The Darkness's upcoming album Dreams On Toast, set for a March 2025 release, marks a bold new chapter for the band. With their signature blend of flamboyant rock anthems and tongue-in-cheek lyrics, this album cements their place at the pinnacle of British rock. Expect soaring guitar riffs, infectious hooks, and a nostalgic yet fresh take on the genre that will resonate with longtime fans and new listeners alike.

Anekdoten's debut shows them a little rougher, more Gothic in tone, and less tonally subtle than in later years, but compelling nonetheless. From the crashing bass and Mellotron in the opening track "Karelia", it's clear that King Crimson reigns over their work - not to mention that it features riffs nicked from Crimson's "Easy Money." "Wheel" also has the dissonance and horns of the Lizard album. But they are creating something unique here, as the gentle instrumental "Longing" attests. While Anekdoten hadn't quite reached its potential yet - this first album shows a band of great promise.

Helloween Alongside Switzerland's Celtic Frost and Sweden's Bathory, Germany's Helloween are possibly the most influential heavy metal band to come out of Europe during the '80s. By taking the hard-riffing and minor-key melodies handed down from metal masters like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and infusing them with the speed and energy introduced by the burgeoning thrash metal movement, Helloween crystallized the sonic ingredients of what is now known as power metal. The group hit their commercial peak in the late '80s with the release of the two-volume Keeper of the Seven Keys, which helped make them the benchmark by which most every power metal band is measured. Their meteoric rise was interrupted by internal strife and unfortunate business decisions, but Helloween took their hard-knock lessons in stride and continued to prosper well into the 2010s and 2020s in the international metal arena on their own terms.

John McNeil had the idea of applying some of Gerry Mulligan's arranging principles to free jazz after arranging some of the late baritone saxophonist's music for a tribute band. Recruiting baritone saxophonist Alan Chase, bassist John Hebert, and the much in-demand drummer Matt Wilson, McNeil's experiment creates some provocative music. "Deadline" features a constantly shifting time signature, changing its mood throughout the piece, contrasting it with the more steady and loping "A Time to Go." McNeil's humorous take of "Bernie's Tune" (long a part of Mulligan's repertoire, though written by Bernie Miller) quickly takes it away from its roots for a wild ride on his horn into the world of free jazz. He also adapts Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone classical music into his realm with his playful arrangement of "Schoenberg's Piano Concerto." Throughout the session the band is up to the challenges of McNeil's compelling music, producing a provocative CD that should open ears for decades to come.

This 1998 disc from Joni Mitchell harks back to the days when she heard the hissing of summer lawns and the jazzier essays of her Hejira days. The only difference between then and now is her use of a guitar synthesizer for her aural textures and melody templates. Always employing the best of musicians to help her out, Mitchell takes off on a trip through "Harlem in Havana" and ending up with "Tiger Bones" to show for it. Along the way, she puts forth "No Apologies" and rocks things up with "Lead Balloon" (which will remind one of "Big Yellow Taxi"), and contains one of her best opening one-liners ever. With "Taming the Tiger" dedicated to her newfound daughter and grandson, "Stay in Touch" could be about them, or almost anyone Mitchell's been close to. Either way, it's a great tune…

Fleetwood Mac While most bands undergo a number of changes over the course of their careers, few of them experienced a more radical stylistic evolution than Fleetwood Mac. Initially conceived as a hard-edged British blues combo in the late '60s, the band gradually evolved into an incredibly popular and influential pop/rock act over the course of a decade. Originally, guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer provided the group with their gutsy psychedelic blues-rock sound, then the band moved toward pop/rock with the addition of keyboardist/songwriter Christine McVie. By the mid-'70s, Fleetwood Mac relocated to California, where they added the duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to their lineup; the latter pair's writing and vocals helped the band become one of the most popular groups of the late '70s.

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”. Some of these performances – including the complete recording of Bach’s St. John Passion, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis, Schubert’s Sixth Symphony and a disc of opera choruses with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as well as Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings and the ballet music from Massenet’s opera Le Cid – have never appeared before in the digital medium, and they shine a light into new corners of Ormandy’s astonishingly large repertoire.

