A year after the 2004 live DVD You Gotta Move, Aerosmith unleashes another live release with Rockin' the Joint. This 11-track album was recorded live on January 11, 2002 at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino as the quintet was pushing their 2001 album Just Push Play…

The Lost Sessions Vol. 2 is the second (obviously) Rolling Stones outtakes on Empress Valley. Similar to the first volume the material here is not collated in any strict fashion but rather takes bits and pieces from various sessions. The subtitle of this release is The Auction Reel since this is the tape that was auctioned at Sotheby’s several years ago. The tracks here are all in excellent quality and present some interesting insights…

With 26 tracks from 1966 and 1967, this CD acts as a comprehensive supplement to the Peanut Butter Conspiracy's more widely circulated recordings for Columbia and Challenge. While seven of these recordings found official release in 1966 and 1967 on the Vault label, the rest were previously unissued. Too, it has seven cuts (both released and unreleased) by the Ashes, the group from which the Peanut Butter Conspiracy evolved, though most of this material was done in the early days of the era in which they were going under the Peanut Butter Conspiracy billing. Because a lot of this was done in the group's formative days, much of it's a little (and sometimes a lot) more folk-rock-oriented than the more psychedelic output on their Columbia albums…

The second Kvazar album gives you a lush-sounding retro-prog, that can only please a proghead's lower instincts. The group has suffered a few personnel changes - most notably the old bassist and guitarist having left, but not replaced by full-time members and they still present on two tracks - but this has not affected their sound or songwriting skills. The ten tracks display a very personal Progressive rock, mixing symphonic parts and jazzy flavour. Kvazar offers a beautiful fusion, refreshing and inspired.

After eight years of silence Sieges Even was releasing their sixth album and it became their most untypical one and certainly their most accessible one. After they lost (once again) their lead vocalist Andre Matos (ex-Angra) and found a brilliant replacement with the Dutch Arno Menses they decided to restart again under the new name Val'paraiso in 2003. But soon after they had recorded the new material they realized that it contained all features which are typical for the music of Sieges Even and switched back to the band's original name. There is a lot of Rush-influence in these songs: sounds, chords, riffs, changes/shifts, drumming, even the vocals. And yet, they manage to make it sound fresh and like it's all their own. Truly in interesting and refreshing.

Duchess of Coolsville is Rhino's three-CD career retrospective of the work of singer and songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, an artist who changed the face of pop in the 1970s in her own way beginning with her surprise hit "Chuck E's in Love." Since that time she has continued on a highly personal, often idiosyncratic path; one that does not always give the marketplace its due…

There's little question that Shout! Factory's double-disc compilation The Marshall Tucker Band Anthology: The First 30 Years is exhuastive. It spans 32 songs, sampling from 20 albums, running more or less in chronological order, and giving a good idea of the group's narrative…

The late '60s and early '70s didn't yield many (as far as we know) unreleased studio recordings of completed, otherwise unavailable Rolling Stones songs. But it did produce a wealth of fairly interesting alternate/working versions and song embryos that never got polished off, sixteen of which are presented on this compilation. As the title Sweet Black Angel implies, many are from that murky early-'70s period when the Stones were working, in fits and starts, on Exile on Main St., and several of these tracks are different versions of songs that ended up on that album…

Cecilia Bartoli's new CD features a collection of music that could not be heard in her native Rome at the start of the 18th century due to Papal censorship. Theaters, the Church felt, were places of evil and corruption and operas led people to immorality. But some music-loving senior members of the priesthood asked composers to write oratorios and cantatas–indeed, operas without staging, essentially–for their own private entertainment. Call it what you will, the music is sensational–by turns virtuosic, gentle, and playful–and always expressive: just right, it seems, for Cecilia Bartoli's temperament. The opening aria on the CD, a call for peace in the name of Jesus, is, in fact, a dazzling martial air with trumpets blaring and the voice going through an amazing array of coloratura fireworks.

The legendary Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920 - 1995), playing at the height of his powers, performs two Beethoven sonatas in an historic recording now digitally restored and re-mastered. He also plays earlier sonatas by Scarlatti and Galuppi. Michelangeli's fine control and perfect clarity - always present in his playing - have positioned him as one of the most outstanding recording artists of any generation.

Led by the rhythm section of Eclat (Drummer Fabrice Di Mondo and bass-player Bruno Ramousse) and helped by guest musicians such as Mirage's guitarist Stephan Forner, French band from Marseilles recorded its first eponymous album in 2005. It starts in a surprising way with a composition that may evoke Primus. A few seconds later, it is nothing but obvious: Negative Zone stands for one of the best Pink Floyd disciples. Every ingredient that made the formula successful in the early Seventies is here, in the "Atom Heart Mother" period: careful singing and Beatlesque vocal harmonies, mindblowing keyboards parts and unreal atmospheres, subtle guitar parts and refined acoustic sequences… Some sudden high temperatures and more experimental passages are also present.

The weakest studio album recorded with Jim Morrison in the group, partially because their experiments with brass and strings on about half the tracks weren't entirely successful. More to the point, though, this was their weakest set of material, low lights including filler like "Do It" and "Runnin' Blue," a strange bluegrass-soul blend that was a small hit…