Though Michael Bolton's Love Songs isn't tremendously different than his Greatest Hits 1985-1995 – his popular body of work is virtually nothing but love songs – this collection will probably please his biggest fans. Gathering smash hits from 1987 to 1997, the album includes "Soul Provider," "Said I Loved You … But I Lied," "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You," "Missing You Now," and "When a Man Loves a Woman." Though it's not quite as definitive as Greatest Hits 1985-1995, anyone looking to own just one Michael Bolton album wouldn't go wrong with this one, either.

Margot Reisinger has composed, performed and produced contemporary World Music based on a great diversity of cultures. In her unique style she brings together artists from a wide range of ethnic musical traditions with contemporary Western musicians to create a cultural understanding in the universal language of music…

Italian jazz, world and classical singer Maria Pia De Vito has a penchant for British pianists. Before hooking up with Huw Warren, in the late 1990s/early 2000s she made three albums with John Taylor, including her breakthrough set Phone (1998).
Dialektos is a richly fruitful collaboration between the two musicians, playing as it does to their mutual love of folk roots, energetic rhythms and strong melodies. Its cultural fulcrum is the southern Italian city of Naples, whose popular songs the virtuosic but earthy De Vito has celebrated on previous recordings…

Michel McLean (guitar, ex-Les Karrik) and Pierre Moreau write most of the music for L'Engoulevent, and the core band is completed by Francoise Turcotte (violin) and Russel Cagnon (cello). They are aided by a number of musicians from Conventum, as well as McLean's old Les Karrik cohort Claude LaFrance on one track. Their first album was entitled "L'Ile Ou Vivent Les Loups", and was released on the Le Tamanour label in 1977. Roughly half the tracks are instrumental, and the vocal tracks are done in a folk style but are not traditional pieces. Perhaps because half the core band is employed on string instruments, there is both an exquisite beauty and contrapuntal richness to much of the music. There can sometimes be three semi-independent, but mutually supportive, harmonic lines going at once…

Franz Liszt's songs remain the least-often-heard segment of his output, even as serious historians of 19th century music, including Alfred Brendel, have praised them. They are a bit uneven, and they are, for a composer who made his living with the grand gesture, uncharacteristically quiet. Various singers have taken them up, however, and this major release by Jonas Kaufmann, with the invaluable Helmut Deutsch on the piano, marks a kind of milestone. The songs are striking for how little they resemble Schumann or anything else written anywhere near the same time (until perhaps Hugo Wolf), and Kaufmann absolutely gets their originality.

Holiday-themed albums need to either be pretty good, horrifically terrible, or completely original to cause even the jolliest head to turn. Twisted Christmas, a ten-track collection of yuletide classics from the band that once writhed atop a convertible singing the song "Burn in Hell" near the end of Pee Wee's Big Adventure, manages to achieve all three…

Eye II Eye is the fourteenth studio album by the German hard rock band Scorpions, released in 1999. It is a radical departure in that Eye II Eye is much more pop-oriented than their previous work, which alienated some fans, despite the single "Mysterious" reaching number 26 on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart…

So named because this consists of Skynyrd's earliest recordings and was released after the tragic plane crash, thereby seeming to close the door on the band's career, Skynyrd's First and… Last is more than a simple historic curiosity, but not too much more. This music is more notable for being interesting - in how it's possible to hear Ronnie VanZant coming into his own as a writer, or hearing future Blackfoot leader Ricky Medlocke's early songs - than it is for being good, which it certainly is. Taken on its own, separated from the rest of the group's catalog, this would likely be seen as a great forgotten hard rock album from an obscure Southern outfit, but since Skynyrd went on to greater things, this winds up as a footnote - enjoyable, yes, but not quite necessary.

Some things refuse to die, they just morph endlessly. While few of the original members of the Fabulous Thunderbirds are present for this effort, two founding members of Roomful of Blues are leading the charge. The results are commendable. Duke Robillard's expert guitar lines ride along on Al Copley's true-blue piano and smoky vocals for a very fine trip. The trademark Texas blues of Jimmie Vaughan is replaced here with some of the swampiest Louisiana R&B you can find. You'll boogie, you'll stroll, you'll pass out in your whiskey, but you'll have a good time.

Malafemmina is Gianna Nannini's eighth studio album, and tenth album overall. It was released in 1988…

Anthrax fans have had no choice but to be very patient waiting for the arrival of the group's tenth studio album overall, 2011's Worship Music. Doubling as the first Anthrax studio album since 2003's We've Come for You All and the first with singer Joey Belladonna since 1990's Persistence of Time, Worship Music was also recorded once before with singer Dan Nelson, and was to be released in 2009. After the group parted ways with Nelson shortly before the album's projected release, Belladonna was welcomed back into the fold, and all the vocals were re-recorded…

Friendship has often been the basis for great collaborations in music. It was also something very special for “Mr. Red Horn”, trombonist Nils Landgren, when two years ago he fulfilled a long-cherished wish by celebrating Christmas With My Friends (ACT 9454-2). The critics celebrated the album as "the year’s most beautiful Christmas CD", "a soulful heavenly journey", and it went Gold in both Sweden and Germany.
Five of the twelve friends who accompanied Nils Landgren two years ago are with him again on Christmas With My Friends II: the classic singer Jeanette Köhn, the versatile vocalist Sharon Dyall, jazz singer and pianist Ida Sand, and The Norrland Duo of Sweden’s most talented acoustic guitarist Johan Norberg and Jonas Knutsson, a saxophonist especially known for his lyrical style…

Akritas created a unique piece of art, Greek in nature (vocals in Greek, though there are not many vocal parts, Mediterranian tunes throughout the album) and similar to Italian symphonic prog in approach, when lots of musical ideas change each other in a short period of time, making the music always unpredictable. Lots of contrasts, powerful organ chords, propulsive and at times aggresive drums, tasteful use of synthesizers, interesting guitar passages are the components of this short record.