In the end, Charles didn’t just fit in; he revolutionized the genre by sparking a rush of Nashville/pop crossover acts. This music remains a tribute to and rejoinder of the futile divisions we so often take for granted.

Years removed from its source, its impact is multiplied tenfold. In 1996, it was a path towards adult-contemporary pop radio; today, it’s an exquisitely faded Polaroid.

The influence of Pinkerton led to hundreds of mostly regrettable bands, but what ultimately distinguishes Weezer is how they sonically mirror the unhinged and private mental terror of its narrator.

A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.

For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos--deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix--clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material.

They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here.

The rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.

As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. ... The vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity.

What remains so great about Tim, and is emphasized over and over again on this new remix, is how Westerberg delivers each song as if it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do.

It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. ... The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards.

It’s an overwhelming amount of material. ... The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering.

At its heart, jazz thrives on bold, sensitive interaction in the moment, and Live in Europe 1967 represents the pinnacle of that practice.

[The “Underdubbed” version is] not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. .... Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.

Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers. The surrounding records are also strong.

It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating.

As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk.

This super deluxe edition—complete with a 49-minute album pressed as a double-LP at 45rpm--encourages exploration of the original album, because even with the bright, discordant new remix, there remains a mysterious core that can not be explained but only experienced.

The Cutting Edge is music of the present, but not the '60s present, an eternal present; the songs are about observation and they exist in a place where it's always now, in sound and word.

If anything, the elucidating peek behind the curtain that Bangs’ documentary provides makes the album feel like an even more singular, remarkable achievement.

Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time.

The Velvet Underground's stunning simplicity and unflinching honesty presented an even more accessible model of DIY aspiration, free of Warholian conceptualism and Cale’s classically schooled chaos.

Frankly [add-ons would] just be a distraction from the underlying theme that becomes clear once you get absorbed into the music, which is that Blue Lines is still Blue Lines, and most of the world is still trying to catch up to it.

[Graceland] was unique in its total, and totally natural, synthesis of musical strains that turned out to be not nearly as different from each other as its listeners might have expected, and the result resonated strongly around the world and across generations.

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wildstyle symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

III is, indirectly, Led Zeppelin’s own version of Pink Floyd's Meddle--the folky, pretty early record that was never too popular and hence a favorite of indie types skeptical of such a massive mainstream band.... III has easily the best bonus material too.

Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it. There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again.

The end result is a great album, albeit one more lighthearted than its myth would suggest.

Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record.

The ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

None of the bonus material on Kid Amnesiae, the third “bonus” disc accompanying the two studio albums, has the same revelatory quality as the inclusions on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. ... It was the indelible sounds they made on Kid A and Amnesiac, more than any of the album’s digital age paranoia or its baleful view of the future, that comprise the band’s enduring legacy. Those sounds break free of anything you might want to attach to them.

Led Zeppelin is one of music's most assured and fully realized debuts; individually, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were great players, but the whole of their sound somehow exceeded the sum of its parts. But even above the instrumental virtuosity, Led Zeppelin is a triumph of production, each part clear and forceful but adding up to something even more powerful.

How the West Was Won serves up their muscle, sweaty heart and golden grandeur in an exhaustingly persuasive light. That, and a hundred of the best riffs you've ever heard.

Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d city did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse.

You don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.

The Little Match Girl Passion is as much a devotional piece as the Bach Passion it is modeled on, and with it, Lang has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career.

These four discs ultimately do what any good box set should do: In tracing the band's trajectory from power-pop progenitors to post-pop tinkerers, Keep an Eye on the Sky presents a history of the band that could not be gleaned from the albums themselves, using finished studio tracks along with demos and rarities to give a fuller picture of the musicians, their dynamic, and their songs.

If the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. ... It’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition.

The Sabbath may be Black indeed, but there’s room for both light and shade, and Vol. 4 is a masterful evocation of both by the band that did it better than anyone.

Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.

The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own. The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay.

The first half of CD2 is the apex of Burial’s dancefloor material, truly as good as it gets.

This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.--a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Her themes of desire and fuckery are vivid and emotionally complex.

The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. What distinguishes this collection is its scope.

Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off.

The bonus disc is a mildly interesting amalgam of alternate mixes and rough takes--the kind of stuff anyone but the most dedicated obsessives will listen to only once--and there’s little advance here lyrically from the debut, but II is still close to perfect.

