Applemagazine From 22 January 2016

Sonny Rollins - 5 Original Albums with full original artwork (2016) {5CD Set Prestige - originally released 1956}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 969 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 427 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 161 Mb | 5% repair rar | Mono | remastered
© 1956, 2016 Prestige / Concord / Universal | 08880 7236299
Jazz / Bop / Hard Bop / Saxophone

Official 2016 remastered collection of 5 albums recorded for Prestige, housed in replica card sleeves with full original artwork. Includes 'Worktime', 'With The Modern Jazz Quartet', 'Tenor Madness', 'Moving Out', & 'Saxaphone Colossus'. The quality of the music collected here needs no comment, really. But what I like about this series of box sets is that the original LP covers are faithfully reproduced on the small paper sleeves, front and back, just like the Japanese do it with their ridiculously expensive miniature CD paper sleeves. All relevant discographic data, like musicians, recording dates etc., are listed on the CD labels, which is unique for this kind of box sets and a great service if you ask me.

Subtlety and economy aren't words that typically come to mind when pondering a new Dream Theater album, much less one that arrives in the form of a double-disc epic with 34 tracks spanning two-and-a-half hours. Yet counterintuitively, those qualities help the veteran prog-metal quintet's 13th album, The Astonishing, live up to its title.

The Enid, Antimatter, Big Big Train, Aisles, Mystery, Panic Room, Galahad, Deus Ex Machina, Gandalf's Fist, NoSound and many more…

Lucinda Williams - The Ghosts Of Highway 20 (2016) {2CD Highway 20 Records H2003}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 479 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 204 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 152 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Highway 20 Records / Thirty Tigers | H2003
Americana / Folk / Country / Alternative Country Rock / Alternative Folk / Singer/Songwriter

Calling her own shots seems to agree with Lucinda Williams. While the singer/songwriter has long had a reputation for taking her time between albums, she's back with another double-disc set, The Ghosts of Highway 20, just a year-and-a-half later. She launched her own label with Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone in the fall of 2014. In many ways, The Ghosts of Highway 20 feels like a companion piece to Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone in its emotionally direct approach and willingness to let the songs play themselves out at their own pace. – they drift with the current, but they don't meander, and they get where they're going in their own sweet time.

It's difficult to separate 2016's Blackstar from The Next Day, the album David Bowie released with little warning in 2013. Arriving after a ten-year drought, The Next Day pulsated with the shock of the new – as Bowie's first album of new material in a decade, how could it not? – but ultimately it was grounded in history, something its cover made plain in its remix of Heroes artwor…

Billy Bragg & Joe Henry - Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad (2016) {Cooking Vinyl COOKCD623}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 271 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 102 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 156 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2016 Billy Bragg / Cooking Vinyl | COOKCD623
Acoustic / Folk / Blues / Americana

In March 2016 Billy Bragg and Joe Henry, guitars in hand, boarded a Los Angeles-bound train at Chicago’s Union Station looking to reconnect with the culture of American railroad travel and the music it inspired. Winding along 2,728 miles of track over four days, the pair recorded classic railroad songs in waiting rooms and at trackside while the train paused to pick up passengers.