A reissue of the similarly named concert film, Maiden England '88 expands on the epic set of the original with a two-disc CD set. While this version only has three more tracks than its predecessor, it shows that a little change can go a long way, adding classics like "Run to the Hills," "Running Free," and "Sanctuary." Though it doesn't seem like much, these single cuts help to turn the live set into a more well-rounded listening experience, as the band forgoes the more far out tracks from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Somewhere in Time in favor of some of their earlier, more direct work. Whichever way you slice it, though, Maiden England '88 is a solid concert that shows one of the most influential bands in heavy metal getting down to business and bringing some epic metal to an enthralled crowd, making it an easy recommendation for any Iron Maiden fans out there who haven't already checked this one out.© Gregory Heaney /TiVo

Less overtly adventurous than its predecessor, Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage nevertheless finds Herbie Hancock at a creative peak. In fact, it's arguably his finest record of the '60s, reaching a perfect balance between accessible, lyrical jazz and chance-taking hard bop. By this point, the pianist had been with Miles Davis for two years, and it's clear that Miles' subdued yet challenging modal experiments had been fully integrated by Hancock. Not only that, but through Davis, Hancock became part of the exceptional rhythm section of bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, who are both featured on Maiden Voyage, along with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and tenor saxophonist George Coleman. The quintet plays a selection of five Hancock originals, many of which are simply superb showcases for the group's provocative, unpredictable solos, tonal textures, and harmonies. While the quintet takes risks, the music is lovely and accessible, thanks to Hancock's understated, melodic compositions and the tasteful group interplay. All of the elements blend together to make Maiden Voyage a shimmering, beautiful album that captures Hancock at his finest as a leader, soloist, and composer.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Joshua Redman makes his Blue Note debut with his nuanced 2023 travelog where are we. Along with being his first studio album for the storied jazz label (and his 16th overall), where are we is also his first primarily vocal-oriented production, featuring singer Gabrielle Cavassa. Also joining him is pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Joe Sanders, and drummer Brian Blade. Vocally, the California-born/New Orleans-based Cavassa has a warm sound that bridges the gap between the relaxed style of alt pop artists like Billie Eilish with jazz and R&B luminaries like Billie Holiday and Phyllis Hyman. She fits nicely alongside Redman, whose own burnished tone has always evinced a vocal-like quality. There's a sense throughout the album that Redman is pulling songs from an array of influences. Most emblematic of this broad palette is "Chicago Blues," a heady cross-stitch of Count Basie's "Goin' to Chicago" and indie singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago" that also features Chicago-bred vibraphonist Joel Ross. Redman returns to the hometown concept throughout the album, bringing along several special guests who each play a song associated with the place they grew up. Crescent City-born trumpeter Nicholas Payton jumps on board for a boldly reharmonized take on "Do You Know What It Means," while guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel sprinkles his fusion-influenced lines on a convincingly reworked rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia." We also get New York guitarist Peter Bernstein for an urbane and swinging take on the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart standard "Manhattan." Elsewhere, Cavassa settles into warm readings of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "That's New England," and "Stars Fell on Alabama," all of which bring to mind the relaxed, '50s jazz of singers like June Christy, albeit with a modern creative jazz and classical-inflected artfulness that longtime Redman fans will be familiar with.© Matt Collar /TiVo

Although it picks up a thread left hanging from - (subtract), which it follows by a mere matter of months, Autumn Variations represents a major break from tradition for Ed Sheeran in some important ways. The first of his albums to not follow a mathematical scheme in its title, Autumn Variations is also the first not to be released through a major label -- he put it out on his own imprint, Gingerbread Man -- and it also was made with one main collaborator, Aaron Dessner of the National. Many of these fresh starts are felt more than heard on Autumn Variations, which spends its 14 tracks in sepia-toned reflection. Sheeran's ruminations are inspired by the plights of his friends and family, a lyrical distance that amounts to a distinction without much difference; his reflections here feel as earnest as the personal musings that fueled -. Similarly, the vibe of Autumn Variations doesn't feel markedly distinct from -. Perhaps Dessner helps Sheeran keep his ebullience subdued -- "Amazing" and "Plastic Bag" come to the precipice of unfettered pop, then pull back -- but he mainly allows Sheeran to follow his introspective instincts, resulting in an album that sustains a mellow, melancholy mood without quite distinguishing itself as a collection of individual songs. Then again, that's kind of the point of the album: it's a pensive soundtrack for a specific season, nothing more and nothing less.