Eurythmics

EURYTHMICS
 
 
Eurythmics  are a British music duo consisting of members Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart.  Stewart and Lennox were both previously in the band The Tourists, who split up in 1980; Eurythmics were formed that year.  The duo achieved global success with their second album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), released in 1983.  The title track was a worldwide hit, topping the chart in various countries including the US.  The duo went on to release a string of hit singles and albums before they split up in 1990.  After almost a decade apart, Eurythmics reunited to record their ninth album, Peace, released in late 1999.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
With all of that as background, the first hint that garage rock might at long last find widespread appeal came with the 1998 release of the first album, The White Stripes by the rock duo the White Stripes.  At first guitarist and vocalist Jack White and drummer Meg White pretended to be brother and sister (they were actually previously married; the members of the new wave band EurythmicsAnnie Lennox and Dave Stewart were also former lovers), causing Rolling Stone magazine to run a tongue-in-cheek cover story on the band:  “The White Stripes: The New Carpenters?” 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Chimera recorded something like 20 songs (variously reported as being in 19681969 and/or 1970) in an acid-folk style for a planned album that remained unreleased for decades, while picking up legendary status among psychedelic record collectors.  Amazingly, only cassettes remain from the recording sessions, though the sound quality is not at all impaired; they were remastered beautifully by Denis Blackham, an industry legend who had previously mastered the music for the Evita and Cats musicals and also albums by Led ZeppelinMadnessEurythmics, and Brian Eno

 

(November 2013)

 
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I once wrote about Patti Smith in another connection that she “sounds like nothing so much as the Beat poets of the 1950’s”.  Despite their groundbreaking sound, Annie Lennox’s vocals for Eurythmics – who came onto the music scene at about the same time as Black Russian – sounded like a 1940’s chanteuse to me.  Similarly, Black Russian is a startling album from the very beginning of the lively decade of the 1980’s whose source is from a decade or two earlier.  In 2015, the album is not a bit passé but still sounds as fresh as it must have the day it was released; today, the album gives the listener a double dose of looking back. 

 

(April 2015/1)

 

Last edited: March 22, 2021