With Dream Weapon, Genghis Tron don’t so much transition as achieve transcendence of everything they once were. And the change is so fully realized that it renders notions of genre loyalism utterly moot.

"Love and Theft" sees Dylan roaring back from Highway 61 at full bore, reminding us -- as he did on Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes, and Blood on the Tracks -- that, like him or not, there isn't anybody else who can do his job.

Raw Power is one of his definitive statements, and it is presented here in superb form. You owe it to yourself to get this.

Screw Wilco; In Our Gun is sounding very much like the Album of the Year.

This is truly a virtuosic tour de force. Every time you hear a new Jane Weaver album and think to yourself, well, that’s about it, there’s nowhere she can go from here, and then she goes to yet another level, forging still new paths.

Cryptic and daunting, "Dopesmoker" is the quintessential stoner metal track. Sixteen years since its birth, it remains unsurpassed.

A Crow Looked at Me is a masterpiece in the manner of A Grief Observed and “She Will Find What is Lost”. All of these works create a special communion between creator and observer, artistic experiences that join individual circumstances of loss with whatever the listener/reader/viewer brings to the work.

Upon further reflection, an Achtung Baby shorn of any extras should be more than enough to satisfy you, after all-that's how it's been served for the past two decades. Everything else is mere garnish on top of a flat-out genius work.

Because half these songs are already widely available elsewhere, this collection has slightly less archival impact than the Gentile Elvis's Sun Sessions or last year's widely-circulated Never Mind the Bullets, Here's Early Bob Seger. Musically, though, it's in their league.

For my money, Newsom has demonstrated more nuance, depth of feeling, and originality than a hundred bedazzling pop divas.

This is material that has, and will continue to stand the test of time.

What makes Wildflowers & All the Rest worth perusing is the home recordings. As the record takes shape in Petty's home studio, we understand how Petty managed to make Wildflowers so uniquely devastating.

With Blood Mountain, Mastodon have completed a three-album arc that most young bands can only dream of, culminating in a record that’s as thrilling as it is multifaceted, as melodic as it is bludgeoning.

With this record, Skinner is now in a class all his own; nobody else is making music like this.

This fine, fine album (quite possibly the finest of year) signals that the White Stripes have arrived. Hype or no hype, this is a band of significance...

3.15.20 captures the tumultuous contemporary moment. As society contends with sickness, anger, and fear, Glover remedies the malignancy while fueling the anguish. 3.15.20 signals an important shift for Childish Gambino and secures the album's spot as one of the best of the year.

Even by Mdou Moctar’s high standards, Funeral for Justice is extraordinary. It is searing in music and lyrics, with messages that are essential in a world on fire and whose sounds can carry those messages far and wide. More than any previous Mdou Moctar album, it feels alive.

he Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 is more than just music--it’s cultural history of colossal significance. This collection is a resource that fans and students of Dylan’s work will reference again and again as the years and decades pass and these classic albums are introduced to new generations of music fans.

At Carnegie Hall staunchly carries with it the brand characteristics that launched this cultural exchange.

If you care a thing for rock ‘n’ roll, country, or American music in general, No Depression is simply essential.

Skull Ring is not merely a testament to Iggy's staying power as an artist, but it is also an amazing feat in that it melds the past, present and future of punk/pop onto a single CD.

The result of this incredible journey, Memorial, is the first landmark post-metal release since Isis’ Panopticon, Russian Circles’ greatest achievement, and unquestioningly one of 2013’s true artistic masterpieces.

Some of the most euphoric, mind-blowingly beautiful music we have heard in years.

This is not only a treasure trove for Mitchell completists, but it’s also a definitive chronicle of the ascent of the greatest artist of the singer-songwriter genre. It’s a credit to her talent that none of the tracks – even outtakes and alternate versions of memorable songs – feel superfluous. The live tunes are especially poignant and captivating because we’re privy to an artist growing into her talents and gifts.

Blondie’s Against the Odds is a story of many intersections: art and commerce, punk and pop, disco and rock, femininity and masculinity, and underground with the mainstream. Against the Odds tells that story beautifully.

For fans of a certain kind of music, there is unlikely to be a more significant release in 2006.

The most prolific, beautiful, and vital statement of rock since the Stooges' Raw Power.

Six years later, Kanye is undoubtedly the most openly self-aware MC. And the music world should be grateful to have him. I know I am.

Almost 50 years after the fact, that first Cluster record (named either Cluster or Cluster 71, depending on whom you ask) still sounds miles ahead of the curve.

Around these four brilliant sets, we also get three bonus cuts from the Fillmore West in April of 1970. These sets [are] a bit murkier in quality--the four proper sets here are pristine--but they make for compelling contrasts.

One of the best buys you'll ever make.

However delayed Live at Reading‘s official release is, thankfully fans can finally rejoice and celebrate its long-awaited arrival. Few live shows are able to communicate a band’s heart and soul the way Nirvana’s is brilliantly encapsulated here.

The improvement over the seven previously released tracks is one thing, but the treasure here is the 11 unreleased performances.... Few bands ever had a year like the Velvet Underground did in 1969. Even fewer have a set that documents a year like that as beautifully as this one.

