Lisa Guyer Band

Like Seven, released four years earlier, Lisa Stansfield's eighth album bounces from style to style with the singer's deeply impassioned, life-embracing approach a constant feature. Sophisticated pop, Motown/Philadelphia International-styled retro-soul, a few flavors of house, and even muted go-go and elegant drum'n'bass factor into the material. Most unforeseen is "Hercules," not an update of the Allen Toussaint classic but a fiery hero's theme that incorporates the Bo Diddley beat, a triumphant horn arrangement from master Jerry Hey, and the main riff from John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13." A few cuts rate with Stansfield's best. The title song sounds like it was designed to fit with smooth early-'80s R&B grooves like the Mary Jane Girls' "All Night Long" and Keni Burke's "Risin' to the Top."

After the wrenching but rewarding Geek the Girl, Lisa Germano widens her focus and brightens her outlook on Excerpts From a Love Circus. Of course, Love Circus is a Lisa Germano album, but it's a slightly lighter take on her vulnerable, folky dream-pop: only she could make the refrain "Bruises, bruises, bruises" equally catchy and disturbing. As the title suggests, Excerpts From a Love Circus collects vignettes about hating the one you love and loving the one you hate; once again, Germano captures awkward, abstract feelings with her dreamy arrangements, hooky songwriting and unflinching lyrics. Passive-aggressive love songs like "I Love a Snot" sport flourishes like toy pianos and tablas, and incisive comments like "A Beautiful Schizophrenic"'s "I know you like my bad side/I love you like my good side." Germano's dark, self-effacing sense of humor surfaces on "Victoria's Secret," which answers the question "What is Victoria's Secret?" for once and all: "She says 'You are ugly/I am pretty/Your man wishes/You looked like me".

Complete Collection is a six-disc, U.K.-only set celebrating the breadth and depth of Lisa Stansfield's extensive and impressive career. It includes her five studio albums – Affection; Real Love; So Natural; Lisa Stansfield; and Face Up – as well as an exclusive sixth disc, with recordings from a 1992 Wembley date, club mixes (including a great Massive Attack version of "Live Together"), B-sides, and three songs from Stansfield's Blue Zone days. Not enough? Each studio album is augmented with at least two bonus tracks. Complete Collection is definitely the most comprehensive Lisa Stansfield retrospective; it borders on overkill. But since it's only available in the U.K. – and is also quite pricey – the single-disc Biography is perfectly acceptable for the casual Stansfield fan.

While other musicians mostly vary their repertoire with nuances, every Klaus Schulze performance is hard to predict. His former bandmate Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream) once needed a nice image when describing his way of improvising on stage with electronic instruments, “This is like a parachute jump where one cannot be sure if the parachute will even open.” This was particularly true during the time of the unpredictable, analog synthesizers- but Klaus kept this same work method throughout the years without making any changes. And with this he is one of the few musicians who saved this art of improvising, all during the transition from the analog to the digital era…

I Get A Kick: Cole Porter Reimagined presents adventurous new takes on 10 classic tunes written by Cole Porter for stage and screen, performed by jazz singer and award-winning poet Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) on her sixth record and first for Jazzed Media. This distinctive homage appeals to fans of vocal music, jazz, and the Great American Songbook, as well as anyone seeking a lush and witty background to a cozy night at home or a sophisticated gathering. It was co-produced and engineered by James Gardiner, who boasts two Grammy nominations and 42 gold and platinum records, and features internationally known, Bay Area-based jazz players Mike Zilber, John Santos, Ben Flint, Frank Martin, Fred Randolph, Troy Lampkins, Jeff Marrs, Alan Hall, and Paul Van Wageningen.

Scarcely three decades old, the enduring appeal of novelist Stephen King's horror oeuvre has already begun to foster remakes of the films and TV productions already based on his most popular works. This cable TV redux of King's 1975 tale of a small hamlet beset by vampires features an ominous, brooding orchestral and choral score that's a winning collaboration between newcomer Christopher Gordon and former Dead Can Dance mainstay cum film scorer Lisa Gerrard. The gothic seasoning she imparted to her previous collaborations with Hans Zimmer (most notably Gladiator) comes to the forefront on this score's haunting title aria (composed by Gerrard and partner Patrick Cassidy) and tracks like "Bloody Pirates" and "Free in Spirit." But it's the music of newcomer Gordon (Master and Commander) whose sheer scale and ambition belie the small screen format it was written for at nearly every turn.