Touch Definitive

No one, but no one, painted a picture in song of despair and desolation like the Thin Man from the West Plains, Porter Wagoner. Forget the Nudie suit and the pompadour; Waylon Jennings once said that Wagoner couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers, and these 40 songs prove it. Sure, the hits—27 of ‘em in all and every Top Ten solo smash—are here, like “A Satisfied Mind,” “Misery Loves Company,” “Skid Row Joe,” “The Cold Hard Facts of Life,” and “The Carroll County Incident,” but what elevates this collection above a mere best-of are the tracks lifted from Wagoner’s starkly compelling concept albums (complete with their amazing album art, some of which we’ve included here) like Confessions of a Broken Man, Soul of a Convict and Other Great Prison Songs, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Grammy-winning writer Colin Escott contributes notes to the package, which is newly remastered by Vic Anesini at Battery Studios in New York. Country music never got harder than this…this ain’t cry-in-your-beer country, it’s more like punch-in-the-gut poetry. Essential!

Magazine's three-disc box set is a mess. Breaking the group's history down to two eras spread across the first two-thirds of the box and adding a fantastic and well-needed third disc dedicated solely to Peel Sessions, it's yet another multi-disc package that half-pleases both fan and neophyte. Only four of the 45 tracks come directly from the band's four studio LPs. Oddly enough, seven-tenths of the decent live album Play is strewn across the first two discs.

Play It Again, Sam: The Fox Box is the long-awaited, first-ever definitive retrospective of Samantha Fox's musical career to date. Marking three decades since this undisputed icon of the 80s first topped the world's charts. this lavish 2CD + 2DVD box set is replete with a fold-out double-sided poster, a set of button badges and a picture-packed 32-page booklet. This is an essential package for Sam's army of Foxy fans and all self-respecting aficionados of 80s pop culture.

Funcrusher Plus is the 1997 debut album by Jaime Meline, Leonard Smythe, and Justin Ingleton. They are better known as El-P-, Mr. Len, and Bigg Jus and together they were better known as Company Flow. This was released on 28 July, 1997

It's been a long time since that late May, 2013 week in Luleå, Sweden, where pianist Django Bates and his Belovèd Trio first collaborated with the renowned Norrbotten Big Band. Fully documented in the All About Jazz article Django Bates: From Zero to Sixty in Five Days, Bates, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, along with other non-Norrbotteners, including guitarist Markus Pesonen, tubaist Daniel Herskedal and trombonist/vocalist Ashley Slater, made the lengthy trek to this small coastal town, located just 100 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle (and already experiencing 22 hours of daylight), to collaborate with Norrbotten for an appearance at the first edition of Luleå's New Music Festival. The objective was for Bates and his band mates to bring a brand new book of music to life, the pianist largely expanding arrangements of Belovèd's existing repertoire, but also including a commissioned new work from the festival.