The Police Every Breath You Take The Classics (1995){pocm 1990}

The group's first album with Michael McDonald marked a shift to a more mellow and self-consciously soulful sound for the Doobies, not all that different from what happened to Steely Dan – whence McDonald (and Jeff Baxter) had come – between, say, Can't Buy a Thrill and Pretzel Logic. They showed an ability to expand on the lyricism of Patrick Simmons and Baxter's writing on "Wheels of Fortune," while the title track introduced McDonald's white funk sound cold to their output, successfully. Simmons' "8th Avenue Shuffle" vaguely recalled "Black Water," only with an urban theme and a more self-consciously soul sound (with extraordinarily beautiful choruses and a thick, rippling guitar break).

The ever-increasing popularity of Handel and his contemporaries, and their employment of alto castratos, has encouraged the development of countertenors capable of similar vocal feats to the original interpreters of the heroic roles in these works. Among these the distinguished American, David Daniels, who burst on to the scene here a couple of years ago at Glyndebourne in Theodora, is a leading contender. If I would place Scholl in the category of Deller and Esswood, with their luminous, soft-grained tone, Daniels is closer to the more earthy sound of Bowman, his voice — like Bowman's — astonishingly large in volume.

The Electric Family, led by singer and songwriter Tom "The Perc" Redecker, is not a group; it is a tribe of singers and players drawn from more than three decades of German space music. Previous records featured members of Thirsty Moon, Embryo, Amon Düül II and Grobschnitt as well as kindred spirits from the Tav Falco and Jimmy Page/Robert Plant bands. "Ice Cream Phoenix" (2003) is a true unity project. Part of the album was recorded in the old Studio of the DDR in the former East Berlin and brings together musicians from both sides of the fallen Wall and beyond, including pianist Rainer Kirchmann of the band Pankow, Agitation Free drummer Burghard Rausch and pedal steel guitarist Hermann Lammers-Meyer, a veteran of stone country sessions in Nashville and Austin, Texas…