Known for biting the head off of a bat, bickering with his vulgarity-happy family on MTV, and being one of the icons of heavy metal music, Ozzy Osbourne is nothing less than a cultural treasure and train wreck rolled into one dazed-and-confused man. LIVE AT BUDOKAN was filmed at Tokyo's famed concert venue in 2002. With his backing band, the inimitable Ozzy performs two hours of his greatest hits, including "No More Tears", "Crazy Train", and "Paranoid".

1989 release on the Repertoire label featuring six early recordings from 1979 by the popular '80s metal group, including live versions of 'Liar' & 'Prisoner' from a show that year at Sounds Music-Club.

An amazing collection spread out over two CDs, highlighting what has to be the best work of the band's career. Though nothing from the excellent 'Lightning Strikes' album is here, you can count on a representation of everything else that was great about this band in this one collection. From debut 'The Birthday Eve' to 'Thunder In The East', the band's critical early phase is well-represented, including a few previously rare and hard-to-find tracks.

This is LOUDNESS' third album, and it is one of their best ever!!! The songs shine, real metal classics. Altough the song tittles are in English, the album is sung in Japanese. Fantastic piece of metal, much better than everything they released when they tried to go pop-glam.

On the evening of September 15, 1997, legendary British music producer George Martin (who had risen to prominence with the Beatles) held a benefit concert at London's Royal Albert Hall for the small Caribbean island of Montserrat, which had recently been devastated by a volcanic eruption. All of the invited superstars had recorded some of their biggest hits at Montserrat's Air Studios, which Martin had founded in 1970, and this shared history gives Music for Montserrat an added sense of enjoyment among friends. Despite a few vocal dropouts and forgivable mixing problems, this outstanding concert has been captured with impressive fidelity, and while each artist performs songs appropriate to the occasion, they share the stage (along with a house band, choir, and orchestra conducted by Martin) in brilliant combinations that bring out the best in everyone involved.

After falling out with mentor Ozzy Osbourne following the recording sessions for 1995's Ozzmosis, guitarist Zakk Wylde struck out on his own with his first solo album, Book of Shadows, in 1996. When it failed to score any mainstream success, the six-stringer took an extended break before resurfacing with a new album and band called Black Label Society in 1999, featuring Wylde on vocals, guitar, and bass and drummer Phil Ondich. A number of different musicians would sift through the band's ranks during the convoluted tour that followed, but Ondich was back on the drum stool by the time Black Label Society recorded 2000's Stronger Than Death album for new label Spitfire Records. The subsequent tour included a slot on the second stage of his old boss' Ozzfest tour and yielded the Alcohol Fueled Brewtality Live!! album in 2001. The band returned to Ozzfest the following year (this time on the main stage) in support of the 1919 Eternal LP. Blessed Hellride appeared in 2003 and Hangover Music, Vol. 6 followed a year later. Mafia, Black Label Society's seventh album, was released in spring 2005. The following October, Spitfire Records issued the Wylde work compilation Kings of Damnation: Era 1998-2004. In 2006, the band began their relationship with the Roadrunner label with a new album, Shot to Hell.

As one of Japan's first heavy metal bands, Loudness was quite literally playing it by ear when the group released its first album, 1981's The Birthday Eve. A somewhat awkward affair, the album finds the young but ambitious members of the quartet struggling to establish their identity by translating whatever sounds and styles they could from the established Western metal bands of the time. Interestingly, Loudness made it a point to give their songs English titles from the very get-go, even though, except for the very basic choruses, all the songs were still sung in Japanese by vocalist Minoru Niihara. Despite this curious arrangement, from a musical standpoint the band is already remarkably proficient here, as seen on surprisingly mature offerings like "To Be Demon" and "Rock Shock (More and More)." Guitarist Akira Takasaki is already firmly established as the band's leader, but his obsessions with Van Halen-styled guitar pyrotechnics sometimes get the best of him, resulting in somewhat derivative tracks like "I'm on Fire" and "Sexy Woman." A promising start nonetheless.