Could Feist, the Canadian singer, have read Marcel Aymé? Nothing could be less certain, and yet the concept of this sixth album by the Canadian singer has false airs of Les Sabines, one of the most famous short stories by the Montmartre author, published in 1943. Sabine “could, at will, multiply herself and exist simultaneously, in both body and mind, in as many places as she pleased.” In the aptly named Multitudes, Feist realises Marcel Aymé's fantasy, by displaying vocal layering in some of the album’s songs, in particular in Become The Earth. This original concept is also applied in the project visuals (see the Hiding Out In The Open clip). It was during concerts performed after the Covid pandemic that the artist wrote the Multitudes songs, a recording characterised by a wide gap between minimalist folk ballads (Forever Before, Love Who We Are Meant To) and more powerful and exalted tracks like Borrow Trouble. The themes of the songs revolve around a struggle for the search for truth. According to Feist, by digging into the past we can begin to find answers, undoubtedly illustrating why certain pieces have an ancestral flavour: David Ralicke’s traditional flute in Martyr Moves, the questions posed to her ancestors in Calling All The Gods (in which she quotes Homer's Odyssey). Produced by Mocky and Robbie Lackritz, Multitudes is, ultimately, a vocal feat: whether alone facing the microphone or in multiple layers, Feist's timbre has lost none of its original charm, even six years after his previous opus, Pleasure. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz  

Arriving at the dawn of 2006, the Strokes' First Impressions of Earth was one of the year's first albums, and one of its first disappointments as well. To be fair, First Impressions starts out strong. "You Only Live Once" is everything a fan could want from a Strokes song, with a joyful melody, skipping rhythm, and cheerfully snotty lyrics. "Juicebox," meanwhile, moves from a bassline nicked from the "Peter Gunn Theme" to ragged grunge before landing on a soaring, plaintive chorus. Love it or hate it, the song has a boldness and creativity that is in short supply elsewhere on First Impressions of Earth. On the other hand, the similarly experimental "15 Minutes," a shambling mess of a ballad that eventually ignites into a rocker, is so odd that it ends up being more surprising than disappointing. That honor goes to the songs that sound like the band is just tracing over its own work -- and not especially well. Waiting for memorable hooks and lyrics to emerge from "Heart in a Cage," "Electricityscape," and other half-formed songs is a lot more depressing than the occasional failed experiment. Indeed, depression is a big theme on First Impressions of Earth; while jaded and bruised lyrical territory is nothing new for the Strokes, now they sound boring instead of just bored with everything around them. On "Ask Me Anything," an otherwise pretty ballad, Casablancas repeats "I've got nothing to say" so often that the listener has no choice but to believe him. There are a few bright moments: "Ize of the World" and "Razorblade" channel the bite of the band's older work without rehashing it entirely. At just under an hour long, First Impressions of Earth is nearly the length of the Strokes' first two albums combined. They used to be impeccable editors, both in the length of their songs and which ones ended up on their albums. Is This It was a debut album so solid that it felt like a greatest-hits comp; hints of reggae, soul, and '80s pop flavored Room on Fire without overwhelming it. Here, the Strokes indulge their every whim, and the result is their weakest album yet. It seems that less really was more with them, and now more is simply too much.© Heather Phares /TiVo

