With Your Wilderness, Bruce Soord's the Pineapple Thief shift their musical focus away from their exploration of polished rock so evident on 2012's All the Wars and 2014's Magnolia, and back toward contemporary prog. Drummer Dan Osborne, who made his debut with the band on Magnolia, proved short-lived in his role; he has been replaced by Porcupine Tree/King Crimson kit man Gavin Harrison. Soord also enlisted guests including Supertramp's John Helliwell on clarinet, Caravan's string player/arranger Geoffrey Richardson, Godsticks' guitarist Darran Charles, and a four-voice choir. Harrison's addition can't be overstated. His playing extends the reach of their musicality exponentially. The album title denotes themes of isolation, loneliness, and alienation -- not unfamiliar ones in PT's oeuvre. That said, they've never been explored with such a brooding focus as they are here. The overall textural palette is muted, songs flow in and out of one another without much in the way of dynamic variables, but there's no shortage of excellent music. Opener "In Exile" is haunted by the sound of Steve Kitch's mellotron hovering behind Harrison's popping snare and tom-toms. They're eventually given flight by Charles' blistering guitar breaks. The chorus contains a small but pronounced hook, making it a perfect candidate for a single. It's followed by "No Man's Land." In his best subdued tenor, Soord relates loneliness and separation accompanied by a lovely meld of piano and acoustic guitar. Halfway through, Jon Sykes' massive bassline engages Harrison's rolling tom fills, adding drama that's expanded by electric guitars and keyboards toward a rocking close -- classic Pineapple Thief. "Take Your Shot" commences at midtempo, with gorgeous harmonic guitar layers and drum vamps amid ambient space. A middle-section crescendo fueled by Harrison is reined in by stacked choral voices before spiraling guitars wrestle it all free. The chorale, mellotron, strummed acoustic guitars, and Helliwell's free-floating clarinet fills make "Fend for Yourself" one of the album's high points, and a perfect setup for the nearly ten-minute "The Final Thing on My Mind." Like most things here, it commences sparingly and slowly. The emotional resonance in Soord's delivery and lyrics carry the song's weight. The bass and drums add a platform of tension as strings, choir, and monumental guitar breaks explode it. For all its strength and promise, Your Wilderness isn't perfect. Soord's songs are composed with a deliberately monochromatic dynamic foundation in order to assert the poignant, focused intention in his lyrics. As a result, the instrumental acumen gleams all the brighter. Deliberate or not, the lack of variation creates a series of lovely, sad, but blurry episodes in an extended work rather than strong individual tracks. That said, this is a marked return to form for the Pineapple Thief; it delivers back to fans a sound most have been missing for years.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

This matchup between pianist Oscar Peterson, bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and drummer Louis Hayes directly precedes Peterson's recordings for Pablo. The pianist is in typically brilliant form on the LP, performing six standards (including "Soft Winds" and "On the Trail") along with his own "Wheatland." From the results here, it couldn't have been too surprising that Peterson would want to record frequently with Pedersen in future years.© Scott Yanow /TiVo

Billed as both a Barbra Streisand album and as an original motion picture soundtrack, Yentl contains the songs, sung by Streisand and written by Michel Legrand and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, that the character played by Streisand sings as internal monologues in the film, sometimes with spoken dialogue interspersed. (The album is filled out by "studio versions" of two of the songs, "The Way He Makes Me Feel" and "No Matter What Happens," played on contemporary electronic instruments, rather than in the orchestral settings used for the rest of the songs.) With such a thematic base, the music has an unusual consistency, and written specifically for Streisand, it makes use of her emotional expressiveness, phrasing, and timing as a singer. But it was also written as a complement to the film and on its own comes across as a group of isolated musical plot highlights rather than as a coherent song cycle. (Yentl won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score.)© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

