It's hard to explain in 2007 what it feels like for music to be both uniting and important. Having spent nearly three years of the '90s living in London, it's with honest nostalgia and wonder that we examine Rhino's The Brit Box. The set's mission is rather broad: it attempts to examine the whole of UK indie rock from 1985-1999 and devotes a disc each to '80s indie, shoegaze, Britpop, and the late '90s. One......

Accompanying the release of Bryan Singer's quarter-billion-dollar summer epic Superman Returns is a compilation album put out by Rhino Records entitled, aptly enough, Sound of Superman. More of a themed record than a soundtrack (also available), the disc piles together fourteen tracks of Man of Steel-related rock, mostly performed by today's batch of MTV bands like The Academy Is ..., The Sun, Motion City Soundtrack, American Hi-Fi, and The Spill Canvas. Covers make up nearly......

Close listeners coming into musical consciousness in the 1980s were faced with a paradox: while past recordings that had slipped into obscurity had become available once again, the sonic quality and production values that had marked the great age of vinyl had been swept aside by record companies in order to reissue as many albums as possible. From 1997, with the long-awaited remasterings of jazz masterpieces by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, many notable record......