It’s fascinating to hear how some songs started in one direction and darted into another one entirely.

It’s an ideal album for this decisively odd moment, its homemade feel (much of it was recorded in her house, with percussion partially supplied by objects around her home) and sense of awe giving it a defiant energy. ... A thrill ride.

Where “good kid” was a perceptive look at Lamar’s adolescence in a small part of Los Angeles, Butterfly is a weary assessment of his adulthood, and a world that’s bigger, more complex, and more flawed that he knew. If the albums share anything, it’s that they’re both cinematic. But the movie Lamar is shooting now puts the current era into a more fitting frame.

For all of the gussy rhythms--which can stop just this side of overly cute--and legit power, there’s real subtlety at work, too, and in unlikely spots.

The album is a 55-minute blitz of thumping beats and head-spinning rhymes that blur by you before you have a chance to process them.

Backed by his new band the Vanguard, to whom the album is jointly credited, his sprawling funk grooves and pointed (if characteristically indecipherable) lyrics are still strikingly timely.

Maybe it's not surprising that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is so seamlessly his personal best.

The set list for most of these shows was identical, so you get as many as 20 versions of certain songs. For all that, listening through the whole of this box set is an exhilarating experience.

The hits (“I Will Always Love You,’’ “9 to 5’’) are here, but the rarities make this box set essential listening for diehards and newbies alike.

Heard in its complete, unruly, sometimes crazed glory, Miles at the Fillmore shows just how furious the evolutionary pace of his music was at this point.

A taut display of his dry wit and ability to wring beauty out of even the most harrowing human ideals.

Channel Orange stands strong on its own merits.

The highs wouldn’t feel so high without the lows here, which is a regular trope of the genre; but as with all tropes, execution trumps invention, and the Hotelier executes exceptionally.

The Compton MC's long-awaited major label debut is a breakthrough, as he both resurrects and reinvents West Coast hip-hop.

It's both jarring and exhilarating how disjointed the record often feels, from the dreamy Tin Pan Alley balladry of "Sir Greendown'' to the Screamin' Jay Hawkins freakout "Come Alive (War of the Roses).''

The Guitar Song comes grouped in two parts, a "Black Album" and a "White Album," structured, according to Johnson, as a progressive movement from a dark and sordid beginning to a reassuring and redemptive end. That structure isn't always discernable in listening. What is immediately evident, though, is that this is a phenomenal collection of country music.

As it stands, Stevens’s words drive these songs, and not always in the most linear fashion. Lyrics that meander in unruly metric on the page are parsed into eloquent couplets that, somehow, sound conversational.

Thrilling and joyous, fierce and focused, the women sound like they’re having the time of their lives sinking their teeth back into the music together.

Inevitably, there’s some repetition--no fewer than 12 different attempts at “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” for example. What’s exhilarating is the chance to eavesdrop on the evolution of the songs as Dylan grasps, bit by bit, for the emotional center of each one.

The album bubbles over with insidious grooves, inventive samples, and lissome rhyming about things frivolous and fraught.

The Dusk in Us is, then, a 44-minute master class in wielding extreme art toward human ends, using hardcore’s berating heft as a foundation for dirging experimentalism.

Musically, the band mixes its customary blast beat-driven grindcore maelstroms--the punishing one-two assault of “Smash a Single Digit” and “Metaphorically Screw You,” the layered, complex “Cesspits”--with industrial dolor (“Dear Slum Landlord”) and junk-bin clangor (the title track): caustic nods to influential circa-early ’80s noise-mongers like Public Image Ltd. and Swans.

There’s enough variety here that you understand why the whole shebang needed to come out--and vintage audiophiles will just about bow down before the quality of these tapes.

An album this endlessly chill might get boring in a less talented songwriter’s hands, but Musgraves never fails to draw listeners into her reverie.

It’s a refreshing, empowering record that embraces finding identity in a lack thereof.

Apple has been here before, but it makes her new album no less arresting.

Some of the phrasing on "MPP" sticks; some of it soars; most of it slips and slides through puddles of rich sonic texture. Only at a distance does the magic of the whole major-key mess become clear.

The album isn't as heady as She Wolf, but there's an easy charm to how Shakira deftly navigates such a mash of genres.