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Lil Hanky Panky is ‘Gettin’ There’
Lil Hanky Panky is ‘Gettin’ There’
Dancehall fusion artiste Lil Hanky Panky is excited about the release of a new single, Gettin' There, featuring US-based rapper Kash XO.
"It was great working with Kash XO on the single, the shoot was in Calabasas (California) and the concept was basically rich life, flexing, flossing, big-balling in front of a $50- million mansion. The song itself is just a fun song. On my part, I am talking about levelling up," she said. After releasing an EP last year, she is lining up a string of new releases for her growing fanbase.
Kash XO, who has been making waves in the music industry with his unique sound and captivating performances, was born and raised in Los Angeles. He grew up surrounded by music, which had a huge influence on him from a young age. He started writing his own music at age 16, and it wasn't long before his talent started to gain attention from people in the industry.
Kash XO's big break came in 2020 with the release of his single Glowin, which took the world by storm. The song received widespread critical acclaim and quickly went viral, amassing millions of streams on popular platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud. Now, the plan is to push Gettin There to the next tier with an aggressive social media and marketing plan across the US.
Lil Hanky Panky is excited about the project and the trajectory of her career.
"I plan to do a lot more collaborations over the summer," she said.
10)Cover of "Drive"
The Cars' 'Drive' Given Americana Makeover By David Starr
https://www.allmusic.com/album/movin-with-nancy-mw0000190324
Movin' with Nancy Review
by Joe Viglione [-]
Sundazed released a 1996 CD version of the original Movin' With Nancy album, adding three bonus tracks to the 1968 soundtrack from her television special, and it earns high marks for documenting more of the fun and campy escapades of Frank Sinatra's daughter. Without the opportunity to surpass her dad the way Mira Sorvino or Charlie Sheen may have moved beyond Paul Sorvino and Martin Sheen in terms of popularity, Nancy Sinatra deserves credit for a sultry, hip image and the ability to hit a few home runs. It's easy to hit a home run, of course, when your father owns a piece of the record label, Reprise, and a Rodgers & Hammerstein composition makes its way onto track four, like "Younger Than Springtime," sung by "a very close relative." The uncredited Frank Sinatra performance is great, of course, and is followed by a Dean Martin/Nancy Sinatra "duet" on the Bobby Darin song "Things." It sure sounds like dad called up Martin and asked if he wouldn't mind Nancy overdubbing her voice on a pre-existing Martin track -- this was, of course, before the days of putting Natalie Cole on a Nat "King" Cole master. Despite the awkwardness of it, there is a certain charm that adds to the festivities. Make no mistake, this is a festive album. Heck, some kids go to the circus with their folks, Nancy Sinatra got to play at the record company. Her vocal style is on par with Claudine Longet and Jo Jo Laine, not the kind of singing to give Whitney Houston or Jackie DeShannon sleepless nights, but charming nonetheless. Where this Sinatra really shines is when she and producer Lee Hazlewood do the Sonny & Cher routine on the previous hit, "Jackson," and the real gem here, "Some Velvet Morning." When Nancy Sinatra has Hazlewood as her foil, she is outstanding. Though "Some Velvet Morning" was number nine out of her Top Ten hits as far as chart action goes, it is her strongest performance here, and proves she had more of a voice than maybe she even realized. She walks through Jimmy Webb's "Up, Up and Away," but it works, as does, surprisingly enough, the cover of Ray Charles' "What I'd Say," which closes the vinyl version of this project. Do the math: two hit singles, a duet with Dean Martin, an appearance by the Chairman of the Board (the legend, not the band), and superb production by Lee Hazlewood all make for a highly entertaining disc. Yes, she was lucky to have those doors open for her, but while other showbiz kids fell by the wayside, Movin' With Nancy delivered the goods. You can't help but like her.
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Late at Night Review
by Joe Viglione [-] https://www.allmusic.com/album/late-at-night-mw0000870190
Motown was the perfect label for Billy Preston's late-'70s/early-'80s creativity, the Top Five "With You I'm Born Again" his biggest chart action since the string of hits he had for A&M in the early to mid-'70s. Pairing the Beatles/Rolling Stones keyboard player with Syreeta Wright on this glossy hit from the film Fast Break created a wondrous adult contemporary/gospel/rhythm & blues staple. The problem with the album Late at Night is that, outside of the hit, it is a recording, for the most part, lost in time. The title track and "All I Wanted Was You" are disco numbers, and even with Scherrie Payne of the latter day Supremes and Rolling Stones horn player Bobby Keyes on saxophone, this great artist squanders his talent on this limiting format, especially on the opening track "Give It Up, Hot." It's that same familiar voice, it's up-tempo and energetic, but half of the album also lacks identity. "You," on the other hand, closes out side one with startling urban pop. Yes, it has the Herman Melvin & the Blue Notes kind of dressing, but the song breaks through the trappings and could evolve as a pop hit with a different arrangement. Rita Coolidge worked Tom Snow's song with the same title the year before achieving chart action, and George Harrison went Top 20 in 1975 with yet another song titled "You." Billy Preston's co-write with Gloria Jones and Richard Jones could've followed suit. Side two continues the pop leanings of "You"; "It Will Come in Time" is a pure hybrid of Sly Stone's "Somebody's Watching You" flavored with Preston's own "Nothing From Nothing" beat. "I Come to Rest in You" sounds like it was written after Preston listened to "Georgia on My Mind" by Ray Charles. There's lots of musicians, and the album has lots of heart, but for an artist who graced the stage and is immortalized on the Concert for Bangla Desh album, he certainly had the opportunity to reinvent himself at Motown. Reuniting with Sly Stone, who worked with Preston on the Pickwick/Capitol release Organ Transplant, and maybe Stevie Wonder was what the doctor ordered, but the prescription just never got filled. Late at Night is not as much a bad effort as it is disappointing. It could have been so much more.
