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Cream teamed up with producer Felix Pappalardi for their second album, Disraeli Gears, a move that helped push the power trio toward psychedelia and also helped give the album a thematic coherence missing from the debut. This, of course, means that Cream get further away from the pure blues improvisatory troupe they were intended to be, but it does get them to be who they truly are: a massive, innovative power trio. The blues still courses throughout Disraeli Gears – the swirling kaleidoscopic "Strange Brew" is built upon a riff lifted from Albert King – but it's filtered into saturated colors, as it is on "Sunshine of Your Love," or it's slowed down and blurred out, as it is on the ominous murk of "Tales of Brave Ulysses." It's a pure psychedelic move that's spurred along by Jack Bruce's flourishing collaboration with Pete Brown.

X-Legged Sally (XLS) is a Belgian avant-garde rock/jazz-band founded in 1988 by composer Peter Vermeersch, and disbanded in 1997. They were one of the first bands from Belgium to combine a set of very different musical styles (jazz, rock, improvisation and classical), becoming a starting point for the Belgian indie music scene that developed in the nineties. Initially, X-Legged Sally was formed to compose and perform the music Peter Vermeersch wrote for dance productions, such as Immer das Selbe Gelogen (Always the Same Lies), released as a live cd in 1991. Vermeersch' composing style was becoming too demanding for the constraints of sheet music such as was used in his earlier band Maximalist! From the beginning, improvisation played an important role in XLS' songs. The first X-Legged Sally concert took place in November 1988. Soon, XLS became a band in its own right, although there would be cooperations with dance ensembles throughout the existence of the group.

Morrocan Roll is not a step toward the rock & roll side of the fusion equation, but rather an experiment with Eastern sounds and softer textures that trades in the thunderstorms of their debut for rhythmically rich siroccos. Expanded to a quintet with the addition of percussionist Morris Pert, Brand X balances their arrangements with more equanimity, resulting in a subdued sound that is mesmerizing rather than arresting. The songs are written by individual members (their debut credited the band), but this doesn't yield the results you might expect: while Percy Jones' "Orbits" is essentially a showcase for the fretless bass, Lumley's "Disco Suicide" shares more with Frank Zappa than the artist's typically dreamy tones, and it's Phil Collins' "Why Should I Lend You Mine" that sounds most like the work of Lumley…

Without the drumming of Phil Collins, who does appear on some of Brand X's albums, Masques still maintains a snug, jazzy-prog milieu and comes off clean and tight. Each song has a different beat, speed, and tempo with a satisfying assortment of keyboards and percussion instruments to keep the entire album afloat. Resounding xylophone and chimes outline the music on the seven tracks, with "Earth Dance" and "The Poke" coming up a little bit stronger than the rest. Most notably is the superb musical interplay of all the instruments used, and the way in which they enhance and benefit one another. The progressive rock sound does evolve by way of lengthy guitar passages from John Goodsall and accelerated keyboard fingering from Morris Pert, adding spice and vivaciousness while popping up when least expected. Masques is a firm studio album, and will keep listeners fascinated with the band.

What's Going On is the eleventh studio album by American soul singer Marvin Gaye. It was released on May 21, 1971, by the Motown Records subsidiary label Tamla. Recorded between 1970 and 1971 in sessions at Hitsville U.S.A., Golden World, United Sound Studios in Detroit, and at The Sound Factory in West Hollywood, California, it was Gaye's first album to credit him as producer and to credit Motown's in-house session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers. The album was an immediate commercial and critical success, and came to be viewed by music historians as a classic of 1970s soul. Multiple critics, musicians, and many in the general public consider What's Going On to be one of the greatest albums of all time and a landmark recording in popular music. In 1985, writers on British music weekly the NME voted it the best album of all time. In 2020, it was ranked number one on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton was Eric Clapton's first fully realized album as a blues guitarist – more than that, it was a seminal blues album of the 1960s, perhaps the best British blues album ever cut, and the best LP ever recorded by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Standing midway between Clapton's stint with the Yardbirds and the formation of Cream, this album featured the new guitar hero on a series of stripped-down blues standards, Mayall pieces, and one Mayall/Clapton composition, all of which had him stretching out in the idiom for the first time in the studio. This album was the culmination of a very successful year of playing with John Mayall, a fully realized blues creation, featuring sounds very close to the group's stage performances, and with no compromises.

What's Going On is the eleventh studio album by American soul singer Marvin Gaye. It was released on May 21, 1971, by the Motown Records subsidiary label Tamla. Recorded between 1970 and 1971 in sessions at Hitsville U.S.A., Golden World, United Sound Studios in Detroit, and at The Sound Factory in West Hollywood, California, it was Gaye's first album to credit him as producer and to credit Motown's in-house session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers. The album was an immediate commercial and critical success, and came to be viewed by music historians as a classic of 1970s soul. Multiple critics, musicians, and many in the general public consider What's Going On to be one of the greatest albums of all time and a landmark recording in popular music. In 1985, writers on British music weekly the NME voted it the best album of all time. In 2020, it was ranked number one on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".