Close to the Noise Floor: Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984 collects four discs of the alternately thrilling, grim, silly, and just plain bizarre stuff.

There's a Dream I've Been Saving is a prime cultural artifact documenting a high point in an independent era in pop recording, production, and D.I.Y. aesthetics. It deserves a Grammy for content and design.

It adds up to another pitch perfect album by the band, certainly one of their best and most devastatingly pretty works. In a career full of brilliance, that's saying ever so much.

It could be argued that Live at the Fillmore, 1997 is the definitive live portrait of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: not only do they sound mighty, this freewheeling eclecticism rooted in 1960s rock and pop is the best showcase of the band's aesthetic.

Musgraves has a sense of humor, too, and all of these traits add up to make Same Trailer Different Park more than a collection of songs just aiming for the country charts.

It's the work of a master musician/producer paying wonderful tribute to Scott-Heron for sure, but it's also a fully realized McCraven album, chock-full of his instrumental, arrangement, and production prowess. If you didn't know better, you'd swear this was a collaborative date.

That's a lot of repetition but whether it's taken in either its single-disc or double-disc deluxe editions, The Sound of the Smiths is the best of these posthumous overviews.

Freed of commercial expectations and paired with an empathetic band, Wynonna will sing anything she damn well pleases and she's wound up with a monster of an album.

None of these are precisely new tricks for Swift but her writing from the explicit vantage of other characters, as on the epic story-song "the last great american dynasty," is. Combined, the moodier, contemplative tone and the emphasis on songs that can't be parsed as autobiography make folklore feel not like a momentary diversion inspired by isolation but rather the first chapter of Swift's mature second act.

Joe Strummer 002 is worth its weight simply for containing remastered versions of all three Mescaleros albums, but the copious liner notes, ephemera, and bonus disc of demos and rarities make it essential.

Most of LongGone feels deeply organic, with Redman and his bandmates feeding off each other and working to build something cohesive and bigger than their individual contributions.

The fine track list, together with the rarity value, should make this a high priority on the purchase list of Neil Young fans or, indeed, rock fans.

Anyone who enjoyed The Dirty South as it appeared in 2004 will find The Complete Dirty South rewarding, and those who haven't heard it owe it to themselves to hear it in uncompromised form.

Yours, Mine & Ours is a truly grand record, another in the string of classic releases by Joe Pernice.... The kind of record fans of intelligent pop music played with real emotion should purchase. Immediately.

Chutes Too Narrow's breezy subtlety is less accessible than the Shins' debut, but that doesn't mean the album lacks great songs.

Michael Gira is a man unafraid to follow his muse wherever it may take him, and To Be Kind is another example of his singular vision writ large without compromise.

Taken together, Valentine represents both a bold musical step and a signal that Jordan is ready to move on in more ways than one, at the same time that it leaves some of her distinctiveness behind.

American Band is an op-ed column with guitars, and it presents a message well worth hearing, both as politics and as music.

Come All Ye: The First Ten Years is essential listening. For fans, all of this is necessary, for the curious, start with the studio offerings (there are two fine offerings entitled Five Classic Albums, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2) or the double-disc Gold from 2008.

Ultimately, War Music doesn't sound especially innovative, particularly stacked up against their 1998 masterpiece The Shape of Punk to Come. But it speaks to a world still wrestling with problems that have divided society for centuries, and Refused aren't rehashing old arguments so much as they're launching one more campaign in a war they cannot bear to surrender.

At its most chaotic, Hypermagic Mountain could tear open a wormhole into Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral.

This sequel may have little to do with the original, but if the title helps to point out this is the Shaolin poet's best work since 1995's Pt. 1, then so be it.

An album that's not only satisfying, but one of the band's strongest works to date.

At just 30 years old and with seven albums to her credit, Marling's songwriting has been honed to a level of literate maturity that few artists achieve in their careers.

With this flawless effort, she manages to achieve both. Future Nostalgia could have just as well been titled "Future Classic."

At its core, these demos are the sound of Dylan becoming Bob Dylan, and it's an evolution that's spellbinding.

Newsom can make her audience work almost as hard as she does, but the rewards are worth it: Dazzling, profound and affecting, Divers' explorations of time only grow richer the more time listeners spend with them.

Meeting titanic expectations, this linear journey of the heart is Adele's most cohesive statement to date, pairing her inimitable voice with a dozen engrossing vignettes, reminding us that all we can do is keep trying.