Could Feist, the Canadian singer, have read Marcel Aymé? Nothing could be less certain, and yet the concept of this sixth album by the Canadian singer has false airs of Les Sabines, one of the most famous short stories by the Montmartre author, published in 1943. Sabine “could, at will, multiply herself and exist simultaneously, in both body and mind, in as many places as she pleased.” In the aptly named Multitudes, Feist realises Marcel Aymé's fantasy, by displaying vocal layering in some of the album’s songs, in particular in Become The Earth. This original concept is also applied in the project visuals (see the Hiding Out In The Open clip). It was during concerts performed after the Covid pandemic that the artist wrote the Multitudes songs, a recording characterised by a wide gap between minimalist folk ballads (Forever Before, Love Who We Are Meant To) and more powerful and exalted tracks like Borrow Trouble. The themes of the songs revolve around a struggle for the search for truth. According to Feist, by digging into the past we can begin to find answers, undoubtedly illustrating why certain pieces have an ancestral flavour: David Ralicke’s traditional flute in Martyr Moves, the questions posed to her ancestors in Calling All The Gods (in which she quotes Homer's Odyssey). Produced by Mocky and Robbie Lackritz, Multitudes is, ultimately, a vocal feat: whether alone facing the microphone or in multiple layers, Feist's timbre has lost none of its original charm, even six years after his previous opus, Pleasure. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz  

Lincoln's place among the pantheon of great jazz singers is undisputed, but this recording finds her voice past its best years. The ravages of time have taken their toll, and the result is pleasant but not her best work. The drop in strength is especially evident in the opening duet with a much younger Maggie Brown. Still, the album has many fine moments, such as an easy swinging "If I Only Had a Brain" and the sweet original "And It's Supposed to Be Love." Her band is particularly fine, especially pianist Marc Cary and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes.© Tim Sheridan /TiVo

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Agemo's Trip to Mother Earth was one of the most ambitious psychedelic albums to emerge from continental Europe in the late '60s. The LP's nominal concept was, like many early such endeavors, obscure, involving something like the journey of Agemo from a paradise-like planet to the more chaotic imperfection of Earth. Musically, the record owes a lot to late-'60s British psychedelia (particularly of the Pink Floyd school), with hints of the onset of progressive rock in its less-conventional passages. Although plenty of melodic shifts, celestial organ, wiggling distorted guitar, harmony vocals, Gregorian chant-like singing, Mothers of Invention-like horns, beatific respites (on "Reborn"), and general freakiness entertainingly convey the exploration of new psychic territory, it ultimately lacks the lyrical and musical cogency of, say, late-'60s Pink Floyd. At times the bold weirdness gets self-indulgent, throwing in phased drum soloing, solemnly intoned spoken female romantic exclamations, and multilingual murmuring. The album was reissued, in its original sequence and its entirety, as part of the Group 1850 CD compilation 1967-1968. © Richie Unterberger /TiVo

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For a short time in the mid-'60s, the Modern Jazz Quartet was primarily working in Europe and recording for the French division of Philips, with the results coming out in the United States on the MJQ's regular label, Atlantic. There was only one exception to this rule: Place Vendôme, the collaboration the MJQ did with the Swingle Singers, which appeared in the U.S. on Philips' American subsidiary through Mercury Records on which the Swingle Singers had been appearing some years already. For Philips, the collaboration must have seen like inevitability; Ward Swingle had sung with the Double Six of Paris, which had backed up Dizzy Gillespie who, of course, had led the big band out of which the MJQ was formed in 1952. The Swingle Singers had been jazzing up the music of Johann Sebastian Bach since at least 1963 with phenomenal success, and while John Lewis wasn't quite as into the Bach bag in 1966 that he would be later, his MJQ compositions had long been taken up in European devices such as fugue and the renaissance canzona. Although Swingle and Lewis agreed to collaborate backstage after an MJQ concert in Paris in 1964, it wasn't until 1966 that the two groups found themselves in Paris at the same time. The resultant album, Place Vendôme, was a huge international success commercially, with the track Aria (Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068) -- though then popularly called "Air on a G String" -- charting strongly in Europe and the album easily earning its keep in the U.S., though it did not chart there. Not everyone was pleased; jazz critics savaged the album, the consensus being that a pop vocal group like the Swingle Singers had no business making an album with an exalted jazz group like the MJQ.Fast forward more than four decades, and Place Vendôme itself is a rare album that's basically impervious to criticism. It's sui generis; the Swingles and the MJQ's badinage on Bach is what it is, you either like it or you don't and whether one does or not doesn't much matter. However, the Philips CD version of it does have one significant variable in that the digital mastering was supervised, in 1988, by John Lewis. His input into the remastering was to bring the MJQ more up front in the mix, not an entirely evenhanded solution as it was originally marketed as a Swingle Singers album to start with. Moreover, the effect of the new mastering results in some strange artifacts, such as a passage in the Ricercare 2 à 6 (Offrande Musicale, BWV 1079) where the MJQ drops out for a passage, and the unbalanced Swingles continue singing away in the background, as though segregated to a phantom channel. Nevertheless, that what John Lewis wrought is liable to stick -- a proposed BBC Legends reissue of an MJQ concert recorded in London was quashed in 2001 by Lewis shortly before he died; it hasn't appeared, and it isn't likely to. For those interested primarily in the MJQ in reference to Place Vendôme, the Philips CD version should be fine, whereas those interested in the Swingle Singers part of the equation might want to track down a copy of the original LP release -- not a difficult task -- as the mix is weighted more in the favor of the voices. Anyone desiring a genuinely balanced version of Place Vendôme where both elements are relatively even, however, will have to get used to one or the other.© TiVo

