Wege in Die Nacht Paths in The Night (1999)

Charles Lloyd teams with a different band here, replacing Bobo Stenson's piano with John Abercrombie's guitar, bassist Anders Jormin with Dave Holland, and drummer Billy Hart with Billy Higgins. The title references the feeling on the album in that Lloyd was going for more of a jazz sound, something more basic and lyrical as opposed to exotic and unusual.

Adept and international specialist of bansoori (a bamboo flute among the Indians of North), Andreas Ludwig attempts to produce an ethnic music slightly tinged with electronic music and progressives. Our man in particular is helped by drummer Harald Grosskopf and guitarist-keyboardist Axel Manrico Heilhecker, the duo is Sunya Beat in full force! Recorded between 1993 and 1998, parts of "Callings Of The Night" looks like an imaginary film, which leads the listener to the depths of the mysteries of the orient. Very relaxed and a kind of New Age.

In 1975 Bernd Noske was on tour in Spain with his famous band Birth Control. Deeply impressed from the country and the people he take the liberty to form a solo album. This album is a mirror of his personal impressions. In 1979 the work was done. Now - after 20 long years - finally you can listen to this wonderful music.

Loreena McKennitt is in her element in front of an audience, telling interesting stories about the songs and assembling a topnotch backing band. This is her first live release available to the public, and uses material from three concerts (one from Paris and two from Toronto) to put together a complete show. As with The Book of Secrets tour, the first half is The Book of Secrets in its entirety, arranged in the same order as the studio CD. This material is covered on the first CD, and it has never sounded better. The live performance seems to breathe new life into the tracks and some songs, such as "Dante's Prayer" and "Skellig," sound better than the studio recordings.

The album that was Manfred Mann's commercial breakthrough was a departure from the previous albums made with the Earth Band. Though the personnel are the same and the musicianship is as mind-blowing as ever, the songs are shorter and punchier, in some cases more poppy. This is not to say that the band had sacrificed a bit of ingenuity or complexity, but the long jams are gone in favor of briefer sound portraits. Nightingales and Bombers included Manfred Mann's first cover of a Bruce Springsteen song, the album-opening "Spirits in the Night," a single that charted, and became one of the only pieces written in 10/4 time ever to do so.

From the opening pairing of "Are You Shivering?" and the gorgeously titled "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night," it's apparent that Coil was making a return during 1999 that would prove to be as influential on the post-industrial scene as its 1984 debut, Scatology…

There is a certain charm to an album like this from a historical standpoint, particularly for anybody who still wanted a more flashy and fun style of metal/rock that cut against the "Alternative" ideal of dumbed down songwriting and morose or mundane lyrics about how much the world sucks, because this is about as clear of a rejection of the decade it was born from that one could find. It embodies the same sort of fantastical escapism that would occupy the early days of lighter, fantasy-oriented bands like Freedom Call and Edguy while also being a bit more retro in character, perhaps most closely dovetailing with the somewhat later reformation and restyled incarnation of Domain…

Attempting to make sense of Hawkwind's early-'80s output has never been easy. Between 1980 and 1984, the band itself released just four new studio albums, but behind them, the floodgates strained beneath the weight of a career's worth of live and studio outtakes and off-cuts, many of which did, in fact, date from the first years of this new decade. Among these, the albums Zones and This Is Hawkwind, Do Not Panic are the best representatives of the 1980 and 1984 eras; The Collectors Series, Vol. 2: Choose Your Masques arrived to slip in between them, with a seamless recounting of the group's fall 1982 U.K. tour - and at the same time, render any other document of the same period redundant. (The Friends and Relations and Independent Days collections both include overlapping material)…