Seven Tears finds Golden Earring continuing to develop its distinctive blend of hard rock and prog elements, but the end result is not as consistent as 1970's Golden Earring. The big problem this time out is that the group's adventurous genre-hopping tendencies don't always result in strong songs: "Silver Ships" is a soft, science fiction-influenced song that generates a potent atmosphere but lacks the strong arrangement and sense of dynamics that would allow it to take flight, and "You're Better Off Free" loses sight of its catchy tune with a lengthy midsection guitar jam that derails an otherwise interesting song.

Detunized Gravity The prolific and long-running De-Phazz (also known as DePhazz) is a contemporary lounge project led by Peter "Pit" Baumgartner, a German-Austrian producer who has surrounded himself with a shifting cast of collaborators that includes vocalists Barbara Lahr, Karl Frierson, and Pat Appleton. Beginning with Detunized Gravity (1997), Baumgartner and company have explored various forms of lounge music, much of it balancing samples with live instrumentation, with innumerable cross-sections of vintage jazz and soul, easy listening, and Latin music. De-Phazz tracks like "No Jive" and "The Mambo Craze" have appeared on dozens of compilations with "lounge," "chill," and "cafe" in the title.

Murray Perahia's account of the Grieg Concerto is utterly absorbing. The playing is brilliant, but the pianist's approach–more Chopinesque than Lisztian–keeps that brilliance at the service of larger expressive goals. The result is a performance aglow with understated intensity, one in which the prevalent feeling is often melancholy, at times even bleak. Sir Colin Davis draws a wonderfully refined accompaniment from the Bavarian orchestra in this live reading of the score. The recording, from Munich's Philharmonic Hall, is excellent and effectively captures the beautiful tone Perahia coaxes from his piano.

Moondog Matinee is the fifth studio album by Canadian/American rock group the Band, released in 1973. It consists entirely of cover material reflecting the group's love of R&B and blues music, with one exception in their interpretation of the theme from the film The Third Man. The original idea had been to replicate the group's setlists of the mid-'60s when they had been known as Levon and the Hawks, playing clubs throughout Canada and the US. Of the ten tracks, only one, "Share Your Love (With Me)" had been performed by the group in the mid-'60s. The rest were merely tracks the group admired, two of them, "Holy Cow" and "A Change Is Gonna Come", chronologically coming after the group's club days.

The first studio album of Band originals since 1971's Cahoot – in many respects, Northern Lights-Southern Cross was viewed as a comeback. It also can be seen as a swan song, in that its recording marked the last time the five members would work together in the studio as a permanent group, with a commitment to making a record they would tour behind and build on as a working band. The album was also, ironically enough, the Band's finest since their self-titled sophomore effort, even outdoing Stage Fright.

Ex-husband Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Records can be accused of scraping the bottom of the barrel in its second compilation of old Sarah Brightman tracks released to take advantage of the singer's international popularity due to her albums Time to Say Goodbye, Eden, and La Luna, all recorded for a different company. Happily, even the bottom of the barrel contains some excellent material, even after the cream was skimmed off with The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection. During and after her marriage to Lloyd Webber, Brightman performed on the Original London Cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera and recorded the albums The Songs That Got Away (1989) and Surrender (1995), and that's the material sampled here, that is, the remaining tracks that weren't used on The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection.

Though she's undoubtedly resigned to nearly eternal comparisons with Amalia Rodrigues, the master of Portugal's fado, Mariza's debut album finds her breaking out of the mold from the beginning. Newcomers to the fado will quickly become familiar with the style from the plaintive crystal of Mariza's voice and her evocative guitar accompaniment, but her delivery occasionally recalls jazz or the blues. Double bassist Ricardo Cruz and pianist Tiago Machado help carry the effervescent "Poetas," while light percussion adds a note of intrigue on the closer, "Barco Negro."

Between his various standards albums of the '90s and the heavily collaborational Anutha Zone from 1998, by the end of the millennium it'd been nearly a decade since Dr. John's last record of straight-ahead New Orleans R&B. Creole Moon rectifies that situation nicely - it's "a personal interpretation of New Orleans" (as he says in the liner notes), and these 14 vignettes of New Orleans life are soaked in Crescent City soul. Creole Moon is also a return to the sound of his classic mid-'70s records (Dr. John's Gumbo, In the Right Place), right from the spidery electric piano and testifying back-up vocals on the opener "You Swore." Most of his band, the Lower 9-11 Musician Vocaleers, have been playing with him for close to 20 years, and provide solid accompaniment…

Three serenatas by Vivaldi survive (he is known to have composed at least eight)‚ of which La Senna festeggiante is by far the most enjoyable…One of the work’s most interesting features is Vivaldi’s deliberate use in places of elements of French style‚ for instance in the solemn ‘ouvertur’ which opens Part 2 and the courtly minuet of The Golden Age’s second aria‚ thereby adding to the richness of a work which for the most part is vintage Vivaldi at his most buoyant and irresistible.

Looking On is the third album by The Move, released in the UK in December 1970. The LP is their first to feature Jeff Lynne, their first containing entirely original compositions. It includes both their 1970 singles, the Top 10 hit "Brontosaurus," released on Regal Zonophone in March, and the less successful "When Alice Comes Back To The Farm," released on Fly in October. Looking On is generally regarded as the hardest rocking, least popular and most eclectic album in the Move's catalogue, as it presents the band dabbling in heavy metal ("Brontosaurus"), blues ("When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", "Turkish Tram Conductor Blues"), prog-style epics ("Open Up Said the World at the Door"), soul ("Feel Too Good"), or, in the case of the title track, all four styles mashed together.

The primary impetus behind this ambitious 12-disc box set is to gather all nine of the Grateful Dead's Warner Brothers titles. However, the staggeringly high quotient of previously unissued bonus material rivals - and at times exceeds - the content of those original albums. The Golden Road (1965-1973) truly has something - and usually a lot of it - for every degree of Deadhead. Working chronologically, the bonus material begins before the beginning so to speak, with the two-disc sub-compilation aptly titled "Birth of the Dead," a project actually green-lighted by Jerry Garcia in the mid-'80s. Disc one features studio recordings by a primordial incarnation of the band known as the Warlocks and later the Emergency Crew. Disc two contrasts their studio efforts with some of the earliest surviving live Grateful Dead recordings from July of 1966…

Arena, a band who knows what it means to satisfy their fans. Arena has a fanatic fanclub: The Cage. Arena makes regular CD's just to be had for their members. "Unlocking the Cage" is the third one in this tradition. This disc gives a good view of the evolution of Arena over the five years.
The album opens with “Enter”, an instrumental atmospheric piece written by Clive to be used as the intro for “Moviedrome”, the track with which Arena would start it’s show. Deadcertain to be asked back on stage the band rehearsed “Encore medley” which contains loads of big immortal riffs. The nice thing about this release is the fact that it contains tracks from well over five years thus also from a period in time where very few people knew about their existence…