Art Angels is a marvel of meticulous, even obsessive home-studio recording, uncompromised by bandmates or collaborators.

At the very least, listening to The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 should send you scurrying back to the official versions of those three classic Bob Dylan albums. It’s his story, and it’s history, reconsidered one more time.

The subtler, less stylized Wiped Out! keeps the palm-trees-at-twilight feel, but the sound is more hazy R&B than rock.

All that retro angst is more rote and less involving than the way its debut tried to square loud guitars with the hooky imperatives of chart pop. In the last several tracks, though, the energy returns.

On Storyteller, it’s striking to hear her respond to varied musical textures by expanding her repertoire, toying with inflection and phrasing, and bringing new wrinkles to the characters she’s inhabiting.

You can question its originality, but the music hits hard.

The whole endeavor has a “live and let live” feel that fits in perfectly with Strait’s laid-back, though never sloppy, attitude.

Hamilton’s stage production should be required viewing for every American citizen, but this exhilarating listen is a much more practical, and every bit as enjoyable, stand-in.

It’s evocative and vivid, recalling early Red House Painters, or even The Blue Nile.

The Documentary 2, succeeds by reminding you what made the original so memorable.

Deerhunter isn’t repeating itself: This creatively restless group doesn’t stand still for long.

Her willingness to own every step and misstep, and to show her audience how the rough times helped her become the woman she is, makes Confident a surprisingly compelling listen.

His 18th studio LP, 35 mph Town, bypasses the cliches and tones down his sometimes overbearing bravado.

Unbreakable is the mature album, free of commercial ambition, her all-too-breakable brother never made.

As on True, the nondance tracks are more or less power ballads, albeit with fairly pallid vocals.... The dance tracks are actually where most of this album’s pleasant surprises lie.

Reference points include Liars and The Fall, but Girl Band is very much its own beast.

He can sound awkward navigating Swift’s vernacular of haters and mad love, but when he plays up his strengths--the fingerpicking and strings on “Blank Space,” or changing the “Style” lyric “James Dean daydream” to “Daydream Nation,” a nod to Sonic Youth--the universality of great songwriting shines through.

The chemistry works as expected, even if it never exceeds, or even reaches, the sum of its artists. There's no transcendent moment here, because the project is essentially a meeting of opposites who mostly stay in their lanes.

Under the cover of midnight, Del Rey has been exploring big ideas about eroticism, drugs, myth, the empty promise of YOLO, what it means to be a woman, and the American soul.

Caracal is the kind of effort that diehard fans might convince themselves to appreciate, and then never play again.

On major-label debut GO:OD AM, his third and best studio album, Miller grapples frankly with fame, addiction, recovery and the struggle to be a decent person over taut, melancholy production that channels both bleary inebriation and hard-fought optimism.

In this age of frivolity, Duran Duran is straight-up thriving.

The music is digital and danceable but with emotional depth--much of it thanks to Mayberry.

While nothing on Repentless reaches similar heights of mayhem, overall the album is more focused and fierce than its predecessor, 2009’s Hanneman-assisted World Painted Blood.

It doesn’t all click, like when Imbruglia smooths over all the emotional grit of Damien Rice’s “Cannonball.” But her charms on Male win you over in the end.

On Souls, Maiden mostly hits its target.

There’s a semblance of a flow to the record’s sprawling track list, but too many songs sound hastily written, and too often Cyrus acts as if her drug trip is more poignant than the average freakout.

Stuff Like That There shows that Yo La Tengo is, remarkably, still effectively the same band it was a quarter-century ago: graceful, centered and eager to play its latest finds.