as much as it did their appreciation for an older sound.

Review: This is the first heavy-weight vinyl version of the Cure's greatest hits performed acoustically. The album first appeared as a limited-edition CD accompanying the 2001 Greatest Hits compilation and in 2017 was released as a double picture disc for Record Store Day. This latest version, however, is the audiophile's dream copy. The tracklist is everything you can want from a Cure set: 'A Forest', 'Lovecats', 'Just Say Yes'... all the most memorable numbers are on there. Having it stripped back allows the songs to just be what they are and emphasises the fact that Robert Smith is an all-time great.

Review: The eighth studio album by American folk and country rock singer Linda Ronstadt, Simple Dreams was the best-selling album of her otherwise long career, and at the moment of its release in 1977 was also the second best-selling album by a female artist of all time, second only to Carole King’s Tapestry. From the upbeat ‘It's So Easy' to the poignant 'Blue Bayou’, the album seamlessly weaves Ronstadt’s trademark rock, country, and folk influences while saliently attending us to her gripping alto; her distinctive flutter was emblematic of the great American folk sound of the ‘40s onwards. Spanning everything from ballads to line dances, the album is most notably marked by the lonesome lament ‘I Will Never Marry’, on which Ronstadt imparts the extent of her dreams’ simplicity, and her strength: “I expect to live single all the days of my life."