Crass The Feeding Of The Five Thousand

A more succinct and straightforward anthology of the Housemartins than 1988's Now That's What I Call Quite Good!, 2004's The Best of the Housemartins is a 14-track overview that sticks to the basics. While it does not contain the significant BBC sessions, B-sides, and album cuts featured on Quite Good!, it does feature superior sound and all the material (such as "Happy Hour," "Sheep," "The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death," and their cover of the Isley Brothers' "Caravan of Love") that casual fans truly need. Most of the band's biggest fans will tell you, of course, that the two studio albums are absolutely necessary.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet was always a popular addition to the many internationally famous Jazz Musicians who appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival. Over time Brubeck made a number of appearances and These recordings date from concerts which were performed in front of a rapturous audiences in Freebody Park, Newport, Rhode Island on the 17th July 1955, 3rd of July 1958, 5th July 1959 and 7th July 1963. In the 1950s Brubeck was considered the darling of the “Cocktail Set” and no soiree was deemed complete without a background of his innovative interpretations of topical jazz themes and time signatures as evidenced in his most popular recording “Take Five”.

Essentially the Allman Brothers Band's Gold collection is an expanded version of both the Universal Masters and 20th Century Masters collections. It contains two discs that total 30 cuts and cover the band's catalog from 1969's Allman Brothers Band to 1975's Enlightened Rogues. There are five cuts from the first album, including the original studio version of "Whipping Post," and four from Idlewild South, including the studio read of "Midnight Ride." The cuts from At Fillmore East number four with the inclusion of the 13-minute "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," and five from Eat a Peach, including "Melissa," "Blue Sky," and "Ain't Wasting Time No More."

Throughout the 1990s, Cuneiform Records has released essential Happy the Man material that had been overlooked by the band's label Arista in the mid-'70s. Death's Crown presents three archival recordings made in 1974 and 1976 in Happy the Man's rehearsal room. The sound quality is rather poor (the voice is particularly lost in the background), but it is still enjoyable and the beauty of the music makes up for the inconvenience. The record opens with the title track, "Death's Crown," an 11-part suite of 38 minutes. Composed in 1974, "Death's Crown" was originally a multimedia performance including dancers, actors, and a light and slide show. The piece has been performed on numerous occasions, and the band later integrated some parts into its live show (as an example, part five appears on the Live CD as the track "Open Book"). It is the tale of a man's journey into the other side of life, sung in the most emotional way by Frank Wyatt…

Ideally, one would avoid compilations of the Doors' work, except perhaps for the hit singles and moments when one wanted very light listening. This was a band that took itself very seriously, almost to the point of self-parody at times, and their music ought to be discovered in the setting and context in which it was intended, but assuming that one needs a Doors anthology, this 18-track collection (19 on CD) is the place to start…

We often cite the Reunion tour as a demarcation between the “classic” and “modern” Springsteen eras. Yet this April already marks 23 years since the start of the Reunion tour in Barcelona. Do the math, and the E Street Band’s return in 1999 is inching ever closer to being the midpoint of their overall career—a line to be reached in 2026, at which point it will have been 27 years from the start of Reunion; and Reunion itself was 27 years after the band formed in 1972. Time flies.