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English is widely regarded as the official language of rock, which is why so many Scandinavian and German rockers have opted to perform exclusively in English. The Scorpions, Accept, and Doro Pesch grew up speaking German as their primary language, but most or all of their work has been in English. However, there is a market for non-English-language rock. The rock en español phenomenon has been huge in Spain and Latin America, and there are plenty of European rockers who prefer to record in German, Italian, or Dutch -- and unlike the Scorpions, Accept, or Pesch -- don't worry about whether or not they are accepted in the English-language market. David Hallyday, meanwhile, is a bilingual pop-rocker who has recorded in both French and English. The singer is well-known in the French market, although his English-language releases haven't done as well. Released by Scotti Brothers in 1990, Rock 'n' Heart was among Hallyday's attempts to go after English-speaking audiences; none of the songs are in French. Rock 'n' Heart, however, didn't make him a big name in the United States. Produced by Richie Wise, Rock 'n' Heart is a slick, glossy, very middle-of-the-road pop/rock effort along the lines of Phil Collins (although the writing generally isn't as strong). Most of the material -- which exemplifies what rock critics disparagingly called "corporate rock" in the late '80s and early '90s -- is adequate but not very memorable. Nonetheless, Rock 'n' Heart has its moments; some of the more noteworthy tracks include the mildly funky "Hey Louise" and the anthemic power ballad "Tears of the Earth" (which contains an environmentalist message). Rock 'n' Heart is far from a total meltdown, but it's an uneven effort that didn't give Hallyday the U.S. breakthrough he was hoping for.© Alex Henderson /TiVo

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Released just seven months after Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, Mogwai return with the EP Earth Division. Featuring material that was recorded during the Hardcore sessions but didn't make it onto the album, the EP features four songs that take the band's sound in a more subdued direction, substituting the drive of their last album with lush atmosphere.© TiVo

Recorded in Montreal with 24 strings from the Montreal Symphony and two can't-miss jazz cohorts, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Billy Higgins, here we have another reunion between Weston and arranger Melba Liston in a collection of mostly early Weston tunes, some dating back to the early 1950s. The strings sound unearthly, as if they were recorded in a dead studio (the locale is the Ludget-Duvernay Hall of Montreal's Monument National), and even though Liston blends them with the piano in an integral manner, they respond stiffly; it's an uneasy, not terribly imaginative fusion. The most famous Weston tune "Hi-Fly" is completely retooled into a cocktail-hour ballad - it also features the most intricate string chart - and composer Weston enjoys poking around the tune's angles and corners. Coming after his exciting African experiments in the '90s, this CD, despite Weston's sharply-etched solos, is a relatively minor nostalgic effort.© Richard S. Ginell /TiVo