20th studio album by the German heavy metal band formed by vocalist and bassist Mat Sinner. The heavy metal world has produced quite a few legends. But none is like Mat Sinner. So much conviction, lifeblood and self-sacrifice, so much pure heavy metal spirit, so much dedication is usually not found bundled in a single person. Since 1982 he fronts the band named after him, with which he now triumphantly returns in the form of "Brotherhood": a massive album, whose title is as self-explanatory as the mission of its creator. Self-produced and mixed/mastered by Jacob Hansen (VOLBEAT, among others), it is a record that carries the band's internal brotherhood under its heart as much as the brotherhood of the worldwide heavy metal following.

For some years the Third Symphony was a repertory piece, at least on BBC programmes, but it fell out of favour in the late 1950s. Commentators have noticed a certain Sibelian cut to its opening idea (with woodwind in thirds) but everything else strikes you as completely personal.

In conjunction with the release of Ken Burns' ten-part, 19-hour epic PBS documentary Jazz, Columbia issued 22 single-disc compilations devoted to jazz's most significant artists, as well as a five-disc historical summary. Since the individual compilations attempt to present balanced overviews of each artist's career, tracks from multiple labels have thankfully been licensed where appropriate. That's especially nice in the case of Billie Holiday, who recorded excellent and essential work for Columbia, Commodore, Decca, and Verve. Since her signature numbers were also spread out over those labels, and since Ken Burns Jazz includes pretty much all of her best-known songs, this makes an excellent introduction and an even better single-disc retrospective.

Jolliver Arkansaw was the group originally known as Bo Grumpus – they were a quartet formed in Boston as the Bait Shop, who moved to New York and took the name Bo Grumpus at the suggestion of producer Felix Pappalardi and his wife. They recorded one highly regarded album on Atco under that name before a label switch to Bell Records led to legal complications that forced them to relinquish the name Bo Grumpus. "Jolliver Arkansaw" was the new name under which the group – Eddie Mottau (guitar), Joe Hutchinson (guitar, keyboards), Jim Colegrove (bass), and Ronnie Blake (drums) – recorded their next album, Home, which was released in 1969. The group broke up early the next year. Mottau, Hutchinson, and Colgrove have all enjoyed long subsequent careers in music.

More than any other Fleetwood Mac album, Tusk is born of a particular time and place – it could only have been created in the aftermath of Rumours, which shattered sales records, which in turn gave the group a blank check for its next album…

This is the second recording for Quartz from Olwen Morris, offering a cross section of works from the Classical period through the early Contemporary. Olwen Morris grew up in war-time rural Wales, where she was first taught by Josef Gruenbaum, a musician and lawyer from Stuttgart, who with his family had fled Nazi Germany. Olwen made extraordinary progress, and enrolled at 14 as the youngest student at Cardiff College of Music, (later becoming the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama). She soon made her first early live broadcasts, including a concerto with the BBC Welsh Orchestra, and debut concerts in Cardiff's City Hall and Reardon Smith Theatre. Teaching, directing church music, organ improvisation and chamber music have all played parts throughout a lifetime in music, but solo playing continues to remain the vital center of it all. Her performances of the Viennese classics are remarkable for their insight and depth, and her playing of French music for sensitivity to sensual sound, also reflecting her long close association with northern France, where her artist husband, David Morris painted.

Neon Lights is Simple Minds' covers album. Frankly, these projects often serve little purpose beyond announcing that the artists concerned have run out of original ideas. With the Simple Minds' new album of freshly composed material, Our Secrets Are the Same, now shelved due to legal complications, the Minds have opted to doff their caps in the direction of the heroes of their youth, such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the Doors. This is the material the band performed when they were scrawny Glaswegian punks called Johnny & the Self-Abusers. The arrangements here are slightly dated techno-rock efforts, albeit without the expansive pomp and bluster of their stadium-straddling 1980s heyday. Even so, Neon Lights is probably too respectful. Many of these numbers–Echo & the Bunnymen's "Bring on the Dancing Horses," Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World"–are identikit presentations, while electro-rock assaults on Them's "Gloria" and the Doors "Hello I Love You" are monotonous and misguided. A very interesting revision of Pete Shelley's "Homosapien" and a faithful, powerful reading of the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" are much better.

