Tell.it.to.the.bees.2019

Do you like yourself a bit of “Dutch Beat”, or as insiders refer to it, “Nederbeat”? Well, if so then there is no time like the present to get yourself totally wrapped up in a huge heavy dose of it, and if you’re not really sure or perhaps you’ve only maybe dipped a toe in here and there, well now’s the time for that full immersion experience to start. This brand new eight CD box set issued by premier league Dutch reissue specialists Pseudonym, and helmed by the label’s head honcho Hans Van Vuuren, is an exhausting, exhilarating labour-of-love style project … and then some! Diggin’ In The Goldmine has been categorised, broadly speaking as “Dutch Beat” but what purchasers are subject to are around two hundred tracks of exciting, multi-genre, early-days rock music which spans from the immediate post-Beatles and ‘Stones fallout of 1963-64.

Rhino Records Presents 100 Greatest Heartbreak contains the defining tracks of the decade and features some of the biggest hits from artists including Coldplay, Dua Lipa, a-ha, Chicago and many more.

This triple-CD set devoted to Alma Cogan won't supplant the four-disc set issued a couple of years earlier by EMI, but it does contain a different breakdown of her music with a couple of tracks – most notably, her rendition of the Beatles' "Help!" – that aren't on the larger set. Each disc is broken down chronologically, into "The Fifties," "The Sixties," and "The Standards," respectively, and while John Lennon might've been amused by it, Paul McCartney will probably be downright impressed that the Beatles songs that Cogan – a beloved personal friend of the band, but a half-generation older and out of a completely different performing tradition – embraced during the final phase of her career, are presented on that last disc, alongside the work of George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Arthur Freed, and Nacio Herb Brown; as Cogan herself might've quipped, all "jolly good company."

Patti Austin's 3rd Qwest album was a reasonable success, making the Top 50 on the R&B chart and throwing off three R&B chart singles, "Honey for the Bees," "The Heat of Heat," and the title track. But you could tell it was supposed to do a lot better on the Pop chart: five heavyweight producers (Russ Titelman, Tommy LiPuma, Monte Moir, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), plus 14 songwriters, contributed to what was doubtless a big-budget production, and that means label head Quincy Jones was looking for a lot more in the way of crossover than a low chart ranking for "The Heat Of Heat." In retrospect, the fault lies with all that high-priced help, while Austin gives her all in any guise they devise for her sultry balladeer, disco diva, pop princess.

"Promenade Blue" - the new studio album of R&B/Soul icon Nick Waterhouse - full of Energy, heart and creativity from start to finish!