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Holland's Brainbox were founded by Jan Akkerman in the mid-'60s. While H.P. Lovecraft kept changing members around the drummer, this band would release a record with totally new people in 1972, entitled Parts. Yet the original Brainbox do have qualities somewhat resembling the earlier H.P. Lovecraft, and their eponymous album is a worthwhile collection of musically diverse and eclectic performances. The decent liner notes call this "progressive pop," and in some respects it is, though they shift gears from the Simon & Garfunkel classic "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" to the 17-minute plus original "Sea of Delight," and take lots of other directions in between. The Damned had a song called "New Rose," which is where the French record label got its name, and there was the aforementioned Savage Rose, but Brainbox start the album with "Dark Rose," a blend of Jethro Tull meets the Mothers of Invention. Brainbox ups the ante by sliding into Tim Hardin and a very credible cover of "Reason to Believe" a full two years before Rod Stewart would get a B-side hit with it (the original A-side of the "Maggie Mae" single), they pull off a chameleon-like change on this to become folk rockers. Casimirz Lux has a very appealing voice with a bit of Stewart's rasp, making "Reason to Believe" a highlight of the album. The liner notes credit Jimmy Smith for writing "Baby, What You Want Me to Do," but the tracking properly gives it to Jimmy Reed, and his Top 40 1960 hit is as bluesy as you can get here, the band changing styles yet again and showing their grasp and appreciation of American music. From progressive rock to folk-rock to blues-rock to the folk-pop of Simon & Garfunkel, who is to say they weren't rewriting Blind Faith's lengthy "Do What You Like" by way of "Sea of Joy" for their epic "Sea of Delight"? The album is a dense amalgam of sounds and themes from England and America, but is reverent in its borrowing and presentation. Brainbox's rendition of "Summertime" sounds like Deep Purple adding heavy keyboard sounds and slowing up the Billy Stewart 1966 hit reinvention of the Gershwin tune from Porgy & Bess. Of course, Janis Joplin did it two years earlier than Brainbox and psychedelicized it with an immortal performance -- but a good song is a good song, and this is Jan Akkerman before he would give us "Hocus Pocus" from Focus, and that fact makes the album more than just a curiosity. Since these gents were so enamoured of American music, it seems credible that they took the Vanilla Fudge sound -- famous in Europe a year before it hit in America -- and put it on a Janis Joplin favorite. Released with five bonus tracks on CD, including additional versions of "Sea of Delight," this is much more than the "bargain bin" item many American record buyers passed it off as. It's a real diamond in the rough.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/sun-secrets-mw0000837807
40)Blue Swede
Blue Swede - Out of the Blue Album Reviews, Songs & More | AllMusic
https://www.allmusic.com/album/out-of-the-blue-mw0000848983
Out of the Blue by Blue Swede leans more toward an American band like Wild Cherry than their European neighbors, the Shocking Blue, and that's a shame because the album is more listenable than one would picture after hearing their two Top Ten hits from the 1974 Hooked on a Feeling debut. Crassly commercial, they do no favors to Cher's number one hit from the previous year, 1973's "Half Breed," but Alan O'Day's "Flashback" comes off with credibility. Lead singer Bjorn Skifs and producer Ben Palmers co-write three of the songs here, "Why Don't You Go Your Way" sounding like a disco cover act emulating the Grass Roots. As funny as that sounds, it isn't as bad as the notion that description might conjure, and lo and behold, the album concludes with Grass Roots songwriters Lambert and Potters' "I Didn't Sing (In the New York Subway)," which does sound like a show band performing in Rob Grill's shadow. Skif's vocals fall somewhere between Rare Earth and the aforementioned Wild Cherry, not the thing to endear him to fans of the Velvet Underground. Following a dreadful rendition of "Baby I Need Your Lovin'," which is so insincere Levi Stubbs would be perfectly justified in filing a lawsuit for potential damage to his fan's memories, is a version of Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll" which destroys any of the compassion the high points of this album evoked from the listener. This is a remake of the Runaways' Kim Fowley's version, which itself was a copy of the Bob Ezrin/Mitch Ryder arrangement, a masterpiece which it is said Reed called the best cover of one of his tunes he had ever heard (at that point in time). There's no denying Blue Swede was tasteful in their selection of songs, but when they performed "Rock & Roll" on The Midnight Special television program it probably stifled sales. Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll" is an underground standard, and though the group had a good grasp of the English language, they failed to grasp the nuances of what makes something hip to those attracted to specific genres. What is unique, though, is the opening track, a bizarre concoction of the Joe South/Deep Purple smash "Hush" with Tommy James and Peter Lucia's "I'm Alive." This is borderline brilliant, a combination of two songs which work so well together someone might be able to do to Blue Swede what they did to Jonathan King when they ripped off his rendition of "Hooked on a Feeling" to get them all this U.S. attention in the first place. Any group with the good taste to put a Tommy James and Lou Reed composition on the same album at least can be lauded for having some good fan sense. It's just when you hear their original, "Don't Be Fooled by the Name," that, once again, everything gets shot to hell. This is not a parody, and because they do this with a straight face, the only thing that might stop you from smashing this disc against the wall is to consider it as warped humor. A tough one.