Four albums and seven Grammy® nominations later, Garbage has its first best of collection – Absolute Garbage. Along with the new track Tell Me Where It Hurts, Absolute Garbage features 17 songs of extreme and intense emotion, from Stupid Girl, Queer and #1 Crush to Special, Bleed Like Me and Why Do You Love Me.
The special limited edition 2-CD set adds to the original CD a bonus disc of remixes by some of the world s most renowned DJs, including U.N.K.L.E., Massive Attack, Todd Terry, Crystal Method, Fun Lovin Criminals, and Felix Da Housecat.
Absolute Garbage offers the best of a band that, to quote a lyric from Queer, has been the strangest of the strange, the coolest of the cool.

Released at the front end of 1999's Lilith Fair, Mirrorball is a take-home sampler of the live performances that catapulted Sarah McLachlan into the modern rock stratosphere. Over half of the album's 14 songs are radio hits (including four of the first five), proving McLachlan's worth as a pop songstress bar none, but also hinting at an underlying stagnation in her recent musical output…

Nuance is not a term normally associated with thrash metal, but between the infectious melodic hooks and the varied velocity factor, this iconic Danish outfit has brought just that to the table without losing any of the style’s inherent intensity…

Pietro Antonio Cesti, byname Marc’ Antonio, (1623-1669) composer who, with Francesco Cavalli, was one of the leading Italian composers of the 17th century. Cesti studied in Rome and then moved to Venice, where his first known opera, Orontea, was produced in 1649. In 1652 he became chapelmaster to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at Innsbruck, a post he combined for a time with membership in the papal choir. From 1666 to 1669 he was vice chapelmaster to the imperial court in Vienna.

This is a compilation of Franki Valli & The 4 Seasons' hits, including "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Sherry", and "December, 1963 (Oh What A Night)". Although they were one of the very biggest rock & roll groups of the 1960s, the Four Seasons – unlike, say, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, or the Byrds – don't excite virtually automatic respect from listeners and critics. A big factor is their most distinguishing trademark, the high falsetto vocals of their lead singer, Frankie Valli. Many also found their material – romantic tunes with tightly arranged group harmonies that updated doo wop ethos into the '60s – a little too clean-cut. Whatever your feelings about the group, though, there's no denying their considerable importance.

Lonely Girl (1956). Liberty Records was pleasantly surprised when Julie London's debut album was such a big hit. Julie Is Her Name did contain the hit single "Cry Me a River," but each featured mellow jazz guitar and bass backing - which was considered commercial suicide in 1955. So, instead of changing direction and recording the follow-up Lonely Girl with a full orchestra, Liberty wisely allowed London to strip the accompaniment down even more on the album by dropping the backing down to one instrument. Lone guitarist Al Viola plays gentle Spanish-tinged acoustic behind the hushed vocalist, and it suits London perfectly. While the singer was often chided for her beauty and lack of range, she deftly navigates these ballads without any rhythmic underpinnings to fall back on. London's intense focus on phrasing and lyrics recalls Chet Baker's equally telescopic approach…

Although her career seems to have been more as a media sensation than as a musician at times, British-born singer, songwriter, and actress Hazel O'Connor has stayed active and productive since her breakthrough role as Kate in the 1980 film Breaking Glass. The soundtrack album for Breaking Glass, which O'Connor wrote, was a huge U.K. hit and spawned several singles, launching her musical career, although she continued to act on British TV and in several stage productions while maintaining an active touring schedule with her band Megahype. Among her many albums are the 1980 debut, Breaking Glass, that same year's Sons & Lovers, 1981's Cover Plus, 1984's Smile, 1993's To Be Freed and Over the Moon…Live, 1995's Private Wars, 1997's Live in Berlin, 1998's 5 in the Morning, 2000's Beyond the Breaking Glass, 2002's Acoustically Yours, 2003's "best of" A Singular Collection, 2005's Hidden Heart and the double-disc Fighting Back, and a 2008 version of Smile. Throughout her career, O'Connor has used the tremendous pressure and scrutiny that accompanied her sudden fame as a central metaphor in her work, detailing the often-baffling complexities of modern life in a media-driven world.

