Alice Cooper's third album, Love It to Death, can be pinpointed as the release when everything began to come together for the band. Their first couple of albums (Pretties for You and Easy Action) were both largely psychedelic/acid rock affairs and bore little comparison to the band's eventual rip-roaring, teenage-anthem direction. The main reason for the quintet's change was that the eventually legendary producer Bob Ezrin was on board for the first time and helped the Coopers focus their songwriting and sound, while they also perfected their trashy, violent, and theatrical stage show and image. One of the band's most instantly identifiable anthems, "I'm Eighteen," was what made the album a hit, as well as another classic, "Is It My Body." But like Alice Cooper's other albums from the early '70s, it was an incredibly consistent listen from beginning to end…

Recorded during the period of time when Ella Fitzgerald cut her famous series of "songbooks," this set (which in 1998 was reissued on CD) is a bit of a hodge-podge, drawing its 14 selections from six different dates which find Ella backed by orchestras led by either Nelson Riddle, Frank DeVol, Russ Garcia or Paul Weston. "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was previously available as just a single while "Swingin' Shepherd Blues" (an alternate take) was previously unreleased. As usual, Ella uplifts all of the material and her best moments come on "Somebody Loves Me," a heartfelt "Moonlight Becomes You," a scat-filled "Blue Skies" and (somewhat surprisingly) "St. Louis Blues." Although this was not her most essential release, the formerly obscure Get Happy finds Ella Fitzgerald at the peak of her powers.

Stick Men is an Eclectic Prog supergroup founded in 2007 by Pat Mastelotto (King Crimson), Tony Levin (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel) and Michael Bernier. Since 2010, the lineup stabilized around Mastelotto, Levin, and Markus Reuter. The band was formed as a vehicle for progressive rock music performed almost exclusively with Chapman Sticks and drums. Needles to say, the fans of crimsonian prog will love it; there's also a lot of jazz and heavy chugging bursts, as well as avant moments and African soundscapes.

In May 1996 Radio Massacre International were the first group to play an electronic concert at Jodrell Bank space research centre in Cheshire, in the shadow of the biggest satellite dish in the world. It was a location buzzing with inspiration and ideal for creating improvised music. Knutsford In May is a complete direct to DAT recording of the music played that evening. The pristine digital sound quality is matched by some inspirational musical twists and turns. From the first notes of 'Under the Dish' the atmosphere is one of unashamed glorification of the surroundings and its relationship with space and time. R.M.I. are always a group to thrive in a special environment. The album's centrepiece is a long dynamic improvisation named 'Skeletope' which includes samples of Jodrell Bank scientists bouncing the first signals off the surface of the moon…

The Move were the best and most important British group of the late '60s that never made a significant dent in the American market. Through the band's several phases (which were sometimes dictated more by image than musical direction), their chief asset was guitarist and songwriter Roy Wood, who combined a knack for Beatlesque pop with a peculiarly British, and occasionally morbid, sense of humor. On their final albums (with considerable input from Jeff Lynne), the band became artier and more ambitious, hinting at the orchestral rock that Wood and Lynne would devise for the Electric Light Orchestra. The Move, however, always placed more emphasis on the pop than the art, and never lost sight of their hardcore rock & roll roots.

Perhaps the greatest Quincy Jones album of the 60s - a hard-swinging batch of big band bossa tunes - and one of the greatest American takes on the bossa sound ever! Quincy really brings a lot of soul to the set - syncopating the bottom end of the tunes to really bring out the rhythms, and working with a jazzy flourish of horns that creates all these quick and clever little turns in the tunes! The sound's been heard most famously on the incredible track "Soul Bossa Nova" - an original by Quincy for the set, which has gone onto much greater fame through its use in the film Austin Powers, and a bazillion TV commercials!

In another successful "recycling" project, Vidna Obmana reconstructs original compositions which willem tanke previously had rendered on classical European organs. These variations for organ, keyboard and processors respectfully merge two musical worlds from across time, simultaneously exploring mystical/physical revelations by way of thoughtful sonic alterations. The opening five tracks encompass six canons which form The Tao of Physics; having composed the original pieces as reflections upon Fritjof Capra's East/West metaphysical writing, Willem Tanke performed them on an historic Netherlandic church organ. After careful studying, avid recycler Vidna Obmana proceeded to dismantle and reprocess the oringal acoustic recordings, reassembling them in accordance with the Canon-method, and of course, his own fine-tuned sense of sonic art…

Genesis 1970-1975 is a box set of five studio albums by Genesis featuring Peter Gabriel. The 7CD box set includes newly remixed versions of the albums Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The band's 1969 debut album, From Genesis to Revelation, was excluded because of the band losing the rights to it. The fifth pair of discs includes B-side songs, 3 rare songs from BBC Sessions in 1970 and the never-before-released Genesis Plays Jackson soundtrack.

Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble formed the most impressive blues act of the 1980s, which made Vaughan's death in a helicopter crash at the start of the '90s all the more tragic. He grew up in Dallas, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan (cofounder of the Fabulous Thunderbirds). Stevie began playing in clubs at 12, and by 17 had dropped out of high school and moved to Austin. There followed years of struggling until April 23, 1982, when Vaughan and his group, Double Trouble, played a private audition for the Rolling Stones in New York. The gig led to an invitation to appear at the Montreux Jazz Festival, at which Vaughan was seen by David Bowie, who hired him to play guitar on his Let's Dance album, and Jackson Browne, who offered the free use of his recording studio. Vaughan took up that offer after being signed by legendary talent scout John Hammond to Epic, recording his debut album, Texas Flood, in the fall of 1982. ..

The Doobies team up with the Memphis Horns for an even more Southern-flavored album than usual, although also a more uneven one. By this time, Tom Johnston, Patrick Simmons, and company had pretty well inherited the mantle and the core (and then some) of the audience left behind by Creedence Clearwater Revival and John Fogerty, with Johnston songs like "Pursuit on 53rd Street," "Down in the Track," and "Road Angel" recalling pieces like "Travelin' Band," while Simmons' "Black Water" (their first number one hit) evoked the softer side of the "swamp rock" popularized by CCR. Actually, in some respects, given the range of instruments employed here, including an autoharp (courtesy of Arlo Guthrie) and viola, the songs on the original LP's first side suffer somewhat from a sameness that makes What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits a little less interesting than the albums that preceded it…

Garofano Rosso is an instrumental album. Now, why would a band with such a prominent singer as Banco del Mutuo Soccorso record an instrumental album? Because behind Francesco Di Giacomo's voice one finds strong instrumental compositional skills. And so the band was asked to write and record a soundtrack for the movie Garofano Rosso. (Keyboardists Vittorio and Gianni Nocenzi would later write a handful of other soundtracks, both together and separately.) But the album is not the actual soundtrack; two tracks, "Zobeida" and "Funerale," don't appear in the final cut, and the band fiddled with the track order to make things more interesting. Therefore, Garofano Rosso stands as a good album on its own, not as exciting as Darwin! or Io Sono Nato Libero, and not as impressive (or pompous) as Banco's other instrumental LP Di Terra, but still an honest effort…

"Soundmill Navigator", a Tangerine Dream Classics Edition, contains a vintage live recording from 1976, where the trio Baumann, Froese and Franke performed a concert at the Philharmonics.The almost 42-minute track finds the musicians in good spirits, as the set features lots of mellotron and antique sound textures, which are later on accompanied by some nice sequencing. Halfway, Edgar’s typical guitar soloing is added as well. Music wise, "Soundmill Navigator" the space ambient contains lost of elements and characteristics from their albums "Ricochet" and "Encore".

Sodom returns with "The Arsonist", their first full-length album since 2020. It’s not only the complex production process that testifies to the band’s exceptional creative spirit, but also their diverse songwriting, which saw all four Sodom musicians - Tom Angelripper (vocals, bass), Frank Blackfire (guitar), York Segatz (guitar) and Toni Merkel (drums) - involved in the development of the material on "The Arsonist". The mastering was done by the famous sound engineer Eroc and the cover artwork with its martial design was penned by the exceptional Polish artist Zbigniew M. Bielak (Ghost, Mayhem, among others).

This LP is an excellent studio representation of Louis Armstrong & the All-Stars at work in their prime as a nostalgia act. And just because they were a nostalgia act didn't mean they didn't push the envelope given half a chance, as these recordings did. The personnel list is impressive on its own terms, with Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, and Barney Bigard together in the small group stretching out on "Twelfth Street Rag," and if the later incarnations of the group aren't as eye-catching in their personnel, they're every bit as much of a pleasure to hear on "Skokiaan" (aka "South African Song"), "Frog-I-More Rag," or the title tune. Pianist Billy Kyle gets the spotlight for a chunk of the extended jam of "Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya" before Peanuts Hucko and Eddie Miller take center stage on clarinet and tenor sax…

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound - keyboards - he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics…