Spooky Electronics

James Newton Howard makes a rare but welcome foray into the horror genre with The Devil's Advocate, a chilling but majestic work highlighted by its stunning choral passages. While Howard's signature fusion of symphonics and electronics is the score's backbone, his use of the human voice most effectively communicates the evil lurking within lead Al Pacino, and his decision to avoid thematic consistency is another clever tool for keeping the listener off balance, with strange, ominous noises lurking in the background to further underscore the dark forces at work. Spooky, compelling stuff.

This release from 2003 offers 54 minutes of modern rock, while the second disc features 51 minutes of verbal fiction. A solid horn section augments a traditional rock ensemble: searing guitar, rumbling bass, durable drumming, and partytime keyboards. Passages of cafe piano lend a sedate romantic flair to the tunes, while sinuous electronics balance the music with futuristic embellishment. The core of power revolves around Brown's masterful vocals. His voice can be sultry and seductive one minute, only to soar to stratospheric heights the next, trembling the soul and scraping the ceiling of heaven. His soulful crooning delves past the audience's eardrums, burrowing deep into the heart to churn with evocative vigor and generate emotional responses of monumental scope…

Alphaville's 1984 debut, Forever Young, deserves to be viewed as a classic synth pop album. There's no doubting that Germans are behind the crystalline Teutonic textures and massive beats that permeate the album, but vocalist Marian Gold's impressive ability to handle a Bryan Ferry croon and many impassioned high passages meant the album would have worldwide appeal…

Opilec Music is back with another treasure trove of music that outlines how important Turin and the Piedmont area was to the development of electronic and dance music in the 70s and 80s and beyond. This compilation has been expertly put together by Opilec Music boss, I-Robots, from his own experiences as a DJ and collector and from time spent digging in archives, old collections and anywhere else he could. It marks the start of a new series and is the latest in a long line of such projects he has worked on before now.

More than 20 years after Stephen Duffy departed Duran Duran, he reunites here with Duran mainstay Nick Rhodes to create an album's worth of wonderful, bubbly pop songs. From its spooky robotic opener, "Memory Palaces," with its brilliant stabs of icy synth patterns, to the moody closing instrumental, Dark Circles never falters. It's as if Rhodes and Duffy were destined to create this immeasurably fun ode to their past and their separate paths…

With the frenzied knocking of what sounds like a clock shop gone berserk, Crossings takes the Herbie Hancock Sextet even further into the electric avant-garde, creating its own idiom. Now, however, the sextet has become a septet with the addition of Dr. Patrick Gleeson on Moog synthesizer, whose electronic decorations, pitchless and not, give the band an even spacier edge. Again, there are only three tracks - the centerpiece being Hancock's multi-faceted, open-structured suite in five parts called "Sleeping Giant." Nearly 25 minutes long yet amazingly cohesive, "Sleeping Giant" gathers a lot of its strength from a series of funky grooves - the most potent of which explodes at the tail-end of Part Two - and Hancock's on-edge Fender Rhodes electric piano solos anticipate his funk adventures later in the '70s…