If you love the Band, it’s mostly nothing you haven’t heard a couple thousand times before, but little else is needed. A half-century later, the brotherhood of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Manuel and Garth Hudson still makes you want to join the party.

Like a great DJ set, songs morph into one another thematically and structurally, most notably in the album’s central triptych. ... The music works its magic, and like a perfect night a clubbing, the uplift is ultimately irresistible.

More Blood, More Tracks does not contradict the choices Dylan made on the way to Blood on the Tracks. It fills in his road to wisdom.

The deluxe edition is an overwhelming portrait of one of the most pivotal moments in the lives of Metallica but also the metal genre as a whole, because the band would take the Justice template and streamline it to become megastars within just a few years.

The result is by turns audiobook, podcast, and live album, and at its most potent when it becomes a hybrid of the three.

An awe-inspiring greatest hits set.

Vampire Weekend were late arrivals, lacking the Strokes’ switch-blade attitude and the art-punk edge of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. But Vampire Weekend now look like the smartest guys in the room, marshalling a sumptuous, emotionally complex music perfect in this pop moment.

The album cuts on Honk include monolithic classics like “Start Me Up” and “Brown Sugar,” but it’s the more recent material that makes this compilation interesting. ... But no matter how skilled the band became in the studio, it’s on the road where they earned their “world’s greatest” mantle, and the bonus live cuts here prove their vitality.

The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground.

Olsen’s up to something different here, inviting a different sort of attention to fully absorb. It’s worth the investment; the emotion’s as visceral as it is complex, and it ranks among the best sounding records this year, deserving to be cranked on a good sound system — an album to spend time with, to fall into, to shut up and let yourself be kissed by.

Ghosteen is a masterpiece of melancholy. You mourn right along with him and hope he finds solace.

It’s rare to hear Dylan sound like a fan trying to be a peer, but that’s what’s evident here. Those sessions serve as the core of Travelin’ Thru, Dylan’s 15th “Bootleg Series” release, but since the Man in Black is spry and dominant throughout — he’s the true star here — it could also be a new entry in his own Bootleg Series.

It’s the sound of a freewheeling star at the top of her game, reimagining rock history in her own platinum image.

None of the bonus songs are necessarily better than the ones that made the cut on 1999, but they show just how curious he was at the time, trying out new and different ideas, musical themes he would still be exploring in the decades that followed. ... As with the Purple Rain box set a couple years ago, this macro look at 1999 shows not just Prince’s genius but the breadth of his brilliance at the time.

Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana (or I Do Whatever I Want) convenes a family reunion of his favorite rappers and reggaetoneros to produce a genre-promiscuous work of reggaeton a la marquesina: a more street-savvy form of reggaeton once deemed so risqué that it was criminalized and relegated to garage parties across Puerto Rico throughout the Nineties.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she’s still more than capable of telling off partners, detractors, and others who have done her wrong, all while picking apart the inner workings of her frantic mind. But what sets Bolt Cutters apart from its predecessors is that, for the first time, the scales tip more toward resilience than agony.

On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before—yet he just keeps pushing on into the future.

This is an album that proves something beautiful and enduring can come from even the most dire circumstances.

Across the whole album, Ware’s voice fills each moment with incredibly lustful longing. It feels timeless more in its emotionality and drama than even in the sound itself, which stays firmly strapped to a bygone era. Her nostalgia feels like a proper tribute, mostly because it digs so deep to the core.

But the real surprise is the music itself — the most head-spinning, heart-breaking, emotionally ambitious songs of her life.

Sign ‘O’ the Times was an eclectic funk-pop-rock-R&B-gospel-novelty hodgepodge of songs about love, sex, and Jesus that sounds awful on paper — what great record this side of Little Richard could include the phrase “green eggs and ham,” as Prince deadpanned on “Housequake,” and still work? — yet it was a masterpiece. Its very lack of focus was its greatest strength. ... It’s impossible to trace his thought process, which makes it all the more exciting to find the diamonds he left in the vault.

From the very first moment they started playing, this was a band that was eons ahead of its time. Pylon Box is exactly the deep dive their incredible legacy deserves.

For casual listeners, the inclusion of already-released material and repeated songs may feel bloated and unnecessary. But hardcore fans have craved this for years, and they’ll be more than happy to indulge in any and all versions of these tracks (ahem, “The Losing End” at the Roxy!). ... Some of the unreleased tracks are unfathomably great.

Swift touches on so much more – nuanced acts of forgiveness, complex personal histories, the ability to visualize and know how a person can look in different shades of light. No doubt Swift is still the master of writing a spiteful kiss-off, but the songs of Evermore are a welcomed step in a more mature direction.

Thanks to all the cheeky winks and nods that the Who dressed the record with, it transcended mishmash status. Now this exhaustive, super deluxe edition box set is showing the genius at work behind The Who Sell Out.

Home Video is her greatest work yet — a cohesive and poignant collection of tales from her teenage years in Richmond, Virginia. These stories are woven like a quilt, with several dark patches reminiscent of her hero Bruce Springsteen’s The River.

The result is a raw quality with a sound akin to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes — an album that undoubtedly influenced these sessions (George Harrison, having recently hung out with the Band in Woodstock, describes his early take of “All Things Must Pass” as ‘Band-y’.) The mix also includes “Don’t Let Me Down,” tragically left off the original album but now in its rightful place, nuzzled between a loose, rowdy medley and the gem “Dig a Pony.”

It's the best thing they've ever done, more than exceeding their usual quotient of fire guitars, killer choruses, and crafty rock-history updates. [Feb 2022, p.72]