Now From 29 December 2014

Leaving behind Columbia Records along with his latter-day collaborator producer Rick Rubin, Neil Diamond sets up shop at Capitol - which now belongs to Universal Records, who owns his classic recordings for Uni and MCA - and teams with producer Don Was for 2014's Melody Road. Diamond may have left his label of 40 years, but in an odd way, Melody Road is a return home after his stark wanderings of the 2000s. Rubin encouraged Diamond to be spare, sometimes recording him with little more than an acoustic guitar, but Was - who is assisted by Jacknife Lee - coaxes the singer/songwriter to bring back the schmaltz, an essential element of Neil's glory days that was largely ignored on the Rubin records. Was and Lee retain a hint of that new millennial intimacy - it's never once as overblown as his '70s records - but the songs themselves alternate between stately ballads, effervescent bubblegum, and self-important pomp…

The band’s new CD, I’ll Have Some of That, turns out to be a great rock and roll record. The band is not trying to be modern and, in fact, they are just trying to be what they always were, a great melodic hard rock band who never quite made it…

German thrash metal veterans SODOM will release a new EP, "Sacred Warpath", on November 28 in Germany, December 1 in the rest of Europe and late January 2015 in the USA via SPV/Steamhammer. The effort will be made available on CD, 10-inch clear vinyl (limited to 1,000 copies) and as a digital download.Comments SODOM frontman Thomas "Angelripper" Such: "Since we've been getting the impression that the world is falling apart at the seams, we've decided to make our voices head … while there's still time.

This album consists of the best of the last solo recordings made by Robin, mainly recorded between 2006 and 2008. When Robin started making what would eventually become his final solo album, he always knew that it would be titled “50 St. Catherine’s Drive” – the address of the house where he lived when he was born in Douglas, on the Isle of Man. Robin planned the album to be a reflective, sometimes autobiographical album, and this intent has been heightened by the inclusion of what is almost certainly the last song Robin ever wrote or sung.

Unhalfbricking was, if only in retrospect, a transitional album for the young Fairport Convention, in which the group shed its closest ties to its American folk-rock influences and started to edge toward a more traditional British folk-slanted sound…