BIG STIR RECORDS proudly presents a new, never-before heard full-length album from legendary NYC power pop pioneers SORROWS, the third and final chapter of a legacy that's only grown since their late '70s debut. PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW, recorded in a one-night whirlwind session in 1981 and capturing the band at their fiery peak, includes the indie hit preview single “Out Of My Head” along with ten more previously unreleased Sorrows originals and three choice covers.

MUSHROOM RECORDS was founded in London’s Chalk Farm district in 1970 by producer Vic Keary, an experienced industry veteran who’d spent most of the 1960s working as Maximum Sound Productions. Over the course of three years, Mushroom issued a dizzying variety of records, embracing a broad range of music styles from Prog Rock (Second Hand, Chillum) to Singer-Songwriters (Simon Finn, Andreas Thomopoulos), Traditional Folk (Callinan-Flynn, The Liverpool Fishermen), Indian music (Pandit Kanwar Sain Trikha, Nitai Dasgupta), avant garde jazz (Lol Coxhill) and world music (Les Flambeaux). And in Magic Carpet, Mushroom hosted a group who reflected most of the above genres on one album.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Four Wheel Drive album is most often overlooked, mainly because all of the attention was focused on the singable "na na na naa"'s of one of B.T.O.'s biggest hits in "Hey You." But the rest of the album is made up of the band's lunch-pail rock & roll sound, combining ample amounts of factory-made blues to street-dirty guitar rock. Although it can't really hold a candle to Not Fragile, B.T.O.'s best album, there's still a fair amount of well-played radio rock to hold Four Wheel Drive up.

Two CD set containing a pair of albums plus bonus tracks from the music industry legend. A songwriter, producer, singer, entrepreneur, artist and candidate for the title of Fifth Season, Crewe was one of music's true renaissance men. With Bob Gaudio, he co-wrote and produced most of the Four Seasons greatest hits, and he also guided the careers of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Oliver, and many others. Yet one period of his extraordinary career has been long overlooked… until now. During 1976 and 1977, Crewe was signed to Elektra Records, where he released two remarkably diverse albums. 1976's Street Talk resurrected The Bob Crewe Generation, best-known for the swinging bachelor pad classic Music to Watch Girls By, for the disco age. As a disco-rock ballet concept album aimed at Broadway, Street Talk reflected the exuberant, uninhibited and provocative spirit of the era with it's lush, orchestral disco style. The following year, Crewe emerged as a singer/songwriter with the solo Motivation. Helmed by legendary rock producer Jerry Wexler and famed Muscle Shoals musician Barry Beckett, Motivation was inspired by Carole King's Tapestry and remains a passionate, spiritual and raw pop statement from an artist who had plenty to say.

“The enormous, long river of storytelling, fed by ancient headwaters, shoring up time, bounded by landscape and people and witness to the beauty and anguish of each. Deconstructed ballads and reveries of drunk ghosts, obtuse and palatable superimposed. The relatable not just accompanied but defined by the very weird. Kitchen-table images from a spotty memory, beater cars mystically lifted, characters coming and going, old friends on the porch. In this town everyone knows each other, knows each others’ business, and everyone’s got strange trouble. Big Ugly is beer-fisted radio country from a post-verbal hermit; “Oh what country, friends, is this,” a line from “Twelfth Night,” uttered by Viola after being shipwrecked on an unfamiliar shore, one that might hold new life or prove to be another disappointment. Nobody moves. The voice is home, but home is a mystery. We get older and learn nothing, our world barely recognizable. We help each other out. We stay in a place that is losing its future, whether out of commitment or despondency. Big Ugly is Southern mountain rock, Southern lit, made and dedicated to the inextricable entity of land and people, to visions of community and utopia and testament to erosion. The country is a steady drum beat and fried guitar. The language is a dream.” – Dan Wriggins

Return of Saturn is an almost defiantly mature record about two things: Stefani's exploration of a troubled romance and her own romantic ideals, plus a serious attempt by the group to not only keep new wave alive, but to make that adolescent music relevant to an older audience. It's a high concept, but Return of Saturn is filled with satisfying contradictions. It's melodic, but deceptively complex; it can seem frothy, but it's never frivolous. No Doubt's desire to expand the emotional template of new wave is the perfect match for Stefani's themes – she may be writing about love, but she's not writing adolescent love songs. Fragments of her teenaged romantic fantasies remain, but she's writing as a woman in her late 20s. She's tired of being another "ex-girlfriend" – she wants to fall in love, get married, and have a family. It's a subject that's surprisingly uncommon in pop music, which would alone make Return of Saturn an interesting album. What makes it a successful one is that the band delivers an aural equivalent of Stefani's lyrical themes.

It's easy to take Robert Cray for granted, for the singer-guitarist has altered his approach so little since he first burst on the scene. Nonetheless, the changes from his early albums to Some Rainy Morning are no less real for having been subtle. Cray is still combining urban-blues guitar and Southern-soul vocals on stories of romantic treachery and working-class frustration, but he has distilled that strategy until nothing superfluous remains. "Some Rainy Morning," recorded with his stripped-down road quartet, is full of breathing room so Cray's singing and playing are set off more dramatically than ever. In addition to the eight originals by Cray and his bandmates, the album includes remakes of Wilson Pickett's "Jealous Love" and Syl Johnson's "Steppin' Out," and Cray does a great job of matching Pickett's raucous shouts and Johnson's silky crooning. On his own songs, Cray sounds better than ever when he's holding out notes for effect or communicating paradoxical emotions.

