Cat in The Agraharam

This recording of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s two sacred masterpieces is one of the only forays Neville Marriner ever made into French baroque. Full of elegance and refinement, this rendition features great vocal soloists such as Ann Murray, Daw Upshaw or John Aler.

Sir Neville Marriner thins out the usual ASMF textures and leads vigorous, stately accounts of both the Water Music Suites and the Music for the Royal Fireworks. The playing is snappy, the feeling of dance-inspired animation just right. This is the ideal compilation, presenting both scores complete; and the sound is open, well balanced, and extremely well defined.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) return with their 14th studio album Bauhaus Staircase, over six years after the triumph of their Top 4-charting record The Punishment of Luxury. The album was born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when as Andy McCluskey admits: “I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom.”

For this wonderful recital finally making is digital debut, Kathleen Battle made a beautiful selection of Handel arias excerpted from its most famous operas (Alcina, Giulio Cesare in Egitto), oratorios (Solomon, Messiah) and masques (Acis and Galatea). It is witfully accompanied by Neville Marriner’s Academy, who provides an ideal backdrop in which Battle’s voice can express all its charm and virtuosity. This album is definitely a highlight of our Neville Marriner centenary retrospective!

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) return with their 14th studio album Bauhaus Staircase, over six years after the triumph of their Top 4-charting record The Punishment of Luxury. The album was born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when as Andy McCluskey admits: “I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom.”

A 2005 appearance on a German television program, followed by a tour - throughout which the original four members performed 1981's Architecture & Morality in its entirety - culminated in the first OMD album since 1996 (and this particular quartet’s first since 1986). History of Modern, for the most part, sounds like OMD. There are two alarming exceptions: “Sometimes” incorporates turntable scratching and guest vocalist Jennifer John, who interjects with lines from “Motherless Child,” while “Pulse” is oversexed and awkward neo-electro sleaze, full of bedroom whispers, moans, and yearning yelps. Most updates to the group’s sound are natural, though only a handful of the songs - the placid ballad “New Holy Ground” and the somehow cathartic and pensive “Green” especially - rate with the earlier material…

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (OMD) return with their 14th studio album Bauhaus Staircase, over six years after the triumph of their Top 4-charting record The Punishment of Luxury. The album was born from the impetus to kickstart new explorations during lockdown when as Andy McCluskey admits: “I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom.”

With the split between McCluskey and the rest of the band resolved by the former's decision to carry on with the band's name on his own, the question before Sugar Tax's appearance was whether the change would spark a new era of success for someone who clearly could balance artistic and commercial impulses in a winning fashion. The answer, based on the album - not entirely. The era of Architecture and Morality wouldn't be revisited anyway, for better or for worse, but instead of delightful confections with subtle heft like "Enola Gay" and "Tesla Girls," on Sugar Tax McCluskey is comfortably settled into a less-spectacular range of songs that only occasionally connect. Like fellow refugees from the early '80s such as Billy Mackenzie and Marc Almond, McCluskey found himself bedeviled in the early '90s with an artistic block that resulted in his fine singing style surrounded by pedestrian arrangements and indifferent songs…

The Pacific Age is the last OMD album to feature founding member Paul Humphreys (although The Best of OMD does collect a pair of subsequent singles). With producer Stephen Hague returning and guests Graham and Neil Weir elevated to full-time members, OMD aggressively targets the American pop market cultivated with Crush and the Top Ten single "If You Leave." With the Weirs' horns and a trio of female backing vocalists, the music on The Pacific Age sounds larger than life (the opening "Stay" in particular), a trait common to popular music in the mid-'80s. The added production value and better material represent an improvement over Crush, despite the opinion of some that The Pacific Age is a bland sellout. It's true that tracks like "(Forever) Live and Die," "Shame," and "Goddess of Love" are more style than substance, but it's a style that plays to OMD's mastery of melody and mood…

3rd wave of black metal darlings and trustees of American Pacific Northwestern Shamanism WITTR unleash yet another solid, measured slab of densely atmospheric ponderings of the archaic from their forest realm…