Full-on homage to the funk and soul bands of the 1970s

Dumpstaphunk started 10 years ago backing local hero and keyboard player Ivan Neville at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival, caught a breeze and never stopped. Though boasting two members of New Orleans first family (Art Neville’s son and Ivan’s cousin Ian plays guitar), Dirty Word has little in common with the elastic sound of the Neville family brand. It’s full-on homage to the funk and soul bands of the 1970s, the big bold bass lines and wily chants of arena acts like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, Cameo, and the “Brick House” Commodores. The two covers — Betty Mabry Davis’s overlooked “If I’m In Luck, I Might Get Picked Up” and Graham Central Station’s highlight “Water” prove the durability of that ’70s pocket.

The new angle is the two-bass hit of Tony Hall and Nick Daniels III, creating, with drummer Nikki Gillespie, a booming bottom that in isolation could be compared to the sound of IMAX theaters showing Transformer movies. Guest appearances dot the landscape — Ani DiFranco, Skerik, Flea — but it’s the visiting horn sections that are necessary, because in the great ’70s funk bands, the bass was the body but the brass was the head. Consider the finale “Raise the House,” in which the Rebirth Brass Band and Trombone Shorty not only tear the roof off, they turn it into kindling and light a bonfire.

And if you don’t like a particular song, chances are good, really good, that you’ll like the next one.

Going on, like the road, forever

On which Neil Young & Crazy Horse get on their ponies and ride…and ride… and keep on riding, as three of the eight new songs on Psychedelic Pill just go on, like the road, forever. Or at least north of 16 minutes. Opener “Driftin’ Back” is nearly 28 minutes of NY & CH in excelsis, rambling gorgeously with dream fragments and meditations that include sightings of Picasso, the Maharishi and Rust Never Sleeps. Yes, Young sings, he wants “a hip-hop haircut.” No, he repeats, he still “don’t want my MTV.” These images are offset by the reliable barbed wire instrumental sound of Crazy Horse – the layered guitars, the steady drums, the limited-range solos that travel like Morse code moving down a telegraph wire between isolated western train depots. The sprawling, unhurried “Walk Like a Giant” laments the failure of Young and his larger circle of friends to change the world, and ends with four minutes of musically-generated Godzilla stomps. Among the shorter tunes, “Born in Ontario” may be Young’s long-awaited response to “Sweet Home Alabama,” while the winning “Twisted Road” carries shout-outs to the Grateful Dead, and to Bob Dylan, “poetry rolling off his tongue/ like Hank Williams chewing bubble gum.”

Maybe the best of the bunch

After enduring 40 years of bad luck in the record industry, the persistent blues/soul singer Bettye Lavette finally gained some career traction in the 21st century, with a series of smartly-conceived albums on the Anti- label. Thankful N’ Thoughtful may be the best of this bunch, matching Lavette’s interpretive skills with unexpected or unconventional song choices. On Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” Lavette sounds on the eve of spiritual destruction. “Dirty Old Town,” via composer Ewan McColl (and famously performed by the Pogues), could be a tribute to every troubled post-industrial city, and Lavette sings like she’s lived on the wrong side of all of them. The Black Keys’ “I’m Not the One” is defiant funk; Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” gets its hair mussed up; and Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” is just crazy thumping good. Lavette has made “a pretty memory of my disgrace,” as she sings on Patty Griffin’s “Time Will Do the Talking,” proving that sometimes just surviving to do good work is the best revenge.

