Selah Sue Kingdom

Selah Sue has taken five years to follow her acclaimed debut. Five years of live performances, studio sessions, and five years of writing, revising and honing her voice. But now she's ready. New album 'Reason' arrives on June 3rd, and it's a supple, languid return, languishing in a torpor of sound that recalls early Portishead, or even Massive Attack's more soulful cuts.

When the Czech composer Petr Eben died in 2007, he was renowned and performed the world over as a composer for choirs and organ. Nevertheless, 15 years on, this album inaugurates the first attempt at a complete survey of his output for the organ – an output so rich and individual that it has come to define a late 20th-century sound for the instrument as characterfully as Marcel Dupré achieved some six decades earlier.

This album explores music by three father-and-son generations of the Tcherepnin family of composers: Nikolai, Alexander and Ivan. Although each wrote a wide range of scores, from solo pieces to operas and ballets, this recording focuses on their chamber music, presenting pieces spanning 95 years. Nikolai’s works for violin and piano reveal a late-Romantic, post-Tchaikovskian sensibility, whereas those of Alexander have a more modern, twentieth-century touch, closer to the style of his friend Sergei Prokofiev (a student of Nikolai Tcherepnin). Ivan is represented by two works — early and late – for flute, clarinet and piano, which have an improvisatory and playful quality.

The cover's cutout silhouette of these guitar-slinging soul/blues women is a succinct visual overview of the rather ambiguous contents within. Recorded in preparation for 2007's Blues Caravan tour featuring journeywomen singer/songwriters Sue Foley and Deborah Coleman along with the comparatively fresh-faced Roxanne Potvin (whose first widely distributed set was released earlier the same year), the disc seems more like a respectable concert souvenir than an actual collaborative affair. The 11 tracks break down into three solo cuts from each participant, one shared and joyous effort on the closing cover of a Chess oldie, "In the Basement," and a crackling instrumental dominated by Foley's always impressive guitar. There are many fine moments here, especially as Coleman lays into an easy funk groove on James Brown's "Talking Loud" and on Potvin's emotionally charged ballad "Strong Enough to Hold You".

Ten tunes with an all-star cast including Ronnie Earl (guitar), Kim Wilson (harmonica), Greg Piccolo (sax), Wayne Bennett (guitar), and other excellent players. Plenty of fine guitar, keyboards, harmonica, and uptempo blues music.

In an era before the Page and Plant albums and Jimmy Page's reworking of Zep songs with the Black Crowes, this CD garnered a lot of attention by sounding very much like Led Zeppelin. With an audience hungry for the hard-rocking kings of the '70s, a disc billed that way was guaranteed to sell quite a few copies…

Yeah, Kingdom Come were a bit too enamored with Led Zeppelin on their first album, and their career didn't last much longer after that, but at the very least they were one of the very examples of what was storming the rock charts back in 1987-1988. Zep-styled riffs and that sorta watered-down boogie-guitar swagger were everywhere, and Kingdom Come were just one of the many bands getting loads and loads of criticism from purists. Oddly, though, the kids (for a short time) loved it, and the records sold enough to convince those at Polydor to release this collection of some of their more well-known tunes.