Moppa Elliott has always been a maverick musician, poking fun at the established order. Bassist, composer, label-owner, educator, and self confessed rabble-rouser, he is leader of one of America's strangest and most inventive bands – Mostly Other People do the Killing (MOPDTK). Once described as America's funniest jazz band, they are known for their quirky tunes, even quirkier artwork and their pastiche albums. I've been a fan for a long time.

Ultimate Rock: 72 of the biggest rock anthems and harder to find rarities across 4 CDs, all housed in a fold out cardboard digi-pack sleeve. Alice Cooper, Argent, Blue Oyster Cult, Kansas, Judas Priest, Mott The Hoople, David Bowie, Primal Scream, Meat Loaf, The Stranglers, Santana, Manic Street Preachers, Jeff Buckley, Ted Nugent, Joe Satriani, Al Stewart, Cheap Trick, Spirit, Johnny Winter, The Guess Who, Fleetwood Mac and more, and more…

Collection includes: Mirage (1974); The Snow Goose (1975); Moonmadness (1976); Rain Dances (1977); Breathless (1978) and Stationary Traveller (1984).

Experimental lute player Jozef Van Wissem and acclaimed film director and musician Jim Jarmusch have a working relationship that dates back to 2006, when they ran into each other on the street in New York City and quickly struck up a friendship. Van Wissem contributed to the soundtrack for Jarmusch’s 2013 movie Only Lovers Left Alive, and the two have collaborated on three previous studio albums. An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil delves into the theology of William Blake and Emanuel Swedenborg, this time also exploring the work of Russian occultist and philosopher Helena Blavatsky. The album is mostly instrumental, so the dialogue between the esoteric thinkers who inspired it and Van Wissem and Jarmusch is expressed in the song titles — fittingly arcane phrases like “Concerning the White Horse,” “The Two Paths,” “When the Sun Rises Do You Not See A Round Disc of Fire.”

X-Legged Sally (XLS) is a Belgian avant-garde rock/jazz-band founded in 1988 by composer Peter Vermeersch, and disbanded in 1997. They were one of the first bands from Belgium to combine a set of very different musical styles (jazz, rock, improvisation and classical), becoming a starting point for the Belgian indie music scene that developed in the nineties. Initially, X-Legged Sally was formed to compose and perform the music Peter Vermeersch wrote for dance productions, such as Immer das Selbe Gelogen (Always the Same Lies), released as a live cd in 1991. Vermeersch' composing style was becoming too demanding for the constraints of sheet music such as was used in his earlier band Maximalist!

Aberdeen is an indie rock brass band based out of NY. They create a wall of sound with soaring, horn-driven melodies, supported by a bed of distorted guitars and raucous drums. Brian Plautz is the primary songwriter in the band, along with Alex Conroy and Shubh Saran. The band, featuring two saxophones, trombone, trumpet, two guitars, bass and drums never ceases to fill a room with energy.

Most rock & roll bands are a tightly wound unit that developed their music through years of playing in garages and clubs around their hometown. Steely Dan never subscribed to that aesthetic. As the vehicle for the songwriting of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan defied all rock & roll conventions…

Coogans Bluff is a rock band founded in 2003 in Rostock. She plays a varied mix of soul and progressive rock. The band named after the eponymous film Coogan's bluff…

Emboldened by the popularity of Inner Mounting Flame among rock audiences, the first Mahavishnu Orchestra set out to further define and refine its blistering jazz-rock direction in its second – and, no thanks to internal feuding, last – studio album. Although it has much of the screaming rock energy and sometimes exaggerated competitive frenzy of its predecessor, Birds of Fire is audibly more varied in texture, even more tightly organized, and thankfully more musical in content. A remarkable example of precisely choreographed, high-speed solo trading – with John McLaughlin, Jerry Goodman, and Jan Hammer all of one mind, supported by Billy Cobham's machine-gun drumming and Rick Laird's dancing bass – can be heard on the aptly named "One Word," and the title track is a defining moment of the group's nearly atonal fury. The band also takes time out for a brief bit of spaced-out electronic burbling and static called "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love." Yet the most enticing pieces of music on the record are the gorgeous, almost pastoral opening and closing sections to "Open Country Joy," a relaxed, jocular bit of communal jamming that they ought to have pursued further.

Digitally remastered edition of these recordings by the Krautrock duo, initially released semi-legally as Neu 4. After being out of print for years, surviving band member Michael Rother remixed, reworked and remastered the original multi-track tapes, which he has now referred to as 'our fourth studio album'.

This album further focused the classic Neu! krautrock sound, with the 11-minute "Für immer" in particular being the archetypal example of their style—a seemingly endless forward-driving vamping, propelled by Klaus Dinger's 4/4 drumming and Michael Rother's layered guitar with its fluid lines and droning harmonic structure. It also features elements of ambient music and proto-punk.

With albums as tightly constructed as Minus the Bear's, it's hard to imagine that there's much left over after the recording process is over and done with. Those knotty, intricate albums come at a cost, and songs that once paid the ultimate price in the name of consistency get a second chance on Lost Loves. Resurrecting songs from the recording sessions that spawned 2007's Planet of Ice, 2010's Omni, and 2012's Infinity Overhead, the collection lovingly compiles these nearly forgotten (or at the very least hard to find) gems into what feels more or less like a complete album. And unlike a lot of odds and ends compilations, which often contain at least a few tracks where it's obvious why they were jettisoned from an album, the quality of the tracks on Lost Loves easily stands up to the rest of the band's body of work.

Brand X was a jazz fusion band active 1975–1980 and 1992–1999. Noted members included Phil Collins (drums), Percy Jones (bass), John Goodsall (guitar) and Robin Lumley (keyboards). In 1992, original members Goodsall and Jones formed a new trio version of Brand X, with drummer Frank Katz.