Free

Legendary 'bootleg' recording of the Velvets on home turf, taped just before Lou Reed went home to mama and then became the godfather of gory glam

Fiery follow-up to 2003's acclaimed Thickfreakness

Roundup of Texan troubadour's seminal recordings

In 1968, Raybert productions—a Hollywood hotbed of drugged-out '60s fornication—saw fit to hand would-be-Fellini Bob Rafelson The Monkees as a vehicle for his auteurist debut. This was the result.

Noir is the hour...

A warm-hearted homecoming for Athens bard Chesnutt's earliest recordings

As solo outlet for Carl Johns—leader of Wisconsin countryites NoahJohn—Charlemagne allows him the freedom to break the slow-shuffle shackles and explore pop. The headlong skip of "Dawn Upon" is typical, its happy quick-step framing a tale of a man tormented by moonlit visions of a lost love.

Typically unadorned, quirky new album from cult hero

After all the talk of paying tribute to original 1970s cops David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson throw out any genuine resemblance to those freewheeling dudes and simply take the piss for 90 minutes. There are some canny gags and clever pastiches of buddy-movie clichés, but they give up on it halfway through and just cruise camply.

First released in CD form in 1992, Fragments Of A Rainy Season marked a crucial, pivotal point in the life and career of our greatest living Welshman. After years of alcohol and drug addiction had turned his life into a full-blown shambles, Cale swapped whiskey and cocaine for regular games of squash and full-time commitment to parenthood in the early '90s. Far from blunting his creative edge, sobriety and responsibility appeared to free him up to take greater risks in the studio, and brought the kind of focus that enabled him to hone his live act down to something like perfection.