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Drummer Gary Powell and bassist John Hassall provide the Libertines necessary structure and foundation, but it is the wonderfully rococo decorations of terror twins Carl Barât and Pete Doherty that give the band its bloody emotion: the charming devil rascality that lives up to the name. Their first album in nine years finds the foursome cleaner (presumably, in multiple meanings of the word) and tighter than the deliciously dangerous-sounding records that helped define post-Britpop in the aughts, yet it still feels like a natural progression. Single "Run Run Run" is pretty classic Libertines: romantic garage rock, pulled off with an imperious dishevelment that could ignite a dancefloor. Barât delivers the nihilism with a chip on his shoulder, crooning, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to/ Light the fuse, sing the blues, I can die if I want to/ Tonight we're gonna bring tomorrow's happiness." Sunny "Mustangs" finds the band borrowing from Lou Reed and glam; cowbell, Doherty's falsetto back-up and what sounds like a full choir on the bridge add up to excellent chaos: "Sister Mary shivers—whooo!" Both tracks easily belong on a future Best Of. Doherty steps up with a slightly breathless delivery for the garage-meets-sea-chanty "I Have a Friend"—making room for Barât to unleash a fiery bit of guitar work—and "Merry Old England." The latter is a surprising adventure, packing in Latin percussion and '70s neo-soul, as well as melodramatic strings and fog-moody piano; it's the kind of epic they could not have pulled off in the bad old days. Strings and piano grandiosity also elevate the haunted ballad "Man with the Melody," while "Oh Shit" is bright and bouncy blue-collar pop-punk that sounds like a party in the studio. The same goes for "Be Young"—which marries a pub-singalong chorus, a searing guitar solo and even a Two-Tone breakdown; is it any wonder the whole thing ends in a coughing fit? Murder ballad "Night of the Hunter" injects a romantic Balkan feel into a Gallagher Bros. style melody, switching between a Greek Chorus narrator ("A-C-A-B/ Tattooed on your knuckles/ Does the world know what it means?") and the weary antagonist ("I was calling to tell you, baby/ They're taking me away for a while/ Ah, you can't blame me, it's this world that's made me"). Unvarnished "Baron's Claw" hints at Weimar cabaret mystery with drunken horn and tinkling piano. In the messy past, there was always a danger that things could just fall apart for the Libertines; now, there's a joy in hearing them keep it together. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Genesis proved that they could rock on Foxtrot but on its follow-up Selling England by the Pound they didn't follow this route, they returned to the English eccentricity of their first records, which wasn't so much a retreat as a consolidation of powers. For even if this eight-track album has no one song that hits as hard as "Watcher of the Skies," Genesis hasn't sacrificed the newfound immediacy of Foxtrot: they've married it to their eccentricity, finding ways to infuse it into the delicate whimsy that's been their calling card since the beginning. This, combined with many overt literary allusions -- the Tolkeinisms of the title of "The Battle of Epping Forest" only being the most apparent -- gives this album a storybook quality. It plays as a collection of short stories, fables, and fairy tales, and it is also a rock record, which naturally makes it quite extraordinary as a collection, but also as a set of individual songs. Genesis has never been as direct as they've been on the fanciful yet hook-driven "I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)" -- apart from the fluttering flutes in the fade-out, it could easily be mistaken for a glam single -- or as achingly fragile as on "More Fool Me," sung by Phil Collins. It's this delicate balance and how the album showcases the band's narrative force on a small scale as well as large that makes this their arguable high-water mark.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

