Best 2021

French Pop – music so effortlessly cool and hip you can’t help but fall in love, Psychedelia – fuzzy dance floor music to lose yourself too. Put the two together and you have an intoxicating mix that is so lush and so perfect, and a sound that has helped soundtrack recent hit TV series such as The Queens Gambit, Killing Eve, and The Serpent.

This version, newly remastered at Abbey Road Studios, brings together all the available recordings to narrate the story of this remarkable album on 3 CDs. This Deluxe edition includes the original album remastered, a bonus CD with B-sides and rarities and another one recorded live in 1990 in London.
After the breakthrough success and worldwide respect that Queensrÿche gained from their conceptual masterpiece Operation: Mindcrime, it was a fair assumption that they couldn't possibly outdo or perhaps even match themselves. Empire, released just two years after that watermark, reveals that Queensrÿche reinvented themselves (though certainly not for the last time)…

The familiar declaration that Enrique Granados’s suite Goyescas—Los Majos enamorados (The Majos in Love) and Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia form the twin peaks of Spanish keyboard music is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not go far. The good intentions behind this declaration ultimately parochialize, if not to say diminish, Goyescas as well as Iberia by qualifying them in relation to other piano works by composers from the Iberian peninsula, not in relation to the varied topographies of all piano works. From an international or cosmopolitan perspective, the Goyescas suite may be suituated between Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a memorial to the work of the artist Victor Hartmann, and Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), a memorial to both Couperin “le Grand” (in particular, the French Baroque keyboard suite) and friends of the composer who died in the Great War.

Named after the tour from which the performances were taken, "Music Is Our Friend" is an official bootleg featuring all of King Crimson's final performance in North America at Washington in September, 2021. This 2CD set is completed with four pieces from the first concert of the tour's second leg in Albany. Taken together, these tracks represent both a beginning and an end of a tour that took place despite almost insurmountable issues. Originally scheduled for 2020, postponed for a full year because of the pandemic, the tour began July in Florida as the latest Covid wave hit and the band moved across the country in a tour bus bubble. Following a two-week break due to scheduling conflicts, they returned to the road again, with the Zappa Band appearing nightly before Crimson.

KEYS is the eighth studio album by American singer and songwriter Alicia Keys, released through RCA Records on December 10, 2021. It was primarily produced by Keys. It was preceded by the release of two singles: "Lala" featuring Swae Lee and "Best of Me".