"If you grew up in the ‘80s and had even the smallest of passing interest in music, particularly club music, chances are you were very familiar, albeit unwittingly, with the work of John Morales. On the radio, in the record racks and most importantly on the dancefloor John’s work (predominately with studio partner Sergio Munzibai) helped define an era and influence future generations of DJs, producers and artists.
Born into a hard working Puerto Rican household in the Bronx, New York, at the start of the rock ‘n’ roll era, Morales, like many children of the era, was fascinated by this new art-form that was saturating the airwaves and rebelling parents everywhere. So in love with the music he heard, as a 12-year old he persuaded his local record store to give him a part-time job with payment not in dollars, but in 45s. By the time he was old enough to get a full-time job his burgeoning record collection had helped land him one of his first DJ gig at the influential Stardust Ballroom in the Bronx (his father had early owned a bar in Jersey City where John had first got the DJ bug). As his reputation grew Morales was invited downtown to Manhattan to play guest spots at the likes of Pippins, Bentleys, 1018, Limelight and the infamous Studio 54.

French 24-bit remastered reissue of 1967 album includes three bonus tracks, 'Harlem Lady', 'This Side of Heaven', & 'Poverty Street', packaged in a digipak. David Samuel McWilliams (4 July 1945 – 8 January 2002) was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist from Northern Ireland, best known for his 1967 song "Days of Pearly Spencer".

This 1972 film broke reggae into U.S. pop culture with Jimmy Cliff's Many Rivers to Cross ; the Maytals' Pressure Drop , and the rest of its stellar soundtrack. 30 years later Island and Hip-O teamed to create this 2-CD edition, the definitive master of the original plus 18 cuts of crucial 1968-72 reggae: Guava Jelly Johnny Nash; Sweet Sensation Melodians, and many more of Cliff's classics. Great new liners, too! Jamaican filmmaker Perry Henzell made reggae an integral player in his gritty 1973 saga of a renegade Kingston singer who becomes a modern Robin Hood, casting one of the style's earliest stars, Jimmy Cliff, in the lead, and filling this soundtrack–here presented in a remastered version–with classics from Toots & the Maytals ("Pressure Drop," "Sweet and Dandy"), Desmond Dekker ("Shanty Town"), the Melodians ("Rivers of Babylon"), and the Slickers ("Johnny Too Bad"). Cliff himself gets pole position, however, getting in the first ("You Can Get It If You Really Want") and last ("The Harder They Come") words in this first-rate reggae primer, which also features Cliff's enduring "Many Rivers to Cross." –Sam Sutherland

9 1/2 Weeks Review by Thom Jurek
Every Valentine's Day, video stores and online rental outlets are swamped with requests for the film this soundtrack represents. Crazy as it sounds, this tale of obsession, surrender, masochism, and domination really gets under the skin of some people over and over again. (For those who either don't remember or never knew, the film was an interpretation of a seemingly authentic account of just such an affair by a well-known socialite who wrote it under a nom de plume.) While the film might have a sort of timeless appeal – Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke were young then, and while one has aged gracefully, the other has become a plastic surgery disaster – the soundtrack (which also experiences a bit of a sales spike during this holiday) has lost much of it. Certainly the theme song, "I Do What I Do," penned by John Taylor (right), Michael Des Barres, and Jonathan Elias and performed by them along with B.J. Nelson, Michael Brecker, and Dalbello, sounds so dated as to be almost laughable, as are contributions by Devo ("Bread and Butter"), Dalbello ("Black on Black"), and Corey Hart ("Eurasian Eyes"). Other cuts here have become classics (or already were): Bryan Ferry's "Slave to Love," Joe Cocker's "You Can Leave Your Hat On," and Eurythmics' "This City Never Sleeps." Still others, such as Luba's "The Best Is Yet to Come" and "Let It Go," are campy fun, and Stewart Copeland's moody "Cannes" is a miniature masterpiece that actually reflects something akin to incidental music in a film score.

The Hot Spot [Original Soundtrack] Review by Eugene Chadbourne
A return look and listen to this historical and breathtaking collaboration between two of the great figures of modern music should naturally be prefaced by a few key facts. Although this album presents itself as the soundtrack to the film The Hot Spot, like many such releases it bares little relation to the music that was actually used in the film – not that much of this music was actually used.

St. Elmo's Fire Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
St. Elmo's Fire was the definitive Brat Pack movie, following Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Rob Lowe, and Mare Winningham as they tried to sort their life out after college. The soundtrack launched two big hits, "Love Theme from St. Elmo's Fire" and John Parr's "Man in Motion (Theme from St. Elmo's Fire)," but those are the only two memorable pieces of the music on the album. Apart from his "Love Theme," David Foster doesn't manage to write music that stands apart from the movie, which makes the soundtrack a bit of a dull listen when taken on its own terms.