This is the second of a pair of Tchaikovsky albums by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and its new conductor, Alpesh Chauhan; both are impressively recorded at the City Halls in Glasgow. For Tchaikovsky buffs, the attraction here is that most of the music is infrequently played. The exception is the Capriccio Italien, Op. 45, and here, the listener may prefer other choices, but there are not so many other choices for the likes of the tone poem Fatum (Fate), Op. posth. 77, an early Tchaikovsky work that was assembled from orchestral parts and published after his death. It was dedicated to Mily Balakirev (who turned around and criticized it severely) and owes a lot to Borodin as well, but for all this, it contains Tchaikovsky's own voice, especially in the trenchant orchestration and has thematic links to the composer's symphonies. Hamlet, Op. 67, a "fantasy overture after Shakespeare," conveys the subject matter of the play effectively, and the Movements from "The Snow Maiden," Op. 12, from incidental music from a play by Ostrovsky, is a neglected example of Tchaikovsky's lighter side and ends the program on a lively note. Opinions will differ on Chauhan's style in the larger pieces; he is definitely an exponent of restrained Tchaikovsky rather than the blood-and-guts stuff, and that will be a matter of taste. His sense for orchestral balance is very strong, and the scores reveal many small details. Perhaps an album primarily for Tchaikovsky fans, but of course, there were enough of them to put the album on classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo

Mandy, Indiana's debut album has been a long time coming, some three years after the Mancunian group captured attention with its first singles. Since then, the band's post-punk sound has grown more ominous as the world's political landscape has become divisively darker. "The themes of revolution and a need to stop the rise of fascism are very present in the lyrics," singer Valentine Caulfield has said. Sleazy and slinky, "Pinking Shears" features Caulfield, who sings in her native French, delivering what sounds like a playground chant but is actually extremely bleak: "This shitty world has worn me out ... I no longer want to wake up/ When we let humans die/ In the Mediterranean Sea/ In unheated buildings/ In our countries of big freaks/ When we choose our refugees/ Only blondes are allowed in." "Injury Detail," meanwhile, throbs and kicks out a manic dance floor beat, applying the monotony of video-game action as a way of getting through the day: "Player 1, prepare yourselves ... Up down/ Down, left/ Left right/ Right, up," ad infinitum, Caulfield orders, before declaring: "Finish off your opponent." The band chose to record the album in parts and pieces at unusual locations, from a Bristol shopping mall to a cave in the West Country to Gothic crypts, while splicing in lo-fi field recordings of, for example, a herd of Swiss cows. According to guitarist and producer Scott Fair, "It's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment." "The Driving Rain (18)" opens with the sound of exactly that, a sort of cleansing relief before the song is taken over by needling synth and intermittent sparks of tumbling drums, with Caulfield's vocals layered and layered in AutoTune, like an AI angel chorus with a mind of its own. Caulfield has said that her therapist told her to utilize her anger about the world, which emerges as a brilliant disturbance in "Drag (Crashed)," cataloging shitty things said to and about women, like "I prefer natural girls, but you look tired" and "She's gonna pop some fly buttons/ You're going to need a gun to fend off the boys"—a comment made about the singer when she was just a toddler. She sounds caught behind a metallic wall as she hollers and hisses her words over a siren-guitar skronk and horror-movie screams. "Iron Maiden" is a trudging funeral march punctuated with shocking guitar brightness that builds to a blinding frequency and, low in the background, a wail of anguish. And "Peach Fuzz" comes on like a war whoop, its Centipede-esque video game squiggles chasing the beat; if it were soundtracking a movie, this would be a breaking-point scene, the main character drugged and sweaty, strobe lights illuminating the cartoon grotesquerie of a late-night dance floor. "It's not a revolt, it's a revolution," Caulfield proclaims. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Jethro Tull's 11th studio album, Heavy Horses, is one of their prettier records, a veritable celebration of English folk music chock-full of gorgeous melodies, briskly played acoustic guitars and mandolins, and Ian Anderson's flute lilting in the background, backed by the group in top form. This record is a fairly close cousin to 1977's Songs From the Wood, except that its songs are decidedly more passionate, sung with a rough, robust energy that much of Tull's work since Thick as a Brick had been missing, and surpassing even Aqualung in its lustiness. "No Lullaby" is the signature heavy riff song, a concert version of which opened Bursting Out: Jethro Tull Live. Anderson sings it -- and everything else here -- as though they might be the last lines he ever gets to voice, with tremendous intensity. The band plays hard behind him throughout, with lead guitarist Martin Barre (most notably on "Weathercock") and bassist John Glascock showing up very well throughout. Anderson's production and Robin Black's engineering catch their every nuance without sacrificing the delicacy of his acoustic guitar and mandolin playing. "Acres Wild," "Rover," "One Brown Mouse," "Weathercock," and "Moths," the latter featuring some of David Palmer's most tasteful orchestral arrangements, are among the loveliest songs in the group's entire repertory. Curved Air's Darryl Way plays violin solo on the title track -- a tribute to England's vanishing shire horses, which doesn't really take off until Way's instrument comes in on the break, with a marked tempo change -- and on "Acres Wild."© Bruce Eder /TiVo

