Dancing In Berlin Berlin

This brand new CD edition has been remastered from original master tapes and has now been expanded with a number of essential bonus tracks, including the original 12” dance remixes of No More Words and Dancing In Berlin, along with a rare remix of the single Now It’s My Turn.

This brand new CD edition has been remastered from original master tapes and has now been expanded with a number of essential bonus tracks, including the original 12” dance remixes of No More Words and Dancing In Berlin, along with a rare remix of the single Now It’s My Turn.

Berlin reached their commercial peak – and their creative low point – with "Take My Breath Away" in 1986. While it's really not a bad song, the Top Gun hit removed the group from their new romantic roots, straying into adult contemporary territory. Master Series is an enjoyable career summary that collects nearly every track from Berlin that is worth collecting. Like many American new wave groups, Berlin was a superb singles band, but their albums were somewhat inconsistent. And their earliest work is the best, especially MTV classics like "Masquerade," "Dancing in Berlin," and "The Metro." On the naughty "Sex (I'm A…)," singer Terri Nunn shocked pop radio years before Madonna with its pornographic moans and groans and racy lyrics. "The Metro" encapsulates Berlin's affection for European new wave music with its somber, swirling synthesizers and sad, cold-as-ice vocals. The spiteful "No More Words" rips away the saccharine layers of "Take My Breath Away".

Love Life is the third album by the American new wave band, Berlin, released in 1984. The album contained the hit "No More Words", which became their first Top 40 single on the Billboard Hot 100 peaking at #23. The group was formed in Los Angeles in 1978 by John Crawford (bass guitar). Bandmembers included Crawford, Terri Nunn (vocals), David Diamond (keyboards), Ric Olsen (guitar), Matt Reid (keyboards) and Rod Learned (drums). The band gained mainstream-commercial success in the early 1980s with singles including "The Metro", "Sex (I'm A…)", "No More Words" and then in the mid 80s with chart-topping single "Take My Breath Away" from the 1986 film Top Gun.

Simple words, and yet that was the way Ornette Coleman summed up the reason behind his quest in music: a manifestation of the pure joy of sound and rhythm. And if the music of Ornette Coleman continues to move us today, it's because it drives its roots deep down into the rural blues of America's south, causing the emergence of a free and carefree jazz whose melodies form a vibrant, lyrical celebration of the moment. Ornette Coleman, incidentally, was a musician whose fervent admirers have included great artists of immensely varying styles, from Lou Reed to John Zorn and Leonard Bernstein, or David Cronenberg, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Patti Smith, Claude Nougaro and Pat Metheny, to name only those.

Georgian composer Giya Kancheli wrote seven symphonies between 1967 and 1986, all sharing an organic one-movement form. If his work has been in danger of losing its identity amid the tide of spiritually motivated music to come out of the ex-Soviet Union in recent years, these persuasive performances will set the record straight. Both are distinctly Russian in character: grave, ritualistic, shot through with religious symbols – pealing of bells and fragments of Georgian ‘church songs’ – long paragraphs punctuated by crude blasts, in the manner of Schnittke or Ustvolskaya, and brief flashes of caustic vulgarity – sudden jazz ‘wowing’ in the brass or a sinister quoting of a Bach invention. The Second rises gradually from an ascending four-note scale, richly suspended across the brass. Kancheli’s control of its sustained, circular development is extraordinary, moving from a gargantuan anticipation of the melody with its wistful, downturned coda to bright, dancing Stravinskian ostinatos in the wind and back again. The longer Seventh Symphony is conceived on a more conventional and grandiose scale. Suffused with Georgian folksong, its powerful rhetoric and hefty orchestration hark back to the world of Shostakovich, though veiled in a prayerful introspection peculiar to Kancheli.

The saying "never trust a synth pop band over 30" goes out the window as the arena-filling Depeche Mode present the 2014 film Live in Berlin, a career-spanning set that breathes new life into old numbers, while tackling new tunes with the same power and commitment. Thank lead singer and hyped showman David Gahan for all the power, as on this soundtrack, he growls, cries out, and full-bodied croons these soul-bearing lyrics, including the Delta Machine newbie "Should Be Higher," which soars about three or four stories higher that its studio version. Gahan takes the verses as if he's Leonard Cohen, and then belts the chorus like he's Freddie Mercury crossed with Trent Reznor, but in the case of fan favorite "Enjoy the Silence," he's often off the mike, allowing the audience to take over the singing with a couple "come on!"'s in support…