Daughter of Time is the fourth album by Colosseum, released in 1970. The album remained for five weeks in the UK Albums Chart peaking number 23. Recorded in the midst of an upheaval in the band's lineup, only one of its eight tracks, "Three Score and Ten, Amen", features all six of the official band members. Mike DeGagne gave the album a rave retrospective review in Allmusic, chiefly praising the wide variety of instruments used, but also acknowledging the melancholy tones and sense of drama. His only criticism was that the songs are too short, "all around six minutes in length" (in fact, only three of the songs are around six minutes in length, and half of them are much shorter).

Assembled from various shows from various tours from around the world, 2016's Live: Greatest Hits from Around the World is billed as ZZ Top's first "full-length live album" – a matter of dispute considering how Eagle Rock released three CD/DVD/Blu-ray combo sets between 2008 and 2014. There is no visual component to Live: Greatest Hits from Around the World, which may be how it skates around the first live album distinction – if there's no video, this is a pure album – but the record mines a similar musical vein, collecting highlights from latter-day ZZ Top tours. During the 2000s and 2010s, ZZ Top released an excellent studio album called La Futura, but that's ignored here in favor for all the songs that are classic rock staples.

Eve is the fourth studio album by progressive rock band The Alan Parsons Project. It was released in 1979. Eve's focus is on the strengths and characteristics of women, and the problems they face in the world of men. The album had originally been intended to focus on "great women in history", but evolved into a wider concept. Eve is The Alan Parsons Project's first album with singer Chris Rainbow. The album's opening instrumental "Lucifer" was a major hit in Europe, and "Damned If I Do" reached the US Top 30. "Lucifer" also is used as title track for the German political TV show Monitor.

Rod Stewart's sixth album was called Atlantic Crossing because the singer was literally crossing the Atlantic, making America his new home for reasons of the heart (he was fully enamored with actress Britt Ekland at the time) and the wallet (he was eager to escape Britain's restrictive tax rates). As it happens, 1975 was a perfect time for a new beginning for Stewart: the Faces were falling apart, his last LP, Smiler, wasn't roundly loved, and he had wrapped up his contract with Mercury and signed with Warner, so he completely rebooted, hiring legendary producer Tom Dowd to steer him through a slick, streamlined revamping of his signature sound.

This performance can be labeled Portuguese only loosely, since many of the pieces are sung in Spanish, or taken from Spanish manuscripts, or more properly Galician than Lusitanian. But hey! Who cares? Really artful recordings of any Iberian music of the 'Golden Age' are not sprouting from the cork trees even today. Male alto Gerard Lesne has seldom recorded pre-Baroque chansons, and it's a thrill to hear what he can do with them. Track 9, for instance, the Latin cantiga "Clamabat autem mulier" by Mudarra, takes Lesne from his usual alto register down seamlessly into his tenor chest voice. Wow! Not every counter-tenor can do that and still sound musical!

There is an enormous amount to admire in Munch’s reading of Saint-Saëns’ ‘Organ’ symphony, right from the glowing strings of the opening through to the truly superbly articulated first-movement climax. Munch gets real delicacy from his Bostonians in the Poco adagio, and the organ’s entry in the finale is certainly highly impressive. Perhaps the Scherzo could be more on-the-ball, though. This remains one of the top recommendations for this piece.

Alexander Melnikov’s recent, excellent set of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues (currently nominated for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) demonstrated eloquently that he was no slavish follower of performing tradition. This new disc of Brahms’s earliest surviving piano works shows his questing musicality in another way. In an absorbing booklet essay on Brahms’s pianos and pianism, Melnikov cites the copious (and contradictory) evidence of how Brahms played, and what pianos he used and favoured. Brahms’s partiality for Steinways and Streichers is well attested, as is his admiration for Bösendorfer’s instruments, and Melnikov has opted here for an 1875 Bösendorfer even though, as he comments, it is ‘notoriously difficult to play and to regulate’, shortcomings ‘compensated by the beauty and nobility of its sound’. Those qualities, along with immediacy of attack, agile articulation and individuation of registers, are admirably well caught in this recording: no matter that none of these works were played on such an instrument when they were new. Melnikov shows himself a formidable Brahmsian, and the piano’s ‘nobility’ is best displayed in the surging grandeur he brings to the finale of the C major and the intensely sensitive readings of both sonatas’ variation-form slow movements.

A classic example of the whole not matching the component parts, Tramp featured several high-profile veterans of the British blues boom including Mick Fleetwood (drums), Bob Brunning (bass), Danny Kirwan (guitar), Dave Kelly (vocals), Jo Ann Kelly (vocals) and Bob Hall (keyboards). Hall, like Brunning, had earlier been co-leader of the Brunning-Hall Sunflower Blues Band. Tramp made their debut for Music Man Records in 1969 with a self-titled collection which lacked direction or convincing songwriting. Far better were the group’s singles, ‘Each Day’ (1969) and ‘Vietnam Rose’ (1970). A further album was issued in 1974, by which time the group featured an expanded line-up with Dave Brooks (saxophone) and Ian Morton (percussion) joining the original sextet. Again, however, Put A Record On featured nothing that an average bar room blues band might not have aspired towards, and sold poorly. With such high-profile names involved, both Tramp albums have subsequently been reissued on CD.

A NEW, STELLAR AND ECLECTIC JOURNEY OF OLD METAL IN THE DARKTHRONE ODYSSEY. From their formation back in 1986, to becoming one of Norways’s finest musical exports (with a number of highly revered black metal masterpieces released in the early 90’s helping to solidify their legacy), Darkthrone has continued to evolve and challenge in equal measure, throughout their illustrious recording career spanning over three decades. And now, the ever-productive duo of Nocturno and Fenriz continue their own metallic saga with a new selection of fine, vintage sounding headbanging classics in the making. ‘Astral Fortress’ is itself a swift follow-up to 2021’s ‘Eternal Hails’ opus, as a result of Darkthrone’s consistent and ongoing writing process, which has been in force for some years now. For Darkthrone does not sleep - it only waits. Carried on the brisk wind of eager rock, with foundations in black, thrash, doom and heavy metal, ‘Astral Fortress’ is the latest album of stellar, eclectic old metal in the Darkthrone odyssey.