Second Best To None

Collection includes 3 studio albums and one live compilation by rock band Parabelle.

The highly anticipated new recording from the Gramophone Recording of the Year winners in 2011. Two years on from their award winning Dvorak album, the Pavel Haas Quartet turn their attention to Schubert’s two late masterpiece. The String Quartet in D minor has a sort of dark cipher encoded within. The title “Death and the Maiden” reflects the quotation from Schubert’s eponymous song in the second movement. The theme of death is also underlined by other quotations and the choice of the key of D minor, which according to the period definition is characterised by “heavy-hearted womanliness, spleen and foreboding”.

After Neil Young left the California folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in 1968, he slowly established himself as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic singer/songwriters of his generation. Young's body of work ranks second only to Bob Dylan in terms of depth, and he was able to sustain his critical reputation, as well as record sales, for a longer period of time than Dylan, partially because of his willfully perverse work ethic…

Celebrated as the European electronic music community's premier ambassador, composer Jean Michel Jarre elevated the synthesizer to new peaks of popularity during the 1970s, in the process emerging as an international superstar renowned for his dazzling concert spectacles…

A single-disc distillation of Sony Legacy's massive box set celebrating the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special, this 2019 compilation covers ground that has been covered many times before. Back in 1968, RCA put out a soundtrack album to the special, and once the show entered in the realm of legend, it was repackaged on its anniversary three times over. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that The Best of the '68 Comeback contains a bunch of easily available material, yet none of the previous compilations assembled these tracks in precisely the same way (nor did they contain a new version of "If I Can Dream" plucked from NBC's anniversary special, a version distinguished by the presence of Shawn Mendes, Darius Rucker, Blake Shelton, Carrie Underwood, and Post Malone…not precisely a dream lineup for an Elvis fan).

Slade may have never truly caught on with American audiences (often narrow-mindedly deemed "too British-sounding"), but the group became a sensation in their homeland with their anthemic brand of glam rock in the early '70s, as they scored a staggering 11 Top Five hits in a four-year span from 1971 to 1974 (five of which topped the charts)…