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No-one could accuse Kurt Elling of spinning his wheels or resting on his laurels. After Secrets Are the Best Stories (2020) which he wrote with pianist Danilo Pérez around themes of human rights, immigration and climate change, the Chicago singer has released an album of... pure funk! It's a torrent of lava put together with guitarist and producer Charlie Hunter. And to flesh out this SuperBlue, the double-act brought on board drummer Corey Fonville and bassist/keyboardist DJ Harrison, both members of Butcher Brown... Whether he was juggling bebop, pop or neo-soul, Elling always had a pretty funky rhythm. Here obviously, everything gets turned up a notch with original compositions but also covers of a Wayne Shorter theme (Where to Find It) or Freddie Hubbard (Super Blue), the radio-friendly The Seed Cody Chestnutt, and Circus by Tom Waits. The originality of the project lies in the muted approach. The funk is there, real, solid. But the warm, low, nonchalant voice of the American crooner gives it a rather original form. With SuperBlue, funk comes to Kurt Elling: not vice versa. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Paolo Fresu won't be stopped so easily! Not even at 60. In this, his birthday week, the Sardinian trumpeter with the XXL discography (his name appears on more than 300 records!) is releasing a triple album! The one who keeps slaloming between genres, inspirations and partners is offering up three sides of his art. This copious P60LO FR3SU opens with a remastered reissue of Heartland, a 2001 album featuring the voice of David Linx and arrangements for string quartet by Diederik Wissels. It closes with Heroes, a surprising vocal work, exclusively composed of David Bowie covers. These covers are often surprising and full of  freshness, performed by Petra Magoni and recorded at the end of 2020. Fresu has placed The Sun on the Sea, dead centre in this vocal romp. Also recorded in 2020, it was made with two faithful companions: his fellow bandoneonist Daniele Di Bonaventura and the Brazilian cellist Jaques Morelenbaum. A trio sailing on the currents of a Mediterranean jazz which is also pushed along by Latin American waves. More than two hours and forty-five minutes of protean and colourful music, made in the image of the trumpeter himself. © Clotilde Maréchal/Qobuz

A duet classic, and perhaps the most popular album Roberta Flack made. Their single "Where Is the Love" dominated urban contemporary radio for almost the entire year, while "You've Got a Friend" was just as influential and was later covered by numerous artists (of course they didn't write it, but a lot of folks thought they did). It did so well that Flack eventually did other duet material and also became very close to Hathaway.© Ron Wynn /TiVo

Shortly after 2Pac died, there were rumors that hundreds of unreleased songs remained in the vaults; a mere two months after his death, the first posthumous record, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, appeared. Death Row released the record, and shortly afterward, 2Pac's mother, Afeni Shakur, gained the rights to all of his unreleased recordings from both the Interscope and Death Row labels. She founded the Amaru label and released the double-disc R U Still Down? (Remember Me) in late 1997. Culled from 2Pac's unreleased Interscope recordings between 1992 and 1994, including several tracks that have had backing musical tracks "reconstructed," R U Still Down? doesn't have the aura of exploitation that haunts the Makaveli album. For the most part, Shakur sounds good, spinning out rhymes that are alternately clever or startling, although he eventually begins repeating himself. As for the music itself, it's pretty much standard-issue gangsta rap that never deviates from the course. There are enough hidden gems to make R U Still Down? worthwhile for hardcore 2Pac fans.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Like Face Value before it, Both Sides could be characterized as a "divorce album," but marriage wasn't the only thing Phil Collins was leaving behind in 1993. He was two years removed from We Can't Dance, the 1991 album that turned out to be his last with Genesis, so at a personal and professional crossroads, Collins holed up in his home studio to write and record the songs that became Both Sides. Apart from the relatively chipper "We're Sons of Our Fathers" and "We Wait and We Wonder," a percolating number that feels like a retort to Peter Gabriel's Us, Both Sides is moody without being menacing; it never slides into the stark, skeletal territory that gave "In the Air Tonight" a sense of unease. Rather, Collins turns inward, reveling in a hushed melancholy that conveys heartbreak and loss while skirting the edge of desperation. Song titles tell the tale: there are "Both Sides of the Story," but you "Can't Turn Back the Years," and "Can't Find My Way" and you wind up as "Survivors." By abandoning his thirst for big pop hooks and swapping introspection for art rock, he winds up with an album that is quietly compelling: it lacks the big hits but it feels complete as an album.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo