Timing is everything in pop music, and Marilyn Manson hit a zeitgeist in the mid-'90s with Antichrist Superstar, riding the post-alternative wave to the top of the charts with his dark, arty, industrial metal. He was a proud shock artist and a great interview, one of the few rockers of his time who stood his own against his attackers by offering articulate, informed counterarguments to their blustering rage. Like any shock rocker, though, the novelty wears thin fast, and what was once scary turns into self-parody. Manson, no stranger to rock history, attempted to circumvent this by turning quickly to the left with the glam-soaked Mechanical Animals, but in doing so he lost huge portions of his audience, and by the time he returned to scary industrial metal form on Holy Wood in 2000, he seemed out of date and few critics or fans paid attention…

Where Is Brooklyn was Don Cherry's final album for Blue Note, and it returned to the quartet format of Complete Communion, this time featuring Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax along with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Ed Blackwell. Here, Cherry abandons his concept of recording all the album's compositions as side-long medleys; rather, each is treated separately, with spaces in between the tracks. There wasn't a need to integrate the compositions by periodically returning to their themes, so perhaps that's why Cherry doesn't really focus as much on bringing out his compositions this time around…

David Geyra is one of Israel’s premier dance music composers and producers and his music is performed worldwide by some of the leading dance and theatre companies. His very original and highly individual music encompasses elements of jazz in combination with a Gershwin style of composition, modern dance music, ballett and Middle Eastern pop influences.

In 1975, the Italian progressive rock band Banco del Mutuo Soccorso released its first English LP after three Italian ones. Following the example of fellow progsters Premiata Forneria Marconi, they shortened their name to Banco and re-packaged a handful of tracks from their previous records with English vocals to put together an introductory package for the English-speaking world. But unlike PFM's Photos of Ghosts, Banco contained two new pieces, and the old ones had been completely re-recorded, some even re-written.

Even many serious Rolling Stones fans aren't aware that Bill Wyman issued a solo album in the early '90s, as Stuff initially came out only in Japan and Argentina. Like some other Stones projects of the time, it wasn't recorded in a concentrated dose, but pieced together from sessions dating back as far as September 1988. Even had it benefited from a worldwide release, however, it's hard to see how many fans – of the Rolling Stones or otherwise – would have taken to the record, for these are largely basic, repetitious funk-disco-dance-based tunes with a dated 1980s synthetic production. Wyman's thin, hoarse vocals don't help, and while it's possible these are intended more as satires of a trendy style or '80s stars like Prince than serious artistic statements, the wit is so mild that any jokes are wont to pass largely unnoticed.

The Dirty Truth marks Joanne Shaw Taylor’s fourth studio release and second time working with producer Jim Gaines (the first being on her studio debut some five years ago) with the goal of tapping into some of what drove White Sugar. The record plays out like what we’ve come to expect from Taylor - a heady combination of not-quite-aggressive and not-quite-mellow - but this one sounds a little closer to home for Taylor. Her songs just sort of flow off of the record naturally, almost as though they’d always been out there somewhere and Taylor merely uncovered them and made them accessible…

Ultravox (formerly known as Ultravox!) are a British new wave band, formed in London in 1974 as Tiger Lily. Between 1980–86, they scored seven Top Ten albums and seventeen Top 40 singles in the UK, the most successful of which was their 1981 hit "Vienna". The band has been led by two different frontmen who never played together in the band at the same time. From 1974 until 1979, singer John Foxx was frontman and the main driving force behind Ultravox. Foxx left the band to embark on a solo career and, following his departure, Midge Ure took over as lead singer, guitarist and frontman in 1980 after he and keyboardist Billy Currie worked in the studio project Visage. Ure revitalised the band and steered it to commercial success lasting until the mid-1980s. Ure left the band in 1987 after establishing his own solo career and the group disbanded for a while. A new line-up, led by Currie, was formed in 1992, but achieved limited success.

Johann Heinrich Rolle belongs to the generation of J. S. Bach’s elder sons. Pipped at the post by C. P. E. Bach as Telemann’s successor in Hamburg, Rolle centred his musical life round Berlin and his native Magdeburg. Recitatives, arias, duets and choruses make up this two-part music drama which is both lyrical and on occasion vividly pictorial in its imagery. A fine performance.

Born in Moravia in 1759, Franz Krommer was trained as a violinist and organist. Relatively late in his carrier, in 1975, he settled in Vienna as a violin teacher, but he quickly earned a reputation as a composer, which is evident by the large number of his works published at the time.

Glazunov’s ballet Les Ruses d’amour (also known as The Trial of Damis), is a charming choreographic realization of the French rococo, with a strong element of pastiche. Although the music is thoroughly Russian in its orchestral colouring and language, Glazunov makes imaginative use of earlier French dance melodies, and the score was praised by his former teacher Rimsky-Korsakov for its ‘unusual mastery of writing and extremely pictorial beauty’. The scenario concerns a duchess’s daughter, Isabella, who tests the Marquis Damis’s love by disguising herself as a maid servant.

The Return of the Fabulous Hofner Bluenotes is the twenty-second studio album by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea, released in 2008 by his own record label, Jazzee Blue. It comprises three CDs and double 10" Vinyl records in an 80-page hardback book. It is the second album of his project, the Hofner Blue Notes (2003). The project narrates the history of The Delmonts, an imaginary guitar instrumental band from the late 1950s, who in early 1960s evolved into blues band The Hofner Bluenotes. It also gives a brief history of the Hofner guitar, and its importance in the development of music in Britain. The music was recorded by Rea (guitars), Colin Hodgkinson (bass) and Martin Ditcham (drums), who feature in the book, together with Niel Drinkwater and Robert Ahwai.