A heavy metal cornerstone that heralded the arrival of Bruce Dickinson, solidifying the band's classic sound as well as their legacy.© TiVo

As a suburban California kid, DJ Shadow tended to treat hip-hop as a musical innovation, not as an explicit social protest, which goes a long way toward explaining why his debut album, Endtroducing....., sounded like nothing else at the time of its release. Using hip-hop, not only its rhythms but its cut-and-paste techniques, as a foundation, Shadow created a deep, endlessly intriguing world on Endtroducing....., one where there are no musical genres, only shifting sonic textures and styles. Shadow created the entire album from samples, almost all pulled from obscure, forgotten vinyl, and the effect is that of a hazy, half-familiar dream -- parts of the record sound familiar, yet it's clear that it only suggests music you've heard before, and that the multi-layered samples and genres create something new. And that's one of the keys to the success of Endtroducing.....: it's innovative, but it builds on a solid historical foundation, giving it a rich, multifaceted sound. It's not only a major breakthrough for hip-hop and electronica, but for pop music.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Although it picks up a thread left hanging from - (subtract), which it follows by a mere matter of months, Autumn Variations represents a major break from tradition for Ed Sheeran in some important ways. The first of his albums to not follow a mathematical scheme in its title, Autumn Variations is also the first not to be released through a major label -- he put it out on his own imprint, Gingerbread Man -- and it also was made with one main collaborator, Aaron Dessner of the National. Many of these fresh starts are felt more than heard on Autumn Variations, which spends its 14 tracks in sepia-toned reflection. Sheeran's ruminations are inspired by the plights of his friends and family, a lyrical distance that amounts to a distinction without much difference; his reflections here feel as earnest as the personal musings that fueled -. Similarly, the vibe of Autumn Variations doesn't feel markedly distinct from -. Perhaps Dessner helps Sheeran keep his ebullience subdued -- "Amazing" and "Plastic Bag" come to the precipice of unfettered pop, then pull back -- but he mainly allows Sheeran to follow his introspective instincts, resulting in an album that sustains a mellow, melancholy mood without quite distinguishing itself as a collection of individual songs. Then again, that's kind of the point of the album: it's a pensive soundtrack for a specific season, nothing more and nothing less.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The Palazetto Bru Zane, the centre for French Romantic music in Venice, has an uncanny ability to rouse our curiosity for rare musical offerings. For each discographic release, the institution makes a point of indulging the listener, presenting them with only the very best: from the casting to the sound recording, not to mention the cleverly constructed programmes and the detailed illustrated booklets, everything is flawlessly produced. They essentially offer a first-class journey to the land of Romantic music. With Les Nuits de Paris, the institute once again proves it knows what it’s doing. At the helm, François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble Les Siècles take us on a dizzying tour of French society during the Belle-Epoque. At the time, the Parisian public routinely frequented dance venues—the upper classes went to the opera whilst the lower classes turned to cabarets, music halls and other “café-concerts”. Links were made between the profane and the sacred, the stylish and the mainstream. This cheerful disc sheds light on this entire dancing tradition. Alongside the great composers of the period (Massenet, Delibes and Saint-Saëns), the programme introduces other figures who were well-known in their time but have been somewhat forgotten today: Ernest Guiraud, Victorin Joncières and Ambroise Thomas. A special mention must go to Jeanne Danglas, one of the rare female composers to have been able to escape the patriarchal grip of the period.François Xavier Roth and his orchestra fully embrace the retro charm of these compositions, which might have been considered a little absurd if it weren’t for their radiantly joyful and deliciously playful performance. This is a wonderful journey through time. © Pierre Lamy/Qobuz