The seventh studio album from Propagandhi, 2017's Victory Lap finds the Winnipeg post-hardcore outfit delivering a set of politically and socially aware punk anthems. The album follows up 2012's similarly inclined Failed States, and once again features the band's trademark mix of kinetic, prog-inflected arrangements, angular guitar riffage, and lead singer Chris Hannah's incisively literate, anti-fascist lyrics. It's also the first album the band has recorded with guitarist Sulynn Hago, who replaced longtime member David Guillas.

After forming in New Jersey in 2013, indie rockers Forth Wanderers make their Sub Pop debut five years later with Forth Wanderers. It's not their first LP, but given that singer Ava Trilling and guitarist Ben Guterl were still in high school when they started the group, and it's their first record with an outside producer (Cameron Konner), it offers their boldest and most consistent sound to date. Call it a best foot forward warranting an eponymous title. When writing the album, they honored a practice established at their inception in which Guterl writes kernels of songs and sends them to Trilling, who works on lyrics and vocal melodies, as they collaborate from separate locations.

What's that old saw about "laughing on the outside, crying on the inside"? That doesn't exactly describe Cullen Omori's second solo album, 2018's The Diet, but it's not entirely off the mark, either. Omori sounded sweetly bummed out on his previous effort, 2016's New Misery, which was primarily recorded with Omori handling all the instrumental chores himself. However, for these sessions, Omori and producer Taylor Locke brought in a handful of accompanists to help out, and the difference is clear from the outset. The Diet sounds brighter and more engaging than Omori's debut, and if this doesn't resemble sunshine pop, it is consistently warmer and more welcoming than New Misery.

Lovely, wonderful, inspired, poised performances by an aristocrat pianist. Arrau, who studied with 1 of Liszt’s students, brings us the 19th-century grand manner in music that in lesser hands can sound empty & like so much Romantic slapdash claptrap. Make no mistake, this is pianism of the most patrician & musical quality that never takes ANY musical gesture as a throw-away.

Essential: a masterpiece of Rock music
WHO’S NEXT is the Who’s most exciting album, and one of the greatest masterpieces of 1970s rock.

The Flaming Lips have a flair for making other artists’ music their own. Their versions of T. Rex’s “Ballrooms of Mars,” Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” and Madonna’s “Borderline,” a song they recorded with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, who also appear on the literally titled The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon, all show what they took from those artists and what they gave back.

With Hit to Death in the Future Head, the Flaming Lips make the leap to major-label status as though it were the moment they've been waiting for all their lives. Though not as conceptually tight as In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the album is no less cohesive or imaginative, and in its way serves as the bridge between the band's noisier, more hallucinatory indie work and the acid-bubblegum aesthetic perfected on their later Warner Bros. albums.

Two-time GRAMMY winner Tori Kelly's new album, Inspired By True Events, is released on Capitol/School Boy Records/Universal Music Canada. Kelly produced Inspired By True Events and co-wrote all of the songs. Jimmy Napes (Sam Smith, Disclosure, Mary J. Blige), co-produced the album and co-wrote several songs, including the first single, “Change Your Mind.” Inspired By True Events follows Tori’s 2018 album, Hiding Place, which won the GRAMMY Award for Best Gospel Album while the chart-topping lead single, “Never Alone” (Feat. Kirk Franklin), took the Best Gospel Performance/Song prize. This deluxe edition features two previously unreleased bonus tracks.

Facce d’amore, ‘Faces of love’ follows Jakub Józef Orliński’s first solo album, Anima Sacra, which moved Gramophone magazine to announce that “This is a voice with a big future.” It brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained countertenor says, the programme – which includes eight world premiere recordings – comprises “operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also anger or even madness.”

Facce d’amore, ‘Faces of love’ follows Jakub Józef Orliński’s first solo album, Anima Sacra, which moved Gramophone magazine to announce that “This is a voice with a big future.” It brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained countertenor says, the programme – which includes eight world premiere recordings – comprises “operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also anger or even madness.” Spanning some 85 years of the baroque period, the arias on Facce d’amore are by Handel, Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini, Conti, Hasse, Orlandini, Predieri and Matteis. Orliński is again partnered by the instrumentalists of Il Pomo d’Oro and their Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev.

The Berliner Philharmoniker and their honorary member Zubin Mehta are travelling to Japan – with Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. Zubin Mehta confesses to feeling particularly close to this mammoth work. Above all, the warm-sounding Adagio is “among the greatest Romantic movements, and when the cellos and violas sing out freely in the second theme, it breaks your heart”. Before setting off for Japan, the conductor and orchestra present their tour programme at the Berlin Philharmonie.

Daniele Gatti and the RCO are presenting an unconventional and thought-provoking approach to Mahler’s First Symphony. At the premiere in 1889, the audience was ill-prepared for Mahler’s bold orchestration, but the symphony gradually gained in popularity. The Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by the composer himself, gave the Dutch premiere in 1903. Mahler was absolutely delighted, exclaiming, ‘The musical culture in this country is stupendous! The way the people can just listen!’ This luxurious edition in book form is available in a limited edition.

Alexandre Bloch juxtaposes two French composers on this disc. First of all, Maurice Ravel, with the Rapsodie espagnole, his first major work for orchestra alone, written at the age of thirty-two, and La Valse, premiered thirteen years later and which he himself described as a ‘fantastical and fatal whirlwind’. And then Benjamin Attahir, born in Toulouse in 1989, one of the most gifted and prominent composers of the new generation. Commissioned by the Orchestre National de Lille and recorded here for the first time, it is a concerto for serpent that showcases the splendid sound of this low wind instrument, a member of the brass family even though it is made of wood covered in leather.

La Serenissima’s imposing standing in music history is reaffirmed again and again through the continuous presence of some of its greatest composers and musical works in concert and radio programs throughout the world. Inês d’Avena and Claudio Ribeiro wanted to have a different look at the repertoire, discover ‘new’ music, and perhaps add a small, new piece to the musical puzzle. In the autumn of 2018, they spent forty days in Venice exploring a number of musical archives.