Indebted 2

Steve Lacy snapped on this one. The guitarist/bassist of The Internet (and acclaimed producer for Solange and J. Cole, as well as featured collaborator on Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride) presents a kaleidoscopic tour of funk and R&B styles on his debut solo album Apollo XXI. The sound and drive heard on the album are deeply indebted to the freaky early days of Prince Rogers Nelson, from the way Lacy stylizes song titles (“Love 2 Fast,” “N Side,” “4ever”) to his voice, which ranges from growly lows to pleading, teasing falsetto.

Eleven is aptly titled: it's Martina McBride's 11th album, contains 11 songs, and is her debut for Republic Nashville. McBride co-wrote over half the album and co-produced it with Byron Gallimore. Her husband, John McBride, engineered, mixed, and offered excellent creative advice. "I'm Gonna Love You Through It," the album's well-known single, deals with surviving the ordeal of breast cancer. It's a socially conscious anthem of the type that McBride has recorded throughout her career, and although it's typically inspiring and beautifully performed, it doesn't really reflect the album as a whole; "One Night," the celebratory opening number with ringing electric guitars….

Aerosmith prove that a band can be inspired by the blues and play the blues without ever feeling like a blues band. Then again, the nature of the blues is that every musician who plays it stamps his or her own identity on a set of familiar chord changes and songs. While it might not feel like the blues, Aerosmith do indeed stamp their identity on each track on their long-promised blues album, the atrociously named Honkin' on Bobo. Other rockers who have cut full-length blues albums have always played the music with a kind of scholarly reverence, taking care to pay tribute to their influences. Not Aerosmith.

The First Symphony is by way of a late graduation piece—Kancheli was 33 when he completed it in 1967. The style is much indebted to Shostakovich, in particular recalling the latter's Fourth Symphony, then only recently rehabilitated, but there is also a foretaste in the second movement of the mystical-apocalyptic tone which was soon to become Kancheli's hallmark. More striking than either symphony though is Mourned by the Wind, one of the very few pieces of music composed in memory of a musicologist—Kancheli's fellow-Georgian and a figure well known to Shostakovich scholars, Givi Ordzhonikidze. Here is another example of Kancheli's special gift for finding pathos in the simplest of musical materials, with the solo viola's unearthly keening set against waterfalls of passionate declamation for the full orchestra. In its starkness and haunting spirituality this should appeal to those who respond to Part, Gorecki or Tavener—and perhaps even more so to listeners who find those composers a little too glamorous in their asceticism, so to speak, and who prefer to meet the music half way, rather than merely submitting to its spell.