Benefit was the album on which the Jethro Tull sound solidified around folk music, abandoning blues entirely. Beginning with the opening number, "With You There to Help Me," Anderson adopts his now-familiar, slightly mournful folksinger/sage persona, with a rather sardonic outlook on life and the world; his acoustic guitar carries the melody, joined by Martin Barre's electric instrument for the crescendos. This would be the model for much of the material on Aqualung and especially Thick as a Brick, although the acoustic/electric pairing would be executed more effectively on those albums. Here the acoustic and electric instruments are merged somewhat better than they were on Stand Up (on which it sometimes seemed like Barre's solos were being played in a wholly different venue), and as needed, the electric guitars carry the melodies better than on previous albums.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream are among the first groups that come to mind when discussing classic power trios. Ireland's Taste, led by guitarist Rory Gallagher, were also there at the beginning. They were raw, rocked hard, and were more devoted to the blues. Gallagher kept the trio format long after going solo, and became a fine songwriter as well. Crow Black Chicken are his countrymen. Christy O'Hanlon (vocals, guitar), Stephen McGrath (bass), and Gev Barrett (drums, backing vocals) have soaked up his and his contemporaries' influences, as well other loud and proud trios: ZZ Top, Mountain, Gov't Mule, etc. Electric Soup is their debut long-player. It's an excellent showcase for CBC's stunning playing and excellent songwriting – the latter is something many of their contemporaries never learned. These are not mere riff-heavy stoner rock jams, but songs. While they keep things basic, CBC understand the place of melody and dynamics; they've soaked up their share of folk and country in addition to blues and guitar rock.

The debut album by Alabama-born soul singer Ellis Hooks is a breath of fresh air on the blues and R&B scenes. For starters, Hooks' songs and sound are entirely unaffected by modern notions of sterility and restraint, or even worse, revivalism. These 13 songs burn with the same fire that the great Southern soul and R&B tracks did from the days of yore – without sounding like them. With producer Jon Tiven – who, along with wife Sally, also co-writes with Hooks – the singer has crafted an entirely upstart outing, one that touches upon Wilson Pickett, Sam Cooke, and Otis Redding, but feels like one of the gritty New York streets Hooks has busked upon. The brokenness and hope that lie in the rough grain of Hooks' voice in "Everything's Falling Around Me" feel as much like a prayer as a wish for transcendence, supported by the biting chunkiness of Sally Tiven's popping bass strut and Jon Tiven's knotty six-string fills. Hooks goes into the groove and lets it cover him; he's singing to the heavens, but also to anyone else who is in earshot and can provide help.

Heart had a pair of greatest-hits collections to their credit by 1997, but both did not contain all the renowned studio versions of their classic hits from the '70s (both 1980's Heart Greatest Hits: Live on Epic and 1997's Greatest Hits on Capitol contained half studio and half live material). 1998's Greatest Hits on Epic/Legacy finally corrected this once and for all – collecting all of Heart's '70s studio hits on a single disc. Nearly all of the songs have become classic rock staples, the best-known being the Zep-esque rockers "Crazy on You," "Barracuda," and "Magic Man," while the more subdued acoustic material ("Dreamboat Annie," "Love Alive," "Dog & Butterfly") showcases the immense talents of vocalist Ann Wilson.

After gaining some recognition from the success of the band's previous album, Bachman-Turner Overdrive got around to recording Not Fragile. Not only had one of the three Bachman brothers (Tim, the rhythm guitarist) left the band to BTO's advantage, but Randy Bachman and C.F. Turner had clearly grown musically. To the album's benefit, most of the material on Not Fragile are the band's much-liked rock anthems, ranging from the hyper-distorted title track, through the famous but far more timid song "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet." Indeed, for hard rock fanatics, it doesn't come much better than on Not Fragile.

Like most products issued from the Jimi Hendrix archive in the '90s, several separate releases featuring identical recordings of this one performance have been issued. 1994's Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock on MCA is the first formal packaging of this most famous of rock shows. Other, more collectable discs followed, often with much more extensive track lists. The Woodstock show that these discs commemorate was supposed to be a headline performance for Hendrix and his band, but after many delays and a fan exodus, the guitarist ended up playing to only a fraction of listeners a full day after the event was scheduled to end. The first performance with new backing outfit Hendrix's Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, this expanded outfit is often difficult to hear over Hendrix and his guitar on this recording…

Come his last mass to be written in Salzburg, Mozart had an ulterior purpose: to annoy the Prince-Archbishop. Einstein highlights the Gloria. It features an extended "Amen". Its prolongation was designed to inflame the cleric who was no fan of florid church-music. Mention should also be made of the Kyrie with its droll interjections - penitential this ain't. The motif that Mozart uses to unify the Credo is a pale imitation of its counterpart in the Coronation Mass. The Salzburger is back to best form with the fugal Benedictus in A Minor; similarly, he later cannibalised the Agnus Dei when he came to write Figaro. Two other works feature on this disc. Note-spinning predominates in the Litany, K 125; it's sole redeeming feature is the high-spirited Kyrie which only Mozart could have written.

Pleyel, who is more famous as a piano maker, enjoyed great popularity at the time by publishing Haydn's works and producing numerous chamber music works that followed Haydn's style as a disciple. The string quartet Op. 11 included here has a beautiful formal beauty with impressive handling of unique accents, and the variety of variations is more impressive than that of his teacher. The Luigi Tomasini Quartet uses original instruments and produces beautiful tones with excellent control, creating a perfect harmony between strong accents and delicate melodies.

After ten years and five albums of groundbreaking progressive death metal, Neurosis have managed to carve a highly original niche for themselves… coming off somewhat like a Tool for extremists. Yeah, you heard right. But while this Oakland bunch deserve great kudos for such unwavering commitment to their vision, they seem fated to remain confined to well-kept secret status for remaining so stubbornly inaccessible. 1999's Times of Grace adds another chapter to this ongoing dilemma by delving ever deeper into the group's hypnotic semi-industrial dirge. But whereas previous efforts tended to suffer from erratic songwriting and uneven pacing, many tracks taking painfully long to build towards their crescendos, this album offers the most seamless continuity of any album in the band's challenging discography…

German Brass is a brass ensemble, founded 1974 as Brass Quintet by Enrique Crespo, named "Deutsches Blechbläserquintett – Solobläser deutscher Spitzenorchester" ( German Brass Quintet - Soloists of German top level orchestras ) In 1985, to record the CD "Bach 300" (J.S. Bach born 1685) the group was extended to 10 performers and still makes music in this instrumentation. The group is well known as best performing professional brass ensemble in Germany. More than 20 CDs and 2 DVDs have been recorded to date. German Brass musicians are members of major German Symphony Orchestras and/or are Professors at university schools of music.

Powerhouse vocalist Jack Russell leads a superb new Great White through this killer salute to the mighty Zep. This long-awaited sequel to the 1998 album that became one of the group's best-selling, most loved albums, rocks even harder than it's predecessor and includes all-new covers of "Whole Lotta Love," "Kashmir," "Houses Of The Holy," "Misty Mountain Hop" and more. Russell's voice has only improved with the years and he is ably backed by stellar guitarists Robby Lachner and Michael Olivieri along with bassist Dan McNay and drummer Dicki Fliszar.