After completing the Both Ways Open Jaws tour, the Dø looked for a new creative path. Finding inspiration in the abstract electronics of Fuck Buttons and Kanye West's Yeezus, they emerged with Shake Shook Shaken, a set of songs trading kitchen sink experimentalism for sharp-edged electropop. It's a transformation for the better -- even though Mouthful and Both Ways Open Jaws had plenty of eclectic charms, the clearly defined aesthetic here allows them to concentrate on making pop that's addictively weird and catchy. The brightly bittersweet opener "Keep Your Lips Sealed" and the buzzing "Going Through Walls" recall the tart, hooky songs the Knife wrote before Silent Shout, while "Despair, Hangover & Ecstacy"'s sugar-coated melodrama calls to mind La Roux. The Dø's songwriting takes just as big a step forward as their sound, tackling the uncertainty of emotional fault lines and unwelcome but necessary change with vivid imagery and melodies. Olivia Merilahti's higher, slightly pained register suits turbulent songs such as "A Mess Like This," where she sings "You were the worst idea I ever had" with equal amounts of frustration and affection, and "Miracles (Back in Time)," an elliptical recounting of heartache with sentiments that pierce like arrows. Things get even more complicated on "Lick My Wounds," which teeters between joyous and bittersweet so often that it erases the line between them, while "Anita, No!" disguises its plea for closure in a pun. Though the album loses a little focus after its near-flawless first half, Shake Shook Shaken is the Dø's finest work yet and a pointed and poignant document of change and its aftermath. © Heather Phares /TiVo

Olivia Merilahti and Dan Levy raised the roof of Olympia in Paris. After promoting Shake Shook Shaken for a year on tour, the French-Finnish duo ended their round on the Boulevard des Capucines, where great names are written in red neon. Surrounded by the excellent Bastien Burger, Marielle Chatain and Pierre Belleville, The Dø manage to irrigate the cold stretch since their last release. Aside from Lick My Wounds and Nature Will Remain, this live recording includes all of the tracks on the album. A solemn version of Cole Porter’s I Love Paris with Jeanne Added, Aha and The Bridge Is Broken are the rare surprises from this bath of contemporary melancholy soaped with synthesizers. Without reinventing the wheel, the former lovers prove they can carve French-style electro-pop and bring it back to its former glory on stage. Elegant and boisterous, the result proves tastier than the digestible synthetic feel of its studio version. © CS/Qobuz

By the 1974 release of Shankar Family & Friends, George Harrison's post-Beatles career had peaked twice, once with his debut solo album, All Things Must Pass, and again with 1973's Living in the Material World. Along the way, in August 1971, he—along with Ravi Shankar—co-produced the Concert for Bangladesh, a multi-act charity event intended to raise funds for starving refugees of the then-raging Bangladesh Liberation War. This was not Shankar's first high-profile U.S. concert appearance, as the sitar player made a seismic impact at both Monterey Pop and Woodstock, but it was the first time he had been so publicly tied to his friend Harrison. (The two musicians connected personally in the late '60s, but had not previously collaborated on a musical project.) Given the success—both in terms of critical reception and awareness-raising—of The Concert for Bangladesh album, it wasn't too surprising when Harrison chose to make Shankar Family & Friends one of the first album releases on his Dark Horse Records label. Of course, legend has it that Harrison's enthusiasm for Shankar's music led him to feature the sitarist too much on their 1974 tour together—the first big tour by a solo Beatle—leading many fans to turn away from both artists and perhaps precipitating Harrison's commercial and critical decline through the rest of the '70s. However, Harrison's dedication to his friend never wavered and he released more albums of Indian classical music on Dark Horse over the next couple of years. He also collaborated directly with Shankar on 1996's incredible Chants of India. Shankar Family & Friends is probably the clearest and most direct statement of their connection: Harrison obviously wanted the album to be a success on its own terms, so the album sequence leads off with "I Am Missing You," a deceptively infectious pop anthem that sounds like it was written by Harrison, but was in fact penned by Shankar, with production and arranging duties falling to Harrison. "I Am Missing You" is a brain-melting bit of east-west fusion, not because of any overt psychedelic vibes, but for the way it presents as an actual fusion; depending upon which moment or which element of the song you're focusing on, it's either obviously a Ravi Shankar composition or obviously a George Harrison arrangement. Shankar's sister-in-law, Lakshmi Shankar sings the English lyrics in her Hindustani classically trained voice, while sitars and tablas are set aside for guitars, organ, saxophone, and Ringo Starr's drums. It is catchy and familiar while also being incredibly distinct and unusual to Western ears. That it is featured twice on the album is even more evidence of Harrison's enthusiasm for it, but it's also the album's anomaly. For the rest of the first half, Shankar's vision of accessible east-west fusion—leaning more toward jazz-and soul-flecked renditions of bhajans and Indian folk music—dominates, making for a pleasant, atmospheric listen. Shankar's sheer creative energy unfolds in the second half, in the form of a multi-part suite, Dream, Nightmare & Dawn, that was originally written for a proposed ballet. The nine-piece composition straddles the line between Indian and Western classical forms and instrumentations, in much the same way that "I Am Missing You" does with pop music. It's as stunningly audacious as it is engagingly listenable. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