Bringing forward much more than Beatle George

More than any of the Beatles, George Harrison’s mission was to live out his belief that his time with the band was “just a little part that got played…there is much more to me than Beatle George.” You can hear just how distinctive the not-Beatle George Harrison was on Early Takes Volume 1. These 10 tracks, clocking in at barely over 30 minutes, are billed as the audio companion to the DVD release of Martin Scorsese’s HBO documentary about Harrison, Living in the World. Some tracks are in the film; some aren’t. But all of them accentuate the positive, lyrically and musically, bringing to the front Harrison’s gifts as a guitarist and singer, talents that were sometimes camouflaged by the state of the art production demands of mainstream ’70s rock. In fact, many of these versions are preferable to the highly polished studio releases. Six of these Early Takes were demos or early versions of songs that appeared on Harrison’s 1970 post-Beatles solo debut, the bold three-vinyl set, All Things Must Pass. The demo of that song, as well as the trance-like intensity of “My Sweet Lord,” underline Harrison’s humility and awe at the opening of spiritual consciousness, the sincerity of his desire to transcend the temporal. “I’d Have You Anytime,” written with Bob Dylan, should be considered in the same class as Harrison’s now-standard Beatles’ song “Something.” A previously unreleased rendition of Dylan’s “Mama You’ve Been on My Mind” proves that had Beatledom not been his destiny, Harrison could have been one of the great folk singers of his era.

A rich tribute to his longtime hometown San Francisco

Chances are that Chuck Prophet is either one of your favorite musicians, or you don’t know him at all. Through the 1980s, he was member of the edgy West Coast roots band Green on Red. A solo artist since 1990, he’s a musical omnivore who may remind you of iconoclasts from Alex Chilton to Delbert McClinton, with an internal jukebox, a panoramic passion for pop culture, and a gift for storytelling who creates his own alternative musical universe.

Temple Beautiful is a tribute to longtime hometownSan Francisco. The title song, rich in power chords and handclaps, draws on both ’70s Mott the Hoople and ’80s Kinks, and remembers what it can about days of excess at a dive bar and club. “The Left Hand and the Right” is about the fratricidal Mitchell Brothers, who built aSan Francisco porn empire, while also tossing in a casual allusion to musical brothers-at-arms from the Everlys to the Davies. “Castro Halloween” laments the passing of an annual bacchanal that ended when the celebration was marred by fatal shootings.

Like Springsteen and Paul Simon, Prophet is drawn to early rock motifs. “White Night, Big City” has a compelling doo-wop call-and-response section that may remind you of Shangri-Las “Give Him A Great Big Kiss,” despite the fact that the song tells the dark tale of the riots that reverberated after homophobic city councilman Dan White was acquitted for assassinating the iconic gay politician Harvey Milk.

“I Felt Like Jesus” also mixes and matches events, real or imagined: In one verse Prophet is reminiscing in his own doo-woppish way about the self-destructive joyride of bottom-rung clubs, then in the next, he pulls back for perspective: “I saw a dragon once coming out of the Broadway tunnel.” A shoutout to John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, or just a candid observation? This isn’t the San Francisco of 1960s love and Haight: It’s more about love and hate, and redemption, as played out in the Coney Island of Chuck Prophet’s mind.

Most comfortable at the edge

Considering that her 2008 EP consisted of five songs in her notoriously difficult native Welsh language, you can say that, on Cyrk, the exceptional Cate Le Bon is drifting toward the center. But not too far: Like the postwar school of Polish art (wall posters that contained camouflaged messages of defiance against the Communist regime) that gives the album its name, Le Bon’s second full-length (after 2009 debut album Me Oh My) as a surface prettiness that disguises a subterranean discomfort. Unsettling sounds turn up in unexpected places, contrasting with the high register prettiness of her voice and the sweet whimsy of her melodies. Note the momentum-building pauses in the chamber punk opener “Falcon Eyed”; the sudden minor chord that concludes the title song; the off-key trumpet over a marching drum at the end of “Greta.” Dissonant swirls of guitar and synthesized organ enhance the gothic horror hinted at in “Fold the Cloth,” as “seven shades of brown drip from the banisters” of an abandoned house. Le Bon, who has worked with Gruff Rhys and toured with St. Vincent, can write beautiful, conventional pop songs (“The Man I Wanted” could be a 21st-century cabaret standard) with mood, as on many of her songs, represented by changing seasons and the nearness or distance of the sea. But she is most comfortable at the edge. The two-part closer, “Ploughing Out,” makes manifest the transition from lamentation to hope, though like the famous line from another Welsh poet, she does not go gentle into that good night.

