Like a single strand of wafting smoke, Niia's debut album I is entrancing in its sparse, elegantly gliding beauty. Her follow-up to 2014's Generation Blue EP and first release on Atlantic Records takes that release's lush, bassy sound and pares it back to reveal smooth, fully realized songwriting and timeless aesthetics. It's a slow-burning, intimate document that tips its hand towards genres as disparate as the glory days of trip-hop, mid-tempo disco, and misty jazz, while retaining an impressively unified mood evoking modern noir.

Coming off of his biggest commercial success in years, 1989's „Trash“, Alice Cooper decided to follow the same accessible, radio-ready formula for its follow-up, 1991's „Hey Stoopid“. Producer Peter Collins smoothed out the edges of Alice's music for mass consumption. Like its predecessor, „Hey Stoopid“ features many guest appearances from some of the day's top rockers Guns N' Roses' Slash; six-string wizards Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Vinnie Moore; Motley Crue's Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx; and the legendary Ozzy Osbourne all lend a hand. The album's opening title track was a rocker containing lyrics that dealt with the dangers of hard drug use, and was a popular video on MTV's Saturday night heavy metal show, HEADBANGER'S BALL. Other highlights include "Love's a Loaded Gun," "Burning Our Bed," "Feed My Frankenstein," and "Die For You."

While Alice Cooper's late-'80s comeback was a success largely on the strength of his ever-popular stage show, his albums of the era, 1986's „Constrictor“ and 1987's „Raise Your Fist and Yell“, failed to reap mass commercial success. All of this changed with 1989's „Trash“, his first platinum-certified album in nearly 15 years. The album's top-10 single "Poison" made fans of '80s glam-metal fully embrace Cooper, a man who had almost single-handedly created the genre.

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was one of the most complete musicians of the Elizabethan era. He made talented contributions to every genre of vocal and instrumental music. In the domain of the fantasia for viols, he wrote for numerous combinations of between two and six instruments and elaborated endlessly inventive formal structures, in which traces of Italianism are by no means absent. L’Achéron offers us a wide selection from this repertory, which it has recorded on viols based on early seventeenth-century English.

Mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa and pianist Fazıl Say share some tantalising, captivating and sensuous Secrets in this album of songs, centred on Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Bilitis, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Fazıl Say’s own Gezi Park 3 – which he and Crebassa premiered in 2014. Describing the recording sessions, Marianne Crebassa says: “Sometimes we worked in a kind of trance … there were some moments when nothing seemed to exist around us …”

With only a first album ‘Gospel Journey‘ to his credit, Faada Freddy is the inevitable Artist of the Year. Chaplin’s bowler hat on top of thick dreadlocks, striped opera hats and white shirts like a Prohibition-era Untouchable: undoubtedly, Faada Freddy has his own style, a mix of old-style chic and the attire of a ghetto’s rude boy. Looking cool and zazou gives him a street dandy cachet, and it also sets the tone of Gospel Journey, his first album, elegant and stylish, ageless yet furiously modern. As’, who produced Imany’s first album (platinum album in France and in several European markets), produced this quite singular and purely vocal album. The songs effortlessly cover several territories, some of which aren’t exactly neighbors: soul, worship songs, a capella R’n’B, fresh folk, unplugged rock, all united under a single banner, the deep and omniscient voice of Faada. A voice that is assuredly one of the purest, warmest and most melodic among the up and coming talents of 2015.

Award-winning violinist Christian Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt are joined together with Tanja Tetzlaff in this exciting new recording of the Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) Piano Trios. The Brahms Piano Trios belong to the very core of the romantic chamber music repertoire. They span a period from the 1850s (the 1st version of Op. 8) to the 1880s, Op. 101 being completed during the last decade of Brahms' active career as a composer. Piano Trio No. 1 was also revised by the composer as late as in 1889.

Award-winning violinist Christian Tetzlaff together with pianist Lars Vogt offer an exciting program of Violin Sonatas by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). This new release continues a successful series of recordings of violin chamber works by the artist duo. Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonatas are among the greatest masterpieces in 19th century chamber music. Brahms wrote these sonatas between 1878 and 1888, at the height of his creative powers. With these powerful works Brahms brought the genre of violin sonatas into a new dimension. Included is also Scherzo movement from the F. A. E. Sonata which Brahms contributed to a composite sonata with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich in 1853.

Fugue and the art of counterpoint are often almost bywords for Bach the composer. Certainly, from the viewpoint of many later generations, he was the first composer to make fugue the basis for a whole and complete piece of music, one that often seemed to serve no purpose beyond the ‘purely musical’. In a sense, this must surely be right: while there are countless fugal compositions before Bach, very few share the same relentless, yet expressive, cohesion, and most that were written outside the keyboard sphere were associated with a text and liturgical function. There is something about Bach’s fugal composition that immediately places it at the service of composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Schoenberg. For them, earlier counterpoint in the Renaissance tradition provided more a model for refined technique than for an overriding nexus of musically cohering ideas.

Much to the chagrin of Motown executives and soul fans, Marvin Gaye had a penchant for wanting to record soft, sentimental ballads over the formula that made Motown the juggernaut that it was. Hello Broadway is one of several compilations of sessions recorded in the early- to mid-'60s that finds Gaye's smooth, seductive voice covering a wide range of material. But Hello Broadway is Gaye singing standards from Broadway musicals, and for diehard fans this is a real treat. And while there are moments where Gaye simply emulates Nat King Cole rather than being himself, this is nonetheless an enjoyable listen. Diehard fans will most likely already have this in their collection, along with When I'm Alone I Cry and Romantically Yours, but casual fans would be better served starting off with the much more accessible Vulnerable, which compiles the highlights from the aforementioned recordings.