Download not available
A wonderfully gifted child, the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) occupies a completely unique place in the history of music, in which he is only just beginning to feature. A virtuoso organist at the age of eleven, he composed a First Symphony at the age of seventeen. An hour long, it was performed for the first time by no less than the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1913. But Langgaard was too visionary, too original, too far from fashion and the common world to be successful.He was forty-seven when he finally got an official position as an organist on the west coast of Jutland (Jylland in Danish), a remote province with no connection to the musical life of the Danish capital. An idealist, isolated in absolute solitude, this strange composer wrote music that was full of peculiarities, complex and confusing, a good half-century ahead of the evolution of the musical language at the end of the 20th century.Composed in 1918, the Music of the Spheres for a solo soprano, choir, organ and distant orchestra waited fifty years for its premiere, under the astonished eyes of György Ligeti, who immediately and humorously declared upon discovering this music that he was "an imitator of Langgaard without knowing it!" A lovely admission of admiration from one of the most original composers of the end of the last century. A sound object that is difficult to identify, this music is incredibly innovative with its notions of endless space, height, and depth between light and shadow. It touches on philosophy with its apocalyptic ending, expressing the conflict between Christ and Antichrist before dissolving into the cosmos.Under the generic title 4 Tone Pictures, the four songs for voice and orchestra appearing on the same album date from the same time. Their late romantic musical language is sometimes quite similar to that of Music of the Spheres. Created only in 1980, these four pieces were recorded here for the first time. It took a conductor as out of the ordinary and as peculiar as Gennady Rozhdestvensky to bring this astonishing music to life, recorded in 1996 in Copenhagen in the large concert hall of the Danish Radio. © François Hudry/Qobuz

"On FOUNTAIN BABY, Amaarae doubles down on the thrill and amps up the danger, pulling influences from Afro rhythms, Asian standards, and punk-rock rage for a brooding adventure through her world."© TiVo

Though the reissue campaign that presented PJ Harvey's albums with their demos was extensive, it still didn't gather everything in her archives. She fills in those gaps with B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, a comprehensive set of harder-to-find and previously unreleased material that covers three decades of music. Kicking off with a handful of previously unreleased demos, the collection celebrates what makes each track special within Harvey's chronology. Short but fully realized versions of "Dry" and "Man-Size" reaffirm that by the time she hits the record button, she knows exactly what she's doing; the guitar and voice sketches of "Missed" and "Highway 61 Revisited" are as formidable as the finished takes; and the demo of the B-side "Me Jane" (yes, that's how thorough this set is) offers one of the Rid of Me era's catchiest songs in an even rawer state. B-Sides, Demos & Rarities reinforces just how vital Harvey's non-album tracks are to her creative trajectory. The uncanny carnival oompah of "Daddy," a "Man-Size" B-side, feels like one of the earliest forays into the eeriness that gave an extra thrill to To Bring You My Love, White Chalk, and much of Harvey's later work. She continues Is This Desire?'s experimentation on "The Bay," which contrasts songwriting befitting a classic folk ballad with pulsing keyboards and jazzy rhythms, and continues to try to make sense of the world's chaos on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era material spanning the whispery Saturn return of "30" to "This Wicked Tongue," an updated expression of biblical sin, desire, and torment that delivers one of the set's most quintessentially PJ Harvey moments. Fittingly for such an anachronistic-sounding album, White Chalk's B-sides reach back to Harvey's earliest days: "Wait" and "Heaven" date back to 1989 and deliver sprightly, strummy folk-pop that's almost unrecognizable as her work. The set's previously unreleased music contains just as many revelations. One of its most notable previously missing puzzle pieces is the demo of Uh Huh Her's title track. A shockingly pure expression of rage, jealousy, and sorrow, it may have been too raw and revealing even for a PJ Harvey album, but it's a shame that it and the like-minded "Evol" didn't make the cut. Conversely, "Why'd You Go to Cleveland," a 1996 collaboration between Harvey and John Parish, and the 2012 demo "Homo Sappy Blues" are downright playful, proving the complete picture of her music includes something akin to fun. Highlights from the collection's 2010s material include "An Acre of Land," a lush ballad rooted in the British folk traditions that are just as essential to her music as punk or the blues, and the 2019 cover of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," which pays homage to a kindred spirit while transforming the song into something more desolate and plaintive. A must-listen for anyone following Harvey's archival series, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities serves as a fascinating parallel primer to her music and the multitudes within it.© Heather Phares /TiVo