Reaffirming that in 1978, the Stones had something to prove

Some Girls, considered by some the last great Rolling Stones album, is now the last two great Stones albums. The 12 previously unreleased tracks on a second disc reaffirm that in 1978, the Stones had something to prove. Outflanked by punk, disco, shifting tastes (the mega-selling melodic rock of the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Boston), and “cock-rock” upstarts like Aerosmith, the Stones were starting to sound irrelevant. “We were more focused and had to work,” Keith Richards wrote in his 2010 autobiography. It was partly out of professional pride, and partly desperation: Richards, bottoming out in his heroin addiction, was also facing the possibility of a long stretch in a Canadian jail. “Before They Make Me Run,” in this context, was Richards’s bold statement of defiance and hope.

The Chuck Berry-meets-rockabilly track “Claudine” leads the pack of outstanding outtakes finally seeing official release. It’s about the controversial actress/socialite Claudine Longet, who served 30 days in an Aspen jail for shooting and killing her ski star boyfriend. “So Young” is Mick Jagger’s jocular jailbait song, performed with a bit of Leiber-Stoller sass. “When You’re Gone” is a Chicago blues harkening to “12 X 5,” though Jagger’s exaggerated enunciation sounds like a drag queen who adores Moms Mabley rather than an Englishman who wants to be Muddy Waters. “I Love You Too Much” could be vintage “Beggar’s Banquet,” with Jagger’s declaration of romantic obsession sounding as menacing as it is lovesick. “No Spare Parts,” a country song in a commercial Nashville vein, has its moments, though it’s understandable that the group went with the superior, deftly crafted “Faraway Eyes,” a comic parody of country radio homilies, that appears on the original “Some Girls.” The newly-issued batch of covers also include Hank Williams’s “You Win Again” and country standard “We Had It All,” which Richards’s imbues with regret. The topper is a hotwired version of Freddy Cannon’s “Tallahassie Lassie” that evokes the disciplined recklessness of vintage Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

The main disc opens with the disco riff which, filtered through the Stones’ special mojo, morphed into the brilliant barrier breaking “Miss You.” The full integration of Ronnie Wood into the band and the attention to craft make tracks such as “Beast of Burden” and “When the Whip Comes Down” lasting contributions to the best of the Stones repertory. Both “Shattered” and “Lies” answered the punks, blitzkrieg boppers with chops. As Richards wrote, “We’ve got to outpunk the punks, because they can’t play, and we can.” The title song startled and offended some 33 years ago, with its racial and sexual provocations, but it’s still mystifying why anyone was shocked. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the Rolling Stones.

Making good use of the tension between wanderlust and safety

Like any prosperous band with a global audience entering its second decade, Coldplay seems to want to venture away from its enchanted cottage, albeit not too far. Their fifth studio album, Mylo Xyloto (made-up words despite online MacGuffins as to meaning) makes good use of the tension between wanderlust and safety. “Hurts Like Heaven” drops the “soft” from Coldplay’s soft-rock wheelhouse, and kicks hard, a rush of blood through the keyboards with some of the roaming impulse of Arcade Fire’s anthems. “Charlie Brown” with lines such as “took a car downtown where the lost boys meet,” leaves little doubt that Chris Martin means it when he says he had been looking to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town for inspiration. Martin also told NME that “our lyrics are a bit shit,” which is self-deprecating only by a hair: There are comparisons of rivers to raindrops, and the image of teardrop-to-waterfall appears in not one, but two songs.

Brian Eno is back; the co-producer of Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends, (the best-selling album of 2008), is credited with “Enoxification and additional composition.” Tracks such as “Major Minus” and “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” emphasize some of the past descriptions of Coldplay as U2-lite, though these tracks are less lite, more bite. “Paradise” — or, as Martin sings it, “para, para, para-dise” — is the kind of sincere Esperanto pop that will deservedly join “Clocks” and “Viva La Vida” on a future greatest hits collection.

“Enoxification” could also be shorthand for the handful of electronic interludes that suggest Mylo Xyloto could also serve double duty as a soundtrack album. That’s not the only thing: the, uh, soaring finale, “Up With the Birds,” feels designed to be played over the closing credits of a sentimental blockbuster animated comedy. Toy Story 4 producers, take note.

Maybe the best of the bunch

After enduring 40 years of bad luck in the record industry, the persistent blues/soul singer Bettye Lavette finally gained some career traction in the 21st century, with a series of smartly-conceived albums on the Anti- label. Thankful N’ Thoughtful may be the best of this bunch, matching Lavette’s interpretive skills with unexpected or unconventional song choices. On Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken,” Lavette sounds on the eve of spiritual destruction. “Dirty Old Town,” via composer Ewan McColl (and famously performed by the Pogues), could be a tribute to every troubled post-industrial city, and Lavette sings like she’s lived on the wrong side of all of them. The Black Keys’ “I’m Not the One” is defiant funk; Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” gets its hair mussed up; and Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” is just crazy thumping good. Lavette has made “a pretty memory of my disgrace,” as she sings on Patty Griffin’s “Time Will Do the Talking,” proving that sometimes just surviving to do good work is the best revenge.

The welcome jolt of a veteran stretching to meet a challenge

Recorded after more than 40 years of living the blues — but before the life-saving liver transplant that was the unfortunate result of the same — Gregg Allman's Low Country Blues carries the welcome jolt of a veteran stretching to meet a challenge. But instead of stretching horizontally, the way the Allman Brothers Band does, when it adds layers of solos to the music's blues-based foundation, Low Country Blues asks Allman to reach deep into his reserves as a singer.

Largely absent from the studio since the death of producer/engineer Tom Dowd in 2002, Allman was wooed back to recording by T-Bone Burnett. The peerless go-to guy for 21st-century roots recordings (see also: Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Elton John & Leon Russell), Burnett asked Allman to choose from about 20 blues songs, only a few of which (among them Muddy Waters's "I Can't Be Satisfied") were part of the familiar blues-rock canon. Featuring Burnett's longtime rhythm aces Jay Bellerose (drums) and Dennis Crouch (drums), as well as Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack (piano), Doyle Bramhall II (guitar), and a hardy four-piece horn section, the music at times has the spontaneity of a live-to-lacquer 1940s Okeh Records session, without the 78rpm scratches and pops.

Allman plays keyboards and a little guitar, but it's his singing that grabs the gut. You hear the fear of death and disbelief at survival in Sleepy John Estes's "Floating Bridge," the utter despair of Bobby Bland's "Blind Man" (done famously by Little Milton), and the tangible presence of Satan himself in Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman." The high-energy horns push Allman beyond his usual comfort zone on Amos Milburn's "Tears Tears Tears" and Otis Rush's "Checking On My Baby." The one new song, "Just Another Rider," by Allman and ABB guitarist Warren Haynes, is a timeless-sounding addition to their band's long and honored repertory.

The Wacos at their best — fired-up and brutally inspirational.

This is definitely not one of your well-manicured, run-out-the-contract concert recording keepsakes. Waco Express: Live & Kickin 'at Schuba's Tavern, Chicago is both a brutally inspirational album and a career retrospective, drawing from all seven of the Waco Brothers 'studio albums. Aside from providing a home for Mekons co-founder and Welsh expatriate Jon Langford, the Waco repertory has come to epitomize the Bloodshot label's roots-rock with urban twang aesthetic.

The source of that aesthetic, of course, is the hard country twist of such mid-1980s Mekons albums as Fear and Whiskey. The touchstones include that mythical roadhouse stage where Keith Richards slices and dices chords with Gram Parsons ("Hello Roof"), the roots-reach of the Clash ("Too Sweet to Die"), renegade Nashville ("If You Don't Change Your Mind"). Lyrically, the Waco's remain the disloyal opposition, as aroused to battle as they were when they formed in 1994 — perhaps not coincidentally, the same year the Republicans swept both houses of Congress for the first time in a generation. Bittersweet triumphs and defiant sorrows get the punk rock punch and political left hook ("Nothing at All," "Missing Link") that characterizes the Waco's most robust work. From "Cowboy in Flames" to the closer, "Take Me to the Fires," this album redefines torch and twang: The crowd's loud, the band's louder and the Waco Brothers provide the torches.

The welcome jolt of a veteran stretching to meet a challenge

Recorded after more than 40 years of living the blues — but before the life-saving liver transplant that was the unfortunate result of the same — Gregg Allman's Low Country Blues carries the welcome jolt of a veteran stretching to meet a challenge. But instead of stretching horizontally, the way the Allman Brothers Band does, when it adds layers of solos to the music's blues-based foundation, Low Country Blues asks Allman to reach deep into his reserves as a singer.

Largely absent from the studio since the death of producer/engineer Tom Dowd in 2002, Allman was wooed back to recording by T-Bone Burnett. The peerless go-to guy for 21st-century roots recordings (see also: Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Elton John & Leon Russell), Burnett asked Allman to choose from about 20 blues songs, only a few of which (among them Muddy Waters's "I Can't Be Satisfied") were part of the familiar blues-rock canon. Featuring Burnett's longtime rhythm aces Jay Bellerose (drums) and Dennis Crouch (drums), as well as Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack (piano), Doyle Bramhall II (guitar), and a hardy four-piece horn section, the music at times has the spontaneity of a live-to-lacquer 1940s Okeh Records session, without the 78rpm scratches and pops.

Allman plays keyboards and a little guitar, but it's his singing that grabs the gut. You hear the fear of death and disbelief at survival in Sleepy John Estes's "Floating Bridge," the utter despair of Bobby Bland's "Blind Man" (done famously by Little Milton), and the tangible presence of Satan himself in Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman." The high-energy horns push Allman beyond his usual comfort zone on Amos Milburn's "Tears Tears Tears" and Otis Rush's "Checking On My Baby." The one new song, "Just Another Rider," by Allman and ABB guitarist Warren Haynes, is a timeless-sounding addition to their band's long and honored repertory.

Offering a distinctive new perspective from old, weird America

One microphone. Full takes, no edits, recorded on an Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorder from the 1950s at a church, a hotel room and a shrine, on days off from the 2009 summer tour of minor league baseball parks on which he and Willie Nelson supported Bob Dylan. Even with vinyl making a comeback and lo-fi in vogue, John Mellencamp keeps it simple on "No Better Than This," a rootsy collection of 13 new songs that offers a distinctive new perspective from old, weird America.

Three songs were recorded in the church — the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, which really is the first African-American Church in the United States (opened circa 1775). "Love At First Sight" and "Clumsy Ol' World" (about a perfectly mismatched couple) are among most playful of Mellencamp's new folk songs, while "Thinking About You" shows the influence of retro romantic 21st-century Dylan albums like Love and Theft. The hotel room song, "Right Behind Me," recounts an ancient struggle between god vs. the devil, and why not? The room was 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where Robert Johnson recorded "Cross Road Blues" and many other tracks that made him king of the delta blues, during three days in 1936.

The shrine is Sun Studios in Memphis, rock 'n' roll ground most hallowed and the site where the nine other songs were recorded. These tracks range from the subdued yet hope-filled "Save Some Time to Dream" to the hard steel twang of the ghost tale "The West End" (which could have come from the 2003 documentary about the backwoods South, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus). There is, of course, some rousing rockabilly from these Sun sessions, especially "Coming Down the Road" and "Each Day of Sorrow," on which the apparitions take the shape of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Johnny Burnette. Holding it all together is the production of T-Bone Burnett, who knows how to make a single plucked guitar string fill a room and who captures all the energy and vitality Mellencamp and his lean band bring to this freewheeling project.

Recorded, by the way, in mono.

Meaningful songs stirringly played, and a feel for roots that feel right in any time and place

If Alison Krauss only sang, she would be one of the great alt country/folk singers of the last 25 years. And if she only played fiddle, she'd be a Grand Ole Opry legend for that alone. If she wrote her own songs — well, that just wouldn't be fair.

After the long, sparkling detour with Robert Plant for the Raising Sand record and tour, Krauss and her longtime modern bluegrass band Union Station return with their first studio record since 2004. Robert Lee Castleman's title track sets the tone with its heartbreaking beauty; it's as irresistible as it is sad. In fact, there's heartache by the minute on Airplane, whether on Richard Thompson's love-haunted "Dimming of the Day" or Jackson Browne's catch-in-the-throat closer, "My Opening Farewell."

Three songs featuring Union Station guitarist and mandolin player Dan Tyminski, whose vocals split the different between Ralph Stanley and Levon Helm, lighten the mood and quicken the pace. His robust "angry farmer" timbre is front-and-center on Peter Rowan's "Dust Bowl Children," Tim O'Brien's "Outside Looking In" and Sidney Cox's seaworthy "Bonita and Bill Butler." Those who discovered Krauss on Raising Sand will find much to embrace: Meaningful songs stirringly played, and a feel for roots that feel right in any time and place.

The Police embodied the hopes many fans, critics and labels alike held for “new wave”: punk intensity, pop melody and cross-marketing charisma. They were hard, fast, soulful and prettier than the Go-Gos. But it was the reggae rhythms that permeated the Police’s material that gave the band its distinction.

A year and a half later, touring nonstop where few other bands tread (Cairo, Bombay, Buenos Aires) they were worldwide sensations, and headlining sports arenas such as Madison Square Garden. In 1983, they drew 70,000 fans to a headlining show at New York’s Shea Stadium, a rarely attainable rock and roll pinnacle ever since the Beatles played there in 1965 and 1966. But by then, it was almost over – 1983′s Synchronicity was their fourth and final studio album. The stress of endless touring, relentless ego wars, battling over Sting’s dominance of songwriting credits led to their demise.

A solid, sturdy affirmation of strength

Translation: "White Reggae," in the pseudo international language the Police used to title their first three albums. Confidently played and arranged, the songs didn't expand the range of the band as much as they affirmed its strengths. "Message in a Bottle," a castaway's desperate plea, and the sexual loneliness of "The Bed's Too Big Without You" revealed Sting's increasing confidence as a reggae songwriter and singer: Maxi Priest later covered the former, Sheila Hylton the latter, but the Police originals did not suffer by comparison. The repetition of the lyrics at the end of "Message in the Bottle" was protected by the sturdiness of the riff: Sting repeats the line "sending out an S.O.S." 25 times to the fade, but it's still ear candy thanks to the intricate interplay underneath. The pulse and dub shine of "Walking on the Moon" is one of the highlights of the Police catalog. Breaking the reggae mold a bit is "It's Alright With You," which at least in the verse borrows some of the cadence of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "Bring On the Night" is another depature, a more mature pop song that would be one of the relatively few Police songs Sting would embrace later in his solo career.

The whole band shares songwriting credit on the mostly instrumental title song and on the oddity "Deathwish," which works well in its Bo Diddley-beat musical passages but whose lyrics seem like verses in search of a chorus.

Copeland — who in the earliest days was the band's primary songwriter — gets three and a half songwriting credits, his most on any Police album. His best tune in the band's repertory is "On Any Other Day," a comedic litany of domestic frustrations. The others aren't quite as good: "Contact" has a bit of Kinks influence, perhaps, and "Does Everyone Stare," one of the only Police songs with piano as the dominant instrument, seems an attempt at pop via jazz chord change in the manner of Steely Dan. Then again, Sting too fades in the stretch, with "No Time This Time" one of his most forgettable songs with the band.

