At some point in the early 21st century, Radiohead became something more than a band: they became a touchstone for everything that is fearless and adventurous in rock, inheriting the throne from David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and the Talking Heads. The latter group gave the band its name – it's an album track on 1986's True Stories – but Radiohead never sounded much like the Heads, nor did they take much from Bowie, apart from their willingness to experiment. Instead, they spliced Floyd's spaciness with U2's messianic arena rock heft, bridging the gap with guitar skronk borrowed from the '80s American underground. Jonny Greenwood's jagged, brutal interjections on "Creep," the band's 1993 breakthrough hit, recalled the ugly noise of the Pixies and Nirvana, a sound that translated over the expanse of an ocean, but in the throes of the alternative rock explosion of the mid-'90s, Radiohead were the odd band out.

Having documented B.J.'s early sides with our 2-CD Set The Complete Scepter Singles, and followed his late '70s/early '80s foray into inspirational music with a pair of album twofers from the Myrrh label, it was only a matter of time till we at Real Gone Music tackled the next big phase in the career of this all-time great American singer, namely the classic country-pop sides he cut for Columbia in the '80s. This is a stage in B.J.'s career that has seen little attention in the CD era, which is strange because he was just killing it on the Country charts with #1 hits like "Whatever Happened to Old Fashioned Love" and "New Looks from an Old Lover" and the #3 hit "Two Car Garage." In fact, out of the 21 songs on this collection–which includes the A and B-side of every Columbia single plus sides from the Cleveland International and Priority labels –eight were chart hits, among them the Top 20 duet "Rock and Roll Shoes" with Ray Charles plus "The Whole World's in Love When You're Lonely" and "The Girl Most Likely To." We've also added a pair of bonus tracks including his rare original solo version of "As Long as We've Got Each Other," the theme to the TV show Growing Pains, and his early version of "Wind Beneath My Wings," which ended up being a hit for Gary Morris and Bette Midler among others. Remastered by Sean Brennan at Battery Studios, peppered with rare photos, and annotated by Joe Marchese based on a fresh interview with the artist himself, The Complete Columbia Singles is a must for any B.J. fan and anybody who wants to hear some of the best country-pop the '80s had to offer.

Out of all the Beatles, John Lennon had the most interesting – and frustrating – solo career. Lennon was capable of inspired, brutally honest confessional songwriting and melodic songcraft; he also had an undying love of straight-ahead rock & roll. But the extremes, both in his music and his life, were what made him fascinating. Where Paul McCartney was content to be a rock star, Lennon dabbled in everything from revolutionary politics to the television talk show circuit during the early '70s. After releasing a pair of acclaimed albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, in the early '70s, Lennon sunk into an infamous "lost weekend" where his musical output was decidedly uneven and his public behavior was often embarrassing.

Now, she is known for her music for children, but in the Sixties she defined a new type of French girl singer - the yé-yé girl. She featured in Jean-Luc Godard s 1966 film Masculin-Féminin as a pop star who might as well have been her. Chantal Goya married songwriter Jean-Jacques Debout in 1966. The songs he wrote for her, like those he had composed for Charles Aznavour, Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan, were evocative, immediate and very French. Together, they defined the yé-yé sound. Féminin The Complete 60s Recordings is the perfect complement to RPM Interntationals France Gall and Sylvie Vartan collections: Made in France: France Galls Baby Pop and Irrésistiblement.

The Pseudonym label closed out 2019 by showing some love to the long out of print back catalogs of two classic Dutch hard rock bands: Bodine and Vengeance. Both bands coincidentally featured the talents of guitarist (and future Ayreon mastermind) Arjen Anthony Lucassen, and both bands got career-spanning box sets. Vengeance, which Lucassen joined following his stint in Bodine, started as something of a straightforward heavy metal band with a NWOBHM vibe, but soon created their own quirky style of hard rock that brings to mind a Dutch version of Krokus.

Jim Golden's USA and Destination labels put out so many killer garage-rock sides (both legendary and obscure) that it takes two packed CDs to hold just the cream of the crop! I'm a Man Buckinghams; Ben Franklin's Almanac Cryan' Shames; Are You the Kind Flock; Echoes Lord and the Flies; I Know Park Avenue Playground; Come with Me Boyz; What'cha Gonna Do Jokers, and more including unreleased tracks.

