The Most 5000

In the liner notes to these carefully packaged reissues, all four of the Incredible String Band principals– co-founder Clive Palmer, core duo Mike Heron and Robin Williamson, and Elektra records executive Joe Boyd– offer their insights in separate essays. Three of them mention the smell of patchouli. Such were the times, certainly, but the ISB are loved equally by avant-garde musicians, psychedelia enthusiasts, and those slightly dweeby young gentlemen who hang around music shops on college campuses. The reissue of their first four albums probably put to rest any notion that the ISB were a properly great band, releasing just one true classic, but they were rarely anything less than brave, inspired, and profoundly weird.

On their first album of new material since 2009's Somewhere on the Other Side of Nowhere, Powerman 5000 stick with their industrial metal sound to bring listeners their vision of tomorrow with their seventh studio album, Builders of the Future. Like watching an old science fiction movie set in a far-off time that has already come and gone, the album feels like a dated prediction of what the metal of the future is supposed to sound like.

Trombonist who led the most popular band in the world during 1939-1942, playing a wide variety of melodic pop and jazz. Glenn Miller's reign as the most popular bandleader in the U.S. came relatively late in his career and was relatively brief, lasting only about three and a half years, from the spring of 1939 to the fall of 1942. But during that period he utterly dominated popular music, and over time he has proven the most enduring figure of the swing era, with reissues of his recordings achieving gold record status 40 years after his death. Miller developed a distinctive sound in which a high-pitched clarinet carried the melody, doubled by a saxophone section playing an octave lower, and he used that sound to produce a series of hits that remain definitive examples of swing music…