Queen were never adverse to commercialism - after all, Freddie Mercury made sure that he recorded a full album's worth of vocal tracks on his deathbed, so his colleagues could record a posthumous album. It should come as no surprise, then, that just two years after the release of that posthumous record, the surviving members went back into the vaults to assemble Rocks. As the title suggests, Rocks captures Queen at their most rockin', or, to be more accurate, their heaviest. Despite its breakneck conclusion, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is not here, but "Seven Seas of Rhye," "Stone Cold Crazy," "We Will Rock You," "Sheer Heart Attack," "Fat Bottomed Girls," "I Want It All" and "I'm In Love with My Car" are, along with several underappreciated album tracks, new remixes of "Tie Your Mother Down" and "I Can't Live with You," and "No One Like You," a tribute to Mercury recorded by the surviving members of Queen.

In the history of the blues, there has never been anyone quite like the Howlin' Wolf. Six foot three and close to 300 pounds in his salad days, the Wolf was the primal force of the music spun out to its ultimate conclusion. A Robert Johnson may have possessed more lyrical insight, a Muddy Waters more dignity, and a B.B. King certainly more technical expertise, but no one could match him for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.

Although it predates his classic soul-jazz dates for Blue Note by a few years, Lonnie Smith's debut LP, Finger-Lickin' Good, boasts a deeply funky groove quite unusual for the mid-'60s, a period when few jazz musicians acknowledged the influence of more commercial musical pursuits, let alone introduced such elements into their own work. Aided and abetted by an all-star lineup including guitarist George Benson, saxophonist King Curtis, and trumpeter Blue Mitchell, Smith keeps the performances brisk and bold, galvanized by stiletto-sharp bursts of organ. Cuts like "Hola Muneca" and "Can't You Just Feel It" possess a raw vitality quite uncommon for the moment in question, and while it's disingenuous to call Finger-Lickin' Good groundbreaking, it's definitely a record ahead of its time.

Wallenstein were a band that transcended a number of musical styles during their decade-plus of existence, from early krautrock to symphonic to space rock toward the end of their existence. Wallenstein's original line-up was centered around keyboardist/vocalist Jürgen Dollase and drummer Harald Großkopf, both of whom would go on to make names even bigger for themselves in the German music business (Dollase with The Cosmic Jokers and Großkopf as a founding member of Ashra and later the Central Europe Performance). The band was originally named Blitzkrieg, but as they readied their first studio release the band discovered a prior band with that name so changed theirs and retained 'Blitzkrieg' as the title of that first album.

Hong Kong is a live album by Jean-Michel Jarre released in 1994 on Disques Dreyfus. Even though the album is called Hong Kong and has pictures of the event on its booklet, most of the tracks are from the Europe in Concert venues, except for "Souvenir of China" which is a special mix consisting of the Paris la Defense version and the actual track played in Hong Kong. Also, "Fishing Junks at Sunset" was recorded from the Hong Kong concert rehearsals. Magnetic Fields 2 comes from the encore at Barcelona 1993, which appears on the VHS tape released of this concert. Band In The Rain is also from the Barcelona show.

The Berkeley shows by Jimi Hendrix are fairly well known because not only were the shows filmed, but they have been bootlegged pretty extensively over the years as well. Live at Berkeley: 2nd Show marks the first official release of this material, and, like its predecessor, Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight, the show has its strengths and weaknesses. Things start loose, very loose, on "Pass It On," which is actually the music from "Straight Ahead" with some off-the-cuff lyrics, then into "Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)." Hendrix's guitar tone is fantastic, and there are some fine moments of soloing, but as far as the songs go, he seems distracted. Things start to pick up with "Lover Man" (check Billy Cox's bass playing here), and Hendrix really seems to find himself while romping through some older material like "Stone Free" and "Hey Joe"…

Rammstein's second album, Sehnsucht, finds the German metal band making a great leap forward. While the group still sounds a little unfocused in places, their blend of industrial noise, grinding metal guitars, and operatic vocals is staggeringly powerful. No other European metal band sounds like Rammstein, nor does any American metal group - this is powerful, gothic metal that is unlike anything else in late-'90s metal. Sehnsucht may be an acquired taste, but it's one worth acquiring.

A fantastic electric session from the 70s Polish scene - a record that not only features freewheeling trumpet from Tomasz Stanko, and sweet Fender Rhodes from Adam Mackowicz, but also includes some very inventive work on drums and percussion from the great Czelaw Bartkowski! All three players are at the top of their game here - artists who have a strong knowledge of the outside territory of jazz, but also often work a bit more inside - so that their music here can be open and exploratory, but also come back to more soulful, swinging territory too! Most tracks are long, and have the sort of textural energy you'd know especially from Stanko's work.