Innovatively fusing traditional ethnic musics with state-of-the-art rhythms, the work of Deep Forest was best typified by their 1993 smash "Sweet Lullaby," which brought together the contemporary sounds of ambient techno with a haunting traditional lullaby from the Solomon Islands…

Twenty-five years of "Ensemble Obligat": reason enough to celebrate and honor an extraordinary chamber music formation. On this anniversary recording, Ensemble Obligat has expanded into a chamber orchestra with soloists to present Johannes Brahms' Serenade No. 1 and Louis Spohr's large Nonet in F major. These are two pieces that require a balance between soloistic leadership and overall sound, a quality that the ensemble embodies perfectly. Brahms' youthful work takes on a chamber-music-like sonority in this version. The Nonet of the "German Paganini" Louis Spohr, who broke exciting new ground in his time, benefits from the ensemble's harmonious spirit.

This album is the debut CD for both the Helikon Quartet and composer Maarten ter Horst.The CD features String Quartet 1 & String Quartet 2: two completely new works of which the first notes were written in 2017 and the last notes during the spring lockdown in 2020. The works convey a wide range of emotions: String Quartet 1 is a musical journey from frustration to courage, and String Quartet 2 is a work about love, memories and dreams. The music uses a timeless, melodic language, a surprising new perspective on the classical string quartet tradition.To Maarten ter Horst, the string quartet is the ultimate ensemble: instruments that are different yet equal, representing a tradition of music that truly challenges both composer and instrumentalist. For Maarten ter Horst composing music is an effective way of channelling and sharing emotions. He starts from recognizable melodies and writes parts that reinforce each other in a quest in which dreams and desires want to be reconciled with reality.

Giovanni Legrenzi An Italian composer of opera, vocal and instrumental music, and organist, of the Baroque era. He was one of the most prominent composers in Venice in the late 17th century, and extremely influential on the development of late Baroque idioms across northern Italy.

An album full of original compositions by the renowned pianist and composer Stefan Dickerson. These extraordinary ensemble of tracks clearly showcases the artist's amazing talent in all genres. His approach to creating soulfulness mixed with jazz is evidence of pure talent. Stefan allows his listeners a great justice by giving them a glimpse into his motivations and inspiration that will continue to keep music alive and relevant for years to come.

"Rufus" is the debut album by American R&B and funk band Rufus, released on the ABC Records label in 1973 fronted by singers Chaka Khan and Ron Stockert. The album is notable for an upbeat rock/soul sound that would be replaced by a more heavy direction into funk and jazzy-styled recordings. The album reached #44 on Billboard's R&B Album and #175 on Pop and included the single releases "Feel Good" (R&B #45) and "Whoever's Thrilling You (Is Killing Me)" (#40). Shortly after this album's release and struggling with the group's slow climb to success, Stockert would leave the band during sessions of the group's next album, "Rags to Rufus". By then, Chaka Khan's role would be updated and as the group became successful in later years, most of the focus of the band would lay solely on Khan's shoulders.

The Heinzen-Mead Duo's second album on solo musica celebrates the song repertoire of women composers from Romanticism to our current days with twenty-four songs by twenty-four women composers. The Swiss soprano Franziska Heinzen and British-Polish-German pianist Benjamin Mead set out to research the work of women composers for Clara Schumann's bicentenary in 2019 – and discovered a valuable treasure of relatively unknown music. Beginning with a life journey through refreshing spring feelings, the album goes on to describe painful hours of loneliness and uncertainty as well as anxious premonitions of death and dark fears. Five examples of self-confident female characters, whose experiences are concluded with wiser, reflections on life, as seen retrospectively

More than 30 years to the day that they delivered their Albigensian Crusade inspired apex conceptual offering to the original thrash metal wave, Teutonic thrashers with a power metal edge and melodic bent Paradox unveil an even more ambitious sequel that is prime to conquer the current revival scene…