Legacy Recordings Vinyl & CDs

Review: While the soundtracks to earlier Stranger Things seasons often included lots of original music lovingly composed and produced to sound like atmospheric synthesiser jams of the 1980s, this compilation of music from the latest season does not. Instead, it rounds up some of the classic pop music of the period used in the series. Kate Bush's 'Running Up That Hill', which of course returned to the top of the UK singles charts on the back of its inclusion in the series, naturally appears, alongside a mixture of big '80s pop hits (see the cuts by Journey, Kiss, Dead Or Alive and Metallica), much-loved cuts from earlier eras (the Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, James Taylor) and, more surprisingly, a later track from Moby.

Review: If you didn't catch The Summer of Soul on the big screen then we're really, truly, very sorry indeed. The documentary was one of the most fascinating and evocative, not to mention poignant box office releases of the immediate post-pandemic lockdown period, and in our opinion is up there with the best non-fiction flicks we've ever seen.

Centring on the Harlem Cultural Festival, which took place over successive weekends in 1969, it tells the story of how this Black-run, and predominantly Black-billed event welcomed hundreds of thousands and hosted groundbreaking performances, but was quickly forgotten and lost in the shadows of the much more mythologised and predominantly white Woodstock, which took place at the same time. The long-overdue reappraisal is a musical feast, with great archive footage of numerous greats, and asks serious questions about who owns and decides on which narratives survive, while this album offers a fantastic overview of the sounds and names involved.