Beth Hart, a raw and dynamic singer, has joined forces once again with guitarist Joe Bonamassa — and, as with 2011′s Don’t Explain, this collaboration brings out the best in both.

A day after fans heard the first single from Black Sabbath’s upcoming 13 project, the band debuted a second song, “The End of the Beginning,” live in New Zealand.

The appropriately named “Combustible,” part of an upcoming Wallace Roney project called Understanding, bursts out like a spit-shined hard-bop muscle car — and the trumpeter never takes his foot off the gas.

The soon-to-be-released Lifesigns single “Telephone” is perhaps the best example of how the group’s previous lives in prog and pop can coalesce into a listenable, yet still challenging, amalgam of both.

Anthony Branker plays no instruments on his latest record Uppity. Actually, he’s never performed on any of his six releases, so I can’t discuss what a great instrumentalist or vocalist he is.

The title track from If The River Was Whiskey, the first album of new material from 1990s radio-darlings the Spin Doctors since 2005, scuffs up the hitmaking formula for familiar songs like “Little Miss Can’t be Wrong” with a snarling city-blues vibe.

Can K-Pop juggernaut Psy catch lightning in a bottle again? Does anybody care? Actually, a lot of people care.

The National are doing a great job of indirectly building up early Internet torque by releasing tune streams from their forthcoming album Trouble Will Find Me. Will this continue until release date?

OK. I’m a sucker for goofy musical comedy. The goofier the better. A larger than I’d like to admit part of my record collection is taken up by it. I have the full “Weird Al” Yankovic catalog.

Coming together in 1962 and originally known as Chad Allan and the Reflections, then Chad Allan and the Expressions, and finally the Guess Who, this Canadian band eventually turned into one of the biggest groups in the world.