His sixth album is a left turn away from his menacing, comic-book-villain rap persona and toward his indie-curious, experimental, Stereolab-citing self. He mixes noodly, ’80s-sounding synth beats (“What’s Good”) with funky boom-bap (“Running Out of Time”), and draws on quiet-storm R&B (“Puppet”) and hallucinatory beat music (“Gone Gone/Thank You”). Crucially, Tyler’s aesthetic connects the work across disciplines.

That none of this comes off as preachy or simply lame is a testament to both singers’ astute record-making skills. Though the streaming age requires pop stars to be fluent in multiple genres, Pink and Lizzo are expert in more than most.

That none of this comes off as preachy or simply lame is a testament to both singers’ astute record-making skills. Though the streaming age requires pop stars to be fluent in multiple genres, Pink and Lizzo are expert in more than most.

Beyoncé’s ambitions outstrip those of her peers. ... Yes, Homecoming is one of the greatest live albums ever. If nothing else, the intention behind her performance makes it so. ... So much action. So many cues and rhythms, so much narrative momentum. Its melodic and rhythmic quotes need footnotes to fully absorb, and her voice resonates with history. Still, calling it the best live album of all time may be a stretch. ... Hell if I know, but it ranks way, way up there. ... So yeah, it’s fair to say that Beyoncé, and this work, is genius.

Mixing warm, New Age-suggestive electronic tones with conversational, heart-to-heart lyrics meant to stick on first listen, her work floats through space with a glistening, emotionally rich shimmer.

What’s interesting about Honky Tonk Time Machine, though, is that, as eager as Strait seems to reclaim his commercial clout, the album doesn’t downplay his perspective as an aging grandfather at a moment when country music is dominated by youngsters.

What arrives is a virtually seamless country rock album, with verses moving fluidly into choruses that travel unimpeded across sparkling, architecturally sophisticated bridges. ... Duffy doesn’t leave a single loose thread on “Placeholder.” Highly recommended.

Remarkable... a lovingly assembled production that rarely goes where you expect it to — but, like Solange herself, always puts across a clear sense of place.

What arrives is an accomplished roots-music album that serves as a reminder of the band’s legacy.

Thank U, Next flaunts Grande’s emotional healing; it’s suffused with the joy of discovering that what didn’t kill her really did make her stronger. ... As eager as she sounds on Thank U, Next to embrace new ideas and attitudes, the album shows that she can still do the old-fashioned stuff--the big vocals that connect her back to Mariah and Whitney and Celine--when she wants to.

Nesmith brings grown-up emotion to his recordings of Mel Tormé and Robert Wells’ “The Christmas Song” and Claude & Ruth Thornhill’s rarely recorded “Snowfall.” But the big calling card may well be two vocals that Davy Jones recorded in 1991 and that are newly outfitted in fresh instrumental accompaniment pulled together by album producer Adam Schlesinger.

Some listeners may find the meticulous arrangements a tad sterile by the end, but Danny Elfman’s “Making Christmas” brings a welcome bit of edge to the project.

It’s rare to find someone with something new to say about the holiday experience, but the 97’s pull it off so well in that the five yuletide standards that follow almost feel anti-climactic.

He’s honed in on narrative songs that are well suited to a spoken delivery out of the Robert Preston-Rex Harrison-Richard Harris school of nonsinging actors. A delightfully dramatic outing.

The Nashville-based, label-defying group has cooked up eight effervescent originals and added its stamp to a couple of Yuletide chestnuts. ... Boogie-woogie, Tex-Mex, heart-melting pop, retro blues--it’s all here in one irresistible package.

Producing the album themselves, he and the band also zero in on a perfectly period musical and sonic vibe for this outing.

Musically, Sweatshirt couples the words with rhythmically skewed, sampled loops of vintage soul artists including singer Linda Clifford, funk band the Endeavors and Stax Records group the Soul Children. Unlike the boom-bap producers who did the same in the ’90s, though, Sweatshirt busts the bars into cubist, Earl-descending-a-staircase increments.

It’s a short record, clocking in at just over 20 minutes, but the Long Beach linguist crams in a lot of syllables and welcomes into the mix compadres including Earl Sweatshirt, Ty Dolla Sign and San Francisco legend E-40. Though he presents the material playfully, Staples has more on his mind than hot fun.

It veers wildly among mechanized garage rock, ’80s-era soft pop, atmospheric dance music and lush acoustic balladry; one song strongly recalls Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” while another looks back to the Great American Songbook. ... Excellent, often thrilling album.

Healthy doses of humor sit side-by-side with sincerity in this smartly conceived, engagingly executed holiday song cycle.

The R&B-pop singer-songwriter finds a way to bring urban music sensibility even to something as quintessentially foursquare as “Silver Bells.”

The pleasant surprise is the balance between his blues and adult pop instincts that's broad enough to include a fascinating disco-rock meeting-of-the-minds rendering of "Jingle Bells" and his canny interpretations of "White Christmas" and "Away in a Manger," along with one original, "Christmas Tears."

Certainly, there is no small number of Dylan completists who will lap up every shred of tape he ever used. But there emerges a feeling of diminishing returns for anyone not cursed with OCD--obsessive-compulsive-Dylanism--during a stretch on the second disc with nine consecutive versions of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” Likewise the eight takes of “Buckets of Rain” on the fourth disc that are interrupted just long enough for a pair of performances of “Up to Me.”

It’s a warm, appealingly ragged collection suffused with wisdom and reassurance.

A fitting subtitle could be “Everything You Know About Funk is Wrong,” thanks to a couple of flat-out stunning solo performances on this session. This is not the Holy Grail of lost or shelved Prince albums.

Unlike much ambient music, Gave in Rest isn’t made for background listening. In fact, only with volume can you fully appreciate the depth of Davachi’s creation.

A blast to listen to.

His eccentric phrasing brings out new wrinkles in “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” and in a “Young at Heart” that suggest he’s coming up with the song’s tricky intervals on the fly. And he and his producers, Buddy Cannon and Matt Rollings, make all kinds of unexpected choices with the arrangements, as in a sprightly “Blue Moon” and “It Was a Very Good Year,” which they give a lilting Cuban vibe.