In Chronological Order

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  Madonna

  Madonna

  1983 | Warner Bros.

  Released in the summer of 1983, Madonna's debut album was a snapshot of the dance music that had gone back underground in the early '80s through most of America, but was still omnipresent on the streets and radios of New York City. It's disco that is far leaner than its '70s incarnation, but not yet thoroughly electronic, and still rooted in R&B forms. Current yet classic, Madonna has aged the best of... the singer's early albums because it's her most focused and insistent. Six of its eight tracks rightly became pop hits, club anthems, or both.
  
  Reggie Lucas — a guitarist for Miles Davis who helped create sleek smashes for sophisticated soul divas Stephanie Mills and Phyllis Hyman — produced much of the album and co-writes key cuts "Borderline" and "Physical Attraction." DJ Mark Kamins also contributed production while Madonna's DJ boyfriend John "Jellybean" Benitez remixed tracks; Fred Zarr, whose synth sound defined countless NY '80s jams, contributes keys; Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens of disco group Pure Energy pens the transcendent "Holiday," and the rising lucky star writes the rest herself. No ballads interrupt the steady flow of Linn drum beats, synth basslines, staccato guitar licks, and churchy background vocals, and Madonna's growling, yearning presence is already fully formed. She's not polished, though, and that's exactly as it should be; she's alternately tough and yielding in a way that totally suits this material. You can feel her hunger in every utterly engaged moment.

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  Like A Virgin

  Madonna

  1984 | Warner Bros.

  Madonna's career was already on an upward trajectory. But with the late-1984 release of her second album, a record completed then delayed by the slow-building success of her first, things went bananas. Produced by Nile Rodgers on the heels of helming David Bowie's mega-smash Let's Dance, Like a Virgin offers a poppier variant on the Bowie/Rodgers rock-funk alliance, and is far more provocative and polished than her 1983 debut. Its indelible hits,... the title track and "Material Girl," still largely define the singer as a shrewd cultural commentator that many still willfully distort into a gold-digger, completely ignoring that her coy/theatrical/robotic/girlie delivery suggests irony and role-playing. Rodgers contributes his trademark guitar scratching throughout and fellow former Chic members Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson join in on bass and drums for the most R&B-leaning cuts. The rest tilts to New Wave lite with mixed results: The quality drop-off from inspired baubles like "Dress You Up" to filler on the level of "Stay" will rarely be this steep again. Paradoxically, her film career got off to a strong start right after this album with Desperately Seeking Susan before turning decidedly motley.
  
  Recorded digitally, with bottom end doubled on bass guitar and synths, Like a Virgin's blockbuster status re-emphasized after Michael Jackson's Thriller that '80s dance music would be even bigger than '70s disco, especially when delivered by a videogenic superstar capable of crossing gender and color lines. Madonna's vocals may be overdubbed here far more than on her debut, but she's also more mischievous, and the resulting ambiguity allowed scholars, feminists, moral custodians, and countless Madonna wannabes both professional and fan-sized to pick up from the singer radically different signals. Like Bowie, Madonna discovered that pop music became more fun the more it could be mutable. Here she starts twisting.

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  True Blue

  Madonna

  1986 | Warner Bros.

  Inspired by her passionate marriage to Sean Penn, Madonna's summer 1986 release True Blue advanced her control over her music and image. She co-produced and co-wrote every track, as she was considerably more famous and successful than her collaborators here; ex-bandmate Stephen Bray, and Patrick Leonard, former keyboardist for failed Toto clone band Trillion. Her sound was still dance-pop — brittle drums clatter loudly, a mid-'80s quality that time-stamps True stronger than... most of Madonna's output. But the R&B shades of her first two albums fade while retro girl-group giddiness, Latin rhythms, dramatic balladry and tougher rock aggression came to the fore on results far more varied than her previous LPs. Having toured behind Like a Virgin, Madonna's delivery improves considerably, and the melodies are more substantial: Even if the instrumental performances sometimes elsewhere tip the other way into lightweight kitsch, there's no denying that "Papa Don't Preach," "Open Your Heart," "Live to Tell" and "La Isla Bonita" are varied but durable classics that rightly boosted Madonna's profile considerably; without them, more typical dance numbers "White Heat" and "Where's the Party" would've served well as singles.
  
