David Gilmour released his second solo venture in 1984, following the apparent dissolution of Pink Floyd. He had released a record on his own in 1978, but About Face is much more accessible. Gilmour has a stellar band backing him, including Jeff Porcaro (drums), Pino Palladino (bass), and Anne Dudley (synthesizer). The songs on About Face show a pop sensibility that Pink Floyd rarely was concerned with achieving. Although the album didn't attract the attention of a Floyd release, several cuts did manage to get airplay. "Until We Sleep" is rife with shimmering synthesizers and cavernous drums, and "Blue Light" was a minor pop hit, with Gilmour's trademark delay-drenched guitar giving way to a driving, horn-laced rocker. Pete Townshend wrote two of the tracks: "Love on the Air" and the propulsive "All Lovers Are Deranged"…

The French piano duo pay tribute to tour mates Rammstein with an album of covers. Naïri Badal and Adélaïde Panaget have conquered an audience that recognises their sincerity, their complicity and their talent. They also seize every opportunity to present original projects to the public, be it through drawings on sand, mime or hip hop. They don't fear challenges, and they have been offered to do the first gig of the German metal group Rammstein concert at the Nîmes Roman Amphitheatre.

Scriabin and Mozart: two composers rarely associated, yet the juxtaposition here seems clear when performed by Zlata Chochieva. In this first album, the Russian pianist, new to the naïve label, is ingenious in both the cycles of fragmented variations and the more opulent sonatas or preludes.

In 1996, the young violinist Jorge Jiménez heard Bach's Goldberg Variations for the first time in Glen Gould's famous version on a simple cassette recorder. Since then, this wonderful composition has not let him go. At first he resigned himself to the fact that as a violinist he would never be able to play this work. But over time he realised that several voices can sound at the same time on the violin, as Johann Sebastian Bach exemplifies in his six famous partitas and sonatas for solo violin. Finally, he set to work and began to transcribe one of the most complicated piano pieces of the Baroque into a piece for solo violin.

On March 16, 1968, the United States Army killed over 500 unarmed civilians in the hamlet of Mỹ Lai, Vietnam. The unimaginable brutality of the event impacted all those who witnessed it firsthand, including helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, who, against orders, intervened to save Vietnamese lives. Thompson’s story is the basis of the opera Mỹ Lai, composed by Jonathan Berger (music) and Harriet Scott Chessman (libretto) for Kronos Quartet, Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, and vocalist Rinde Eckert. This recording of Mỹ Lai captures the visceral, phantasmal depictions of Thompson’s grief, horror, and guilt as he is haunted by persistent memories of that cataclysmic day, half a world and nearly four decades away. Tense and unforgiving, Mỹ Lai is “a gripping affair, beginning to end” (New York Times). Presented here alongside recollections by Vietnamese survivor Trần Văn Đức, it is a memorial to all the Mỹ Lai villagers killed on that grim day.

Norwegian EBM pioneers Apoptygma Berzerk have announced a reissue campaign for their debut album, Soli Deo Gloria, with Artoffact Records.
Soli Deo Gloria was a massive hit for the band, and includes some of their best-loved songs, Including such classics as "Bitch", "Burnin' Heretic", "Ashes to Ashes", "Stitch"… Apoptygma Berzerk was formed in 1989 and has released six studio albums, several live albums and best of collections, and a series of experimental EPs. The band has played live on every continent in the world save Antarctica. Released as a CD digipak with seven bonus tracks!

Gentle Giant is maybe the major prog band with only a few good quality live recordings, the official Playing The Fool, the BBC recordings, King Biscuit and a few isolated tracks on Under Construction. The Gentle Giant bootlegs, a bigger part now accesible as official releases are mostly medium to bad quality in terms of sound…

Live in London is a live album from Deep Purple. It was recorded on 22 May 1974 at Gaumont State in Kilburn by the BBC for radio broadcast, but was unreleased on vinyl until 1982. It features the Mk 3 lineup of Blackmore/Coverdale/Hughes/Lord/Paice during the tour for their album Burn.

As a more consistently light-hearted version, with delightful La Scala sets and colourful costumes, the 1994 TDK Don Pasquale will also be hard to beat. Visually it is a joy, and with three outstanding principals the performance sparkles from start to finish. By not seeming too old, Ferruccio Furlanetto’s portrayal of Don Pasquale is the more convincing, but he has no chance against Nuccia Focille’s minx of a Norina and one certainly feels sorry for him at his discomfiture. Gregory Kunde is an appropriately ardent Ernesto; his voice isn’t creamy but the sings passionately and has good comic timing, and Lucio Gallo enters into the spirit of the story as a wily Dottore Malatesta.

To the heavy metal and hard rock masses, Richie Kotzen is probably best known as the six-string-shredding "hired gun" for such pop-metal outfits as Poison and Mr. Big. But before landing gigs with those two already-established outfits, Kotzen was a solo artist – issuing releases via the Shrapnel label, and landing quite a bit of coverage in guitar magazines at the time. On his 2005 solo outing Acoustic Cuts, Kotzen decided to switch gears, as he traded his trusty electric instrument for an acoustic. It's understandable to assume that the results on Acoustic Cuts will reflect when past pop metallists attempted to show their sensitive side via acoustic-based power ballads.

Like most compilations from his old group the Stranglers, Hugh Cornwell's first solo collection subscribes to the "leave them wanting more" theory, as it whets the appetite instead of fully satisfying. If this was the be-all, end-all when it comes to Hugh's first six solo albums, then cuts like "Picked Up by the Wind" and "Black Hair Black Eyes Black Suit" would be included, but brevity is the thing here, and this tight, no-filler track list packs quite the punch, and that's hard to argue against. New song "Live It and Breathe It" lives up to the other numbers here – as opposed to when the Stranglers would screw up comps with throwaways like a cover of "96 Tears" – and the black humor of the old days is back with the cover art that features Hugh's well-done plus well-revered solo albums, along with a sledgehammer that says "F*ck it all!"