Despite the playful title, the music on Andrew Rangell’s new STEINWAY album is actually quite serious, even austere and cerebral. While Atkinson's canons and Bach's duets will surprise with their immediate elegance and eloquence, Dallapiccola and Wolpe supply the kind of meaning and beauty requiring more sustained attention. With that, these pieces will yield much in the way of color, wit, sensuality, and poignancy.

Funky, swinging, smooth, low-strung – soul isn’t so much a genre as a feeling! SOUL SESSIONS combines 50 years of signature soul sounds into a hybrid instrument that can do everything from 60s-style dusky horns, to 70s-era bass plucks and buttery organ keys, to the versatile synths stylings of the 80s, and the smoother-than-smooth production aesthetic of 90s neo-soul. Soften up harder beats with a little R&B mood-making, give contemporary jazz and soul a hybrid sound-design edge, or bring loose, laid-back organic tones to left-field electronic productions.

Despite the playful title, the music on Andrew Rangell’s new STEINWAY album is actually quite serious, even austere and cerebral. While Atkinson's canons and Bach's duets will surprise with their immediate elegance and eloquence, Dallapiccola and Wolpe supply the kind of meaning and beauty requiring more sustained attention. With that, these pieces will yield much in the way of color, wit, sensuality, and poignancy.

Borodin’s First Symphony isn’t especially interesting, but his Second is a masterpiece, tightly constructed, brilliantly orchestrated, and tunefully delightful. It’s really the only work of its period to rank with the symphonies of Tchaikovsky (along with, possibly, Balakirev’s First), and Tjeknavorian’s performance of it, indeed of all three works, is outstanding. He doesn’t fuss with or manipulate tempos or textures, preferring instead to keep the music moving energetically and allowing the musicians of the National Philharmonic to inject as much color and vitality as possible. The scherzo flashes by like lightning, the slow movement is aptly seductive, and the finale dazzles. As I suggested, the other two works are less obviously successful, but the performances are no less adept. Produced by Charles Gerhardt, we can expect fine sonics, and that’s just what RCA delivers. In this music, you won’t find better.

ARCTICA is a stunning instrument that features various types of synth and pad sounds. You can create sharp and epic polysynths, pads, as well as cold, ambient and dreamy atmospheres and drones. ARCTICA is based on the same architecture as our previous release, DEEP BLUE, but with some extra features.

The blues had long been a potent undercurrent in the Birthday Party's music, so it wasn't all that surprising that Nick Cave embraced the sound and feeling of rural blues on his second album with the Bad Seeds, The Firstborn Is Dead. What was startling was how well Cave and his bandmates – Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey, and Blixa Bargeld – were able to absorb and honor the influences of artists like Skip James and Charley Patton while creating a sound that was unmistakably their own. The moody obsessions of rural blues – trains, floods, imprisonment, sin, fear, and death – seemed made to order for Cave, and he was able to tap into the doomy iconography of this music with potent emotional force; on "Tupelo," he makes a sweeping and disturbing epic of the rain-swept night when Elvis Presley was born, and "Knocking on Joe" is a tale of life on the work gang that communicates the pain of the spirit as clearly as the ache of the body.

Who You Fighting For? is the fifteenth album by UB40 released on 18 July 2005. The album was nominated for the reggae album Grammy in 2006. It marks the return of the rootsier, political sound that the group cultivated during the early 1980s.