Zelda Tears of The Kingdom

As much as The Moody Blues have earned the right to make a mediocre album, they shouldn't have been given the keys to the studio without a better batch of ideas than what ended up on Keys of the Kingdom. Like Sur La Mer three years earlier, many of the songs on here feel like prefabricated studio pop: programmed drum beats, sterile keyboards and soulless guitars pop up in the speakers seemingly untouched by human hands, compounded by brass arrangements and backing singers that were never a part of the Moodies' original vision…

Even Norwegians get the blues. On “Tears Of The World,” guitarist Knut Reiersrud and his band find themselves in the company of the 72-year old vocalist Mighty Sam McClain, originally from Louisiana. Together, they have dedicated themselves to the music of the deep south and have given impressive proof that, when it comes to playing hard-driven R&B, soul or blues, it's not where you come from that's important.In the context of the regular flow of new releases on the ACT label, “Tears Of The World” is patently a stylistic outlier; and yet this detour is not all that surprising, given label founder Siggi Loch's passion for the blues. In Loch's autobiography he describes the experience of what he remembers as the “wildest night” of his life - until then, at least. It was in 1962, and he was at one of the first American Folk Blues Fest…

An atmosphere of early morning in the Shoyama mountains of Japan. The sun rises above a mountain crest. A monk rings the bell, signalling the time for prayer. It is in such surroundings that Kosei Yamamoto takes his saxophone and warms up on filigree improvisations, to a background of natural sounds. His friends Hiroki and Takashi used a digital MTR and mixer to record this sound, which tunes in to the earth’s gravity.

Tavener wrote the extraordinarily moving …Depart in Peace… following the death of his father. Written for soprano, violin, tampura and strings it features Eastern elements and a glittering setting of the Song of Simeon ; Patricia Rozario and Clio Gould are outstanding soloists in this beautiful piece. Clio Gould’s perfectly pitched and emotive violin playing takes centre stage in My Gaze is Ever upon You and Tears of the Angels . John Tavener, who passed away in 2013, was described as one of ‘ the very best creative talents of his generation ’ by The Times; these compositions are among his finest.

This box set is the ultimate pop collection, 43 albums featuring many of the biggest hits performed on the legendary pop music chart BBC TV programme Top of the Pops, which ran for a record shattering 42 years from January 1964 to July 2006! The show totalled an amazing 2205 episodes and at its peak attracted 15 million viewers per week! This complete set features a total of 875 tracks, including over 600 top ten hits and over 150 number one's!

Although Hans Zimmer receives nominal credit, Tears of the Sun is in fact a collaborative effort featuring contributions from the composer's Media Ventures colleagues including Lebo M., Steve Jablonsky, and Heitor Pereira - the end result channels some unexpected ethnic influences into an otherwise by the book war film score reliant more on its emotional scope than its action themes. While African percussion and chants enliven several cues, Tears of the Sun is above all dominated by a palpable sense of melancholy - little here echoes the heroic, larger than life scale of war scores past, and all vestiges of patriotism are superseded by post-9/11 angst. It's certainly unexpected, especially given Zimmer's affection for bombast, but it works.

All-round singer Huang Yali transforms into a storyteller in her sixth album Tears of the Storyteller featuring ten different tales.