Paradise

After successfully establishing themselves as one of America's best commercial progressive rock bands of the late '70s with albums like The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight, Chicago's Styx had taken a dubious step towards pop overkill with singer Dennis DeYoung's ballad "Babe." The centerpiece of 1979's uneven Cornerstone album, the number one single sowed the seeds of disaster for the group by pitching DeYoung's increasingly mainstream ambitions against the group's more conservative songwriters, Tommy Shaw and James "JY" Young.

Ry Cooder's exceptional Paradise and Lunch takes a popular precept – music as the common denominator across all languages and styles – to extremes few artists have envisioned let alone fulfilled. Considered by many diehards to be the California native's finest hour, the 1974 set unfurls with rarified levels of joyousness, ingenuity, and sophistication. A prime contender for any Desert Island list and an album that repeatedly restores your faith in the inimitable effects experienced upon listening to special performances, Paradise and Lunch is an eternal "musicians' musician" record – an adventurous, ambitious, soulful leap down roads well-traveled and paths less known. Such eclecticism, virtuosity, and ebullience resonate with unmatched verve on our hybrid SACD. Mastered from the original master tapes and strictly limited to 2000 numbered copies, this audiophile reissue boasts dead-quiet surfaces, superb transient response, front-to-back soundstaging, and an organic immediacy that heightens the enjoyment, character, and craft of the arrangements.