Bend It Like Bender! – Devin Townsend Project from Addicted
Blue Cheadle – Cheer-Accident from Fear Draws Misfortune
Cruisin’ With The Deuce – Quarterflash from Quarterflash
Elegy – Bob Belden from Black Dahlia
Hard Shoulder – Mark Knopfler from Get Lucky
Love’s Got A Lot To Answer For – Nick Lowe from At My Age
My Blue Heaven – Django Reinhardt from Django in Rome 1949-1950
Never Mind – Minster Hill from MiNsTeR HiLL
The Road To Hell – Chris Rea from The Road to Hell
Rocks In The Ocean – Al Stewart from 24 Carrots
Take Me Back (Deja Vu) – Van Halen from Balance
That Old Black Magic – Louis Prima and Keely Smith from Capitol Collectors Series: Louis Prima
What She Wants – TDF from Retail Therapy
Witch’s Promise – Jethro Tull from Original Masters
Wooden Planes – Art Garfunkel from Watermark
7 Worlds Collide, spearheaded by Crowded House’s Neil Finn, is a loose collective formed with friends, acquaintances and contemporaries coming together in a studio to hash out some songs. It’s a nice concept, though not an entirely unique one, the most recent comparison (relatively speaking, considering its decades-long gestation) being Peter Gabriel’s 
. Not coincidentally, Tim Finn is a member in good standing of both, but The Sun Came Out trumps Big Blue Ball in one important aspect: consistency. Because of Gabriel, and his Real World label’s world music emphasis, the tracks bounced wildly from a pop tune to a chant, to an African tribal rhythm and back to a pop tune, all good in their own right but incoherent in the record’s preset context.
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It’s hard for me to believe that the band’s older fans couldn’t find it in their hearts to forgive Katatonia. They’ve been far away from their black metal roots for a long time, have reached personal best levels with 
and 
, and have done it again with their latest, 
. The word from the studio sessions was that this would be an extension of 
, read by Jeffrey Tambor (2009)
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Instrumental sludge metallers Pelican return with what may yet be their most surprising disc, What We All Come to Need. The changes are not immediately apparent if you’ve been following the band, as their heavy guitar attack and midtempo advance remain consistent from earlier releases. However, the album’s newer, smaller details eventually come to the fore.
Bad news for all the fans who thought that this, finally, was Knopfler’s return to Dire Straits-style rock and roll: Those days are gone, and have been for awhile now. Get Lucky, Knopfler’s debut for the Warners heritage label Reprise (ugh — “heritage” — it has all the cache of a Revolutionary War reenactment troupe) is tonally more of a cousin to his 
album, gambling iconography and allusions intact. That Warner Bros. kept him within their ranks at all is baffling. His songwriting is as elegant and elegiac as ever, and there are few that will ever approach his skill at the guitar, but they’ll never get 
, L.A. Law and 
and, unlike the diehard loyalists, I don’t think the last couple seasons of 
were anywhere near the level of the first three. But there’s no doubt in my mind that without Leno shoving his chin into that ten o’clock dike, the dam would burst forth with edgy cops with hearts of gold, horny doctors still adherent to the Hippocratic Oath and lawyers who’ll do anything to win, but they won’t do that (No, no, they won’t do that.) 