The Allman Brothers Band's comeback album, and their best blues-based outing since Idlewild South that restored a lot of their reputation. With Tom Dowd running the session, and the group free to make the music they wanted to, they ended up producing this bold, rock-hard album, made up mostly of songs by Dickey Betts (with contributions by new keyboardman Johnny Neel and lead guitarist Warren Haynes), almost every one of them a winner. Apart from the rippling opening number, "Good Clean Fun," which he co-authored, Gregg Allman's contribution is limited to singing and the organ, but the band seem more confident than ever, ripping through numbers like "Low Down Dirty Mean," "Shine It On," and "Let Me Ride" like they were inventing blues-rock here, and the Ornette Coleman-inspired "True Gravity" is their best instrumental since "Jessica".

Marilyn Monroe was not much of a recording artist per se, but she sang in many of her motion pictures. This European two-CD set presents dialogue and musical performances drawn directly from the soundtracks to the movie musicals Ladies of the Chorus, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The River of No Return, and There's No Business Like Show Business. She also sings briefly in non-musicals Niagra, Bus Stop, and The Prince and the Showgirl, plays "Chopsticks" in The Seven Year Itch, and exchanges witticisms with Groucho Marx in Love Happy; and there are a few stray non-movie song recordings. The second half of the second disc is taken up by miscellaneous recordings, not all of them musical, including a TV commercial, the presentation of several awards (she says, "Thank you"), radio sketches with Edgar Bergen and Jack Benny, and Monroe's appearances in Korea (singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend") and at the 1962 birthday party for President Kennedy at which she sang "Happy Birthday".

Brenda Lee Met meer dan honderd miljoen verkochte platen behoort de Amerikaanse zangeres Brenda Lee (1944) in het pantheon van de meest succesvolle artiesten aller tijden. Vanwege haar imposante vocalen werd ze in haar jonge jaren wel Little Miss Dynamite genoemd. Lee is onder meer bekend van hits als "I'm Sorry" en "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree". Wanneer de hitmachine in de jaren zeventig tot stilstand komt, keert de zangeres terug naar de countrymuziek uit haar jeugd. In 2007 brengt ze het album Gospel Duets with Treasured Friends uit.

Gandalf's self-titled album has some attractive baroque-psychedelia with a spacey air, though its quality depends very much on the standard of the material. Generally they're better the more they rely on the slightly weird and spacey production, as on "Scarlet Ribbons" and their cover of Tim Hardin's "Hang on to a Dream." On tracks like "You Upset the Grace of Living" there's a nice balance of melody and quasi-classical keyboards on the cusp between pop, progressive rock and psychedelia. "Can You Travel in the Dark Alone," one of the few originals (by Peter Sando), is nice, harmonic sunshine pop with a slightly experimental feel, along the lines of some of the better things being done by Californian cult figures like Gary Usher and Curt Boettcher at the time.

Labyrinth are considered as one of the leaders of the entire New Wave Of Italian Power Metal. Formed in the early 90’s with the release of their 1998’s album “Return To Heaven Denied”, considered as a milestone for the genre, they caught the attention of the entire European scene, gaining success and building their important career made of great albums and tours. Labyrinth, together with acts like Rhapsody Of Fire, Lacuna Coil helped the entire Italian heavy metal scene to reach the next level globally.
Over the years the band went through difficult times and several lineup changes, taking a break from 2010 to 2017 when in the spring of 2016, the band’s founding members Andrea Cantarelli and Olaf Thorsen received a call from Frontiers, asking them to discuss with singer Roberto Tiranti the possibility of a comeback for the band…

This recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony by the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich under its Music Director Paavo Jarvi, is the first in a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies. Jarvi has of course conducted Mahler's works many times in his career, but has waited for the right moment to record the complete cycle in the studio: the right moment not only in his life as a musician but also in his relationship with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zurich; the maturity and power revealed in the orchestra's recordings for Alpha Classics have been hailed by the music press since 2019. "Mahler truly opened up a new universe with the Fifth, in which he initiated an incredibly personal style of music-making." says Paavo Jarvi. "It is the very nature of its opening – a military funeral - and of its tragedy, in conjunction with the very idea of beginning a symphony in this way, which signals that something completely different is in store for us".

A meeting between violinist David Haroutunian and Karen Khachaturian, son of the legendary composer Aram Khachaturian, inspired this new recording. Following their encounter in Paris at a concert marking the 40th anniversary of Aram Khachaturian’s passing, Karen entrusted David with the score of an unpublished sonata for violin and piano, written by his father in the early 1930s. Avant-garde in style and structured in two unique movements, the sonata stands as a remarkable masterpiece, both profound and accessible to a wide audience. “My discovery of this sonata sparked an intense desire to record all of Khachaturian’s works for violin, as no such comprehensive recording, to my knowledge, exists,” David explains. Together with pianist Xénia Maliarevitch, he set out to capture not only Khachaturian’s original compositions for solo violin and violin-piano duo but also selected arrangements of his most iconic works, including excerpts from Gayaneh and the Sabre Dance arranged by Jascha Heifetz. This album also features a previously unrecorded Dance from 1925, adding to the rich legacy of Khachaturian’s music.

This deluxe release from the classy (but long defunct) Artists House label, as with all of Art Pepper's recordings of his comeback years, is easily recommended. This album has lengthy versions of "So in Love," "Stardust," "Straight No Chaser" and two Pepper originals ("Diane" and "Blues for Blanche"). Assisted by two equally talented rhythm sections (pianists Hank Jones and George Cables, bassists Ron Carter and Charlie Haden, and drummers Al Foster and Billy Higgins), Pepper is in excellent form throughout the album, giving these songs heart-wrenching interpretations.