Touch Miss A

After cockily shrugging off the difficult second album challenge with their hugely successful Yours Truly, Angry Mob, the Kaisers deliver yet another collection of blistering rock-pop in the shape of Off with Their Head. Producer Mark Ronson returns the band to the distilled pop potency of 2005's Employment as well as providing an all-star cast of guests: Lily Allen provides backing vocals on "Always Happens Like That", classical starlet David Arnold adds strings to "Like It Too Much" and UK grime aficionado Sway does a star turn on the unlikely yet winning "Half the Truth". Yet this is definitely the Kaiser's own show, as evinced on the wonderfully woozy "Tomato in the Rain," the catchy "Good Days, Bad Days", the feisty "You Want History" and the lovely–and somewhat surprising–finale "Remember You're a Girl". Musically, Off with Their Heads ain't rocket science, and the band's insights into contemporary urban life are superficial at best–but the Kaisers still manage to mostly hit the spot.

From one of the biggest selling American bands of all time, who brought you their brand of the best of blues based hard rock from the 70’s through to present day, this release collects the best of Aerosmith’s ballad material as well as including a few select other fan favorites. The International tracklisting contains 16 of their biggest hits including the huge hits, ‘Cryin’, ‘Crazy’, ‘Love In An Elevator’ and ‘I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’.

Falstaff was the culmination of Verdi’s long career as an opera composer. He had talked of retirement after the premiere of Un Ballo in Maschera in 1858 and believed that he had laid down his compositional pen after Aida in 1871. But nearly a decade later, persuaded by his publisher, he embarked on a rewriting of Simon Boccanegra of 1857. This involved his working with Arrigo Boito, an accomplished librettist and also a composer; it was an association Verdi relished. The revised Boccanegra, unlike the 1857 original, was a success at La Scala in 1881 and showed that even at the age of 68 Verdi’s inner genius was alive and well. Ricordi and Boito subtly pointed Verdi towards Shakespeare’s Othello. Verdi loved and revered Shakespeare above any other poet. Slowly, via constant personal contact and communication, Boito produced a libretto that sparked Verdi; even more slowly Otello was written. It is a work of significant orchestral complexity that marked major compositional developments, even compared to the revised Boccanegra and the lyrical greatness within Aida and Don Carlos, its immediate predecessors. It was premiered, again at La Scala, six years after the revised Boccanegra… – Robert J Farr, MusicWeb International