Kansas' third album, Masque, is a lyrically dark effort courtesy of guitarist/keyboardist Kerry Livgren's brooding songwriting. Musically, Masque foreshadows the tight melodies and instrumental interplay on the next two albums, Leftoverture and Point of Know Return, which together serve as the peak of Kansas' vision. The band deserves more respect than it gets for incorporating British hard rock and progressive rock to become the only U.S. progressive rock band of note during the genre's 1970s heyday. Robbie Steinhardt's violin work certainly helped give Kansas a distinctive sound. The liner notes indicate Masque is a "concept album" thanks to the title's definition: "A disguise of reality created through a theatrical or musical performance." Vocalist/keyboardist Steve Walsh's "It Takes a Woman's Love (To Make a Man)" is the leadoff track, and it's atypical of the rest of the album. The song is a fairly basic yet groovy pop/rock tune about musicians' loneliness on the road, but it is spiced up with some saxophone lines.

One Second expands the Eurodisco approach of Stella, and while it's considerably less adventurous than Yello's earlier works, it's engaging dance music, highlighted by some clever uses of Latin rhythms and vocal cameos from Billy Mackenzie and Shirley Bassey.

Released when Mercury Records was still located in Chicago, IL, back in 1973, the second album from Bachman-Turner Overdrive was the first to break through in a big way. First the hit single "Let It Ride" went Top 25 circa March of 1974, then the anthem "Taking Care of Business" went Top 15 the summer of that year. By October they would top the charts with "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" from the follow-up LP, 1974's Not Fragile, but their seven chart songs were all made possible by this album and these two songs, "Let It Ride" and "Takin' Care of Business," in particular.

Ambergris, as it turned out, was a one-shot album from a band formed by Jerry Weiss, who’d played keyboards with the first version of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Leaving before the group recorded the second album, he formed Ambergris and got Steve Cropper of MG’s fame to produce it. It’s not groundbreaking in the way that the first BST album was or in the way that Chicago’s first two albums were. There are hints of Latin influences in some of the tracks, while some of them sound as if they could easily have been lifted from sessions by BST or Chicago.

Accompanied by Johnny Winter and his band, Muddy Waters turns in an enthusiastic performance on Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. The set list contains most of his biggest hits, and the sound quality and performances are mostly energetic. Still, there's something faintly repetitive about this record. For one thing, there's only one song here, "Deep Down in Florida," that comes from any of Waters' recent albums. All of the others are old standards, which makes this album rather superfluous, since there are equally forceful performances of these cuts elsewhere. It doesn't help any that "Deep Down in Florida" isn't an especially noteworthy song, sounding more like a rewrite of Waters' older, better cuts. Without much in the way of new material, or anything especially notable about the performances, it sometimes comes off as little more than a set of Muddy Waters' greatest hits, with applause as the sole new ingredient…

Arguably the UK’s leading independent electronic music maestro Ian Boddy has teamed up once again with German touch guitarist, Markus Reuter to create a stunning album called Pure.
Although Boddy and Reuter have collaborated in concert (at Jodrell Bank in 1999 & the E-Live Festival in Eindhoven 2000), Pure represents their second proper studio outing since their impressive 1999 debut, Distant Rituals.
Pure is radically different from the impressionistic prowl of its predecessor. Their collaboration earlier this year was based around a series of distinct musical ideas. Boddy and Reuter explored and expanded the pieces into a cycle of intricate, inter-connected compositions; delicate in expression and character, graceful in execution and richly harmonic…

The durable Brazilian musician Luiz Bonfá recorded this album for the Caju Music label in 1991 in Brazil, where it was much honored, but Americans weren't made aware of its riches until 1993. Throughout, Bonfá's acoustic guitar is treated to differing tone shadings and backgrounds - sometimes left all alone, sometimes fronting a samba band. Tracks like "Space Adventure," "Menina Flor," and "Fat Tuesday's Theme" employ unnervingly realistic orchestrations by Jota Moraes on some deftly handled synthesizers (yes, it can be done). Most of all, listeners are reminded of the remarkable vitality of Bonfá's civilized, wistful compositions, whether improvised on the spot like "Magic Passion," brought forth for the first time ("Smooth Dreams," "Samba Variations"), or resuscitated from his back catalog (like the tune for Elvis, "Almost in Love," now treated to a silky bossa nova groove)…

Produced by George Martin, The Man in the Bowler Hat continues Stackridge's brand of satiric rock marbled with elements of folk and to some extent, even country. The lyrics are just as witty as in their first two releases, and the poetry glistens with a jovial Englishness that became the band's most identifiable trademark. With Martin's help, though, the album became one of their better releases, as the music rises to the top before the words do, sounding fresher, livelier, and noticeably sharper than both their debut and 1972's Friendliness. Stackridge's best song, "Dangerous Bacon," was released as a single, and it's in this song as well as "The Galloping Gaucho" and "The Indifferent Hedgehog" in which their sound comes alive…