Alice (beautyleg No 214)

Alice Cooper wasted little time following up the breakthrough success of Love It to Death with another album released the same year, Killer. Again, producer Bob Ezrin was on board and helps the group solidify their heavy rock (yet wide-ranging) style even further. The band's stage show dealt with the macabre, and such disturbing tracks as "Dead Babies" and the title track fit in perfectly. Other songs were even more exceptional, such as the perennial barnstorming concert standard "Under My Wheels," the melodic yet gritty "Be My Lover," and the tribute to their fallen friend Jim Morrison, "Desperado."

Dispelling rumors of their demise due to Layne Staley's heroin addiction, Alice in Chains is a sonically detailed effort that ranks as their best-produced record, and its best moments are easily some of their most mature music. Alice in Chains relies less on metallic riffs and more on melody and texturally varied arrangements than the group's previous full-length albums, finally integrating some of the more delicate acoustic moods of their EPs. The lyrics deal with familiar AIC subject matter - despair, misery, loneliness, and disappointment - but in a more understated fashion, and the lyrics take on more uplifting qualities of toughness and endurance, which were missing from much of their previous work…

For her tenth Deutsche Grammophon release, pianist Alice Sara Ott returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin. She approaches Chopin’s 24 Préludes op. 28 from a fresh perspective, finding a personal thread that parallels the music’s dramatic arc and wide-ranging moods. The pianist frames the Préludes within a contemporary context by interspersing them with seven works by 20th- and 21st-century composers.

Dirt is Alice in Chains' major artistic statement and the closest they ever came to recording a flat-out masterpiece. It's a primal, sickening howl from the depths of Layne Staley's heroin addiction, and one of the most harrowing concept albums ever recorded. Not every song on Dirt is explicitly about heroin, but Jerry Cantrell's solo-written contributions (nearly half the album) effectively maintain the thematic coherence - nearly every song is imbued with the morbidity, self-disgust, and/or resignation of a self-aware yet powerless addict. Cantrell's technically limited but inventive guitar work is by turns explosive, textured, and queasily disorienting, keeping the listener off balance with atonal riffs and off-kilter time signatures…

It's hard not to feel for Alice in Chains - all the guys in the band were lifers, all except lead singer Layne Staley, who never managed to exorcise his demons, succumbing to drug addiction in 2002. Alice in Chains stopped being a going concern long before that, all due to Staley's addictions, and it took guitarist Jerry Cantrell, bassist Mike Inez, and drummer Sean Kinney a long time to decide to regroup, finally hiring William DuVall as Staley's replacement and delivering Black Gives Way to Blue a full 14 years after the band's last album. To everybody's credit, Black Gives Way to Blue sounds like it could have been delivered a year after Alice in Chains: it's unconcerned with fashion; it's true to their dark, churning gloom rock; and if you're not paying attention too closely, it's easy to mistake DuVall for his predecessor…

The two Impulse albums by Alice Coltrane presented on this single CD are actually the bookends of a trilogy, representing the artist's final recordings for the label. Universal Consciousness was recorded in three sessions in 1971, and Lord of Lords, recorded in a single 1972 session. The album between them is World Galaxy. Universal Consciousness utilized a small string section to augment its trio and quartet settings; by contrast, Lord of Lords emulated its immediate predecessor (World Galaxy) in employing a 16- piece string section behind the trio of Coltrane, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ben Riley. The former album features bassist Jimmy Garrison on four of its six tracks, and drummer Jack DeJohnette on three…

Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier; February 4, 1948) is an American singer, songwriter, and actor whose career spans over fifty years. With his distinctive raspy voice and a stage show that features guillotines, electric chairs, fake blood, deadly snakes, baby dolls, and dueling swords, Cooper is considered by music journalists and peers alike to be "The Godfather of Shock Rock". He has drawn equally from horror films, vaudeville, and garage rock to pioneer a macabre and theatrical brand of rock designed to shock people…

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now…