While it's great to have the old albums re-mastered, the real draw here are the remixes and the concert performances.

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

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.”

Tasty cuts abound here, but Sir Lucious is most enjoyable as a complete listening experience.

Tom Petty, another classic rocker, has assembled an impressive collection of his live work with his band the Heartbreakers that's similar in spirit to Young's remarkable anthology if not quite as expansive.

Moses Sumney and Mike Hadreas have made the albums of our strange quarantine season — bleak but tender, sprawling yet intricately detailed, as suffused with the need for physical contact as they are alert to its dangers and prohibitions. ... Stunning art-soul record. ... Yet as busy as the music can occasionally feel, both albums keep close track of the singers’ voices, which always merit the attention.

"Z" moves away from the more overt Band and "The Notorious Byrd Brothers" references, closer to a convergence of Who-like playfulness and drive with R.E.M. mystery. [2 Oct 2005]

Headphone rap of the highest order, tracks on this sequel hum and groove, laced with texture and hidden sonic accents.

This swinging, sometimes mournful, often tender set of 10 songs proves an easy album to, well, love. [25 Aug 2006]

Both a searing, emotional performance of Young and an ace band firing on all cylinders and a time capsule of West Hollywood in the early 1970s, the recording illuminates long-gone magic. Masterfully mixed, you can hear the delicate interplay among Young, guitarist-pianist Lofgren, the late steel guitarist Keith, bassist Talbot and drummer Molina.

The result is hardly dry or academic: The palpable anger coursing through tracks like “Yankee and the Brave” and “JU$T” — the latter featuring Pharrell Williams and Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha — feels as cleansing as an acid bath. And fury isn’t the only sensation the group articulates on its most emotionally complex album so far.

It's intricate and punishing, industrial and artful.

[A] knockout ... In a funny way, the radical optimism of "Golden Hour" feels far more rebellious than any of Musgraves' earlier work.

It’s her exploration of the nuances of black life that makes this one of the year’s standouts. Even in a time when black pop artists have grown especially political, the work feels critical.

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.

It's essential 2012 listening for anyone interested in popular music as art.

Animal Collective still struggles with effective counterweights to its euphoric beauty--the attempt at romance on 'Bluish' is off-putting and some of the murkiness can exhaust and undermine--but it shifts so rapidly, with such conviction, that it's more fun to hunker down and surrender.

Clark wrote or co-wrote all 12 of these songs with the feistiness of Loretta Lynn and the songwriting gift of Dolly Parton.... This is the country debut of the year.

This 11-track album--the second collection of collaborations by Touré and the Malian kora player Toumani Diabeté--doesn't sound like death. Rather, it's an early contender for the warmest, most life-affirming listen of 2010.

There's a cold efficiency in how the Clipse delivers songs built on street-corner cockiness and billfold bluster. It's all shamelessly amoral, but the Clipse wouldn't be such savvy hustlers if they didn't know how to sling with style.

As spread over four CDs and a DVD, "There's a Dream" is a lot to consume, especially if you're not into Hazlewood's in-your-face approach.... Best, though, are some of Hazlewood's sides with Ann-Margret, recorded in Nashville.

Song for song, “Folklore” does not quite rise to the heady level of albums like “Red” (2012), “Reputation” (2017) and “Lover” (2019). There are no dance floor bangers, no irrefutable earworms, no songs likely to stampede to the upper reaches of the Hot 100. As a collection of songs, though, it stands alone in Swift’s discography. It’s her most album-y album, a creation of and for life in the summer of 2020, ideally experienced alone, late at night, in a single sitting, through noise-canceling headphones.

Brash, polarizing, fearless and filled with a purity of vision that would make Col. Kurtz blanch.

This is an album as much as about emotions as it is topics.

“30” offers deep thoughts on love’s causes and consequences. ... Adele’s singing — soaring yet pulpy, gorgeous even at its rawest (as in “To Be Loved”) — gives these musings the blood-and-guts believability her fans crave. There’s some of the brainy energy of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” here, though it’s filtered through the homey wisdom of Carole King’s “Tapestry.” ... Until people stop breaking one another’s hearts, we’ll keep needing ugly-cry ballads — and nobody does those better than Adele.

An album that reaches for something far more organic and immediate [than 2011's The King Of Limbs].

Accelerando is a rambunctious yet nimble celebration of the groove that turns as much on the fulcrum of drummer Marcus Gilmore and bassist Stephan Crump as it does on Iyer's restlessly inventive piano.

Dear Science, the third album from the Brooklyn-based art rock band TV on the Radio, is a vivid, angry, sensual soundtrack to the haunted life.