It's a startling performance. The package design is simply stellar and the liner essays by critic/historian Ashley Kahn and Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter are educational, authoritative, and indispensable.

Elephant overflows with quality -- it's full of tight songwriting, sharp, witty lyrics, and judiciously used basses and tumbling keyboard melodies that enhance the band's powerful simplicity.

Rifles and Rosary Beads is unlike any other record. It edifies and empathizes with the experiences of its participants in delivering brutal yet tender truths; it confronts listeners to embrace without judgment the struggle of war survivors, while experientially relating the extended fact that over 7,400 veterans commit suicide each year. Gauthier and her collaborators look into the gaping maw of war, its trauma, isolation, rage, and loneliness, to reveal the human faces and hearts of its witnesses. Popular music can do no more than this.

He does his best job yet at balancing smarts and accessibility.

A one-of-a-kind revelatory document. This music was not only professionally recorded, but preserved with archival standards, making for an excellent fidelity reproduction.

Dave makes a potent second statement. His first steps outside of PSYCHODRAMA's concrete sphere of influence continue to cement his generational talent.

The Legacy Edition of Raw Power honors this great album better than the Iggy Pop remix that's been its only digital representation since 1997, but the extras included here fall short of making this the definitive release of the James Williamson-era Stooges' bloodied but unbowed triumph.

The end result is historically significant but also a pleasure: for anybody who has wanted to live within the world of Hunky Dory, this offers an excellent place to do just that.

While it won’t be able to please everyone, that’s not the point: this is an intensely personal statement about reclamation, belonging, and legacy, celebrating the past with hopes of changing the future. One can only hope Act III finds Bey going full rock.

While all of Weyes Blood's albums leading up to Titanic Rising were good, even great, there's something that sets this one apart. Fantastic songs, meticulously detailed production, and a certain, hard-to-name spark of connection all gel into the near-perfect statement that every part of Mering's strange journey before this led up to.

It's the work of two collaborative artists who are in the midst of a later-period renaissance that has spawned powerful, evocative music that speaks to its time without being confined to the crises that sparked its creation.

This balance between discovery and reflection gives Melodrama a tension, but the addition of genuine, giddy pleasure--evident on the neon pulse of "Homemade Dynamite" and "Supercut"--isn't merely a progression for Lorde, it's what gives the album multiple dimensions.

Both records are visionary, imaginative listens, providing some of the best music of 2003, regardless of genre.

Some of this material, particularly the B-sides, are as finely honed as Apple, but the tracks that really kick are the rougher material on the third disc.

It's moments like this, the staticky intro to "Lightning Comes Up from the Ground," and the distant thunder-like, well-spaced drum strikes of "Conversation Is a Flowstate" that elevate what are already lovely songs to something that feels transformative.

All the nuances of desire that Hadreas explores on Set My Heart on Fire, Immediately enhance the individuality of each song, as well as his own individuality -- and as he honors every part of his music and himself, he gives listeners another rich, densely packed album to savor.

Perhaps fate forced Leonard Cohen's hand to stage the tour documented in part on Live in London, but it seems that fate knows just what it's doing, and this album eloquently demonstrates how much Cohen still has to offer, and how clearly his music still speaks to him (and us).

It's an enjoyable look back at one of the main players during an interesting era of American indie rock.

This is an essential entry in Coltrane's catalog and a remarkable kick-off to Impulse's "Year of Alice."

The highlight of these is a ten-minute version of "All Too Well," a bitter ballad that was already one of the peaks of Red and is now turned into an epic kiss-off. This, along with excavated songs, are reason enough for Swift to revisit Red and they, not the re-recordings, are the reason to return to Red [Taylor's Version].

It's that depth of detail, combined with the masterful sequencing, that makes Higher! such a superb box set: it tells a familiar story in a fresh fashion.

Machine Head is still a force in modern heavy metal.

Add it all up and subtract the hype, and this one is still potent enough to rise to the top of the pile.

Confronting doubts about his seriousness and squashing whispers about his talent, Skinner has made a sophomore record that expands on what distinguishes the Streets from any other act in music.

Live in Europe, 1969 makes obvious that on this tour, Davis' creative vision was holistic and completely assured.

Ultimately, no matter how heated the exchanges between Martyn and his fans could be during concerts, the respect between audience and performer was total and it was loyal--the same punters who would complain the loudest would be at the very next show. It is for these people, those who knew his true worth as an artist who The Island Years was created for and will appeal to most.

While technically a companion work to 2020's A Celebration of Endings, Biffy Clyro's ninth studio album, the emotionally sanguine The Myth of Happily Ever After, stands on its own.

Like its predecessors, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis isn't "easy" to listen to, nor should it be, given the nature of what it explores and explicates. That said, it is a necessary, engaged art that bears repeated listening for its revelation to unfold and hopefully open a gateway to understanding. Arguably, it is the strongest and most compelling of the Coin Coin releases thus far.