The Doobies team up with the Memphis Horns for an even more Southern-flavored album than usual, although also a more uneven one. By this time, Tom Johnston, Patrick Simmons, and company had pretty well inherited the mantle and the core (and then some) of the audience left behind by Creedence Clearwater Revival and John Fogerty, with Johnston songs like "Pursuit on 53rd Street," "Down in the Track," and "Road Angel" recalling pieces like "Travelin' Band," while Simmons' "Black Water" (their first number one hit) evoked the softer side of the "swamp rock" popularized by CCR. Actually, in some respects, given the range of instruments employed here, including an autoharp (courtesy of Arlo Guthrie) and viola, the songs on the original LP's first side suffer somewhat from a sameness that makes What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits a little less interesting than the albums that preceded it…

Garofano Rosso is an instrumental album. Now, why would a band with such a prominent singer as Banco del Mutuo Soccorso record an instrumental album? Because behind Francesco Di Giacomo's voice one finds strong instrumental compositional skills. And so the band was asked to write and record a soundtrack for the movie Garofano Rosso. (Keyboardists Vittorio and Gianni Nocenzi would later write a handful of other soundtracks, both together and separately.) But the album is not the actual soundtrack; two tracks, "Zobeida" and "Funerale," don't appear in the final cut, and the band fiddled with the track order to make things more interesting. Therefore, Garofano Rosso stands as a good album on its own, not as exciting as Darwin! or Io Sono Nato Libero, and not as impressive (or pompous) as Banco's other instrumental LP Di Terra, but still an honest effort…

"Soundmill Navigator", a Tangerine Dream Classics Edition, contains a vintage live recording from 1976, where the trio Baumann, Froese and Franke performed a concert at the Philharmonics.The almost 42-minute track finds the musicians in good spirits, as the set features lots of mellotron and antique sound textures, which are later on accompanied by some nice sequencing. Halfway, Edgar’s typical guitar soloing is added as well. Music wise, "Soundmill Navigator" the space ambient contains lost of elements and characteristics from their albums "Ricochet" and "Encore".

From the off, Sharon Van Etten and The Attachment Theory is sonically different from Van Etten’s previous work. Writing and recording in total collaboration with her band for the first time, Van Etten finds the freedom that comes by letting go. The result of that liberation is an exhilarating new dimension of sound and songwriting. The themes are timeless, classic Sharon – life and living, love and being loved – but the sounds are new, wholly realized and sharp as glass. Reflecting on this new artistic frame of mind, Van Etten muses.

Sodom returns with "The Arsonist", their first full-length album since 2020. It’s not only the complex production process that testifies to the band’s exceptional creative spirit, but also their diverse songwriting, which saw all four Sodom musicians - Tom Angelripper (vocals, bass), Frank Blackfire (guitar), York Segatz (guitar) and Toni Merkel (drums) - involved in the development of the material on "The Arsonist". The mastering was done by the famous sound engineer Eroc and the cover artwork with its martial design was penned by the exceptional Polish artist Zbigniew M. Bielak (Ghost, Mayhem, among others).

British jazz composer, pianist, songwriter, Mike Taylor died tragically young, leaving just two albums as well as co-writes with Ginger Baker for Cream’s Wheels Of Fire album to his name.
In 1973, under the direction of Neil Ardley, several of the performers who had worked with him recorded an album of Taylor’s surviving orchestral music, jazz tunes and songs as a memorial to him and to preserve his work as a composer and song writer for posterity. Taken from Ardley’s master tapes, this is their critically-acclaimed tribute to a master of his art by friends and colleagues, themselves representing a cross-section of the cream of modern British jazz talent of the day.

This LP is an excellent studio representation of Louis Armstrong & the All-Stars at work in their prime as a nostalgia act. And just because they were a nostalgia act didn't mean they didn't push the envelope given half a chance, as these recordings did. The personnel list is impressive on its own terms, with Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, and Barney Bigard together in the small group stretching out on "Twelfth Street Rag," and if the later incarnations of the group aren't as eye-catching in their personnel, they're every bit as much of a pleasure to hear on "Skokiaan" (aka "South African Song"), "Frog-I-More Rag," or the title tune. Pianist Billy Kyle gets the spotlight for a chunk of the extended jam of "Otchi-Tchor-Ni-Ya" before Peanuts Hucko and Eddie Miller take center stage on clarinet and tenor sax…

"In tomorrow's world, men will not need artificial instruments such as jets and space ships. In the world of tomorrow, the new man will 'think' the place he wants to go, then his mind will take him there." — Sun Ra, Jazz in Silhouette album notes (1959)

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound - keyboards - he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics…