You have to buy the White Album again. ... [Giles Martins' remix is] a secondary attraction. You come to hear multiple alternate versions of material that could be and was played live by a rock band ... or sounded just as complete in hootenanny form in the all-acoustic demos. ... Tracing the small lyrical changes is a delight.

The new mix is just part of the reason to pick up the four-CD “Let It Bleed” edition, if probably the most crucial one. .... And the disc of alternate versions and outtakes, most previously unreleased, makes for a great listen by itself, as well as satisfying some historical curiosity about things like how some early Alex Chilton-produced demos compare with the finished album.

For the fanatic, there is nothing quite like this sound-bath and its accompanying eye candy. If the full monty is out of reach price-wise for the Clark aficionado, the two-CD hardbound edition, which includes nine of the alternates, is a magnificent alternative, containing generous excerpts (including Rogan’s complete essay, song lyrics and band bios) from the box’s book. Even if you choose the least expensive option of the basic LP or single CD, you are in for a revelation if you have never heard “No Other.” As its title suggests, it remains a one-of-a-kind listening experience.

In short, it’s a die-hard fan’s fantasy come to life — and like the deluxe edition of “1999” released last year, goes a long way toward satiating appetites only made stronger by decades of bootlegs. (And, remarkably, the compilers left out a lot.)

The set employs a “Get Back”-style approach to several of the songs, where listeners can hear the evolution of “Yellow Submarine” from a depressing lament to the familiar jaunty children’s anthem, that “And Your Bird Can Sing” once had a flagrant Byrds reference, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” was originally much slower — and even trippier. ... What’s really special here are the aforementioned book and especially the outtakes, many of which have eluded bootleggers over the half-century-plus since illicit Beatles releases began hitting the market.

Listening to this gargantuan boxed set, it’s hard not to get the sense that if Lambert had been healthy, he might have been able to focus Townshend’s brilliant, beautiful, exciting songs into a concept as coherent as “Tommy.” “Who’s Next/ Life House” shows how tantalizingly close they came.

Needless to say, this gorgeous cacophony sounds more amazing than ever in this revamped sonic edition. ... There are 47 demos and outtakes, most of them previously unreleased — none is a Holy Grail, but several are fascinating. Most interesting are the demos. ... Some may argue, not without reason, that McCartney’s “Band on the Run” or Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” or “Imagine” is actually the best Beatles solo album, but this lovingly rendered 50th anniversary edition makes the case for “All Things Must Pass” in vivid detail.

An album that not only marks Rosalia’s true arrival, it moves her toward the front line of today’s musical innovators.

The complete “Inconcerated” alone is worth the price of admission. Five of the 29 tracks appeared on a promo CD of that name at the time, and it was worth staying alive for an additional 30 years just to find out that the rest of the show was as grandly played and recorded. ... Chances are that the “Wallace mix” will be the version you put on in the future — although, truth be told, there are some elements of the Lord-Alge mix that work and might even be preferable, maligned as it is.

The remixed album itself holds hundreds of small and large musical pleasures. ... So for anyone on the fence, maybe the best advice is to buy this edition for the deliriously detailed historical book, if nothing else — then decide whether to warm up to the new spatial separation on John, Paul and George’s turn-taking guitar solos on “The End,” among other modest tweaks.

There’s one element that will probably sway any die-hard fan still on the fence: The Band’s 11-song, previously unreleased Woodstock set in full. ... You can feel The Band testing itself, stretching its legs, figuring out what it is and what it’s going to become. And 50 years later, you’re there with them.

The Weeknd’s music has always been about contrasts, and here the beauty and the madness are more smoothly integrated than ever. “After Hours” is one of the most successful musicians of the past decade testing the balance between innovation and commerciality as much as anyone today.

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” sounds as fresh as something that crossed Apple’s fertile mind 10 minutes ago. It may be way early to say it’s the most satisfying album of the year, but if there are any more to come along this good, 2020 is not going to feel like such a waste of time after all.

As one might expect from the title, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” is elaborate, dramatic and demanding, and is not the kind of art that one comes to lightly — although, in yet another of the album’s counterintuitions, it works just as well as background listening as it does in intense focus. Expect this challenging and ever-changing artist’s most definitive statement to date to top many album-of-the-year lists.

Possibly, song for song, her best yet. ... She sounds like she knows exactly who she is, what she wants to say and how she wants to say it — and with “Chromatica,” she’s laid a rock-solid foundation for the next phase of her remarkable career.

One of the year’s best.

The fact that Sault seduces listeners, drawing them in with beautiful sounds, and then hits them with uncompromisingly direct lyrics and messages that startle them into thinking about things they might not normally think about, especially when grooving to music, is perhaps the greatest triumph. Sault’s music is definitively 2020, by, for and about these times.

Their melodic sensibilities have translated remarkably well to more traditional songwriting. ... Most importantly, despite the complexity of the production, like its predecessors this album flows with a remarkable sense of fluidity and fun — it doesn’t sound labored-over, even though it obviously was. ... Twenty-plus years and three albums into their career, “We Will Always Love You” opens up a whole new chapter for the Avalanches.

“Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Edition” is again like those aforementioned Beatles boxed sets in that we can see how close some of those songs came to not being classics, quite, without the final bit of vocal arrangement or an extra melodic element that sent them over the top.

Obviously, this isn’t a standard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert — see above for plenty of those — but for people who love the sound of a band stretching, showing off, challenging each other and having fun, it’s hard to think of many better albums. ... The album captures what is arguably the best lineup of the band since its original one, with stellar backing vocals from bassist Howie Epstein and auxiliary Heartbreaker Scott Thurston.

There’s no question whose album this is, and like so many female superstars, Grande is tragically underrated as a musician. She’s not only a virtuoso singer but a skilled vocal arranger and producer whose multitracked backing voices are like songs on their own, embellishing and responding to her lead like a troupe of attuned dancers.

As strong and revealing as the bare-bones collection is, it’s hard to imagine a Coltrane freak who won’t want to plunk for the deluxe version. It affords one of the deepest looks available at the way Trane addressed creative choices in the studio. No less than three more versions of “Impressions” are heard on the second disc, and they are the best advertisement for the two-disc package. ... Is its belated arrival a godsend? Absolutely.

If you believe there can be such a thing as an instant country classic, “The Highwomen” is that. ... The all-star foursome has put together an album full of high comedy and high pathos, zingy group-sings and gut-wreching solo turns, wryness and rue, and harmony co-existing with this strange and nearly forgotten thing called twang.

Above all, “RTJ4” is a triumph of all sorts of unexpected syntheses, seamlessly uniting disparate moods, styles and eras. ... If Killer Mike and El-P haven’t yet fully ascended to that most rarefied plane of telepathically attuned hip-hop partnerships — Q-Tip and Phife, Prodigy and Havoc, Erick and Parrish — they’ve come extraordinarily close.

A fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation.

With fascinating oral-history annotation for all 70 tracks in the “super-deluxe” edition, the augmented “Wildflowers” is the best and most justified boxed set of this kind since the Beatles’ White Album compendium. It’s one of the ones you’d load under your arm in a fire. Petty was on fire during this period, as the presence of 32 distinct compositions in the big box attests.

Far more fleshed-out than the EPs (none of the songs from which are repeated here), it seems all but inevitable that Parks will be one of the breakthrough artists of 2021. So what makes her and this album so special? In a word, intimacy. ... None of the above would work without the album’s brilliantly restrained production and arrangements, nearly all by her longtime collaborator Luca Buccellati: The music flawlessly frames her voice and lyrics and never intrudes.

With 2021 not yet at the halfway point, it’s hard to imagine many other albums coming along that could match the combination of emotional potency, melodic fluency, social significance and heartrending beauty in Russell’s retelling of a lifetime’s worth of debasement and self-reclamation.

“After Hours” has resonated for nearly two years after its release, and in the face of another phase of a daunting pandemic, it seems that “Dawn FM” — possibly the Weeknd’s best and most fully realized album to date — will help carry fans through this one as well.

The kind of album you can put on and leave on: vividly atmospheric, melodically beguiling, and seductive enough to keep you coming back over and over.

The Royal Albert Hall show captures the band at the absolute peak of its powers. ... 52 years after the fact you can see, more than ever, what all the fuss was about.

It all adds up to one of the best and most memorable albums of the year.

And what a vision it is. “softCORE” is a jarring blast of melody and chaos that adds up to one of the year’s best and most exciting albums.

Lizzy are in explosive form on each of the gigs presented here, bringing a vibrancy and fluidity that was sometimes missing from the studio versions of these songs. The band’s all-time best lineup is in top form. ... Yes, seven concerts by anyone is a lot, and not surprisingly for shows recorded across just 18 months, there’s a lot of repetition. But this is the best kind of boxed set: one you can keep coming back to. Nearly 50 years later, Lizzy has never sounded better.

Where “Astroworld” brought spectacle, “Utopia” brings subtlety and innovation.

The album is loaded with singles, but it’s a real album, with most of the other songs branching out her sound and showing off her killer flow. With 17 tracks spanning almost an hour, it sags in a couple of spots, but “Scarlet” sets a new bar on multiple levels, and not just for female rappers.

If not nearly as cocky and confident as the seasoned soul who wrote an album as lyrically clever as “Midnights.” You still get a good dose of her seminal earnestness in these tracks, but there’s a lot more of the woman who knew somebody was trouble when he walked in, and went for it anyway.

Forensic analysis aside, the album is still great, ranging from sweetness and playfulness to dark menace, from vintage soul to dark experimentalism. The title track has fuzzed-out ‘70s synths, a tight rhythm and a clean vocal from Glover. .... The ballads are fire too: Grande turns in a soaring performance on the gospel-inflected “Time,” and “Sweet Thang” is a harmony-loaded slow jam with a heaping medley of voices and a woozy guitar solo that could have been an outtake from Prince’s classic “Sign O’ the Times.”

Funny, fierce, foul-mouthed and in-your-face, Invasion of Privacy is one of the most powerful debuts of this millennium.

It’s a real album, with an arc and continuity. Lost & Found is one of those rare records that’s adventurous but can also appeal to that aunt or sister-in-law or Grammy voter who finds a new artist they like every 15 years.

A gloriously wide-screen album, sweeping and epic. ... Lux Prima is a fresh adventure for both, and one that’s both familiar and strikingly new for the listener as well.

“Charli” is the best of both worlds: It’s innovative and adventurous but not off-puttingly weird; it finds her fine-tuning her pop instincts without getting overly gushy. It’s one of the most intelligent and sophisticated pop albums of the past decade, a merging of Hollywood sheen and European experimentation that — musically, anyway — is on a par with classics of that genre like Robyn’s self-titled 2005 album, Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” and Swift’s “1989.”

Now, as on that pivotal work [2001’s “Love and Theft”], it makes for songs that can be as confounding as they are thrilling. What an accomplishment it is to be 79 and achieving new levels of elusiveness — riveting elusiveness — as his mystery train rolls closer to the station.

It’s more free and fun than the original “Future Nostalgia” — which was free and fun to begin with — because it’s more diverse and much less serious, cruising by smoothly over the course of an over-too-fast hour or so, with a fluidity and seamlessness that is all the more remarkable considering the number of cooks in its kitchen.

Almost indisputably their best, a collection of deeply resonant songs based in Oldham’s folk-leaning melodies and often-bizarre lyrics embellished with gorgeous guitar arrangements that range from rock to country, and even some of dashes of Malian music. ... One of the year’s best so far.

Delivering powerful, confrontational lyrics and messaging in the context of angular, innovative R&B.

All of this is captured in pristine sound quality — that’s Richards’ guitar in the right channel and Wood in the left — even the weak, historic-interest-only songs from night one that are tacked onto the end. ... The concert captured here was the first day of the rest of the Stones’ lives — and 45 years later, you’re in that sweaty club with them.

With songs that are both sacred and profane, with R&B and pop and disco and chorales, “Gloria” is all of that and more.

Nearly 40 years into their career as a band, with “This Stupid World,” Yo La Tengo have reached another peak. Without overstating the case, that’s something not many artists who aren’t named Neil or Bob can say.

“Desire” is clearly her vision all the way, a forceful and determined effort that vaults her to the front of adventurous pop music.

It’s a lush, lavish, luscious hot tub of an album, conjuring visions of plush feather beds, fluffy pillows and bubble baths, although the lyrics will occasionally jolt the listener out of their chill.

100 Gecs pack more ideas into 23 minutes than most artists who release 70+-minute-long albums. With “10,000 Gecs,” the duo has reached a “South Park” level of brilliant absurdity.

Like the group’s best work, its amorphous and vaguely defined nature makes it something you can explore again and again and still find something you hadn’t noticed.

“Act II” feels a lot like a 27-course meal, difficult to describe in whole, but endlessly easy to digest, serving by serving. .... As a whole, “Cowboy Carter” is a masterpiece of sophisticated vocal arranging, laid out on top of mostly fairly stark band tracks.

“The Tortured Poets Department” feels like it comes the closest of any of her 11 original albums to just drilling a tube directly into her brain and letting listeners mainline what comes out. If you value this confessional quality most of all, she’s still peaking: As a culmination of her particular genius for marrying cleverness with catharsis, “Tortured” kind of feels like the Taylor Swift-est Taylor Swift record ever.

This album takes you under the piano, so to speak, witnessing genius casually at work.

The album is on the elegant side, to be sure, but it’s elegance with a distinct pulse, as the Imposters lean into soulful swing and Costello avoids the outright belting that you either loved or didn’t in the ’90s to do the most nuanced cooing and yelping of his career. ... A great cake of an album that doesn’t really sound that much like any of the 30 before it.

It shouldn’t come as any huge surprise that in a year when Ashley McBryde and Kacey Musgraves have been responsible for the genre’s finest records, a strength-in-female-numbers Pistol Annies collection would turn out to be 2018’s best country album. As an alternately droll and affecting wallow in and cure for the blues, it beats the hell out of a recreational Percocet.

McPherson’s album is so far ahead of the rest of the 2018 pack, everyone else is having to eat his Christmas dust. All tracks are originals, every one of them a keeper.

“When I Get Home” is a challenging and satisfying follow-up to “A Seat at the Table,” one that will probably baffle some fans but intrigue and engage even more.

As is most of this album. With “Late Night Feelings,” Ronson has served up a perfect post-night-out soundtrack, romantic and intimate — and a real album, with nary a weak track to disrupt the late-night feels (sorry).

Excellent but tantalizingly brief. ... Although the four new songs on “Iconology” feel more like a hearty appetizer than a full meal, they also find Elliott covering more stylistic ground in 12 minutes than most artists can in exponentially longer time.

The end result is this towering, tempestuous album, where nearly every song has calms and storms matching Olsen’s soaring voice and intricate melodies.

It’s hard to think of a more dramatic example of how far Gomez has come musically in nearly five years: “Rare” is one of the best pop albums to be released in recent memory, and — as it does for artists ranging from Robyn and Charli XCX to Max Martin’s more adventurous productions — it feels like that term does a discredit to this sophisticated, precisely written and expertly produced music.

Her ultra-high, almost kewpie-doll-like voice — which sounds autotuned even when it’s not — and previous tendency toward cheerleaderesque hooks wore thin quickly and threatened to become creative dead ends. Here, she’s found ways to reshape and reinvent them — and in the process, open up a whole new realm for herself as an artist.

Extraordinary . ... A defining work from an exciting new star … even if it’s landing in a world very different from the one in which it was created.

Rather than impose an excess of ear candy (although it’s welcome on the few occasions in which it comes), Antonoff knew what he had on his hands here: an album in which each new incendiary lyrical moment seems to top the last, before grievance gives way to beautiful grief. Candor, take them away.

What “Evermore” is full of is narratives that, like the music that accompanies them, really come into focus on second or third listen, usually because of a detail or two that turns her sometimes impressionistic modes completely vivid. ... It’s an embarrassment of stunning albums-ending-in-“ore” that she’s mined out of a locked-down muse.

It takes all the things that have always served Japanese Breakfast well — Zauner’s awareness of her voice and how best to deploy it, her knack for narrative and story as well as great hooks — and offers them fresh soil in which to grow.

Musical advancement makes “Sling” the breakthrough that it is. ... “Sling” finds this young artist taking an unexpected but welcome turn into a new style, one that leaves the possibilities of her next chapter wide open.

Valuable as it is to be getting near-soundalike versions of so many of these tracks that strip away the ‘80s gloss, that’s only the smaller part of why “Springtime in New York” is a treasure trove.

It’s also arguably his most energetic solo album. ... It works equally well as lean-forward or lean-back music — the listener can focus on it or simply have it on as atmosphere that enhancing the environment without distracting from it.

“Friends That Break Your Heart” is Blake’s best and most refined album to date, one that finds him further down the several paths he’s somehow simultaneously following: more conventional and more disruptive, prettier and more disturbing, all at the same time.

A collection of [new-to-us] songs that doesn’t have a real dud in the bunch.

Wisely, at just a half hour in length, the album doesn’t outstay its welcome, and although not every song is great, the vibe carries through from end to end — and once it’s over there’s no way you’re not playing it again.

An album that meets the breach with enough wrenching, life-and-death drama to leave you completely spent by the time its hour is up, then ready to immediately reinvest. Because, besides being that exhausting, it’s also that good.

“Midnights” doesn’t venture as far into other fields as some of her more openly ambitious albums have. This seems like a feature, not a flaw, even if “Folklore” and “Evermore” still feel like her masterpieces to date. The new album benefits from its relative modesty, length-wise and streamlining-wise. ... She’s able to maintain a tighter focus on alternately dark and light nights of the soul, in matters of love, redemption and minor vengeance.

A quarter century after the French quartet Phoenix formed, it hardly seems likely that they’d make the most fresh-sounding album since the one that lit up the alt-rock charts in 2009, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” — but they’ve done it with “Alpha Zulu.” ... They’ve optimized and maximized their template in a way that seems effortless.

Her strongest effort to date with the new mixtape, “Bubblegum.” Her distinctively wispy voice and sinewy grooves have created a trademark sound — somewhere between Charli XCX and Pink Pantheress — that’s pop without being cheesy and dance-based without sacrificing melody or shunning melancholy.

“Seven Psalms” is unlike any other Simon album in almost too many ways to list.

The oddly beautiful instrumental title track, which is a gentle, simple melody played on a keyboard that sounds like a combination of a computerized church organ and a ghostly merry-go-round — and perfectly evokes the digital spirituality of its title, and the contrasts of where James Blake the artist is at this point in his always-explorative musical career.

If there’s a more innovative and exciting rock album coming in 2024, we can’t wait to hear it.

No apology necessary: “Only God Was Above Us” is an essential chapter in the band’s still-evolving sound and career.

Eilish is also exercising her knack for turning a song around on a dime, mid-stream, as previously heard in the whisper-to-a-scream title track of “Happier Than Ever.” So it’s a 10-track record that happens to contain 13 excellent songs.

The group’s artful combination of beauty and ugliness, familiarity and not-always-pleasant surprises has reached a new peak with Felt.

With nary a weak track, Sparkle Hard finds Malkmus hitting a new peak nearly 30 years into his career.

It’ll clearly be her fourth consecutive record to be nominated for a Grammy for best jazz vocal album… and maybe her third in a row to win. If there were such a thing as a Grammy for best jazz piano album, The Window should rightfully be up for that, too, because keyboardist Sullivan Fortner is an equal--and equally spectacular--partner through all 17 tracks, regardless of whether he gets cover billing.

Taut and primal, “MOTS: 7” is a kind of self-referential homage. ... Each get solo turns to shine here, their collective work is what stands out.

Her producer, Joyce, who’s famous for working with Eric Church, knows something about country music outsiders, and together they’ve made a collection that never tries to squeeze into any radio-friendly box, all the better to be a fit and a find for life’s own jukebox, as cultivated listeners happen across it. Here’s a quarter: Brandy Clark definitely cares.

It’s an impeccably crafted, gleefully executed half-hour-plus of pop perfection that does meet the moment, maybe, in just reminding you how good it feels to be human. And to be in love. And to be in Studio 54.

“Never Will,” is not a letdown. ... It’s McBryde as the driver that makes this the second straight country album of the year contender in a row he’s produced (coming off Brandy Clark’s very different, more stylized effort).

“Homegrown” is an essential addition to the Young catalog and the best of his many archival releases since the equally essential “Live at the Fillmore East” (which was recorded in 1970 and finally released 36 years later).

To say that Sharon and the group make each song their own is almost an oxymoron because some of them, particularly the ‘60s soul sides, are simply part of the group’s DNA. ... And while it’s bittersweet to hear the dearly missed Ms. Jones’ voice again in all its glory, it’s a joy to hear her and the band pouring so much love into these songs.

“Home” is bookended with a musical tactic that is both perfect and obvious: cantos sung by the Danish National Girls’ Choir. ... But as with everything Rhye, it’s all in service of Milosh’s crystalline voice.

The new album just sounds like a terrific remastering of the old — the same notes, and you’d swear the same performances, but sounding brighter and punchier just on a surface level. But on a more philosophical one, it’s not just a case of Swift playing with her back catalog like Andy Warhol played with his soup can. It’s really a triumph of self-knowledge and self-awareness.

Maybe more on this album than others, because she’s turned down the volume — as much as you might miss something as thrilling as the “Pills”-popping of the previous album — it’s easier to hear the heart that’s long been there at the center of the slightly chilly guises.

Powerful. ... Each song is filled with vividly observed memories and vignettes.

Carlile effortlessly glides between octaves while, somehow, still sounding completely conversational — the everyday diva we didn’t know we needed until she showed up at the door. Fans of the singer-songwriter sensibilities of the 1970s will especially find a lot to love in the rich variety of material in “In These Silent Days,” which, under the expert co-production of Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings, certainly sounds analog-era, however it was recorded.