The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety…

With their first official rock album, Berlin's In Extremo have developed from an insider tip to one of the most popular metal acts in Germany. Wake up the dead! is a spontaneous, crisp and, above all, unprecedented record in this form. Guitars complement each other seamlessly with three bagpipes, brute drumming is in harmony with tender, medieval songs. In Extremo, traditional melodies mix with their own ideas and add robust rock to the original sounds. And so they sing their old tunes in old Norwegian, old French, Spanish, Latin, old German and German. The debut album includes the pieces "Ai Vis Lo Lop", "Totus Floreo" and "Villeman og Magnhild", which are played regularly by traveling musicians at medieval markets. The real highlights, however, are the "Palestinian Song", one of the oldest, traditional pieces in human history (in a gripping, cracking metal version) as well as the worn, highly independent "Before full bowls". In short: if you want to have a say in medieval music, you have to get this long player.

Picking up on Herbie Hancock's "New Standards" idea, borrowing some old standards, and splitting the total down the middle, Joshua Redman lends his warm fatback tone, arching skyward passages and a post-bop quartet concept to ten popular songs of the 20th century. Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwins share space with the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Prince - distinguished songwriters all, yet the scorecard tells us that the oldsters' tunes consistently receive more interesting treatment than the rock/folk songs. "Yesterdays" is flexible enough to turn almost into an acoustic funk thing; "How Deep Is the Ocean" saunters along very soulfully; the near cha cha rhythm on "Love for Sale" pulls some inspired heat from Redman…

Nicholas Payton's third album as a leader is assuredly more commanding than his previous projects, and his technically flawless trumpet is right among the leaders in the neo-bop field. Yet he remains essentially a preservationist, a throwback to the hard bopping '50s and '60s and a staunch believer in the orthodoxies and rituals involved. There are exceptions - a nice '60s Blue Note-style boogaloo for starters ("Zigaboogaloo"), a probing, driving, tempo-shifting workout on Wayne Shorter's "Paraphernalia" from Miles in the Sky (which is about as progressive as the record gets) - but conservatism prevails elsewhere, even in the mild-mannered cover of the Stylistics' "People Make the World Go Round"…

Despite the presence of a pair of ballads – one of them ("New Horizons") by Justin Hayward the latter's most romantic number since "Nights in White Satin" – Seventh Sojourn was notable at the time of its release for showing the hardest-rocking sound this band had ever produced on record. It's all relative, of course, compared to their prior work…

Produced by Duke Robillard and utilizing his band as the backing unit, Cool Blues Walk is tightly focused from note one, making a marvelous framework for "The Chief" to do exactly what he does best. With the exception of the covers "Sen-Say-Shun," "Stranded," and "I Just Want to Make Love to You," Eddy Clearwater wrote every tune aboard in his usual wide range of styles from the rocking "Very Good Condition" to the country-ish "Nashville Road" to the shuffling "Boppin' at the Top of the Rock." Clearwater continues to surprise with a rare appearance playing piano and singing the decidedly non-blues-like ballad "I Love You" which also features Marilyn Mair and Mark Davis adding mandocello and mandola to this distinctive tune…

Listen to the very first cut on Freefall and you'll understand the basic problem with the Alvin Lee Band: the track is a nice piece of mid-tempo rock, rather catchy, but is Alvin Lee in there anywhere? Repeated listenings reveal that he might be singing background vocals, and that guitar lead sounds like a slick studio player who listened to a few Ten Years After records one afternoon…

The Crimson Idol was released on May 24th, 1992. A remastered edition was reissued in 1998, containing a bonus disc of B-sides and live material from 1992. This being the band’s fifth studio album, reached the top 40 in over five countries. This was also one of the bands first attempts of a concept album which tells of the rise and fall of fictional rock star Jonathan Steel.

A bit more of a purist album than the usual collection of retro-swingers, All Aboard includes several jump blues (the best of which are "The Indigo Swing" and "Regular Joe") plus a good downtempo swinger, "(Today's the Day) I'm Glad I'm Not Dead," and an intriguing cover of Willie Dixon's "Violent Love" (previously done by bands ranging from Dr. Feelgood to Skankin' Pickle).

Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, completed about the same time as the Eroica Symphony, has suddenly become popular. One reason for its previous lack of popularity was the fact that three soloists cost three times as much as one normally expensive pianist, violinist or cellist. Another reason is that the work seeks to be a popular success, hence the Rondo alla Polacca with which it concludes. The piano part was intended for Beethoven’s patron and pupil, the Archduke Rudolph von Habsburg, and hence is less technically demanding than the composer’s usual pianistic writing, destined for himself. The standard CD (previously LP) of the work was a spectacular performance and recording made by EMI many years ago with David Oistrakh, Rostropovich and Richter with the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan. It was opulently played with the BPO’s luscious sound, but has little to do with what Beethoven would have heard in 1804. Another choice was the version of Stern, Rose and Serkin (Sony), less lush and not so high-powered as Karajan’s.

Hameln is the second acoustic album of the German folk-metal band In Extremo, consisting entirely of medieval folk motives.The name of the album, refers to the German city of Hameln, as well as the famous legend of the Pied Piper of Hameln, who saved the city from hordes of rats, however, not having received the promised payment from the avaricious burgomaster, took all the children out of the city under cover of night. after which no one has ever seen them. Characteristically, the orginal cover is adorned with a photograph of a dead rat found in the basement of a Berlin house. Like Die Goldene, Hameln was re-recorded in 2006 and released in a new format, with improved sound, different cover art and two bonus tracks.

Snake Bite Love is the fourteenth studio album by the band Motörhead, released 10 March 1998, on Steamhammer, their third with the label

Lutenist, singer and composer Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, presided for a short while over one of the most cultivated European courts. Sirinu, with imaginative deployment of instrumental colour, performs the songs, consort music and arrangements attributed to Henry Tudor, including the well-known ‘Pastyme with good companye’. A fascinating disc.