The numerous early takes and rough demos have a diehard appeal (there’s a reason Metallica has a dedicated archivist on their payroll), though the live recordings present a band going through its most monumental transition punctuated by monumental tragedy. Recording a masterpiece was the easy part. Genius does not appear out of thin air and Puppets was a culmination of Metallica’s influences and forward direction, so yes, it will give you a more rounded sense of how a masterwork came to be.

It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. The lyrics are striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs.

Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part.

Sometimes the single versions here are superior to the album edits, 12-inch mixes, and other edits, but not always. It is also possible to imagine a more nuanced and inventively sequenced gloss of Pet Shop Boys’ career than this chronological survey. But there is particular value to this nerdy historicism.

Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely. And yet, not wholly impossible.

Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years--an unmovable feast, immortalized.

Homecoming is an important document of those [Coachella] performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity.

Singles offers a wide-ranging but accessible route to his unearthly sounds.

The sequencing shapes the album beautifully, creating a sense of emotional fatigue while only hinting vaguely at redemption. Thematically, however, that cycle implies a romantic fatalism, as though every relationship is doomed to end painfully. That’s what makes Gentlemen at 21 such a compelling and necessary reissue, even if the album has never been terribly hard to find.

This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

[The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL] are a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend [Bob Mould], starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.

Its genesis, development, and creation are extensively chronicled in Who’s Next | Life House, an 11-CD box set that beautifully communicates the spirit of the original project by opening up the vaults and inviting everybody inside.

Offering passes that test, it’s both an “important” jazz release and one that’s actually enjoyable to listen to.

This streamlined set, Start Together, captures that dichotomy, archiving the Sleater-Kinney canon with care: from the ideological-punches of thirdwave feminism to their post-riot grrrl classic rock revisionism, all seven albums have been remastered and paired with a plainly gorgeous hardcover photobook, as well as the surprise of a reunion-launching 7" single.

Dopesmoker is an infinitely explorable listen, the kind of record that will goad your attention through miniscule rabbit holes whether or not you're as stoned as the people who made it.

The struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted.

The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs from material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best.

It is beautiful, emotive music, literally and figuratively entrancing.

With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye's man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic.

This self-fulfilling fatalism is at the heart of innumerable rock songs by innumerable bitter young men, but it is rarely expressed with the introspective clarity that Bachmann displays throughout Icky Mettle.

Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.

It’s alarming how many of the issues cited by artists and presenters persist today—police violence, systemic racism, poverty, cultural erasure—yet that makes the music sound fresh, lively, relevant in its celebration and commiseration. Both the film and the soundtrack bear that weight of history gracefully and jubilantly.

It remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.

One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.

It feels rare to hear an album that’s so experimental, that aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and that attains exactly what it sets out to achieve.

The album’s production veers from trip-hop to new wave, trance to flamenco, demonstrating an innate understanding of the pop archive in pursuit of a new personal style. Each creation seems marvelously its own.

Madvillainy is inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip-hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots.... Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, undie, or otherwise.

Rise’s “You Know It Ain’t” expands the spoken-word interludes of Black Is into a full song. While these moments can feel heavy-handed at other times, here the humor is welcome and specific.

It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.

So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing.

Room 25 is quarter-life crisis turned breakthrough, a balm through which Noname offers a taste of the simple sort of heaven that she's still searching for herself.

So while two straight discs of Fela is exhausting, it's probably the most suitable way to digest him.

Nearly twenty years later, GAS still assaults our presumptions about electronic music.

Of course, Grace Jones is the star here. Five of the original album’s nine songs are covers, though rather than fealty to the source material, Jones sounds as if she’s shredding the songbook with her bare teeth.

Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez.

The result is both the best career-spanning snapshot of and single-purchase introduction to Talking Heads-- odd accolades for a live record-- and a treat for longtime fans.

The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual.

Though omissions are certain to be an issue for cratedigging obsessives, this collection is as flawless a primer as has ever been made available on a single disc.

Essentially perfect... It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.

Cinema takes in Czukay’s solo and collaborative work outside of Can, the iconic avant-rock quintet he co-founded in 1968. Starting in the early 1960s and ending in 2014, the set lights a path through his sprawling, winding oeuvre and confirms Czukay’s status as one of the great weirdo geniuses of the 20th century.

A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug.

Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl.

By dividing the sessions into what amounts to an overview of his career, My Dusty Road detracts from the recently discovered source material, making it both an incredible find and a missed opportunity.

Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.

Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement.

Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.