Rag‘n’Bone Man’s second album opens with hope. It’s in the sound of birdsong, filtering through the dawn sky in Nashville, where the artist born Rory Graham wrote these songs. It’s in the lyrics – words of love to friends, family, his young son, and himself. And it’s in his unmistakable voice, grown all the richer from experience as he delves into his past, present, and future. This is an album, as Graham puts it, about growing up.

First aired ten days prior to the release of Girl on Fire, Alicia Keys' VH1 Storytellers program featured six songs. While this set expands the set to 11 songs, it does not present the full performance. Heavy editing was involved; certain portions of Keys' dialogue re hacked up, crowd noise is unnaturally lowered and raised in volume, and there is little evident effort to make the songs flow. Keys' first words here, the lead-in to "No One," are "We were at the end of the album, and it was finished, and…" – so it provokes the feeling of walking into the venue as the gig is in progress.

CAMERA SOUL is a powerful jazz-funk ensemble, produced by Mr. Marco Rossi of Azzurra Music (Verona) and released and marketed in the Americas by Kathryn Ballard Shut of TIMKAT Entertainment (Denver, Colorado). Inspired by legendary horn line, soul, R&B, and jazz-fusion artists such as Earth, Wind and Fire, The Commodores, Tower of Power, and Stevie Wonder, as well as neo-soul grooves by Incognito, Erykah Badu, and Jamiroquai, the group is based out of southern Italy (Bari), and led by veteran composer-arranger brothers Piero and Pippo Lombardo.

The sophomore effort from Georgia-raised, Britain-based vocalist Kristina Train, 2012's Dark Black is a brooding, atmospheric collection of slow-burn pop songs that put her burnished, sultry croon at the fore. Picking up where 2009's Spilt Milk left off, Dark Black finds Train once again working with British singer/songwriter Ed Harcourt, as well as songwriter/producer Martin Craft. Together, they've come up with an album that builds upon Train's twangy Southern roots layered with a baroque, cinematic aesthetic. Train's vocals are often drenched in an echo-chamber sound, often backed with boomy, resonant percussion, languid piano parts, eerie orchestral sections, shimmering baritone guitar lines, and even some light electronic flourishes. In that sense, the album brings to mind the work of such similarly minded contemporaries as singer/guitarist Richard Hawley and neo-soft rock singer Rumer as much as it does the classic soul-inflected '60s sound of Dusty Springfield.

'Three Little Words' concludes Dominique Fils-Aimé's album trilogy exploring the roots of African-American musical culture. Each album carries with it a lesson that has been learned and then moulded into each subsequent volume. This final album is Fils-Aimé's adaptation of soul music in the truest sense of the term: music that comes from the depths of her soul and is meant to challenge and enrich the souls of her listeners. It is at once both an acknowledgement and an appreciation of the different musical genres that live within her head and flavour her own soul. In music, as in with life, the best prognosticator is looking to the past.

Human, is the debut album from global phenomenon Rag'N'Bone Man, whose real name is Rory Graham, a singer songwriter from Uckfield, East Sussex, England. The album features the title track, "Human," an emerging worldwide hit that has achieved # 1 Singles Chart status in Austria, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, and is now moving up charts in the United States. The single is certified GOLD in Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden and Platinum in Switzerland. Rag'N'Bone Man's artistry began with the blues. He discovered the genre as a child, with the rhythmic troubles that rang out from his parents' record player and planted a stubborn seed in this kid's head.

Field Songs is the debut album by the Baltimore, MD, sensation Fertile Ground. Why is the band a sensation? There isn't another act out there capable of more polish, sincerity, or creativity on a single album. Using the do-it-yourself aesthetic from the group's own Blackout Studios, this trio consists of composer/pianist/arranger James Collins, vocalist (and true soul diva) Navasha Daya, and drummer Marcus Asante. Field Songs is a document made in the soul traditions created by everyone from Gil Scott-Heron through Brian Jackson, Nina Simone, Terry Callier, Andy Bey, Harry Belafonte, Jon Lucien, and Caetano Veloso, as well as Marvin Gaye, Phoebe Snow, and Smokey Robinson, but here is updated in terms of its subject matter and musical sophistication for the 21st century.

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Switzerland, resident of Toronto, and recording in Memphis, singer Shakura S'Aida turns in her second solo album, Brown Sugar, for the German Ruf Records label. On her first CD, UMI's Blueprint, she sang blues cover songs from the 1940s and ‘50s, but here she and her guitarist, Donna Grantis, have penned nine of the 11 songs themselves. They have done so in some familiar blues styles, starting with the opening trio of 12-bar blues tunes, "Mr. Right," "Walk Out That Door," and "Gonna Tell My Baby," then going on to less hardcore variations such as the blues-rock found on "(Did It)" Break Your Heart" and the bluesy piano ballad "Angel on High."

'Stay Tuned!' is Dominique Fils-Aimé’s sophomore album, the follow-up to her debut full length 'Nameless', part of her trilogy that brings to center stage the resiliency of mankind in the face of adversity and oppression and pays homage to Afro-American history and culture.

There’s a point just past the halfway mark on “Shake It Out,” the rousing first single from Florence + the Machine's second studio release, when the swelling guitars, organs, and strings, staccato percussion, and Florence Welch's air-raid siren of a voice lock up in a herculean battle over which one is going to launch itself into the stratosphere first. It’s a contest that plays out at least once on each of Ceremonials' immaculately produced 12 tracks. Such carefully calculated moments of rhapsody would dissolve into redundant treacle in less capable hands, but Welch does emotional bombast better than any of her contemporaries, and when she wails into the black abyss above, the listener can’t help but return the call. Bigger and bolder than 2009’s excellent Lungs, Ceremonials rolls in like fog over the Thames, doling out a heavy-handed mix of Brit-pop-infused neo-soul anthems and lush, movie trailer-ready ballads that fuse the bluesy, electro-despair of Adele with the ornate, gothic melodrama of Kate Bush and Floodland-era Sisters of Mercy.