A firm favourite of the Jeffrey Podcast fellas, the innovative indie aces dEUS have only gone and cranked out a new album, the first in over a decade - what do we think of it? You'll need to listen to find out ...

(Unless you just want to read where we've ranked it on the dEUS page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website) - and here's the link to the How to Replace It page.

Dire Straits were inescapable in the 1980s, from Sultans of Swing's omnipresence on rock radio, to smash-hit album Brothers in Arms smothering the charts in hit singles, Mark Knopfler and the gang were everywhere!

Despite this, we didn't know them that well. We knew the obvious hit singles, and a couple of albums, but we didn't know that much about the lesser-known stuff. So, in a spirit of (re-)discovery, we - clutching John Ilsley's biography "My Life in Dire Straits" - set out to explore their six-album discography, and what we discovered was that there is very little we agree on when it comes to Dire Straits.

The Dire Straits Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

The Dire Straits page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.

We've always known about Simon and Garfunkel as a thing, and known about both men as solo artists (mainly Paul Simon), but until now we'd never taken the time to listen properly to their five album output and decide which we liked best.

Their songs are inescapable, they're part of the furniture of Western Civilization, you cannot not know Mrs Robinson and The Sound of Silence and Hazy Shade of Winter and Bridge Over Troubled Water because even now, half a century later, these songs are still meaningful, still poignant, and still played.

So, as usual, we read some books and did some research and got to know the story of the band. It wasn't easy to rank the albums, there was a fair bit of disagreement, especially around the final two. We try to use disagreement to better inform our decisions by listening to each others opinions and being willing to change our minds and see things differently; we try not to just compromise by calculating an average view numerically ... but we don't always get that right and sometimes we just have to run the numbers - this felt like one of those times.

The Simon and Garfunkel Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

The Simon and Garfunkel page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.

Neither of us knew much about Patti Smith when we started this podcast, we knew her name and thought of her as a mystical punk poet from the seventies, but didn't know much more ... then as we have explored other artists over the past few years, Patti Smith's name kept popping up over and again as a one of the most influential people of her generation ... and so we thought why not put her on the list for the Jeffrey Music treatment, and here we are!

The Patti Smith Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

The Patti Smith page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.

John and Gordon head off to see the legendary Patti Smith, not an artist they knew particularly well before the research for this podcast. John goes to Madrid's Noches del Botánico festival and Gordon to Bearded Theory's Spring Gathering at Catton Hall in Derbyshire.

The Patti Smith playlist (in combined/fudged setlist order) is here.

Link to the post (including photos) on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website.

Second in a series of live gig reviews, the fellas teamed up to see The Dead South at Madrid's La Riviera, supported by Elliott Brood.

The The Dead South playlist (in setlist order) is here.

Link to the post (including photos) on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website.

This podcast is not just about us wallowing in the music we already know and love (although it is mainly that), it's also about us exploring new stuff and addressing our musical blind spots ... and thus we decided to delve into 1960s soul and Motown with the great Otis Redding!

Our main source of research was Jonathan Gould's book Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.

The

The Otis Redding Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

The Otis Redding page on the JeffreyMusic.Rocks website is here.

In a change of pace, John and Gordon treat us to a discussion on Belgian indie-rock-pop-electro-soul types Balthazar and rank their five studio albums. This coincided (not by accident!) with seeing the band live and so there is separate gig review podcast available for your listening pleasure!

There wasn't much research done because there's not much information out there. Their website is devoid of facts, although there's a bit here on their Wikipedia page.

Here is the link to the La Cigale concert in Paris we mention.

The Balthazar Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

Not strictly speaking a Jefflink, but In their early years, Balthazar often toured with the brilliant dEUS.

No rankings audio product would be complete without discussing legendary heavy-rock / prog-metal / synth-pop / math-rock trio Rush, and Jeffrey is no exception in that regard. John and Gords head off to Toronto to go through their discography, ranking their albums, drooling at the musicianship, whining at the thin 80s production, and argumentatively struggling to put the bloody albums in any sort of sensible order.

The Rush Jeffrey Podcast Playlist is available here on Spotify and here on Deezer.

Research for this podcast included many online interviews, including this recent one with Alex Lifeson and this with Geddy Lee, the documentaries The Boys in Brazil and Beyond the Lighted Stage, and books by Martin Popoff (Anthem,  Limelight, and Driven covering the 70s, 80s, and beyond respectively, and the Album by Album book) and Roadshow by drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.

(There is a sound issue in the fourth, and final, section, due to an overheating laptop, apologies!)

In a new series of podcasts from the Jeffrey Musical Empire, the fellas head off to see Belgian electro-indie aces Balthazar live in concert.

John saw them in Madrid's Sala Mon, and Gordon in London's Electric Ballroom.

The Balthazar playlist (in setlist order) is here.