Wege in Die Nacht Paths in The Night by Andreas Kleinert (1999)

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.

Originally released around the turn of the millennium, Musick to Play in the Dark featured a restarted Coil at bay, with original members John (later Jhonn) Balance (R.I.P.) and Peter Christopherson joined by synthesist/bassist Thighpaulsandra, and Drew McDowall (replaced by Rose McDowall on the second volume). These are long-form works, collections of mood pieces in several modes, and what’s interesting (and somewhat predictable) is that the patience displayed while shifting in between these modes creates a tension and space that feels… almost removed from music by a step, as if the performance decided to slowly back away from Coil at a respectful, totality-fearing distance (or maybe it was the psychic force of their music that pushed it all back)…

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.

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.

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)…

The GSC compilation 36 All-Time Greatest Hits does offer three-dozen solid songs by Dinah Shore, one of America's foremost entertainers from the '40s to the '60s, though they're scattered across three discs and the performances are of a dodgy vintage…