Still II

Although it's missing a few important (not to mention big) hits, Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2 is an excellent retrospective of the first half of Billy Joel's career. Beginning with "Piano Man," the first disc runs through a number of early songs before arriving at the hit-making days of the late '70s; some of these songs, including "Captain Jack" and "New York State of Mind," weren't strictly hits, but were popular numbers within his stage show and became radio hits…

Gaucho is probably the most perfect album ever made. It is in fact so perfect, that you don't notice how much work went into it. It was as if the album was doomed from the start and I bow deep to Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Gary Katz and Roger Nichols that they eventually got it finished.

With each new work and new recording, Kernis (b. 1960) solidifies his position as the most important traditional-minded composer of his generation. Others may be exploring musical frontiers more restlessly, but no one else is writing music quite this vivid or powerfully direct. ...He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 2002 for his work Colored Field, making him the youngest composer to win that prize.

Halloween II is a 1981 Horror film directed by Rick Rosenthal, and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. It is the second installment in the Halloween series and is a direct sequel to Halloween set on the same night of October 31, 1978 as the seemingly unkillable Michael Myers continues to follow his intended victim (his sister) Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) to a nearby hospital while Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is still in pursuit of his patient. Stylistically, Halloween II reproduces certain key elements that made the original Halloween a success, such as first-person camera perspectives and unexceptional settings. The sequel was a box office success, grossing over $25.5 million in the United States.

Ben Davies called Bachman-Turner Overdrive's first album a "fusion of Lynyrd Skynyrd-style Southern/trucker rock and ZZ Top's anthemic arena rock," and with their logo imprinted in a big metallic gear which looks like it inspired James Cameron's Terminator trademark, Randy Bachman, his brothers Tim and Robbie, and C.F. Turner dish out a methodical mix of plodding hard dirges…

In demand singer-songwriter and guitarist, Doyle Bramhall II will release his latest album, Shades on October 5th. The intense and wide-ranging collection is a strong follow-up to his 2016 release Rich Man and marks his first album on the Provogue label. As a left-handed guitarist who plays his guitar “upside down” (i.e.: still strung for a righty a la Dick Dale and a few notable others), Bramhall is automatically going to have a non-standard approach to the instrument. This means unusual tones and textures are to be expected as he easily juggles genres from blues-rock and psychedelia to some smooth R&B as he figures out what is on his mind these days and how he is going to explain it to all of us…