Fans of muscular progressive rock will love Solar Fire, a concept album loosely designed around cosmology. The album opens with the majestic "Father of Night, Father of Day," which has the drive and complexity of a prime King Crimson track. As unlikely as it may seem, the track was controversial in Mann's native South Africa because of the "Father of black, father of white" line, implying that apartheid might not extend to infinite space. The album moves on to the progressive rock/jazz fusion of "In the Beginning, Darkness," a swinging, even funky track that benefits from soulful vocals by Doreen Chanter and Irene Chanter of the Grove Singers.

Mendelssohn's concertos are often denigrated as unworthy of serious consideration compared to the major warhorse concertos of the 19th Century. While they certainly don't compare favorably to, say, the Beethoven concertos, they were never meant to. Mendelssohn wrote them as a young man to demonstrate his clearly remarkable musical talents as composer and pianist in public performance. And they made quite a splash indeed. They literally bubble over with youth, enthusiasm, delight, virtuosity and bravado. They tell me more about the young Mendelssohn than any dry biography could.

Limited three CD set containing original album plus bonus non-album tracks, demos, and more. This year marks 30 years since Roxette released her third album Joyride, which followed up the band's record global breakthrough with the album Look Sharp! In 1989. Roxette had in record time turned into a global hit phenomenon thanks to the three US hits The Look, Listen To Your Heart, It Must Have Been Love and other big hits such as Dressed For Success and Dangerous. Joyride was the album that was supposed to cement the unlikely successes of Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle. Which indeed it did. The album not only became Roxette's bestseller, the title track zoomed all the way up to the top of the US charts on 1st May 1991 - giving Roxette their fourth US No.1. Thus, the group set a record that no Scandinavian group or artist has managed to surpass.

French intellectuals, especially musicians and writers, were enchanted by the magic of Richard Wagner's music, but they earnestly wanted to pursue new ideas for what might follow. They believed that music and art should be free from 'German elements' and they consequently wanted to establish a decidedly contrasting, French style of music. It was for this reason that Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns set up the Societé Nationale de Musique in 1871, tasking it with supporting new French compositions. Successive composers were fascinated by new developments in the great French music tradition and experimented with modal alternatives and aspects of counterpoint. Compositional clarity was expected to express the simple but poetic relationship between music and text, drawing on graceful melodic lines and a Renaissance-like serenity of expression.

The remix collection that complements Original Jam Sessions 1969 has a handful of stunners, with the rest of the tracks being groovy enough, if only because of Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones' original recordings. Herbert mucks everything up on his track, making Quincy's band sound both death metal and amusement-park carousel. Cornershop relate the wacka-wacka guitar to the sitar in their mix, while Bedrock and Said Mrad both take the deep and creeping noir route with great results. Mix Master Mike and Cosby's rap on "Hikky-Burr" sound like a match made in funk heaven, but the turntable master doesn't do much more than scratch over the original track. Everything else is more pleasing than memorable, with few of the remixers willing to really mess with master Quincy's groove…

2-CD set of the complete and unedited concert recorded from the soundboard and mixed by the Peter Gabriel engineering team. These professionally mastered and manufactured CDs (NOT CD-Rs) are packaged in cardboard mini (LP-style) gatefold sleeves that add to the bootleg look and feel.

From classical cover band devoted exclusively to performing Metallica's symphony-friendly epics to all purpose string ensemble interpreters of other heavy metal bands' music for the cello, to composers of original material fit to mingle with even more metallic translations, Finland's Apocalyptica had come a long way in the span of their first three albums. And, naturally, there were bound to be further innovations lined up for the band's fourth opus, Reflections, which arrived in 2003 bearing not a single heavy metal cover, and introducing several unexpected innovations into Apocalyptica's m.o., to boot. Chief among these was the addition of a drummer behind the group (recently paired down from quartet to trio), and since Apocalyptica's virtuosos would hardly stand for anything short of brilliance for such an assignment, that percussionist wound up being none other than Slayer legend Dave Lombardo…

Live Blood' CD containing highlights of his live performance at London's Hammersmith Apollo in March 2011.

On Blue & Sentimental, tenor saxman Guy Laffite leads a quartet through a series of ballads originally composed by the likes of Count Basie (the title track), Duke Ellington ("Krum Elbow Blues"), and Ted Koehler ("Get Happy," "I've Got the World on a String"), among others. It's a rather laid-back and unchallenging set that's intended more for relaxing than analysis, and when approached as such, it proves quite effective. Laffite's quartet includes Raymond Fol (piano), George Daly (vibraphone), and Peanuts Holland (trumpet).

Para Além da Saudade is the third studio album bu Portuguese Fado singer Ana Moura. It was released in 2007 and published by World Village and Universal. Contains 15 tracks, with the opening theme, "Os Búzios," it became Ana Moura's most commercial single to date. The album met with favourable reviews. Rascunho gave the album a favourable review and said: "Leafing through the pages of the small book that accompanies this third record of original, never fail to jump out at you names like Faust, Amélia Muge, Patxi Andeon or Tim Reies - the latter surely the most unsuspecting strangers, but also not sounding that the oddness of names.

miRthkon hails from Oakland, California, and plays what they describe as "an inimitable blend of quirky prog rock, avant-garde jazz, contemporary classical abstraction, thrash metal, and an uncanny pop accessibility that defies categorization". The band was founded by guitarist/vocalist Wally Scharold in the late 1990s; while existing in some incarnation of some sort for well over a decade, it was not until 2005 that the core lineup (Sharold, guitarist Rob Pumpelly, bassist Nat Hawkes, drummer Dickie Ogden, and multi-reedist Carolyn Walter) came together for a heavy gigging rotation throughout the Bay Area. An EP, The Illusion of Joy, was released in September 2006. They were shortly thereafter signed to AltrOck Productions (home of Italian avant-prog outfit Yugen), and soon began work on their first full-length album Vehicle, which was released in May 2009.