The first fusion of punk attitude with reggae bounce

Sting, Copeland and Summers had come together in late '76/early '77 in London, where each had been knocking around with different bands, different styles: Stewart with the fading prog band Curved Air, Sting trying to make it with his Newcastle group Last Exit. (Stewart's brother Miles Copeland III was building a management stable in London; another brother, Ian Copeland, was developing his booking agency. They became brain trust and business backbone of the Police.) The original trio had guitarist Henri Padovani. Their first gigs, in 1977 consisted of filling the opening slot on a U.K. tour for glam personality Cherry Vanilla. By most accounts, they were an unconvincing punk band. Though impressed by the energy and anti-authoritarian vibe of punk, Sting and Copeland were too professional to be part of the insurgency. Padovani wasn't a good fit, and was quickly replaced by Summers, whose pedigree included stints with jazzman Zoot Money, psychedelic band Soft Machine and Eric Burdon's New Animals. One of the first songs they recorded was Sting's "Roxanne," an imagined peek at the persona of a Parisian prostitute. Instead of punk aggression, it had reggae aggression: Rather than the maintaining the laid-back beat of dub, or the lilting beat of uptempo reggae, the slow verses accelerated into overdrive. Infectious excitement was also palpable on other tracks from the same blueprint: "So Lonely" and "Can't Stand Losing You." "Next to You" and "Peanuts" were neither power pop nor punk, but something smart in between: pogo pop. Summers got one of the rare chances to show off some of his jazz chops on "Hole in My Life." Sting's "Born in the 50's" fell short of being the generational anthem he might have hoped for, but it proved something else: Unlike many of their confederates on the punk side of the spectrum, Sting could really sing his ass off. The band as global Police-men was underlined by "Masoko Tanga," which sounds like it could be the title theme to a Japanese anime film.

Walking the fine line between experimentation and exhaustion

The third in a series of titles in Pig Esperanto, meaning essentially nothing, though always a topic for lively discussion on Internet message boards. (One thing is for sure: it is the source of the name of the beloved near-perfect race horse Zenyatta, owned by A&M Records' co-founder Jerry Moss.) As an album, it's a mixed bag: some great fast reggae ("Don't Stand So Close to Me"), the energetic pop of "Canary in a Coalmine," and the lush "When the World is Running Down" are among some of the band's best songs. But experimentation gives way to exhaustion on other tracks: Sting's "Man in a Suitcase" appears to be both about and a symptom of their back-breaking touring schedule. "Voices Inside My Head" is a workmanlike sketch using African-sounding guitar and vocals mixed way back to resemble a chant; Middle Eastern motifs emerge in Summers' solo in "Bombs Away," a song by Copeland that's prescient in its assessment of "unpaid bills in Afghanistan hills." The Middle Eastern musical theme is also evident in "Behind My Camel," a Summers-composed instrumental evoking the North African desert, but its relevance is just a mirage. The coup de grace (to use a phrase in Sting's frequently-favored French) is the band's first top 10 U.S. hit: "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da." No relation to the German band Trio's 1982 new wave hit, "Da Da Da," though the point should be made. Did radio programmers appeal to the lowest common denominator of their audience's intelligence? Weren't they right? In the 30 years since, the deepest thinkers at the Academy for the Study of Rock Lyrics have deconstructed, reconstructed and post-modernized these lyrics, and have come to conclude that "De Do Do Do" means "De Do Do Do." And so forth.

The last gasp of post-punk greats

The fifth album in four years during which touring was almost constant. Talk about dehumanizing labor. The title, in retrospect, couldn't have been more ironic: by most accounts, the band members were as out of sync as they ever were with each other. Still, making good music out of bad feelings is something great bands do. "Every Breath You Take" reflects a drift away from reggae, a kind of pure pop tune that wouldn't have been out of place in the '50s or early '60s — although if you think too much about it, the song could be heard as the obsession of a stalker: "Every bond you break, every step you take — I'll be watching you."

