The new box set does indeed help shed new light on the music and the entire project by way of the various bonus features that now accompany the original album... To paraphrase Rod Stewart, every album may indeed tell a story, but some stories are dramatically more compelling than others. The story of "Graceland" is one of the most compelling in all of pop music.

The result of Apple’s self-imposed social distancing is the stunning intimacy of the material here — a rich text to scour in quarantine. Her idiosyncratic song structures, full of sudden stops and lurching tempo changes, adhere to logic only she could explain, which forces you to listen as attentively as though a dear friend were bending your ear.

"Smile" emerges as a beautiful and cohesive work, at times deeply moving, at others oddly whimsical, at still others eerily disturbing but celebratory. [27 Sep 2004]

This record is so expansive that it's tough to wrestle into shape, even as it overflows with wit, smarts and a masterful skill of the language and phrasing.

He [Brian Wilson] more skillfully balanced inspiration and aspiration elsewhere.

“Rough and Rowdy Ways” rolls out one marvel after another, with killer playing from the singer’s road band.

Rife with the kind of sublimely loose grooves achievable only through instrumental precision, Black Messiah is as vital as it is sublime.

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.

You want immaculate structure and production, there are plenty of albums available. You want the sound of life, of a voice summoning all its powers to shake a room and be heard, this recording is waiting.

The Promise album, with gems like the Crystals' homage "Ain't Good Enough for You" and the lilting ballad "Candy's Boy" (a far cry from "Darkness' " aggressively lustful revision "Candy's Room") showcases the danceability, catchiness and even sentimentality Springsteen had to rein in to create "Darkness."

The new version has been remastered from the original tapes, and the results are spectacular. ... Clark rightly considered it his masterwork, and decades later, this reissue has reaffirmed his belief. A seamless blend of American music — twangy guitars, a rhythm section that taps out dynamic funk and soul patterns, an understated mix of piano, synth and keyboards and lots of backing singers — it connects genres and movements with ease.

“Motomami” practically throbs with the freedom of someone flush with creative capital; its stylistic sprawl shares something with Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” while the album’s mix of harsh noise and sculpted pop melody can recall the music M.I.A. made after “Paper Planes” became a left-field hit in the late 2000s.

A blast to listen to.

On the fierce, vivid Lemonade, Beyoncé goes full shock and awe.

It's almost too much, really, but Waits doesn't release albums very often, so you can make it last.

A dance syncretism made of menacing beats skittering from dark dancehall to mashed-up jungle, super-warped bass frequencies, stark anti-hooks, and a voice that is the most authentic to emerge in years. [18 Jan 2004]

It’s as sprawling and as rigorous as we’ve come to expect from the most intellectually ambitious artist in music.

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.

Melodrama is so much more potent when Lorde is owning her newfound authority, as in the album’s dizzying opening track, “Green Light,” in which she urges a lover to follow her “wherever I go” over a surging house groove that keeps escalating in intensity.

OutKast's duo have made a cohesive statement that not only cries at the boundaries of rap music but vaults over them to a place where the music sounds like neon colors and the only rule is that you must free your mind. Your ears will follow.

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.

It's a masterpiece of storytelling, empathy in the midst of chaos.

The production is as dry as old wallpaper. But as a kind of Art Brut storytelling, it is magnificent.

While hearing the band tear through early takes on pillars from the trumpeter's electric period such as "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" and "Spanish Key," it's hearing the band upend some of Davis' older material that may be most striking.

Wild and ravishing “Renaissance,” which came out Friday and immediately reshaped the conversation about 2022’s most important music. ... “Renaissance” is miles ahead of the competition. ... It’s like a carefully curated library, this whole thing, with an astonishing depth of knowledge regarding rhythm and harmony that puts Beyoncé as an arranger and bandleader on a level with Prince and Stevie Wonder.

At times, the fumes of ambition are so thick off "The ArchAndroid," it's hard to absorb in one sitting. All the same, it's a star-making debut.

With The Guitar Song, he's made an ambitious work that goes down easy. Johnson may masquerade as a throwback but what he really aims for is timelessness, and he usually hits his mark.

“Teenage Dream” recycles a song title of Katy Perry’s and echoes a twisty-turny melody of Lana Del Rey’s. Yet Rodrigo’s emotional presence is so strong throughout “Guts” — so believable even at its most unrelatable — that you never lose the sense of a specific young person navigating a trial of her own making.

In its emotional sprawl — not to mention its diverse assortment of styles, from dusty soul to throbbing trap to trippy psychedelic rock — “SOS” evokes natural memories of “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and “Beyoncé.”

The tone of subdued romanticism is balanced by a fine, seductive sense of melody and arrangement. [3 Jul 2005]

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.

Gripping. ... The evolution on display on “Call Me If You Get Lost” is more elemental; he’s rethinking what kinds of stories he wants to use his music to tell and how much of himself his success obliges him to reveal.

Incisive, cutting and verbally dexterous, if a little overwhelming in a single sitting, Barnett's best new songs — "Pedestrian at Best," "Depreston" and "Debbie Downer" among them--inject memorable heft into timeless rock terrain formerly explored by Polly Jean Harvey, young and angry Elvis Costello, Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain.

The self-professed rapper-actor-activist has delivered a modern-day hip-hop answer to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” tackling everything from romance to the wage gap to the lack of diversity in Hollywood with a political bent.

There are tunes here, including “Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” that feel more spirited than anything Springsteen has done in years, with a touch of the careening intensity that made him and E Street a legendary live act. ... The tunes on “Letter to You” get over thanks to the E Street Band, which drives the songs with purpose and provides a level of detail in the arrangements that keeps anything from getting too mopey.

It's both bleak and unexpectedly beautiful.

Dylan’s vocal is low in the mix, rendering certain lines difficult to discern, especially to anyone not already intimately familiar with his clever roster of creation stories he cooked up for so many critters. With the distance of nearly four decades, it’s possible now to look back at this period and recognize that yet again, the Bard from Hibbing, Minn., was doing what he’s done so consistently through all phases of his career: challenging orthodoxy.

Freed from the more formal sound and circumstances of his previous work, Smith indulged without being indulgent, and the revelation here is the exuberant, instinctive, playful and daring sonic pilot who was hidden inside the meticulous craftsman of such albums as "XO" and "Figure 8." [10 Oct 2004]

The first time I listened to Radiohead's In Rainbows, I loved it, no holds barred.

Silly mortals. This is Madlib, lord of the freaky loop, who in collaboration with Gibbs across this album proves he can sketch out a classic rhythm with the minimalist precision of Picasso drawing a butt. For his part, Gibbs is an unapologetic street rapper who cusses his way through verses with glee, tossing f-bombs as he relays couplets.

Exquisitely rendered tunes lush with echoes of Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode. ... The songs boogie and shimmer just so; the melodies ache with longing and regret. And these vocals! Over forget-me-not grooves as finely detailed as any Mtume or Patrice Rushen fan could want, the Weeknd sings more beautifully than he ever has on “Dawn FM.” ... The year’s first great album.

With this second full album, the singer and songwriter stakes a claim on a unique and fascinating turf, a sort of avant-cabaret musical theater that embraces a David Lynch-like moodiness and experimental-folk mystery, intimate confession and theatrical grandeur. [20 Mar 2005]

Will certainly stand as one of the best rap albums of the year. [26 Mar 2006]

A warm and vibrant tribute to the marginalized people, especially women and those with fluid ideas about gender and sexuality, whom Monáe sees as the true embodiment of America's promise.

West does tend to overextend his songs.... But it's a forgiveable sin for a man whose music and message is so powerful. [12 Feb 2004, p.E16]

Focused on bass, percussion, saxophone and various odd electronic punctuations, the new work is equal parts thrilling and devastating.

It's everything its fans have been pining for the past two decades.

Ribot's work here may not always cry for attention like some effects-laden summer blockbuster, but it can be a quietly immersive art house favorite in the right hands.

This surprising effort answers breathless hype not with shouts but with one long exhalation.

It's an album we'll be looking at in December when it's time to single out the most powerful works of 2014.

At times Iyer and his charges exhibit so much virtuosity and skill it's almost overwhelming how quickly ideas rise and fall through a given track, but attempting to parse all this trio is trying to say is well worth the effort.

This is an album in the classic, pre-digital sense, in which the very sequence of songs suggests meaning and connection. [12 Sep 2006]

Vulnicura is a serious, heavy journey through a rough ordeal, a work certainly too deep to fully absorb so quickly after its release. Like many of her recent records, it's not toe-tapping beat-based music. But fans like myself will find much to love as we explore its many peaks and valleys.

In a few tracks, you sense this band is still at the mercy of influences as it searches for its identity, but the best moments are wonderfully promising.

His songs are lyrically simple yet emotionally and sonically resonant enough to envision listeners being drawn in even if they don't know the language.

The music is equal parts aching, brazen and gorgeously honest.

Some of these lines are so well-crafted that they're tough to bear.

The gratifying thing about this album — beyond its gorgeous melodies and Del Rey’s singing, which has never been more vivid — is that even as she’s mellowed her attack, her sense of humor has grown more pointed.

Their switchblade-sharp vision incorporates acute observational powers about the human condition and savvy compositional skills that come together in songs that are piercingly honest, funny and sometimes both.

The Suburbs is an accomplished love letter that radiates affection as much as bitterness.

Jamie xx proves adept at exploring the intersection of hip hop, Jamaican dub music, strange New York post-disco, British grime music and gritty new-era rhythm and blues.

The album hits hardest by embodying the process by which certain voices are bottled up and distorted within the global noise of what M.I.A. calls "Third World Democracy."

Vernon is in no rush to clear up any of this--to harden ideas about himself or his art--on 22, a Million, which represents an even bigger leap than Bon Iver’s previous record.

The double in the room on Let England Shake is the whole modern world. PJ Harvey has given us a righteous scare.

Murphy succeeds by stretching in two directions — finding a new musical center, and showing his humanity beyond the laughs.

She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.

It's a portrait of an English radical at 62, but it's personal and emotional and neither strident nor stodgy.

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.

Vernon on Bon Iver solidifies his place not as innovator, but as someone who's found a nice, fertile plot of land somewhere near where folk, rock, R&B and indie rock intersect, and is happy to wander across its great expanse honoring all of it.

The artist has presented an utterly human, mostly nonverbal defense of his aesthetic: atmospheric, occasionally funky and meandering instrumental electronic tones, lovingly crafted, with imaginative internal logics.

Maxwell’s transcendent falsetto and the soulful jazz, electronic and soul arrangements need no cohesive story line to make them resonate.