Garret

Special Edition features two additional audio tracks and a bonus DVD with four music videos. Regina Spektor's gold album Begin To Hope was honored as one of Rolling Stone's Top 50 albums of 2006. Far, her much anticipated follow-up, once again spotlights Spektor's daring piano pop, vocal acrobatics and offbeat wit. Utilizing four esteemed producers Jeff Lynne (ELO, The Traveling Wilburys), Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Eminem), David Kahne (Paul McCartney, The Strokes) and Garret 'Jacknife' Lee (Weezer, R.E.M.) Spektor combines rich soundscapes with evocative and intricately structured melodies and a remarkable gift for crafting intelligent, refreshingly honest odes to life. With Far, major stardom draws near for Regina Spektor.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, Black Widow was one of the most prominent bands, experimenting with a mix of progressive rock, psychedelic music and hard rock / heavy metal. The band came to a premature end in the 1970s, but Clive Jones, the only constant in the band, has revived the band, together with Geoff Griffith. The band once caused stirs with occult topics and live onstage sacrifices and were major competitors to Black Sabbath for the throne of dark heavy masters of rock. Unfortunately, just as their star was rising, the band stopped working and they were relegated to cult status.

Get Inside is guitarist Johnny A.'s second solo effort, appearing after nearly four years of touring and performing in support of the promising, effortlessly professional, 2001 effort Sometime Tuesday Morning. Inside is an album of tasteful instrumentals, tinged with the various styles A. has absorbed as a veteran sideman. Bold opener "Hip Bone" features Latin-flecked percussion, and A.'s impossibly clean tone; rich in atmosphere and detail, it could be an instrumental take on Los Lobos……

"Stone Crazy" is a latter-day album from Screamin' Jay Hawkins, recorded with his touring band the Chickenhawks. Musically, the album sounds surprisingly good, since the Chickenhawks are a tight little backing band, but Hawkins' schtick gets a little tiresome after a while, and there aren't many great songs on the album. Only the tribute to the Twin Peaks vixen "Sherilyn Fenn" really hits home, but dedicated fans will be pleased that the record does have sporadic fits of energetic playing.

In 1996, the young violinist Jorge Jimnez heard Bach's Goldberg Variations for the first time in Glen Gould's famous version on a simple cassette recorder. Since then, this wonderful composition has not let him go. At first he resigned himself to the fact that as a violinist he would never be able to play this work. But over time he realised that several voices can sound at the same time on the violin, as Johann Sebastian Bach exemplifies in his six famous partitas and sonatas for solo violin. Finally, he set to work and began to transcribe one of the most complicated piano pieces of the Baroque into a piece for solo violin.