Having acquired a small cult following with its first album, Budgie offered a second dose of abrasive, forceful heavy metal that, like its predecessor, drew on influences ranging from Cream to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Budgie was a band that loved contrasts – the folk-ish qualities of "Make Me Happy" and the Beatlesque "Rolling Home Again" make hard-driving classics like "Hot as a Docker's Armpit," "Drugstore Woman," and "Rocking Man" seem all the more intense. For all its strengths, Squawk didn't turn Budgie into the well-known outfit it should have been. Budgie's followers were a devoted bunch, but unfortunately, there weren't nearly enough of them.

Poison's Greatest Hits 1986-1996 is as definitive as a Poison compilation could hope to be. Featuring a full 18 tracks, including all of their Top 50 hits ("Talk Dirty to Me," "I Want Action," "Nothin' but a Good Time," "Fallen Angel," "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," "Your Mama Don't Dance," "Unskinny Bop," "Something to Belive In," "Stand," among others) plus two unreleased cuts ("Sexual Thing," "Lay Your Body Down"), the album boasts every worthwhile song the group ever recorded, augmented by Bret Michaels' track-by-track commentary. Though the album isn't sequenced in chronological order, it plays like an excellent mixtape, which actually makes the album more listenable. Even on a compilation, Poison wears a little thin – there are still dull moments among these 18 songs, mainly in the form of lesser-known album tracks and singles – but still, Greatest Hits 1986-1996 is the most enteraining album the band ever released.

Lonnie Brooks' music comes from the R&B side of the blues. Brooks is a passionate singer with an intense rock-like guitar style. With the exception of "Roll of the Tumbling Dice" (a relaxed duet featuring the harmonica of Sugar Blue), the music on Roadhouse Rules is generally unrelenting in its ferocity, blues-oriented but also quite open to the influences of Stax-type soul and rock. The impressive musicianship and sincerity of Brooks' music is probably easier to respect than to love; this release gives listeners a good sampling of his playing.

Allan Taylor is one of England's most-respected singer/songwriters. His songs have been covered by artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Don Williams, Frankie Miller, Fairport Convention, Dick Gaughan, the McCalmans, the Fureys, the Clancy Brothers, and De Dannan. Folk Roots praised him for his "ability to crystallize a mood and evoke an era with the ease of a computer memory access, crafting perfect songs with dramatic changes in the spirit of Brecht, Bikel, and Brel." The Oxford Book of Traditional Verse felt as strongly, writing that Taylor was "one of the most literate and sensitive of contemporary songwriters in terms of words and music and one who is capable of exploring more complex subjects than most of his contemporaries."

Combine the artistry and brilliant virtuosity of countertenor Drew Minter and ARTEK/458 Strings with a program of vocal and instrumental jewels from 17th century Italy, and you have a recipe for a dynamic recording, bursting with musical fireworks, overflowing with emotion, and splashed with a multitude of colors.

Sergio Vartolo gave us a broader understanding of Palestrina's output of Masses by recording for another label a group of less familiar Mass settings, many for the first time, that offer a contrast with the more familiar solemn polyphonic style.

Greatest Kiss is a fine collection of the group's biggest hits presented in their original studio versions, with the notable exception of a live version of "Shout It Out," a track recorded at the opening of the group's 1996 reunion tour that was added to entice dedicated collectors. Ignoring "Shout It Out," Greatest Kiss lives up to its billing, since it captures the band's most familiar material – "Rock & Roll All Night," "Strutter," "Beth," "Cold Gin" – on one disc, making it and Alive the only necessary albums for casual Kiss fans.

This is the first live album of this Canadian guitar virtuoso with the wonderful mellow baritone voice (mindful of foggy nights on the West Coast). Amos Garrett and his band, the Eh Team, are in great shape here, just moving along and laying down a very satisfying and moving groove. The many forms of the blues - from laid-back big-band jump blues to the big-city Chicago sound, country blues, and rip-out-the-stops electric blues - are all displayed here, with Garrett's rich voice and stunning guitar work leading everything along. This is no pick-up band. After playing together for ten years, their grown-together familiarity is apparent all throughout the disc, and they also get their individual chances to shine in many places…

Those who are into irony have to appreciate the fact that Kim Wilde, England's top female pop-rocker of the 1980s, enjoyed her first major hit with the anthemic "Kids in America" – for someone who was born and raised in the U.K., she sang quite convincingly about American youth. But Wilde had a lot more than a taste for the ironic going for her in the early to mid-1980s; the singer was very much in her prime when the recordings on this CD came out in 1981 and 1982. At the time, Wilde's forte was synthesizer-minded new wave – an approach that serves her well on "Kids in America," "Water on Glass," "View from a Bridge" and other melodic yet exuberant hits found on Greatest Hits.

On 2 March 1714, barely three weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday, the Weimar court organist Johann Sebastian Bach received "the title of Concertmaster." Shortly before he had turned down an important organist's position in Halle; the promotion to concertmaster, granted "at his most humble request," clearly represented a quid pro quo on the part of his employer, Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. As the principal condition of his new post Bach had the obligation "to perform new pieces every month"—in today's parlance, to produce a new cantata on a monthly basis.

In apparent response to the sampling of old Latin jazz records by hip-hop artists, Verve raided its Cal Tjader archive to come up with this fiercely grooving collection drawn from nine of his Verve albums. For all of producer Creed Taylor's '60s penchant for fashioning two- to four-minute cuts aimed at airplay, he allowed Tjader's groups considerable room to stretch out on several of the tracks included here, particularly on the live "Los Bandidos" and the hypnotic collaboration with pianist Eddie Palmieri, "Picadillo." More importantly, Tjader's records with Taylor were more varied in texture than his earlier discs, venturing now and then from his solid Afro-Cuban base into Brazilian rhythms, soul, big-band backings, and '60s pop touches…