The album that Pink Floyd made in 1979 marked a milestone in progressive rock, and this box set captures everything perfect and imperfect about the album.

This entire collection proves one thing: Paul Simon and Graceland will remain as one of the most relevant pop records of all time.

A perfect album of gorgeous dance music.

I can't stress enough how brilliant this record is, how pertinent and valuable its songs are to our lives.

This is the kind of beautiful album that Reed knows he can make in his sleep yet seldom does.

Neon Golden is one of the most exquisite electronic albums to come out in ages.

The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts does a great job of showing the power and the glory of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The excitement is palpable even on record 40-plus years later.

In the end, Happy Songs might sound like Mogwai's earlier work or be unapproachable to the listener who spends his time chilling in Sam Goody, but that doesn't mean it's not one of the most amazing albums of the year.

The Ramones will remain a launching pad for artists and bands around the globe, as a sense of “Hey, I can do that, too!” is born upon your first listen. It either grabs you for life or scares the shit out of you. Either way, the simplicity is the genius.

It is an album that can be loved as both an achievement and an experience, a document and a revelation; it is simultaneously a problem to be solved and a spectacle to simply witness.

Easily one of the best classic re-releases yet.

The original album is unblemished, all the contemporary b-sides are accounted for, the Peel Sessions are a nice bonus, and as usual, the striking packaging by Vaughan Oliver is incomparable.

This album is so near-flawless it would be easy to go on and on about how you need to hear it as soon as possible.

This is exactly 40 minutes of transcendent music by someone who we always knew was one of the best singers and songwriters on the scene, but someone who we were afraid was never going to make the music she should be making. Well, she's done it.

The production is crystal clear and the soundstage huge, but the true achievement here stems from the huge difficulty in being able to tell where musical mastery has become studio wizardry, as the recording has the vitality and sensitivity of a live recording as well as the flawless sound and power of the synthetic.

No matter how many releases we get from the Davis archives, no matter how familiar you are with his mid-'60s work, LIVE in Europe 1967 will surprise you and remind you that, even in lean times, even when the trends of the genre he championed were moving away from him, even when his country stopped caring, Miles Davis found a way to press forward, to reinvent, and to give us yet another classic sound, and perhaps the final thrilling word on Jazz as he knew it.

In four and a half hours, Wadada Leo Smith writes one of America's defining events in sound, and the story is all of ours.

It’s one of the most honest albums I’ve heard, but even better, it’s told with expertise.

At least half of the 30 songs in The Beatles stand among the best of their career. Now, with this carefully detailed and appreciative restoration of how they were developed (from the beginning to end), this boxed set is yet more proof that genius doesn't take time so much as concerted, focused effort, and there is no way to trace the roots of perfect sonic chemistry. You just know it when you hear it.

Each album, from the White Stripes to De Stijl to White Blood Cells, has shown their evolution from Blind Willie McTell cover band with a pop sensibility to full-fledged, honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll gods, a status finally reached on their latest disc.

It sounds as relevant, fresh, vital and modern as if it were recorded this year. It’s a classic in the making.

Pound for pound, the songs of Pause are far more interesting and multi-layered than most of your general ambient music available on the shelves today.... A mesmerizing work.

It's a complete package - a work of seductive, heartfelt brilliance by an artist at the absolute peak of her powers.

The most impressive album ever painstakingly assembled across space and time.

This release reorients us around familiar material, but outdoes all previously existing versions in the scope of its execution and comparative completeness.

World Without Tears is a complex, multifaceted album that musically highlights Williams's continued blurring of musical genres and poetic lyrics.

While Talib's Quality and The Roots' Phrenology break new ground for both acts, Electric Circus is clearly the most adventurous of the trio of releases.

Ambitious and profound while remaining compelling unpredictable, it's a constantly shape-shifting, all-encompassing musical experience. Outland is, quite simply, a masterpiece.

At the end of the day, few people will doubt Pinkerton's power, and whether you're hearing it for the first time or just for the first time in a few months, it remains as visceral a listen as ever.

In their short time together and in their subsequent careers as solo artists, Morrissey and Marr have yet to equal or surpass what they accomplished here. This one belongs to the ages.

Original Pirate Material, to put it plainly, is the most vivid evocation of life as a young person in the UK since Blur's Parklife, and yes, even The Clash's first album.

Layering his idiosyncratic songs with elements of classical, jazz, Broadway and Disney movie scores, Barnes elevates Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies into the pantheon of seminal new pop masterpieces that test our very concepts of what modern pop should sound like.

The best record to come out this year.

This is an album that is simply, in the most awe-inspired sense of the term, absolutely golden from end to end – a real treasure and an utter delight to experience every time you play it.

Standing in sharp contrast with the 1950s performances, these recordings are furious, emotionally charged and borderline unhinged. It’s an exhilarating contrast that, when listened through start to finish, charts the creative journey of a true musical genius.

If none of the new songs are essential, they'll still be a boon to completists, while those who only know Guthrie's most famous songs will get a much more rounded overview from Woody at 100.

