Hooking up with regular Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard as the co-producer of this album proved to be just the trick for Ferry. Bete Noire sparkles as the highlight of Ferry's post-Roxy solo career, adding enough energy to make it more than Boys and Girls part two. Here, his trademark well-polished heartache strikes a fine balance between mysterious moodiness and dancefloor energy, and Leonard adds more than a few tricks that keep the pep up. Five out of the nine songs are Ferry/Leonard collaborations; all succeed, from "Limbo"'s opening punch and flow to the cinematic (and unsurprisingly French-tinged) feeling of the title track.

Since his self-titled 1990 smash debut, Dave Koz has been one of smooth jazz's greatest musicians. The saxman scored big on the radio and in retail even when he turned away from his established R&B/pop sound on 1996's Off the Beaten Path, which was done with more acoustic instruments. The Dance brings him back to the hard-hitting R&B funk sounds of that first album and its follow-up, 1993's Lucky Man. Aside from reuniting him with some of the producers who worked on his debut – Jeff Lorber, Carl Sturken, Evan Rogers, and his brother Jeff Koz – The Dance is a true testament to the art of collaboration.

As Robert Fripp had done with King Crimson's first live LP, Earthbound (1972), USA is a single-disc concert package documenting the quartet during its 1974 swing through North America. As with its predecessor, USA was also issued as a sonic cenotaph of the concurrently defunct Krim. So insistent that the band would not be resurrected, Fripp concluded the LP's liner notes at the time with another three-letter epitaph: "R.I.P." The 1973/1974 King Crimson included the collective efforts of Fripp (guitar/Mellotron), David Cross (violin), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion).

Toby Keith jumped from Mercury to DreamWorks after his fourth album, Dream Walkin' and How Do You Like Me Now?!, his first effort for his new album, finds the singer/songwriter revived and refreshed, shaking loose some of the sleepiness of his two albums for Mercury. Not that he's given up slower tunes – he still has a keen ear for sensitive love songs and heartbreak sagas, manifesting in both the light, sweet "Heart to Heart (Stelen's Song)" and power ballads like "When Love Fades" – but there is a bit of a showy defiance here, best heard on the hit title track, "Die with Your Boots On" and the rocking "Country Comes to Town."

Compiled by Chris Squire (in case you're wondering how "The Fish" made it this far upstream), Classic Yes was Atlantic's initial attempt to distill the band's best music. The key to this collection is in the title: this is the band's "classic" music. Anything prior to The Yes Album is cut out, no attempt is made to salvage snippets from Relayer or Tales from Topographic Oceans; Drama and Tormato are dispensed with. What remains is what made this band great: the science fiction and fantasy-laced epics, the tangible wizardry of their arrangements, moments that crystallized the magical power of music, and two unreleased live tracks from 1978 that find the band tethered to the realm of mortals."

Nancy Sandra Sinatra is an American singer and actress. She is the elder daughter of Frank Sinatra and Nancy (née Barbato) Sinatra, and is widely known for her 1966 signature hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin". Other defining recordings include "Sugar Town", the 1967 number one "Somethin' Stupid" (a duet with her father), the title song from the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, several collaborations with Lee Hazlewood, such as "Jackson", "Summer Wine" and her cover of Cher's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)". Nancy Sinatra began her career as a singer and actress in November 1957 with an appearance on her father's ABC-TV variety series, but initially achieved success only in Europe and Japan.

Even among Deadheads, there's always been a sense that Jerry Garcia's studio albums have been somewhat ignored. Part of this ties back to the often repeated urban legend that the Grateful Dead were never as good in the studio as they were live – an argument that has some truth but tends to downplay the merits of the studio albums, which had their own distinct attributes. This also applies to Garcia's studio records, but as a whole they're more problematic than the Dead's catalog…

The members of Faust are the jokers in the Krautrock pack – jokers because they never formed with any serious intentions, and jokers, too, because whatever preconceptions you might have in approaching that most disreputable-sounding of sonic genres, Faust is guaranteed to explode them…

The plainly named Box Set – that's the actual title – contains four CDs by a band that made only three albums in their brief lifetime. It goes without saying that this has a lot of great music, and is an essential purchase for fans of this phenomenal 1960s folk-rock-psychedelic band, containing no less than 36 previously unreleased demos, outtakes, and previously unissued mixes. It's the unreleased stuff that holds the most interest, especially since even on their outtakes, Buffalo Springfield were often superb…

Five CD set containing a quintet of albums from the groundbreaking British Art Rock band: Siren, Viva, Manifesto, Flesh + Blood and Heart Still Beating.