  Madonna now commanded attention like no other pop phenomenon since the Beatles: Michael Jackson may have sold more and Prince wasn't far behind, but serious scholars and feminists now analyzed Madonna's songs and videos with unprecedented zeal. What did it mean for her to go against her father's wishes and keep her unborn child in "Papa Don't Preach"? What was she saying by putting herself in a stylized peep-show booth for "Open Your Heart"? Were these complicated feminist statements, or the very opposite? The debate was so huge that all but the youngest and most casual fans had to take sides that informed the way the world hears these records even today.

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  Who's That Girl Soundtrack

  Madonna

  1987 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  Ostensibly a soundtrack for the summer 1987 flop caper comedy in which she starred, Who's That Girl is more like a Madonna EP fleshed out with unrelated dance dreck. (Scritti Politti's delirious "Best Thing Ever" provides the sole non-Madge highlight.) None of her four contributions are remembered among her upper echelon of songs, although this isn't entirely just: The Latin-inflected title track topped the pop chart, while the self-referential "Causing a Commotion"... reached No. 2 and was a deserved club anthem in remixed form. Together with the murky, moody ballad "The Look of Love" they suggest the turmoil of her now-abusive marriage, and so there's a weight here that's often overlooked amid the filler. The melancholy bridge of "Who's That Girl" in which this ordinarily steely superstar concludes, "No one can help me now" may be the first unguarded moment in Madonna's discography. More would be revealed in Like a Prayer.

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  Like A Prayer

  Madonna

  1989 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  Completed the same month Madonna and Sean Penn filed for divorce, 1989's Like a Prayer finds the star analyzing her life — seeking strength and sometimes finding struggle in Catholicism, marriage, friends and family — while reinventing herself as a far more adult artist by reclaiming and updating the music of her youth. Co-produced and co-written by Madonna mostly with Patrick Leonard but with key contributions by longtime collaborator Stephen Bray, Madonna's... fourth album draws from classic gospel ("Like a Prayer"), Sly & the Family Stone ("Express Yourself"), Elton John ("Promise to Try"), Motown and the Association ("Cherish"), the Beatles ("Dear Jessie"), Simon & Garfunkel ("Oh Father"), go-go funk ("Keep It Together"), Latin folk ("Spanish Eyes"), and Jimi Hendrix ("Act of Contrition").
  
  When one considers that the album also features contemporary influences like Prince (who appears in "Love Song" as strikingly low-key duet partner) and even the Smiths (note the ringing guitars and domestic despair of "Till Death Do Us Part"), Like a Prayer comes across as a particularly remarkable achievement because her eclecticism is presented as an explicitly autobiographical statement. Up to this point Madonna was largely seen as a sexy provocateur with streetwise songs, savvy videos, and a scattershot filmography, but Prayer presented her as an introspective singer-songwriter. The racial, religious and feminist debates over this album's hugely popular and controversial videos for "Like a Prayer" and "Express Yourself" both expanded on and distracted from this relatively new image of Madonna as legitimate auteur. Yet everything came together during the following year in what would be her crowning and most influential achievement, the Blond Ambition Tour, which raised the bar for pop concert presentation on nearly every level.

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  I'm Breathless

  Madonna

  1990 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  Released to promote her actually quite good performance in Dick Tracy, this is essentially Madonna's 1990 fantasy of a vintage musical in which she sings every number. Only four songs — including three by Broadway maestro Stephen Sondheim — appear in the film; his "Sooner or Later" won an Academy Award the next year, and having sung repeatedly it in her Blond Ambition Tour, the star absolutely nailed it on the... Oscars. Here, like much of the rest, it's a tad belabored: Stripped of her usual multi-tracking and holding notes far longer than her usual punchy material demands, Madonna sounds like she's trying extra-hard to pull off vocal licks just outside her comfortable reach.
  
  As songwriters, though, she and Patrick Leonard acquit themselves; their swing-jazz ditty "Hanky Panky" (a largely forgotten Top 10 hit celebrating spanking) and the reflective ballad "Something to Remember" would make swell Glee numbers. The knockout here is, of course, "Vogue," the star's tribute to not just classic Philly disco, house music and the drag balls of Harlem, but also to many of the Hollywood vixens she celebrates throughout I'm Breathless and indeed her career. Both femme-centric cult-y and ultra-mainstream (it's her all-time biggest US single), "Vogue" is quintessential Madonna.

