The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 collects more pop and rock holiday tunes, this time venturing further into the '70s and '80s with songs like Paul McCartney & Wings' "Wonderful Christmastime," Hall & Oates' "Jingle Bell Rock," and Barry Manilow's "It's Just Another New Year's Eve." The collection still features traditional pop chestnuts, including Dean Martin's "A Marshmallow World," Johnny Mathis' "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)," and Andy Williams' "Sleigh Ride," but this volume's overall feel is more contemporary than classic. Other highlights include Manhattan Transfer's "A Christmas Love Song," the Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping," the Tokens' "Little Drummer Boy," and the Jackson 5's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." If The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 isn't necessarily the most coherent volume in the series, it's certainly one of the most interesting.

Guitarist Johnny Whitehill has been a fixture on the British blues scene since the 1970s, emerging as a star while a member of the Blues Burglars, the band he formed with harpist Paul Lamb in the early '80s. As a guitarist, his inspirations and influences came from the likes of B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Lightnin' Hopkins, et al., and, later on, fellow British bluesman Peter Green, among others. He has recorded albums of his own intermittently, amid two decades working mostly with Paul Lamb & the King Snakes – the successor band to the Blues Burglars – and since the opening of the 21st century has toured England with his own group, Johnny Whitehill's Real Deal.

With this album, Oldfield began to make an attempt to break down his extended structures into a more commercially acceptable format, with the side-long title track being separated into four sections. Early versions of the album included "Sally," Oldfield's paean to his partner Sally Cooper, while later pressings include "Into Wonderland."

Commercially, Super Trouper, ABBA's seventh album, was another worldwide blockbuster. "The Winner Takes It All," its lead-off single, released several months in advance of the album in most territories, was a smash; for example, it was the group's 14th consecutive Top Five hit in the U.K. and their eighth number one there. The title track was also a British chart-topper (their last), as was the album, their sixth. "Lay All Your Love on Me" made the U.K. Top Ten, and "On and on and On" was released as a single in some countries, hitting the Top Ten in Australia. (Typically, American success was more modest, though the album went gold, and "The Winner Takes It All" was a number one adult contemporary and Top Ten pop hit.) Musically, Super Trouper found ABBA, always trend-conscious, taking account of the passing of disco and returning to the pop/rock sound typical of their early albums…

The acoustic duo's first album in three years doesn't substantially alter the twosome's established game plan. But its well-recorded mix of studio and live tracks - including one with a full yet laid-back band - shows them to be at the top of their form. Combining traditional Delta and Piedmont blues and gospel classics like Robert Johnson's "Last Fair Deal Going Down" (a concert staple that finally makes it to disc), Blind Boy Fuller's salty, suggestive "Something Smells," and Skip James' "Sick Bed Blues" with their similarly styled originals proves they are not stuck in the past, even as they revel in visiting and interpreting it. John Cephas' "The Pimp in the Pink Suit," with its cowboy chorus, could just as well have been written in the '30s. Phil Wiggins shines on "Burn Your Bridges," an instrumental showcase for his lip-shredding harmonica gymnastics that is as compelling as anything from the great Sonny Terry, an obvious influence…

Partly because of its Brazilian collaborators and partly because of "The Girl From Ipanema," Getz/Gilberto is nearly always acknowledged as the Stan Getz bossa nova LP. But Jazz Samba is just as crucial and groundbreaking; after all, it came first, and in fact was the first full-fledged bossa nova album ever recorded by American jazz musicians. And it was just as commercially successful, topping the LP charts and producing its own pop chart hit single in "Desafinado." It was the true beginning of the bossa nova craze, and introduced several standards of the genre (including Ary Barroso's "Bahia" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Desafinado" and "Samba de Uma Nota Só" [aka "One Note Samba"]). But above all, Jazz Samba stands on its own artistic merit as a shimmering, graceful collection that's as subtly advanced - in harmony and rhythm - as it is beautiful…

Samsara Blues Experiment are a Berlin based band, founded in Summer 2007 by leadguitarist/singer Christian Peters. They went through several changes in the first period but are in constant line-up since September 2008 featuring Hans Eiselt (guitar), drummer Thomas Vedder and Richard Behrens (bass). As the band name implies three elemental aspects are to notice - the blues as the fundament where it all comes from, the inclusion of spiritual influences accompanied by Indian/raga music and the experimental approach to mix up varied elements in a convincing manner.
The band's songs are dominated by a playful dual guitar work as well as a passionate blend of heavy psych, stoner and space rock. This is provided with several nuances and transitions in between - quite retro styled, jamming, even sometimes worked out with a repetitive hypnotic touch in the tradition of krautrock…

This live album was recorded at OMD's show at the Liverpool Empire on 4th November, the hometown show on the 40th Anniversary Greatest Hits tour.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are one of the earliest, most commercially successful, and enduring synth pop groups. Inspired most by the advancements of Kraftwerk and striving at one point "to be ABBA and Stockhausen," they've continually drawn from early electronic music as they've alternately disregarded, mutated, or embraced the conventions of the three-minute pop song. Outside their native England, OMD are known primarily for "Maid of Orleans" and the Pretty in Pink soundtrack smash "If You Leave," yet they scored 18 additional charting U.K. singles in the '80s alone…