In the middle of writing her seventh album Wildcard, Miranda Lambert hit pause. “I took the first long stretch I’ve ever had off in my entire career since I was 17,” she tells Apple Music. “Finally you realize how much you need a breath.” During that break, the country superstar made some big life changes, surprising the world by announcing that she’d secretly gotten married and was moving part-time to New York City—a switch-up that she says revitalized her creative energy and breathed new life into her sound. “Oddly enough, on my seventh solo album, I feel like I approached it more like my first album than any other record I’ve made,” she says.

Here is yet another major recording of The Nutcracker. Undoubtedly its great success stems a good deal from the superlative Berlin Philharmonic, but if also confirms Semyon Bychkov as a major new presence on the recording scene. He has the singularly important gift of bringing music to life in the recording studio as at a concert, and every bar of this performance is tingling with vitality.

The celebration of the Nativity has always been a source of inspiration for composers. The different elements of the evangelical narrative evoke numerous images: tender feelings before the Baby Jesus; the gentleness of his mother, the Virgin Mary; the procession of the three Wise Men; the angelic choirs in Heaven; and these shepherds gathered in the manger. All that appears in the musical repertoire linked to this holiday, as well as the presence of colourful instrumentations and themes connected to folk traditions. This set, released by Ricercar, brings together all these elements, drawn from the repertoires of the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Goombay Dance Band is a German band created in 1979 by Oliver Bendt, named after a small bay on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. Their music has a distinctive sound (somewhat similar to Boney M.), which is a mixture of soca, calypso and western pop. The group enjoyed greatest commercial success at the beginning of the 1980s, spawning such number 1 hits as "Sun of Jamaica", "Seven Tears" and "Aloha-Oe, Until We Meet Again". Goombay Dance Band built up a fan base across Europe and proved very popular in South Africa too, where "Sun of Jamaica" and "Aloha-Oe" entered the charts.

Roots band Birds of Chicago formed in 2012 as a collaboration between Chicago's JT Nero (JT & the Clouds) and Vancouver's Allison Russell (Po' Girl). Although both singer/songwriters were actively leading their own projects, their combined efforts were convincing enough to make a go of it and they set about recording their debut. Though a talented songwriter in her own right, a big part of the Birds of Chicago sound came from the material Nero had written specifically for Russell to interpret, and it was their combined voices that won over fans on 2012's self-titled Birds of Chicago LP. Mixing folk, mountain gospel, soul, and rock, the two bandleaders and a revolving cast of players became a well-seasoned touring act, and in 2013 delivered the concert album Live from Space…

Smooth groove chill and lounge tracks. Peter Pearson is a composer of mainly instrumental music, with an emotionally driven style that crosses the genres of Easy Listening and Chillout with elements of Ambient, Lounge, Jazz, Blues, light Classical and Rock. Simplicity and emotion are his driving forces - if there is no passion, there is no music.

Future Bible Heroes - Partygoing (2013) {Merge Records MRG 472}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 239 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 82 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 44 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Merge Records | MRG 472
Rock / Pop / Synth-pop / Indie Pop / Indie Electronic

It’s been ten years since the last Future Bible Heroes album, but for those in the know, it's hardly felt like a drought, as the group is merely a re-skinned version of ultra-prolific songwriter Stephin Merritt's myriad other outlets, which include Magnetic Fields, Gothic Archies, and the 6ths. Originally conceived as a one-off collaboration between Merritt and popular DJ and ex-Figures on a Beach keyboardist Christopher Ewen, the addition of longtime Magnetic Fields collaborator Claudia Gonson in 2002 officially brought the group into Merritt's indie pop empire, and with their heady blend of kitschy electro-pop and darkly funny, Brill Building-inspired tales of heartbreak, the trio really began to cook.