This is Roine Stolt's (The Flower Kings, Transatlantic, Agents of Mercy, Kaipa) double solo CD that’s rootsy and bluesy and very cool. Featuring some lead and backing vocals from Neal Morse, this album has a killer band and is trademark, vintage Roine in all his creative brilliance. This is what Roine says about it: “For a long time I've wanted to do something that is connected with my roots and the way I heard music in my teens. Even the lyrics on this album reflect a spirit that was around at the time, slightly political and as true today as back then. I also wanted to do an album that focus heavily on my guitar playing and in particular the more 60-70's style blues playing with a sound that is closer to clean tube amp than modern overdriven rectified. I started this out as a blues album ,then along the way it became my "postpsycedelicblues" album, but now I've included so many of my early influences so I guess it ended up being just… a music album”.

Flag was a watershed album for the group. On one hand, it is a refinement of all the ideas the band had been following through the '80s, on the other, in the wake of their high-profile success with "Oh Yeah," Yello had reached the point where ideas turned into self-parody - the cover art of Deiter Meier and Boris Blank pulled together into a human knot is horrifically appropriate. Nothing is a surprise here, apart from how "The Race" is a Xerox of their own 1981 song "Bostich." Tracks like "Of Course I'm Lying" are empty exercises in suave, like late-period Roxy Music without the pedigree. Billy Mackenzie returns to provide backup vocals on the more romantic tunes. This isn't to say that the album is a dull listen - "Tied Up," repeated here three times on a nine-track album, is a fascinating collage of Afro-Cuban rhythms, rain storm effects, drums nicked from a Broadway revue, monkey chatter, basso-profundo lyrics, and screams…

Sérgio Mendes & Bossa Rio's Você Ainda Não Ouviu Nada! (1964) is a true milestone in the evolution of Brazilian instrumental music post-bossa nova. Infinitely sophisticated, but still full of swing, Bossa Rio (Tiao Neto, bass; Edison Machado, batteries, Edson Maciel, Raul de Souza and Hector Costita, metals) deal here with the reinvention of bossa classics and original songs.

Compiled by Chris Squire (in case you're wondering how "The Fish" made it this far upstream), Classic Yes was Atlantic's initial attempt to distill the band's best music. The key to this collection is in the title: this is the band's "classic" music. Anything prior to The Yes Album is cut out, no attempt is made to salvage snippets from Relayer or Tales from Topographic Oceans; Drama and Tormato are dispensed with. What remains is what made this band great: the science fiction and fantasy-laced epics, the tangible wizardry of their arrangements, moments that crystallized the magical power of music, and two unreleased live tracks from 1978 that find the band tethered to the realm of mortals."

Alligator has a justifiable reputation as one of the premier blues labels, and it draws on its recorded resources for this compilation. There's certainly no doubting the quality of the players and the music here, from Johnny Winter to the late Hound Dog Taylor, whose raw style sears the ears on Elmore James' "The Sun Is Shining." An older Corey Harris track reminds people that he's a remarkable acoustic slide player, and Sonny Landreth's "Taylor's Rock," from a Hound Dog Taylor tribute, features him playing no less than four parts, and still injecting plenty of grease. Australian Dave Hole remains a bit of a secret, but on the basis of this, deserves wider exposure. And if there's an odd man out here, it's A.C. Reed, who doesn't even play guitar. But he's joined by someone who does, Bonnie Raitt, and she lays down some wonderful work on "She's Fine." Elsewhere, there's Elvin Bishop, Luther Allison, and Lil' Ed…