It's not at all out of place on an album that concludes with "Murder By Numbers," a bizarre Summers song that could have been adapted into a book, "Homicide for Dummies." His other composition, "Mother," might be the back story of such a killer, a hysterical whacked-out blues progression on which the singer shouts such disinviting lines as, "Every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end." Copeland's "Miss Gradenko" may draw on his insider knowledge of the Cold War spy trade. As for Sting, he's a little loony, too, having "Tea in the Sahara" with Paul Bowles (author of "The Sheltering Sky") presumptively declaring himself the "King of Pain," and insisting in "Walking In Your Footsteps" that "Mr. Dinosaur" was "God's favorite creature." In case you miss the metaphor, Sting sings that "If we explode the atom bomb/ Would they say that we were dumb." The band's imminent dissolution could be the central metaphor of "Synchronicity II," a musically exciting song that tells the story of a terminally dysfunctional suburban family having its own nuclear meltdown.

A bleak vision of a stark future

A concept album with an iconic cover: three primitive digital-looking representations of the band members (I believe that left to right, it's Summers, Sting and Copeland). Anyway you slice it, it's a bit ahead of its time in its theme: a complaint about media overload ("Too Much Information") more than a decade before the Internet would become the centerpiece of planetary communication and knowledge. Heck, the Sony Walkman hadn't been invented yet. But the Caribbean-soul horns on the track represented a new wrinkle. "Rehumanize Yourself" was about the debilitating effects of work; though true to its time, the central image is the soul-numbing effect of "working all day in the factory." That's hardly the case in the western world these days, so it's a reminder to be careful what you wish for.

The album was recorded at AIR Studios in Montserrat, and the album's biggest hit, "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic," captures the mood of an isolated but posh Caribbean resort island, complete with steel drums. Synthesizer sounds generate reggae beach visions on the seductive opener "Spirits in the Material World." Summers gets to inject some uncharacteristic but appealing metal riffs on "Demolition Man," while "One World (Not Three)" is a dub-heavy track that that flourishes in Copeland's rocksteady hands. Sting's swing to topical lyrics is represented by "Invisible Sun." One of the Police's best tunes, the pained verses giving way to a hopeful bridge. Relying heavily on synthesizer, its message was inspired by martyrdom of Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands, who died the result of a hunger strike in a British prison in 1981.

Sting explores romance, loneliness and emotional dislocation

If Sting's solo material has always been cerebral, there is a reason. Describing the songs on this album (title courtesy Shakespeare), Sting wonders: "Why does tradition locate our emotional center in the heart and not somewhere in the brain?" Perhaps he answers his own question in the first two songs: "The Lazarus Heart" and "Be Still My Beating Heart," both of which feature on guitar his former bandmate Andy Summers. In addition to Kirkland on keyboard and Marsalis on saxes, the leader's world music credentials are burnished by percussionists Manu Katché and Mino Cinelu. The emotional dislocation of the "legal alien" is the theme of "Englishman in New York." A vigorous supporter of human rights organization Amnesty International, the key song here is "They Dance Alone." A star-loaded indictment of Chile's barbarous 1980s military dictatorship led by General Pinochet, the song is an eloquent balance of mood and message. Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler are among the guitarists on the track, and salsa singer Ruben Blades delivers a verse in Spanish. In the year of Michael Jackson's Bad, there are also party songs like "We'll Be Together" and "Rock Steady," the torch song "Sister Moon," and a version of Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing" based on jazz arranger Gil Evans' big band rendition.

Sting's first, searing solo effort

Sting finished his first solo album before the Police had even split up. The opening song, "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" was a promising beginning, carried by the bristling energy of a good Police tune, striking a message of optimism and regret that could have been aimed at his soon-to-be-former band: "If it's a mirror you want, just look in my eyes/ Or a whipping boy, someone to despise."

Despite politics-on-his-sleeve lyrics, like those on "Russians," another plea against nuclear war, and "Children's Crusade," about the slaughter of millions of young men in World War I, this is a smart transitional album, with other Police-fan friendly tunes such as the hit single, "Fortress Around Your Heart."

Sting mostly puts down the bass, focusing on singing and playing guitar and the synclavier. The basic lineup: Omar Hakim, drums; Darryl Jones, bass; Kenny Kirkland, keyboards; and Branford Marsalis, saxophones, all jazz players, helped Sting create his new sound, most notably on free-swinging tracks like "Shadows in the Rain."