Iñaki Sandoval is a Barcelona-based pianist, composer and educator. Beautiful, affecting and constantly rewarding, Miracielos is his third album as a leader and establishes him as a superb writer and player. Sandoval is backed by the experienced Eddie Gomez on bass and Billy Hart on drums. Both are players of great sensitivity and style, and their contributions are central to the success of an album that alternates between the short "Preludes" and longer compositions.

One of the better ECM recordings, this collaboration by bassist Charlie Haden, Jan Garbarek on tenor and soprano, and Egberto Gismonti (switching between guitar and piano) is filled with moody originals, improvisations that blend together jazz and world music, and atmospheric ensembles.

Skirting on the fringes of the unknown , Final Conflict have been around for quite a while and slowly, like some resolute turtle showing a proggy finger to the hare, they have come to the frontline of modern neo-prog bands that excel in what they so stoutly believe in…

Since the release of Emerald Rain's debut album, "Broken Saviours" in 1998, they've built a reputation as being among the finest Melodic Rock bands around.

"West Side Blues is the new release by guitarist/vocalist Vernon Harrington. Primarily a sideman throughout his 30-plus year career, Harrington steps out on his own for the first time with an album that owes its spirit to his West Side roots and guitar-playing here, the late and very great Magic Sam. West Side Blues is a studio album with a live feel. Harrington captured that after-hours, smokey-blues bar atmosphere."–by Beverly-Zeldin Palmer

The brand-new ESSENCE album „Last Night Of Solace“ is out now! With every song on the album the band deliver a very fierce mix between Destruction and Sodom. It´s a thrash metal bombshell par excellence! ESSENCE comment on the new album: “Last Night Of Solace is very different from our last album. We have matured in our songwriting, our abilities and our expression. It is difficult to describe the album with words, but ‘enormous’ covers a lot of what the listener will hear on the record. We needed to make this album the way it is today, because it is a statement and it will serve as a point of reference in the future. Also, we did what came naturally and ‘all by itself’ to us. There is nothing ‘forced’ on this album and it is just our clean personal energy captured on in 10 tracks. You can hear that the album is recorded in extreme sub-zero temperatures and in the middle of a frozen Swedish winter.”

After 30+ years of music making, most bands are content to simply trudge along, putting out the same old type of album again and again, trying to recapture the glory of days past. Not this band, not Queensrÿche. With every new release, Geoff Tate and company push themselves into new directions, new sounds, and dizzying new heights. The result is that Queensrÿche is just as vital and musically relevant today as ever they ever were. Even when they revisit older ideas, as they did in 2006 with the long awaited sequel to Operation: Mindcrime, the result was one of the most thrilling releases of their extraordinary career. Now, a new chapter is about to be written, a new album, and a new line-up that unites frontman Tate with a stellar group of new players and seasoned vets. Arguably the heaviest version of Queensrÿche ever assembled, the band not only wrote and recorded the 10 brand new songs on Frequency Unknown, but also will be hitting the road to perform the entire Operation: Mindcrime album at select venues across the nation in celebration of that album s 25th anniversary. Make no mistake about it, Queensrÿche is still a musical force to be reckoned with and their legions of fans will undoubtedly be celebrating in 2013!

Harem Scarem have a unique defining sound, yet seem to side step it with each album release. Each record has it's own style and the band have managed to record four studio album's without repeating themselves once while still integrating their key sounds - vocals, harmonies and the guitar sounds. And once again the band have moved a little off center into new territory again. On their debut, Harem Scarem instantly put themselves on the map with a pure Canadian burst of melodic power AOR. With Mood Swings, the band took on the harder edge guitars and big vocals. With Voice Of Reason, it was a tough uncompromising modern record that held their great melodies, but a more complex song structure.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Concerto for violin and large orchestra (1950) is an established masterpiece by one of the most significant (but little known) postwar German composers. Hungarian Peter Eötvös has emerged as a strong and original voice of the late twentieth century, and his Cap-Ko (2005), a concerto for acoustic piano, keyboard, and orchestra, deserves a place beside Zimmermann's concerto. Czech composer Martin Smolka's Walden, the distiller of celestial dews (2000), for chorus and percussion may not prove to have the durability of the other pieces, but it exposes a creative imagination with the potential for more substantial work……..

Stephen Eddins @ AllMusic.com