Blur went from wanna-be's ("Popscene") to provocateurs ("Parklife") to artistes ("Beetlebum") to world travelers ("Good Song"), and, rare moments of torpid dross aside, remained fascinating with each mood change.

Mostly it shows how Lambert earned her throne: by singing top-shelf songs in the voice of a woman getting real. Listening to her records is like eavesdropping in a hair salon.

LCD have managed to be both underground hitmakers and bona fide album artists as easily as Murphy splices guitar noise and machine thump.

Barlow's new approach made for one of the best indie-rock albums in a year full of stellar ones--and Sebadoh's greatest work.

Her third LP imagines a 2015 mainstream by reflecting what it once was--Loretta and Dolly in the Sixties, sure, but also Emmylou in the Eighties and Reba in the Nineties.

Tom Petty inarguably was an American treasure, and this set offers a different valuation of what that means. Beyond the chart crushers, he was an even more thoughtful poet, precise in capturing life’s pleasures and acrimonies, and a perfectionist. When you cut away the stuff that’s already out there from the set, it makes you want to know more.

With Shields, they still sound like Radiohead at a Buddhist retreat, but the songs are more muscular, increasingly driven by drummer Christopher Bear's innate swing.

Ram sounds ahead of its time.

Twigs' deconstructed shards of U.K. grime and garage land heavier, while elegiac vocals soften the songs without blunting their edge.

Like Akomfrah’s Data Thief, Madlib sees the connections between the past and future. On Sound Ancestors, he manages to give us a sense of what those connections feel like.

Influence aside, what's just as impressive about this handsome anthology of barely legal rarities is how well tracks work as songs.

He doesn't just rediscover the past, he remakes it.

The Futureheads reclaim pop punk from the Warped Tour crowd -- and revive it in the process.

A Light for Attracting Attention contains some of the songwriters’ most easily enjoyable music in years.

If anyone expected a drift into sentimentality, her writing’s just gotten bolder, with arrangements that stretch the definition of “Americana” to the point of meaninglessness (Shires won the “Best Emerging Artist” trophy at last years Americana Music Awards).

Full of muscled, vintage R&B grooves, fevered soloing, psychedelic arrangements and oracular mumbo jumbo, it's the wildest record Rebennack has made in many years.

It's easy to read themes of mortality into the lyrics, but this is a stirringly indefatigable farewell.

Transcendental Blues is an intermittently twangy, often trippy and, yes, generally transcendent outing.

Cooder has delivered a remarkable song cycle that tells the story -- a sort of brilliant and flavorful film-noir history lesson that samples the past freely.

So his return to political-minded material on Harps and Angels is reason to wrap yourself in the flag and cheer.

In many ways, Daytona replicates Jay-Z and No I.D.'s 2017 rap highlight 4:44: two older men who simply practice their craft, their legacies already secure.

The songs are subtler, statelier, with Matt Berninger's baritone exuding lonesome warmth. [31 May 2007, p.93]

Some Rap Songs is the rare album by an immensely talented lyricist who deigns not to pull out any fireworks, opting to sink into the cushion’s of a therapist’s couch in the search for an honest work of art. It’s a delicate statement of restraint, and in this case the process shows more of the artist than ever before.

This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean.

Like deciphering an ancient cassette tape, distorted right up to the point of destruction, Scaring the Hoes is, in fact, a little scary. And that's what makes it so compelling. The chaos makes way for clarity.

James Murphy and his wrecking crew of New York punk-disco marauders don't waste a moment on the superb American Dream--it's a relentless, expansive, maddeningly funny set of songs asking how a lifetime of good intentions and hard work can blow up into such a mess.

Surrounding herself with the cream of Southern bluegrass musicians -- dobro master Jerry Douglas and guitar prodigy Bryan Sutton among them -- Parton is by turns reflective ("Little Sparrow"), playful ("Marry Me"), dolorous ("My Blue Tears"), spirited ("I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby") and spiritual ("In the Sweet By and By") on this nearly hour-long modern-bluegrass tour de force.

These discs offer a fascinating glimpse into the years when he transformed his words into a persona: Ziggy Stardust, the first anti-rock star.