• In a world where it seems every niche guilty-pleasure recording is currently in print in some corner of the planet, there isn't much big game left roaming the out-of-print album grasslands. From Rhino Records' catalog to re-issue-only imprints such as Superfecta, a music fanatic's "short list" of lost recordings is probably that - a short list.
• This Tuesday brings a highly anticipated DVD from The Clash, hot on the heels of the band's recent 40-track Essentials series CD. Simply titled The Essential Clash DVD, the Epic Records release features 11 live and studio videos, interview footage from U.
• Radiohead fans get a double dose of heaven this Tuesday as the group's new album, Hail to the Thief, hits store shelves, alongside a fantastic new CD of classical-piano interpretations of the band's songs.
• This Tuesday brings the most guest-list-heavy CD in recent memory, with Rhino Records' release of Small World Big Band Volume Two: More Friends from Jools Holland & His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra. Fueled by big-band boogie-woogie, the album features classic standards such as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" with the Stereophonics and a take on Bob Dylan's "You Got to Serve Somebody" with vocalist Marianne Faithfull.
• In cool-cover alert news, Tricky's new album, Vulnerable, is due this Tuesday and features two interpretations of note: XTC's "Dear God" and The Cure's " Love Cats." The new Anti Records album features his touring band and Italian singer Constanza Francavilla.
• Two successful rock entities have jumped fences to their own greener pastures, each with an artist-owned label and upcoming CD. Serj Tankian has created a more personal home for his new Serart side project, a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Arto Tunboyaciyan, using his clout as the frontman of the System of a Down juggernaut to establish his own Serjical Strike Records imprint.
• While America's war with Iraq is wrapping up quickly, Mordam Records has gathered together a peace-movement fundraiser of anti-war rumblings from today's most politically charged alternative artists. Due in mid-May, the two-CD set is simply entitled Peace Not War and features current singles and selected tracks from muckrakers such as Public Enemy, Ani DiFranco, Midnight Oil, Saul Williams, and Chumbawamba.
• This Tuesday brings a new collaboration of jazz and funk masters, all bowing down to the P-Funk manifesto as The Clinton Administration. The new CD, One Nation Under a Re-Groove, also launches Magnatude Records, a new groove, funk, and jam boutique label through Magna Carta.
• This Tuesday brings the soundtrack from Holes, one of the season's most anticipated films, with new music from The Eels and a disco-ball salute to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" by Stephanie Bentley. While aimed at the teen market, the 1999 Newbery Award-winning novel by Louis Sachar might be one of the freshest plots to knock on Hollywood's door in ages.
• Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer - the trio that conceived and delivered the hysterically funny Spinal Tap experience - have done it again, this time spoofing the 1960s folk scene as "The Folksmen, reunited for the memorial concert of a recently deceased artist manager.

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