Disaster at The Pole : The Crash of The Airship Italia

The Cowsills' volume of 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of the Cowsills contains nearly all of the group's biggest hits and best songs, including "The Rain, The Park, & Other Things," "Hair," and "Love American Style." Over the course of 12 songs, almost all of their hits are presented, along with Bill Cowsill's "When Everybody's Here," which means this will satisfy nearly all of their casual fans. Some diehards could use a longer collection, but the rest will find this to be a fine, entertaining collection.

Kurt Cobain made a lot of mistakes in his life but loving the Vaselines was not one of them. Nirvana covered one of their songs for their MTV Unplugged session, two other covers show up on the Incesticide record and as Kurt might tell you if he were alive today, from 1986 to 1989 the Vaselines were the best pop band on the planet. Sub Pop was kind enough to cash in on the Nirvana connection and on The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History, release everything the Vaselines recorded. From the stomping, singalong opener "Son of a Gun" to the distorted and nasty "Let's Get Ugly" 17 tracks later, this collection is the Holy Grail of indie pop music. It's unfailingly amateurish, almost completely silly, occasionally quite perverted, and always about sex. The music has the simplicity and ear-grabbing melodies of the best bubblegum, the loud and semi-competent guitars of punk, and some of the attitude and lo-fi sound of the noise rock scenesters like the Jesus & Mary Chain.

The Animals were a British band of the 1960s, formed in Newcastle upon Tyne during the early part of the decade. The band moved to London upon finding fame in 1964.

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.

Writing on the Wall's only album was theatrical heavy blues-psychedelic-rock that, despite its power and menace, was too obviously derivative of better and more original artists to qualify as a notable work. The organ-guitar blends owe much to the Doors, Procol Harum, and Traffic, though the attitude is somehow more sour and ominous than any of those groups. The vocals are sometimes pretty blatant in their homages to Arthur Brown, particularly when Linnie Paterson climbs to a histrionic scream; Jim Morrison, Gary Brooker, and Stevie Winwood obviously left their imprints on him too. Throw in some of the portentous drama from the narrations to the Elektra astrological concept album The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (particularly on "Aries") as well…

'The Best of the Pogues' was the sixth album released by The Pogues and marked a watershed for the band. They had sacked founder, principal songwriter and lead singer Shane MacGowan and the album was intended as a end of an era before their projected renascence.

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 19-track collection is the place to start. It started life during the quadrophonic era as a single LP of the same title, with programming intended to combine the concepts behind two earlier compilations, 13 and Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine, under one cover. In 1985, the two-LP version, the fourth compilation of the group's work, and the most comprehensive, was released, providing a good overview to the most obvious different sides of the group's output, and in 1991 this was remastered for CD with improved sound and an extra track…

Following a series of meditative explorations in the form of the Singularity Zone series of releases, The Oscillation have returned with a new sense of vigour and purpose. Refreshed and re-energized, the result is The Start Of The End, an album that casts more light and shade than ever before to create a mood of hope and re-birth.