What would it mean to 'compose like a woman'? The present collection answers the question, in a literal sense, while undoing the premise on which the question was asked in the first place. In social and historical terms, it means enjoying privileges of upbringing, education and/or wealth that were historically denied to the vast majority of women. It means, on the part of the women represented here, a single-minded determination in pursuit of their vocation, helping them to overcome prejudice and sexism in a cultural, social and political milieu that has consistently denied women the opportunity to find and express their own voice in music.

Robert Hunter is best known as a non-performing lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He is also a recording artist in his own right, a poet, and a translator. Hunter began contributing lyrics to the Dead at the invitation of his friend, Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, as of the group's third album, Aoxomoxoa, in 1969. Since then, he wrote some of the Dead's most memorable words, including "Truckin'" ("What a long, strange trip it's been") and the 1987 comeback hit "Touch of Grey." Hunter began recording solo albums on the Dead's record label in 1974 and continued sporadically since. ~ William Ruhlmann

"Hair Metal Mania" is a compilation album that celebrates the vibrant and flamboyant era of hair metal, a subgenre of rock music that dominated the 1980s music scene.

In 1978 Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) wrote the incidental music for a production of The Inspectors Tale, an adaptation for stage of Gogols Dead Souls. It was to have been directed by Yuri Lyubimov, but the Soviet government banned the production. A suite was assembled from the score by Gennadi Rozhdenstvensky, and two leading colleagues of Schnittke - Gubaidulina and Denisov contributed a jointly composed march, which opens this CD. In 1985 the music was choreographed, the ballet, called Esquisses was performed at the Bolshoi. Schnittke composed a number of new pieces for this production. The characters in the action are all from Gogol, but in addition to The Dead Souls, we meet Tchitchikov, Major Kovalyovs Nose, and Ferdinand VIII from Notes of a Madman. A passage from the book is recited in his piece, and is read by the conductor on this CD. The music is a poly-stylistic, with a huge orchestra (2 electric guitars, flexatone, prepared piano with coins inserted between the strings), quotations from Beethoven, Haydn, Tchaikovsky - all with a sense of devilish mischief which suites ideally the grotesque nature of many of Gogols characters.

What would it mean to 'compose like a woman'? The present collection answers the question, in a literal sense, while undoing the premise on which the question was asked in the first place. In social and historical terms, it means enjoying privileges of upbringing, education and/or wealth that were historically denied to the vast majority of women. It means, on the part of the women represented here, a single-minded determination in pursuit of their vocation, helping them to overcome prejudice and sexism in a cultural, social and political milieu that has consistently denied women the opportunity to find and express their own voice in music. Only with movements of emancipation in the last century, and much more rapidly in the last 50 years, has this situation begun to be addressed and corrected.What composing like a woman does not mean - as the music in this collection makes clear - is a definable set of qualities or characteristics to the music itself which would distinguish the work of female composers from the music composed by men.

On this double album, acclaimed violinist James Ehnes joins forces with Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra, an ensemble he's had a friendship and artistic partnership with for more than three decades, to fulfil his longtime goal of recording Johann Sebastian Bach's complete violin concertos. Bach's masterful writing for violin is highlighted through several styles and instrumental combinations. This landmark recording showcases James Ehnes's affinity for Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra and his deep connection to Bach's legacy.

Chilean-American tenor Jonathan Tetelman and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Musical Director Daniel Harding announce their upcoming album, on which they are joined by an array of performers to present Puccini’s operatic thriller Tosca.

Following on from the release of 'We Still Shine', Tony Christie's first new album in 13 years, 2025 brings a brand-new set of re-records of Tony Christie's biggest hits. All recorded in Nashville at one of the world's greatest recording studios, Blackbird Studios, this new album will feature brand-new stripped back country-style versions of his greatest hits, including '(Is This The Way To) Amarillo', 'I Did What I Did For Maria', 'Avenues & Alleyways' and many more. Titled 'A New Life', this new selection of recordings will be released on a 1CD and digitally with brand new artwork featuring superb illustrations by Gillian Martin, thus will certainly bring a new lease of life to Tony's catalogue, adored by his fans.