Primal Scream

Dream Street captures Peggy Lee at her most intimate and melancholy – a song cycle exploring love and loss in uncompromisingly frank terms, it strips away the saccharine and schmaltz so common among the singer's Decca sessions to effectively create the first truly adult music of her career. Lee occupies the same harrowing emotional territory staked out by Frank Sinatra via the landmark In the Wee Small Hours, investing the material with the kind of heartbreak and longing that belies the whole "easy listening" tag – this is music shorn of pretense and artifice, as intense as a primal scream yet beautiful in the way only art of this magnitude can be.

John Lennon's concert appearances during his solo years were rare and scattered about, so any live document is worth hearing. Yet this one, the fabled One to One concert at Madison Square Garden, doesn't live up to its legend, however noble the cause (a benefit for the Willowbrook School for Children). Much of the problem, one suspects, is that Lennon concerts tended to be quick, casual one-offs; this material might have really rocked if John had broken the tunes in on the road first. Also, the Plastic Ono Elephants Memory Band is a fairly crude bunch of bashers, with Stan Bronstein's flailing sax and surprisingly poor drumming, despite the support of Jim Keltner.

When We Were the New Boys finds Rod Stewart tackling the music of his Brit-pop offspring and coming to terms with his pub rock roots. It's a bit of a risky move, since he could have embarrassed himself with stodgy singing but, surprisingly, he (more or less) pulls it off. Granted, he's not nearly as energetic as he once was, and he stumbles on occasion, but he recasts Oasis' "Cigarettes and Alcohol," Primal Scream's "Rocks," and Graham Parker's "Hotel Chambermaid" as comfortable rockers in the vein of "Hot Legs." They're not as vibrant as the Gallaghers' rolling thunder or Bobby Gillespie's ironic classicism, but they're easily the best rockers Rod has cut in ages.

Compilation of early tracks produced or remixed by the legendary Adrian Sherwood; a pioneering blend of post-punk, mutant disco, dub, funk and electro. Includes 6 tracks that have never been reissued in any format, and 2 completely unreleased tracks from the On-U vaults. Features The Slits, Prince Far I, The Fall and Mark Stewart.

Incredible four CD box set filled with influential and diverse U.K.-based Indie Pop and Rock acts that emerged from Great Britain in the broad wake of '80s Post-Punk. The Brit Box features all of the styles that wormed their way into the hearts of the music lovers during the late '80s, all through the '90s and beyond including Indie, Shoegaze, Baggy and Brit-Pop.

The title of this album evokes not only the life-long journey of all these musicians, but also a lasting friendship between soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson String Quartet. One of the greatest string quartets of the last four decades, the Emersons will disband in October 2023. Barbara and the Emersons were determined to record Schoenberg's Quartet No. 2 since they started performing the work together in 2015.

A compilation boasting 101 songs and proclaiming them all as ''classics'' is always leaving itself open to ridicule, and it's human nature to be sceptical, but I have to say that this bumper five CD box from EMI in 2009 really is fantastic set. What's rare for a compilation offering so many tracks is just how very few of them are filler. In fact, I don't think that there are any, their all 'indie'' more or less, and the majority of them were big hits.