Blues singer Shakura S'Aida (pronounced "Shack-oora Sigh-ee-da") was born in Brooklyn and raised in Switzerland before settling in Toronto. She first began singing professionally with a Toronto band called Mystique, after which she worked with the world music band Kaleefah. Simultaneously, she pursued a legitimate stage career, appearing in Canadian productions of such shows as Ain't Misbehavin', and acted on television and in films. As a singer, she provided backup vocals for Patti LaBelle, performed in a Ray Charles tribute band, and appeared on albums by Bill King and Saturday Nite Fish Fry.

The Real Folk Blues series on Chess wasn't really folk, but titled that way, perhaps to gain the attention of young white listeners who had started to get turned on to the blues during the 1960s folk revival. And the Howlin' Wolf volumes in the series were not particularly more folk-oriented than his other Chess recordings, but more or less arbitrary selections of tracks that he'd done from the mid-'50s to the mid-'60s. It's thus also arbitrary to do a two-fer reissue of his The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues, combined here onto a single disc. That doesn't mean, though, that this isn't very good and sometimes great electric blues music. The Real Folk Blues, with tracks from 1956 to 1965, is by far the more modern of the pair in arrangements, and has a good share of classics: "Killing Floor," "Sittin' on Top of the World," "Built for Comfort," "Tail Dragger," and "Three Hundred Pounds of Joy".

The success of the Austin Powers movies rekindled an interest in everything groovy, swinging and mod. The Instro Hipsters a Go-Go responded in kind, serving up fun but mostly forgotten instrumentals from the '60s and early '70s that sound equally good in a bachelor pad or discotheque. Instro Hipsters a Go-Go, Vol. 2 is a Wall of Sound made up of twangy surf guitars, tumbling drums, flourishes of brass, and funky organs, exemplified by Excursion's "Switched On," St. Louis Union's "English Tea" and Zoot Money's "Zoot Suite." The Ray McVay Sound's "Revenge" and the Reg Guest Syndicate's "Underworld" sound like gritty spy movie themes, while Purple Fox's "Git Some" and Salon Band's "Disco 2" take things in a mellower direction, but the entire collection makes for very entertaining mood music that still conjures up that swinging, stylish era.

Big Bill Morganfield continues to forge his own sound with a delicate balancing act on this, his forth album. He pays tribute to his dad and the Chicago sound he helped create on the title track, but he has a jazzy side that keeps moving the blues in a more sophisticated direction as well. Al Duncan's "Too Late Brother" opens things with a juke-joint rocker in the style of Morganfield's dad, with Steve Guyger's harp tossing some fat on the fire. "High Gas Prices," a Morganfield original, gives the country blues an urban edge with a tune too many sang in the waning months of 2009. Morganfield sings Pearl Woods' "I Play Dirty" with a winning combination of humor and aggression, with Clark Stern's organ giving the tune a sanctified feel. "Who's the Fool," another original, is a shuffle on the familiar subject of a faithless woman, and Morganfield growls out the lyric with plenty of panache. What really distinguishes Morganfield from his dad is his way with love songs. Muddy always sounded dangerous, even when he was proclaiming his passion. Big Bill's voice is smoother and more mellow, and when he sings a soulful tune like Buddy Guy's neo-R&B ballad "My Love Is Real," his voice has a seductive power his dad lacked.

"I couldn't have imagined a better constellation for my first album!" says Cristina Gómez Godoy about her first recording. She has chosen this repertoire because these pieces made her fall in love with the instrument and music. As a musician in Daniel Barenboim's Berlin-based orchestra, she feels very privileged to have recorded her first album with him, accompanied by the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, with whom she has played for many years.