Arena Flow

The tradition of presenting operas in the Arena of Verona was inaugurated by Aida when it was performed there in 1913. The wide-open spaces of this opera-the blue skies and fragrant forests of Ethiopia, the starry nights on the Nile-and its picture of Egypt's ancient civilisation found their ideal setting in the grandeur of this centuries-old Roman amphitheatre and in the open air of Verona's summer nights.

Caught in the Game had Survivor focusing on a harder rock & roll sound, with greater emphasis stemming from the guitar and percussion, but this new formula didn't fare well commercially and the band failed to put any of the album's songs onto the charts. With Frankie Sullivan finally expressing himself with his guitar playing, the album does manage to establish a vibrant and dominant punch through most of the cuts, but because of this, there's a shortage of musical flow and melodic consistency that becomes apparent after the first few tracks. Efforts such as "What Do You Really Think" and "I Never Stopped Loving You" are Survivor's best examples of their straight-ahead rock fair, but they're canceled out by non-abrasive fillers like "Slander" and "Santa Ana Winds," which have the band playing well below their capacity.

The Essential Journey doesn't bear a title that's too hyperbolic for the collection it represents. Over the course of two discs and 32 songs, the retrospective winds through all of the group's biggest songs – not just the hit singles, but the album radio favorites and concert staples that kept the group popular on the charts and in the arenas until last third of the '80s (and, for the record, everything on the previous Greatest Hits record is here). The key to the collection is that it doesn't abide strict chronological order. Instead, it's divided into two, with all the biggest hits on the first disc and the second acting like a "more of the best" collection, and within each of the discs, the tracks flow like a concert. The result is a first-class, definitive collection for the serious Journey listener (and, despite many skeptics, there are many out there – which is not hard to understand, since arena rock never got any better than this).

While Bon Jovi managed to stick a couple of killer album tracks onto all of their records, their main strength had always been writing singles. Released in 1994, Cross Road collects all of their biggest hits, adding a couple of new songs (including the international smash "Always," which helped the album go platinum in multiple countries) and Jon Bon Jovi's solo hit, "Blaze of Glory," for good measure…

Bon Jovi's four-CD/one-DVD box set of rarities, 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong, inspires two immediate reactions. The first: How in the world did Bon Jovi have four discs' worth of unreleased material in their vaults? The second: Who on earth would want to hear 50 rarities from Bon Jovi? To anybody who's not a devoted fan, the New Jersey group always seemed like a quintessential singles-driven band…