UK four CD collection from the British Prog Rock band that rounds up all of their Chrysalis albums with bonus tracks including John Peel sessions, 7" mixes, live tracks, 'B' sides and more. Gentle Giant was born out of the ashes of Simon Dupree & the Big Sound, a successful UK rock and R&B-based outfit led by the Shulman Brothers. In 1970, the brothers founded Gentle Giant. Derek was lead vocalist and played alto sax and bass, Ray sang and played bass and violin, and Phil handled the saxophone and added vocals. Kerry Minnear, on keyboards, came straight from the Royal Academy of Music, and Gary Green became guitarist. John Weathers joined the band in 1972 and was the drummer for two albums. Gentle Giant's utilization of complex classical chord and time patterns, together with hard rock, blues, jazz and even medieval melodies, set them apart from other "progressive" groups of their time or since.

George Winston’s "Autumn" has served as an emotional backdrop to the change of season. A beautiful recording for solo piano, Autumn finds Winston developing simple melodic motifs with studied left-hand underpinning, on hypnotic pieces like “Woods,”, which moves from a brisk rhythmic figure to rubato minor-key runs. Leaving pauses and breaths in all the right places, Winston suggests the play of color and light, the comfortable melancholy, and the encroaching slow-down that characterizes the fall season. Full of memorable themes and moods, Autumn is a timeless album, and serves as a good introduction for someone who has not heard George Winston.

This set contains all of Sand's one and only album, Golem, from 1974, as well as whole lot of additional Golem-era tracks and three cuts from Born at Dawn, an unreleased solo effort by Sand vocalist Johannes Vester recorded shortly after Sand's demise. Golem is a strange blend of dark, off-kilter folk music with a very heavy dose of electronic effects. In fact, "Helicopter" starts off with several minutes of rotor-blade-sounding electronic pulses and other effects before heavily processed vocals and guitar strums take over. The music moves from abstract soundscapes to surreal songs, and all of it is filtered through a special artificial head recording system to make for particularly good headphone listening. With Klaus Schulze at the controls, many of the songs have a similar cosmic trippiness to his early solo stuff and Ash Ra Tempel, with lots of electronic swooshes and washes…

The Yellow Balloon was Don Grady's (Robbie on TV's My Three Sons) rock & roll group, but even more important, the brainchild of California producer Gary Zekley. Not unlike a Gary Usher, Zekley could grab a bunch of musicians and - filling in the needed holes with his own talent - produce sessions that rivaled Phil Spector or Brian Wilson for big sound and teen spirit. Grady had already been recording for the same label with his own group, the Windupwatch Band, when Zekley started climbing the charts with "Yellow Balloon," creating a need for a new group to go with the hit. Grady became the drummer and other members were recruited from various bands around the country, but in the studio, it was still Zekley's show all the way. This 20-track compilation brings together the 11 tracks from the Yellow Balloon's 1967 album, along with the Don Grady with the Windupwatch Band singles…

Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton was Eric Clapton's first fully realized album as a blues guitarist - more than that, it was a seminal blues album of the 1960s, perhaps the best British blues album ever cut, and the best LP ever recorded by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Standing midway between Clapton's stint with the Yardbirds and the formation of Cream, this album featured the new guitar hero on a series of stripped-down blues standards, Mayall pieces, and one Mayall/Clapton composition, all of which had him stretching out in the idiom for the first time in the studio. This album was the culmination of a very successful year of playing with John Mayall, a fully realized blues creation, featuring sounds very close to the group's stage performances, and with no compromises…

Pianist Oscar Peterson has long been such a consistent performer that none of his records are throwaways, but this particular set is weaker than most. Since several of the songs are the type that in the mid-'60s would get requested (such as "People," "The Girl from Ipanema," and "The Days of Wine and Roses"), the program would not seem to have much potential, but Peterson mostly uplifts the material (although not much could be done with "People") and adds a few songs (such as his own "Goodbye, J.D." and John Lewis' "D & E"). Overall, this is a reasonably enjoyable Oscar Peterson session, featuring bassist Ray Brown and drummer Ed Thigpen.

This was the first TD album to incorporate lyrics and vocals (from Steve Jolliffe, who also contributed wind instruments and keyboards). By this point, the nucleus of the band was down to Edgar Froese and Christopher Franke, with the sound centering more on shifting arpeggiation over percussive rhythm structures, with "Madrigal Meridian" being an impressive example of this. Jolliffe's vocal contributions on "Bent Cold Sidewalk" and "Rising Runner Missed by Endless Sender" provide an aggressive edge that effectively catapults the listener from the hypnotic pulse that Tangerine Dream are best known for - still, it's by no means a failed experiment, though it does make Cyclone one of the least useful TD albums for working up a good meditative state.