Corazón is Carlos Santana's first album for a major label since 2002's Shaman. It marks his reunion with executive producer Clive Davis, who masterminded 1999's multi-platinum Supernatural. Billed by RCA as his "first Latin album," Corazón is the studio counterpart to the guitarist's HBO Latino concert special that featured his band performing with a host of Latin music superstars in his native Mexico. The singing was (as it is here) mostly in Spanish. For the most part, Santana actually sounds hungry again. His studio band is filled with killers, including drummer Dennis Chambers, timbalero Karl Perazza, and conguero Raul Rekow. Opener "Saideira" features his trademark tone in a passionate, stinging, gritty exchange with vocalist Samuel Rosa, from the Brazilian rock and reggae band Skank. Jittering, insistent horns and layers of percussion push both men to escalate the battle. Juanes lends his soulful croon to first single "La Flaca." It's got an anthemic hook with layers of backing vocals framing Santana's tight and tasty solos.

Some find Karen Dalton's voice difficult to listen to, and despite the Billie Holiday comparisons, it is rougher going than Lady Day. But Dalton's vocals aren't that hard to take, and they are expressive; like Buffy Sainte-Marie, it just does take some getting used to because of their unconventional timbre. Her debut album has a muted folk-rock feel reminiscent of Fred Neil's arrangements in the mid-'60s, unsurprising since Neil's Capitol-era producer, Nick Venet, produced this disc too, and since Dalton, a friend of Neil, covered a couple of Neil songs here ("Little Bit of Rain," "Blues on the Ceiling"). Although clocking in at a mere ten songs, it covers a lot of ground, from Tim Hardin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Leadbelly to the traditional folk song "Ribbon Bow" and the Eddie Floyd/Booker T. Jones-penned soul tune "I Love You More Than Words Can Say." The record is interesting and well done, but would have been far more significant if it had come out five years or so earlier. By 1969 such singers were expected to write much of their own material (Dalton wrote none), and to embrace rock instrumentation less tentatively.

Behind The Sky proudly presents Portals: A Kosmiche Journey through Outer Worlds and Inner Space. Featuring enough analog and modular synths to build a rocketship, Portals features 13 tracks of berlin school inspired electronic music from legends of synthesis like Steve Roach, Ian Boddy and Steve Moore, as well as music from new school wizards of the electron like d'Voxx, Polypores and Listening Center. Lovingly curated by Behind The Sky label head Bluetech, this 2xLP compilation is a love song to unabashedly melodic analog synthesizer music of cosmic proportions and the utopian science fiction of the 70s.

Once again finding harmony and creating alchemy between seeming opposites, on Volta Björk is bold but thoughtful, delicate yet strong, accessible and avant. The intricacy and complexity of projects like Medúlla and Drawing Restraint 9 suggested that she might have left the more direct side of her work behind, but Volta's opening track and lead single, "Earth Intruders," puts that notion to rest: the song literally marches in, riding a bubbling, ritualistic beat courtesy of Timbaland and Konono No. 1's electric thumb-pianos.

Bjork's Vespertine: an album as an opera. Pop music is theatrical, it lives on stories, constantly creating new characters of art. In addition, no other style has changed and influenced music reception so enduringly as pop music. Most people can draw biographical references on the map of pop music. So, it seems high time to open the doors of the opera to a new visitor. With its symphonic elements, dramatic singing lines and ethereal choir vocals, Vespertine seems to be the perfect model for the complex project. A contemporary coproduction between Nationaltheater Mannheim and Hotel Pro Forma.

Medulla, which derives from the Latin word for “marrow,” is Icelandic recording artist Bjork’s fifth studio album. It was released back in 2004 on August 30th and received two Grammy award nominations. With her last album, Vespertine, which was released in 2001, being electronic influenced, Bjork wanted to step away from that style. With Medulla, she wanted an album to be almost entirely a cappella and constructed with human vocals. The idea, though unique was very much what Bjork is known for. In the album, she collaborated with beatboxers Rahzel and Dokkaka, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tadaq as well as the lead singer of Faith No More, an American rock band, Mike Patton.

Homogenic is the third studio album by Icelandic recording artist Björk.

After the breakup of her band Sugarcubes, Icelandic singer Björk released her first solo album with the fitting, yet misnamed, name, as this musical genius made her debut in 1977 at the tender age of eleven.

If this is blues, it's blues in the Billie Holiday sense, not the Muddy Waters one. This is one of Nina Simone's more subdued mid-'60s LPs, putting the emphasis on her piano rather than band arrangements. It's rather slanted toward torch-blues ballads like "Strange Fruit," "Trouble in Mind," Billie Holiday's own composition "Tell Me More and More and Then Some," and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." Simone's then-husband, Andy Stroud, wrote "Be My Husband," an effective adaptation of a traditional blues chant. By far the most impressive track is her frantic ten-minute rendition of the traditional "Sinnerman," an explosive tour de force that dwarfs everything else on the album.

Paul McCartney retreated from the spotlight of the Beatles by recording his first solo album at his home studio, performing nearly all of the instruments himself. Appropriately, McCartney has an endearingly ragged, homemade quality that makes even its filler - and there is quite a bit of filler - rather ingratiating. Only a handful of songs rank as full-fledged McCartney classics, but those songs - the light folk-pop of "That Would Be Something," the sweet, gentle "Every Night," the ramshackle Beatles leftover "Teddy Boy," and the staggering "Maybe I'm Amazed" (not coincidentally the only rocker on the album) - are full of all the easy melodic charm that is McCartney's trademark. The rest of the album is charmingly slight, especially if it is read as a way to bring Paul back to earth after the heights of the Beatles. At the time the throwaway nature of much of the material was a shock, but it has become charming in retrospect.