Rising conductor Cristian Măcelaru recorded mostly American music during his tenures in the U.S., but his posts in Europe have sent his career in a new direction. With the WDR Sinfonieorchester, he has recorded Dvořák and now, on this 2023 release, Bartók, with extremely promising results. Bartók's The Wooden Prince is a charming and affecting ballet about a romance controlled by a wooden puppet. The music is folk-influenced, but in place of the acerbic and rigorous later Bartók is a gentle gracefulness that Măcelaru's reading captures to the hilt, and the clean sounds he is getting from the WDR Sinfonieorchester bodes extremely well for his future outings with that ensemble. Bartók's Dance Suite can look either backward or forward in performance, and Măcelaru chooses the former; he offers a restrained Allegro molto that lets the primitivism in the score emerge naturally rather than hammering it home. Bartók rather lacks a champion right now, but this immensely satisfying recording, with excellent sound from the Kölner Philharmonie, suggests that Măcelaru may be able to fill that role. © James Manheim /TiVo

The climax of a unique musical journey which began two years prior with A Fistful of Dollars, this soundtrack features as its main theme the flute riff (which personifies Clint Eastwood, aka “The Good”) which has gone down in the annals of history of film music. In order to direct him in the concept for this score, Sergio Leone explained to Ennio Morricone that the three title characters were in fact one (joined by their mutual thirst for gold). Thus, the composer decided to use the same musical motif for each of the three characters - limited to two notes - and using a different tone for each of them. A recorder for The Good, an ocarina for The Ugly (Lee Van Cleef), and human voices imitating the cry of a coyote for The Bad (Eli Wallach). Simple but terribly effective. A bridge was added to the heart of this memorable theme consisting of a dialogue between two trumpet players in a cavalry style. This soundtrack is also famous for the theme named The Ecstasy of Gold, which accompanies Tuco’s frantic search among the graves for the one which conceals the treasure. After the piano and English horn introduction, Morricone creates a crescendo making use of all sections and, above all, the voice of Edda Dell’Orso. It finishes with a musical grand finale which evokes Tuco’s ecstasy upon having found the grave in question. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

For twenty years Marco Serino was Ennio Morricone’s violinist, the soloist on his film soundtracks and on world tours where they were reworked for the concert hall. In January 2020, after what proved to be his last public concert, at the Italian Senate in Rome, Morricone finished the transcription of this magnificent and unpublished collection, which recasts the themes of his most famous scores in suites transcribed for violin and orchestra. The work was carried out in close collaboration with Marco Serino and dedicated to him as a fruit of the artistic partnership between the two men. The collection alternates between pieces already performed in concert and others that are heard in this version for the first time. A year and a half after the composer’s death, this extraordinary document, a testimony to friendship and professional esteem, now becomes a recording project with the collaboration of Andrea Morricone, the composer’s son, who conducts the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento. © Alpha Classics

Cuts & Bruises is the sophomore album from Irish indie rock outfit Inhaler and comes two years after their debut, 2021's It Won't Always Be Like This. Produced by Antony Genn (Goo Goo Dolls, Joe Strummer) the album sees the group expanding on their soaring indie rock. The lead single "These Are the Days" is included.© Rich Wilson /TiVo