Dvd Piano

All right, he's made a record with his wife and a record with his pickup band where democracy is allegedly the conceit even if it never sounds that way, so he returns to a solo effort, making the most disjointed album he ever cut. There's a certain fascination to its fragmented nature, not just because it's decidedly on the softer side of things, but because his desire for homegrown eccentricity has been fused with his inclination for bombastic art rock à la Abbey Road…

This box collects several recordings of Satie's piano music by Dutch pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, going back as far as 1977, with an English-language DVD (not reviewed, but the idea is attractive) including a fictionalized presentation of Satie's relationship with artist Suzanne Valadon (after they broke up, he hung in his window cataloging her faults, but the film apparently doesn't get to the fun stuff). The provenance of the music on the third CD, consisting mostly of songs and featuring soprano Marjanne Kweksilber, is unclear from the booklet, and it's a poor choice for the non-Francophone – no song texts are provided at all. The piano music from de Leeuw is another matter, however. It is immediately distinctive in its slow tempos and dreamy, rather lugubrious tone.

By the time this was released in 2001, John Mayall was more known for the people who played in his seminal British band, the Bluesbreakers rather than his own accomplishments. The success of 1999's Padlock on the Blues afforded Mayall the opportunity to fulfill his dreams and gather an all-star lineup of blues and rock luminaries…

Whether you ask bandmembers or longtime fans for the decisive moment when Motorpsycho became, for lack of a better word, themselves, almost all will point to Demon Box. It was the band's third and last album for Voices of Wonder Records. Their previous two, 1991's Lobotomizer and 1992's Soothe, showcased elements of the persona that gels here, but not the totality. Demon Box moves far beyond the hard psych, grungy guitar, and indie tendencies of those albums toward more formal song and compositional structures, as well as the far-flung experimentalist and improvisational frontiers that made them legends…

Based on a network TV special that in turn depicted Elton John's Las Vegas show of the same name, The Red Piano is a concert video. It consists of two DVDs and two CDs. Essentially, the package is padded; the second DVD contains a 53-minute "making of" documentary, and the CDs repeat the audio content of the concert with one additional track ("I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues")…