Chock full of humid, resonant soundscapes that bend time and emphasize texture, tone and timbre, Sarah Davachi's latest is her most defining and rewarding full-length to date. We're floored, again - there's nobody else doing it quite like this.

Following on from the successful An Idiot Prayer live album and livestream event released this year, Nick Cave releases B-Sides and Rarities: Part I and Part 2. B-Sides and Rarities: Part 2 was compiled by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and features 27 tracks. It includes tracks from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! in 2006 to 2019s Ghosteen and 19 rare and unreleased tracks including first recordings of ‘Skeleton Tree’, ‘Girl in Amber’, ‘Bright Horses’ and ‘Waiting for You’.

Even after hundreds of shows, 15 million records sold, two GRAMMY® Award nominations, and almost four decades together, Dream Theater continues to look ahead. Their collective gaze never wavers from the future. Instead, the progressive metal trailblazers - James LaBrie (Vocals), John Petrucci (Guitars), Jordan Rudess (Keyboards), John Myung (Bass), and Mike Mangini (Drums) - consistently explore uncharted territory with the same spirit of sonic adventurousness. On their fifteenth album, A View from the Top of the World [Inside Out Music/Sony Music], the New York quintet rush forward at full speed again with seven tracks equally steeped in articulate arrangements, groove-laden guitars, and sky scraping melodies.

BasBadNotGood return with their highly anticipated new album, Talk Memory, a psychedelic jazz record that explores balance and harmony through musical improvisation. Collaborators include legendary composer Arthur Verocai and contemporary icons such as Terrace Martin, Karriem Riggins and Laraaji.

This British blues-rock group is remembered mostly for their keyboard player, Christine Perfect, who would join Fleetwood Mac after marrying John McVie and changing her last name. Although they were one of the more pedestrian acts of the British blues boom, Chicken Shack was quite popular for a time in the late '60s, placing two albums in the British Top 20. The frontperson of Chicken was not Perfect/McVie, but guitarist Stan Webb, who would excite British audiences by entering the crowds at performances, courtesy of his 100-meter-long guitar lead. They were signed to Mike Vernon's Blue Horizon label, a British blues pillar that had its biggest success with early Fleetwood Mac.
Chicken Shack was actually not far behind Mac in popularity in the late '60s, purveying a more traditional brand of Chicago blues, heavily influenced by Freddie King…

The Swedish trumpet-player Niklas Eklund, born in Göteborg (Gothenburg) in 1969, trained at the School of Music and Musicology of Göteborg University. Further studies took place under the tutelage of Edward H. Tarr at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. After five years as solo trumpet with the Basle Radio Symphony Orchestra, he left the orchestra in the autumn of 1996 to further his career as a soloist. Since then he has appeared with leading ensembles and conductors such as Zubin Metha, John Eliot Gardiner, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Robert King, Eric Ericson, Reinhard Goebel, Gustav Leonhardt, the London Baroque, the Bach Ensemble (New York), the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble and the English Baroque Soloists.

Born Caroline Catharina Müller in the Netherlands, she moved with her family to Germany in the late '70s. In 1980, she became a member of the girl quartet Optimal, who issued two singles…

Eleven examples of Miles Davis caressing a ballad at a slow tempo are included on this 1999 CD, Love Songs. It is interesting to hear the different approaches that the trumpeter could employ in sticking close to a lyrical melody. There are two numbers ("My Ship" and "I Loves You, Porgy") from Davis' collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, selections from his 1961 quintet with Hank Mobley ("I Thought About You" and "Old Folks"), and his groups with George Coleman ("I Fall in Love Too Easily," "Summer Night," and a lengthy "My Funny Valentine"). "Stella by Starlight," by his 1958 super sextet (with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, and Bill Evans) and Davis' famous version of "Someday My Prince Will Come" (in which his Hank Mobley quintet is joined by guest John Coltrane) are also here.

Fusion Orchestra was a highly talented progressive rock ensemble from the UK that did tight but not over-worked heavy prog with an honest, classic but unique sound. Singer/flautist/synthist Jill Saward, apparently the axis of the group, leads with a high squall and quite good flute, and paralleled the vocal sound the Wilson sisters would cultivate. Though unlike Heart, Jill Saward, Dave Bell (drums), Colin Dawson (guitar), Dave Cowell (bass), and Sten Land (synth, guitar, horns) did a very complex and multi-layered music with many roads into jazz-fusion, folk, and Celtic.
The album "Skeleton In Armour", especially for 1973, is a model of Prog Rock successfully integrated as a viable popular medium and though not truly competitive against the likes of bigger peers, is far better than many bands that have become well known…

The third installment of the season EPs from 1998 found William Breeze returning to add more viola as well as mandolin, while Rose McDowell, Louise Weasel, and Sorrow's Robert Lee are among the various guests. Coil worked initially with treated vocals and synth, then built up the arrangements of the five tracks from there. The feeling at many points is very much in line with the Coil/World Serpent tree of modern mysticism. Certainly Balance and McDowell's chants and pronouncements on the exquisite "Rosa Decidua," backed with descending chords on organ and further murky waves of noise, feels like a centuries-old ritual returned to life…

In many ways, the extravagance of this package equates the profligacy of the prog rock combo themselves. After all, how else but on a triple-LP collection could one hope to re-create (and/or contain) an adequate sampling of Yes' live presentation? Especially since their tunes typically clocked in in excess of ten minutes…