There’s a groove that Los Lobos keeps finding on Tin Can Trust that’s kind of slow and that seems like the ultimate cruising music, perfect to listen to if you’re driving down a street as ...

Here’s a project that was definitely done with the audiophile in mind; one of Frank Sinatra’s best records, remastered and pressed onto 180-gram vinyl by a company that specializes in such productions. This 1962 outing ...

Normally fronting the incendiary Taildraggers, Tim “Too Slim” Langford has (for the first time in about ten years) slipped away for a one-man-band effort. Employing modern technology to back himself with various acoustic and electric ...

This strong follow-up to last year’s critically acclaimed Dirty Jeans & Mudslide Hymns adds to a string of strong albums by singer/songwriter John Hiatt released during the past decade on the New West label. He ...

This Helicon release of a 1985 concert with the Israel Philharmonic brings to five the recordings of Mahler’s Ninth by Leonard Bernstein, which span his early advocacy of the composer in the 60s through to ...

Benjamin Britten’s song cycles are among his best and best-known works. Though some maintain that versions by Peter Pears, Britten’s artistic and domestic partner for most of his creative life, are “definitive,” that singer’s voice ...

The good news about Robert Plant’s Band of Joy? It’s not a reprise of his mega- platinum duets with Alison Krauss (Patti Griffin is the female vocalist here), it’s not a Zep or Honeydrippers album, ...

The first time I heard The Black Keys they opened for Sleater-Kinney. For a fan of raw and dirty electric blues they were an immediate delight, playing with an urgency that reminded me of early ...

Musical genes come without genre when you’re a Haden. Petra’s jazz bassist father began as Little Cowboy Charlie in the family country band before going on to play with Ornette Coleman and form the Liberation ...

Early Dylan just sounds better in mono, making this CD box set the holy grail of Dylan audiophilia. The eight reissues— from his 1962 eponymous debut through 1967’s John Wesley Harding—feature the original monaural mixes. ...

She had the twin gifts of naturalness and perfection. She could sing as Eve might have in the Garden of Eden: no artifice, no professional tricks, no mannerisms, the voice every woman would have in ...

Best known as Wilco’s lead guitarist and an avant-garde improviser, Nels Cline scores a major triumph as composer and arranger with this two-CD musical interpretation of paintings by Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha. Producer/poet David ...

Louisiana-born singer, guitarist, and songwriter Memphis Minnie blazed a trail for generations of blueswomen before her death in 1973. Blues diva Maria Muldaur is one of them. As a teen growing up in Greenwich Village ...

There was a time when the Bartók quartets were the toughest challenge a string quartet could face, and when no one played them as well as the Juilliard Quartet. Yet the foursome’s pathbreaking stereo recording ...

I never loved Zep’s singles (plus they’re overplayed): the Druid strain didn’t interest me, the earlier stuff was better, Plant’s vocal gymnastics got old, and who wants live recordings that amount to greatest hits facsimiles? ...