Hole was an American alternative rock band, formed in Los Angeles, California in 1989 by singer and guitarist Courtney Love and lead guitarist Eric Erlandson. The band had a revolving line-up of bassists and drummers, their most prolific being drummer Patty Schemel, and bassists Kristen Pfaff (d. 1994) and Melissa Auf der Maur. Hole went on to become one of the most commercially successful female-fronted rock bands of all time. Live Through This is the second studio album by rock band Hole. It was released by DGC Records on April 12, 1994, just one week after frontwoman Courtney Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, died in their home. It was Hole's only album to feature bassist Kristen Pfaff before her death in June 1994. The album's lyrics and packaging reflect Love's preoccupation with beauty, and its songs contain repeated motifs of milk, motherhood, anti-elitism, and violence against women. The album's title is derived from a quote in Gone with the Wind. The album met near-unanimous critical acclaim upon release, earning top-100 chart spots in seven countries and going multi-platinum. It has been considered as a contemporary classic, and was included in Rolling Stone's list of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The album is featured on the list 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The album was also named the 84th greatest album of all time in a list produced by NME magazine in 2013.

As part of Verve's Standards: Great Songs/Great Performances series, pianist Oscar Peterson is spotlighted on eight tracks recorded in the ‘50s. This set is aimed at the casual listener and includes top-notch performances of "Cheek to Cheek," "That Old Black Magic," and "Georgia on My Mind." The shifting Peterson trio includes guitarists Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Ed Thigpen. Trumpeter Clark Terry shares solo space with Peterson on “Mack the Knife.”

Father and son duos are relatively rare in jazz but there's no generation gap apparent between Bucky and John Pizzarelli. The two have made a number of strong LPs and CDs together (and individually as well), although it is tough to lavish sufficient praise on this duo-guitar date, played primarily on seven-string electric guitars. Each man adapts equally well, whether in the lead, providing rhythmic support for the other, or matching his partner's lyricism while playing the head of a song. An invigorating "Three Little Words" introduces the two masterful guitarists with a flourish, followed by a lightly swinging take of "Jersey Bounce," the bluesy "Two Funky People," and the strutting acoustic duet "Test Pilot." Bucky is featured on two unaccompanied miniatures, "My Romance" and the rarely heard "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Very highly recommended.

k.d. lang's first major-label album (and debut American release) was a bit of a switch from the polished retro-country of her best-known work; with Dave Edmunds in the producer's chair, Angel with a Lariat often sounds more like rockabilly or roots rock than classic C&W, with a big, snappy drum sound, plenty of guitars mixed upfront, and lots of slapback of lang's vocals (a production decision lang mentioned with little enthusiasm several years after the album came out). "Turn Me Around" and "High Time for a Detour" rock significantly harder than most of lang's body of work, and "Watch Your Step Polka," "Diet of Strange Places," and "Tune Into My Wave" find lang and her band (who are in fine form throughout) indulging her sly sense of humor, which tended to get lost in the shuffle on later albums such as Ingénue.

…Nothing Like the Sun is the second solo studio album by English singer-songwriter Sting. The album was originally released on 13 October 1987 on A&M. The album explores the genres of pop rock, soft rock, jazz, reggae, world, acoustic rock, dance-rock, and funk rock. It features a number of high profile guest guitarists, including former Police member Andy Summers, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, and Hiram Bullock, and is generally regarded as the culmination of the smoother, more adult-oriented sound of Sting's early work. On release, the album was received favorably by the majority of music critics and in 1989, the album was ranked #90 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Best Albums of the Eighties". "We'll Be Together", "Be Still My Beating Heart", "Englishman in New York", "Fragile", and "They Dance Alone" were all released as singles. It won Best British Album at the 1988 Brit Awards. In 1989 the album received three Grammy nominations including Album of the Year while the album's second single ("Be Still My Beating Heart") was nominated for Song of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.

Polydor wised up with this 1997 expanded version of their 1990 set, The Very Best of the Bee Gees, in that they took the collection and added nine tracks (from 12 to 21), intensifying the study of the impressive depth and breadth of the Bee Gees catalog. The collection runs chronologically from the group's late-'60s folk-pop period through their legendary disco contributions, thus tracing the arc of the Gibbs brothers' diverse career via their influence on pop culture and vice versa. The collection is then topped off by two late-'80s cuts that sit alongside the collection remarkably well and serve as a reminder that the Bee Gees were much more than the definition of disco, but continued to write some great songs regardless of production or arrangement.

