Stephen Few Signal

The Carmina Burana is the most famous of all treasuries of medieval Latin and Middle High German poetry, named after the Bavarian monastery where it was compiled and preserved. It is best known today for Carl Orff's hour-long selection from it's rich collection of love lyrics, student songs and religious poetry written in Latin and old German. During the 1960s and 70s a few early-music ensembles made more or less successful efforts to capture the unique mix of secular and sacred idioms brought together by the original manuscripts.

A collection of 6 CD, which includes all the studio albums by American alternative rock band from Sacramento at the moment. Best-known for their ubiquitous hit "The Distance," Cake epitomized the postmodern, irony-drenched aesthetic of '90s geek rock. Their sound freely mixed and matched pastiches of widely varying genres – white-boy funk, hip-hop, country, new wave pop, jazz, college rock, and guitar rock – with a particular delight in the clashes that resulted. Their songs were filled with lyrical non-sequiturs, pop-culture references, and smirky satire, all delivered with bone-dry detachment by speak/singing frontman John McCrea. Cake's music most frequently earned comparisons to Soul Coughing and King Missile, but lacked the downtown New York artiness of those two predecessors; instead, Cake cultivated an image of average guys with no illusions and pretensions about their role as entertainers. At the same time, critics lambasted what they saw as a smugly superior attitude behind the band's habitual sarcasm.

EMI's Immersion Edition of The Wall offers a new remaster of the original album, a remaster of the previously released concert album Is There Anybody Out There: The Wall Live, a DVD containing a documentary among other visual highlights and, finally, two discs of demos from the band and the album's chief songwriter, Roger Waters…

‘Crowded House’ was the band’s first and most commercially successful effort, with two of its singles reaching the American Top Forty – ‘Something So Strong’ and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’. Reviewers commonly refer to the music of Crowded House as either new wave or something close to that – songs that are short in length, short on instrumental solos, and, to an extent, compatible with music videos. Much of that is actually true of ‘Crowded House’, but the only real description gets offered by stopping the talk, and turning on the music. The album is one snappy yet alluring melody after the next, music that variously earns the description of soulful, emotional, often a celebration but sometimes solemn. Beneath it all, one detects in Neil Finn’s music a passion and meticulous respect for the art he is creating. The lofty quality of his work not only applies to the music – his deceptively simple lyrics always emerge from the music, never the other way around.