Thatcher, riots, unemployment, Crossroads, Threads, the freezing cold, cold war… you can't always blame it on the weather. CTR+ALT+DEL examines the electronics of circumstance. From the punk explosion that spat on and then spawned the bloated and disastrous and generated the degenerated. A pitiful series of reluctant occurrences in the automatic brutality of an urban paradise. The dirty rotten '80s, oh, how we despaired. A gathering of rare and obscure vinyl adventures culled from the Cold War collective. Also known as cold wave, minimal wave or new wave, these are the monologues of a modern wave. Features a 12-page color booklet with comprehensive liner notes and rare color photographs. Artists include: Moskow, White Russia, Farm Life, Blaue Reiter, Gerry & The Holograms, Magits, Klingons, The Filmcasts, Four Plugs, To The Finland Station, Bumbites, V-Sor, X, Orior, Eternal Scream, Firmament And The Elements, Bendall's Box, Distributors, Allies, The Freeze, and Bad Actors.

3 CD Set, 75 great tracks. The Animals, The Lovin' Spoonful, Gerry & The Pacemakers, Sly & The Family Stone, Manfred Mann, The Beach Boys, The Hollies, Fleetwood Mac, The Band, Jeff Beck, The Seekers, Elvis Presley, Neil Sedaka, Fats Domino, Cher, Paul Jones, Lulu, Jose Feliciano, Peter And Gordon, Johnny Nash, Bedrocks, P. J. Proby, The Dubliners and more, and more…

James Taylor is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. A five-time Grammy Award winner, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide. 3-disc box set includes classic albums: 'JT' (1977), 'That's Why I'm Here' (1985), and 'Never Die Young' (1988).

On October 6, 1953, RCA held experimental stereophonic sessions in New York's Manhattan Center with Leopold Stokowski conducting a group of New York musicians in performances of Enesco's Roumanian Rhapsody No. 1 and the waltz from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. There were additional stereo tests in December, again in the Manhattan Center, this time with Pierre Monteux conducting members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In February 1954, RCA made its first commercial stereophonic recordings, taping the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Münch, in a performance of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz.

Finnish Accordion Concertos contains the works of three Finnish composers for accordion. The album opens with Vyöry (2021), composed by Minna Leinonen (b. 1977), one of the rising names of her generation, performed by accordion artist and pedagogue Antti Leinonen as soloist of KPKO. The piece was premiered with the same force in 2022, and the composer says that during the composition process, "worldwide changes swept through society", and in the piece you can hear "accelerating eruptions, flows and culminations".

Jacob Obrecht was one of the primary composers responsible for significant changes in musical style during the late fifteenth century. He was especially important to the development of larger forms, as the first composer to systematically demonstrate unified formal structure and long-range cadential planning over the course of extended works. Obrecht's approach to unity and development went beyond the simple employment of a cantus firmus or unifying gesture. He consequently personifies today's mass-as-symphony ideal most decisively.

Locatelli was one of the most impressive violin virtuosos of the first half of the eighteenth century. Considered today as a sort of Baroque Paganini, he left picturesque, colourful, strikingly modern pieces for his instrument. A few years after a Mozart collaboration that earned them worldwide acclaim, Isabelle Faust and the musicians of Il Giardino Armonico bring out the full narrative intensity of these concertos, worthy of the operatic stage!

The year 1987 suddenly writes the urgently needed history all by itself. And the Blue Monday Blues Band has remained true to this history for over 30 years now. Anyone who compares the old pictures of the combo with the current press photos will see the external change from hippie-esque attire to father's clean linen suit, from pubs and sunglasses to patent leather shoes and the gallows tie. However, the recipe remains the same: dance and jump on the west coast of Austria, to a form of blues that knows its origins but never forgets the funny confusion of home.

Many improvisers would agree that having the feeling of the blues is a crucial part of jazz expression; however, the jazz and blues worlds don't interact nearly as often as they should. There are jazz musicians who will play Miles Davis' "All Blues" or Charlie Parker's "Parker's Mood" on a regular basis but wouldn't know John Lee Hooker from Little Milton; there are blues artists who are much more likely to work with a rock musician than a jazz musician. So it is a rare treat to hear a blues-oriented guitarist and a jazz-oriented guitarist co-leading a session, which is exactly what happens on More Conversations in Swing Guitar. This 2003 release is a sequel to bluesman Duke Robillard and jazzman Herb Ellis' 1999 encounter Conversations in Swing Guitar, and the CD proves that good things can happen when jazz and blues players interact. More Conversations in Swing Guitar is an album of very blues-minded instrumental jazz – it's hardly a carbon copy of Robillard's work with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, but the bluesman has no problem appearing in a jazz-oriented setting.