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet. The familiar eerie opening, made famous by its use in The Exorcist, starts the album off slowly, as each instrument acoustically wriggles its way into the current noise that is heard, until there is a grand unison of eccentric sounds that wildly excites the ears.

Raging Slab's first major-label album is pretty interesting in retrospect, in that it's both of its time and very clearly a harbinger of the future – which of course is all the more bemusing in that the band was so clearly inspired by the past more than anything else. The quintet's obsession with '70s rock trudge and stomp – perfectly evident with song titles like "Shiny Mama," "Get off My Jollies," and "San Loco" – pretty soon would get full validation in the grunge explosion and even the nü-metal fallout later.

Perhaps the first example of "dragon rock" – a style perfected by bands like Iron Maiden and Dio in the early to mid-'80s – was Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow, a rather pretentious 1975 collection from the guitarist's first post-Deep Purple project. Fittingly enough, a young Ronnie James Dio provides the goblin-like frontman presence required by the increasingly Baroque Blackmore. The young Dio is at his best when he fully gives in to his own and Blackmore's medieval fantasy leanings, in hard-rocking tracks like "Sixteenth Century Greensleeves" and "Man on the Silver Mountain." The dark, trudging doom rock of "Self Portrait" most clearly showcases what they were capable of.

Diana Krall is an attractive lady with a good voice who plays decent piano, but this somewhat ridiculously packaged Verve CD seems like an obvious attempt to turn her into a pop icon and sex symbol to boot. The bland arrangements by Claus Ogerman (who conducts the London Symphony Orchestra on each track) border on easy listening, while Krall and her various supporting musicians – including John Pisano, Russell Malone, Christian McBride, and Peter Erskine (among others) – clearly seem stifled by their respective roles.

A rare solo performance by one of jazz’s great originals, Canadian pianist Paul Bley, recorded live at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2008 by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher. There is nothing else quite like a Paul Bley concert. As the New York Times noted, “Mr. Bley long ago found a way to express his long, elegant, voluminous thoughts in a manner that implies complete autonomy from its given setting but isn’t quite free jazz. The music runs on a mixture of deep historical knowledge and its own inviolable principles." Here Bley, encouraged by an attentive and enthusiastic Norwegian audience shapes music in the moment, plays his own compositions, and brings the music to a fine conclusion in a performance of Sonny Rollins’s “Pent-Up House”.

A new classic of contemporary Japanese spiritual/modal jazz is born. Here unfolds a stunning soundscape painted with overflowing emotion and a quiet, powerful inner energy.

Moving On is Oleta Adams' most straightforward and mainstream release to date. Considering that she is working with Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey's producers (Rich & Friedman and Vassal Benford, respectively), the shift in sound shouldn't come as much of a surprise. What is a surprise is how well Adams' subtle voice works in this setting, adding extra textures to the subdued arrangements. Unfortunately, that can't compensate for inconsistent material, but Moving On remains a fine contemporary soul record.

Originally released in 1973 on Encounter Records, Profile's Sands of Time was produced by Bernard Purdie (a living, walking definition of soul-jazz drumming), and the album bears his signature sound. With Don Sands on organ, Dave Barron on guitar, Seldon Powell on tenor sax, Garnett Brown on trombone, Jimmy Owens on trumpet, Paul Martinez on bass, and Purdie and Butchman Bateman sharing the drum kit, with help from percussionist Norman Pride, the album catches an easy, gently funky shuffle tone from the opening track, Barron's "99 Baseball," and then never lets go. Instrumental versions of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," Isaac Hayes' "Shaft," and Jimmy Webb's (via Isaac Hayes) "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" all fall into a delightful rainy-day groove, making Sands of Time somewhat of a lost classic.

John Pizzarelli takes his nifty little act over to the folks at Telarc, and in fact, little has changed at all; if anything, the act has gotten better. The good news is that Pizzarelli shows continued improvement as a vocalist; the nasal, callow, youthful sound slowly gives way to a less naive, more rhythmically hip style in the manner of early Nat Cole. Pizzarelli was a fine, versatile guitarist from the start, and he continues to astonish at lightning tempos here. His airtight longtime trio (brother Martin Pizzarelli on bass, Ray Kennedy on piano) keeps right up, switching tempos on a dime.