The three discs represent lightning captured in a bottle.

The album is a visionary statement of arrival, a potent and singular masterpiece that exposes the deepest chambers of a fiercely beating heart with a singular purity of focus. It's a mesmerizing journey of self-actualization in an era when constant connection makes that all the more difficult. After soil, Wise's reach seems infinite.

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is one of these future classics. ... Engaging at every turn and carefully calibrated to its point of view, it represents art pop hitting yet another dizzy apex.

Geogaddi is successful as few other albums are. Whereas many artists and groups tend to released records composed of series of unrelated songs, songs based on single concepts, or songs written and recorded during single studio sessions, Boards of Canada's latest has done something exponentially spectacular and commendable.

Spare Ribs is perhaps the band's high watermark, a searing masterpiece of social commentary, childhood memories and recovered trauma, scathing wit, punk energy, funk, and hip-hop influences, and much more. This is a record with no fat and no filler.

Newcomers are strongly advised to absorb and understand Inspiration Information (and the two albums that preceded it) before passing judgment on the new stuff. That said, for anyone fearing the worst, they exceed any reasonable expectations.

He may be nearly half a century gone, but the music of Otis Redding remains in 2016 as thrillingly vital and perfect as the moment in which the words first left his lips. Live at the Whiskey a Go Go is a testament to his brilliance and status as the King of Soul and is thus, in a word, essential.

It was as powerful a set of players as Davis ever played with, but it also did its own thing, carving out a space that was equal parts eccentric and classic, innovative and authoritative.

This is genre-defying music, but anyone with an interest in hearing a blueprint for trip hop or a master class in the depiction of desire in pop music, should be sure to listen to this mysterious, timeless, contradictory album.

The Abbey Road Anniversary Super Deluxe proves they were a cohesive unit through to the end. Their work once again sounds fresh and experimental yet always in the pocket of the melody. We can hear that the Beatles were eager to work together one more time to pour more musical flavors into their magic elixir.

The bonus CD makes it alarmingly clear that the Pumpkins could have assembled another cracking album from the Siamese Dream castoffs before embarking on the road to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)...The new editions of Gish and Siamese Dream (especially Siamese Dream, which handily outclasses its companion release in all areas) are sumptuous reminders of the heights the group once attained back when it had everything to prove and nothing to lose.

It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to declare Keep an Eye on the Sky an indispensable cornerstone of any serious music fan’s collection, and one of the greatest box sets ever assembled. Finally, Big Star get their due chance to shine.

Brilliant, shimmering and wonderfully composed, Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is one of the best albums of year, and the best album GY!BE have never released.

Review 1: <A HREF="http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/stills-logic.shtml" TARGET="_blank">Logic is a certifiable classic.</A> [score=100]; Review 2: <A HREF="http://www.popmatters.com/music/reviews/s/stills-logic2.shtml" TARGET="_blank">Every bit the equal to [Interpol's] Bright Lights. </A> [score=90]

When a band like the Dillinger Escape Plan is able to duplicate the intensity of the previous album, yet at the same time create music that actually possesses (gasp!) commercial appeal, daring to cause an uproar among dyed-in-the-wool hardcore fans, you know they're on to something memorable.

There’s a sense of purpose here, of direction and clarity, shafts of accessibility that relegate the din to the background without ever compromising the potentially hostile underbelly of the band’s core sound.

From backmasking to know-it-all moralists, Arabia Mountain is sprinkled with themes of human folly, aging, change, and corruption, enacted with humorous efficiency, delivered with instrumental-new word-subtlety, all to show, unsurprisingly, that the Black Lips differ greatly with the PTA over the corrupting agents of everyday life and their antidotes.

Live it’s easy to ignore the subtleties of the songs, which makes Six Demon Bag a different, but equally great experience.

Lambchop have long been one of America’s greatest bands, and Damaged is their greatest achievement.

This is going to be on a lot of year-end lists.

An exceptional album filled with passionate, intense, and highly personal songs.

The overall effect of Rare Chandeliers is probably the most enjoyable straight up rap exhibition since Curren$y's Pilot Talk.

As a gathering-in of all that's best about their duality, The Harrow & The Harvest eschews the cosmic Plough and settles instead for the blessings of a more earthly crop.

Live at Barrowlands is a marvelous document of the Jesus and Mary Chain at the height of their influential power thirty years later.

Teasing out musical abundance from simple instrumentation, lyrics, and vocals, Pratt concertizes complexity and nuance. Quiet Signs is a staggering work of hushed beauty.

R.A.P. Music, a few slightly faulty hooks aside, is a definitive statement from Mike and a legacy changer for El-P.

On Beauty & Ruin, Mould’s guitar-pop is sturdy and stirring enough to take on heavier and more poignant resonances, covering a broad range of tones and themes that reflect a gamut of feelings and experience that could only be accrued by living through a lot.

This is the kind of indie rock record you wait all year for.

If not for the superior variety and scope of Pale Communion, In Cauda Venenum would absolutely be Opeth's best album in a decade. Like most great records, it takes a few deep listens to appreciate fully, but the reward is easily worth the investment.