The Silver Fox’s complete Groove and RCA recordings in one place for the first time, including several new-to-CD tracks and one previously unissued. A high-class fusion of R&B, Country, Pop, Jazz and Easy Listening, produced by Chet Atkins in Nashville 1963-1965.
Charlie Rich looked and sang like Elvis’ brother – his mature older brother, hair a silver grey, and more into jazz than the jumped-up country sound that had taken over the world in the mid-50s. Like Elvis, Charlie Rich started out his recording career with Sam Phillips in Memphis. And like Elvis, he was an incredibly versatile performer, with a seemingly effortless style and a soulful vibrato; Greil Marcus once said he “could make it on all the charts at once: R&B, Pop, Easy Listening and Country. [He has] that much range.”

UK collection that focuses on songs penned by the American singer/songwriter. The songwriting skills of Penn and Spooner Oldham have already been celebrated in fine style on Ace's award-winning Sweet Inspiration. This compilation includes performances by Ted Taylor, Linda Gail Lewis, Roy Hamilton, Billy Young, Jeanie Fortune and many others.

Kiss to the Brain is the closest Helios Creed has ever come to conventional hard rock. Whereas the last Helios Creed album, Lactating Purple, was essentially a long psychedelic track extended over an album length, Kiss to the Brain has a more song-oriented approach. There is no shortage of psychedelic dementia (like the title track and the opener, "XL-351") but there is also plenty of concise, hard-driving guitar rock, such as "Throw Away the Rind" and "Legs." Even the spacy psychedelic songs are enveloped in fairly conventional structures. This is still not anywhere near mainstream hard rock – there's plenty of bizarre lyrics and spacy sound effects, even on the hard rock songs – but it does display that Helios Creed has the ability to create more than unstructured sonic explorations. The result is the most satisfying effort of Helios Creed's oeuvre.

Her amazing 1993 solo debut full of heartrending songs, baroque pop arrangements and lovely melodies. Mann has retired the 'Til Tuesday moniker, but the elements that made Everything's Different Now (1988) so superb–heartrending songs, baroque pop arrangements and lovely melodies–remains intact. Jeff Bateman.

This two-in-one set features a pair of LPs by Corey Hart, First Offense and Boy in the Box, originally issued in 1984 and 1985. These 19 tracks include the original versions of Hart's biggest hits, "Sunglasses at Night" and "Never Surrender".

Passionate, dramatic, yet poetic and richly nuanced Mari Kodama brings all these qualities to her interpretation of Beethovens Complete Piano Concertos. This exceptional recording with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin shines with extraordinary intensity and contrast, due in no small measure to the artistic bond between Mari Kodama and her husband, the conductor Kent Nagano. Beethovens Piano Concertos are undoubtedly amongst the most influential works in the history of music. Art demands of us that we shall not stand still, the composer once wrote, placing the idea of development at the heart of his music. His five piano concertos saw Beethoven take piano music out of the salon and into the concert hall, playing a crucial role in advancing the genre towards the symphony, whilst simultaneously creating a bridge from the First Viennese School to the Romantic period. Mari Kodama, whose virtuosic mastery of the piano made her a household name all over the world, has completed the Beethoven Piano Concerto Cycle with her husband Kent Nagano, the international star conductor.

"Stupendous brilliance, breathless virtuosity. Anne-Sophie Mutter's Virtuosi thrilled at the Vienna Musikverein." (Die Presse) In June 2023, star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter gave an impressive concert in Vienna with her Virtuosi ensemble. Based on this, a varied album has now been created, with music by Antonio Vivaldi, J. S. Bach, Joseph Bologne, André Previn and John Williams. "Growing up, I'm on the trail of storytellers," Mutter says of her work with the Virtuosi, a rotating ensemble of current and former Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation scholarship holders.

The second part of the 18th century saw increasing popularity for the trio for keyboard and two melody instruments. Joseph Haydn contributed considerably to the development of this genre with his trios for keyboard, violin and cello. Whereas in his early trios the violin has a relatively important part to play – Haydn usually played that part himself - gradually the keyboard became the dominating instrument, reducing the violin and cello to merely accompanying roles.

The 17th-century Austrian composer Heinrich Biber is remembered today for his extraordinary solo violin music–collections such as the Mystery Sonatas. He wrote a number of large-scale instrumental works and choral pieces as well, but their reputation is not as high. They include a lot of grand gestures for brass, but they tend to be harmonically static and often seem long-winded. So Konrad Junghänel and his superb musicians have really achieved something by making the works on this disc sound so appealing.