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  Erotica

  Madonna

  1992 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  "Give it up, do as I say/ Give it up and let me have my way" Madonna says at the outset of this set to a willing S&M bottom and, by extension, her fans and the music industry. Having recently scored considerable coups with material that would've been considered uncommercial coming from any other act, the singer put her power to the test on her fifth and wildest album, the first for... her own label, Maverick. Like her art-photography-slash-softcore-porn book Sex, Erotica addressed female pleasure, self-hatred, the death of gay friends and mentors from AIDS, lovers who raced away from emotional intimacy, man-stealing so-called pals and other thorny subject matter. While "Deeper and Deeper" ranks amongst her most uplifting, melodious dance tracks, much of the rest is far darker, emphasizing rhythm, words, and bass over tunes Madonna talks and whispers throughout. When she does sing, it's usually in her sultry lower register.
  
  The models are deep house music and the hip-hop-informed spiritual R&B of Soul II Soul, here served up by collaborators Shep Pettibone, the co-author of "Vogue" who contributed his revered remixing services to You Can Dance and The Immaculate Collection, and newcomer André Betts. The sound is dirty, sometimes even distorted, as Madonna creates boudoir jazz by way of crackling samples and thwacking machine beats that push her diary-like poetry into provocative shapes. Sometimes she's trifling, updating Motown songwriting tropes via street slang and puns: Calling the trollop in "Thief of Hearts" who steals her beau "little Susie ho-maker" is particularly cute. And sometimes she's delicate in a way that she rarely gets credit for achieving: Check her gently bending chorus on the concluding "Secret Garden." Her experiment in how far the public and media would let her go generated mixed results: Sex sold well but was panned mercilessly. Erotica achieved significant sales by most any other artist's standards, but not hers. Suddenly, Madonna seemed overexposed, both literally and figuratively. A new approach was in order.

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  Bedtime Stories

  Madonna

  1994 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  Following Sex, the backlash against Madonna's transgressive image climaxed. At first, she struggled to tone herself down, but couldn't quite do it: A tender soundtrack ballad, "I'll Remember," was promoted with a profanity-intensive David Letterman appearance in which she gave her panties to the host and suggested he smell them. Bedtime Stories, her October 1994 album of comparatively subtle R&B, showed similar growing pains. "Secret," the first single, scored big, but listen... closely and you can hear that it's more than a little blue, as if Madonna deeply resented the widely shared belief that she should hold herself back in order to save her career, but didn't know what else to do.
  
  Co-written and produced by TLC overseer Dallas Austin, Mary J. Blige producer Dave "Jam" Hall, Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper, and R&B crooner Babyface, most of these stately ballads and muted mid-tempo grooves share that sense of hurt — not just over sour relationships, but also her career itself. Her largest chart-topper since "Vogue," the Babyface collaboration "Take A Bow" ruminates on both simultaneously. Pain and a renewed fear of failure made her an alternately sharper and blunter lyricist: "I'm not your bitch, don't hang your shit on me" from "Human Nature" couldn't have attacked her critics more plainly, even if her cartoony delivery undercuts her assault. But there's nothing compromised about the Björk-penned title cut, an undulating ambient techno showstopper that points the way to her artistic peak.

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  Evita: The Complete Motion Picture Music Soundtrack

  Evita Soundtrack

  2005 | Warner Bros.

  Madonna's stylistic conservatism continued from 1994's Bedtime Stories to 1995's surprisingly masterful ballad collection Something to Remember to this staid soundtrack for the 1996 musical biopic of Eva Perón in which she starred. As a piece of music, Evita — aside from its biggest hit, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" — isn't particularly accessible: Unlike composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's earlier Jesus Christ Superstar, this rock opera is much more opera than rock.... But its depiction of the famed Argentinian First Lady as a charismatic iconoclast dovetails with Madonna's own mythology, a parallel that works much stronger in the film than on this lengthy, story-heavy album. She's no Patti LuPone, but Madonna belts with impressive technical precision. Unfortunately, the singing lessons that enable her to pull off the sustained vowels that music theater demands subsequently messes with her pop singer diction. From here on, Madonna often sings "properly" — sometimes with a stilted, pseudo-English accent — even when a less precise, more natural delivery might better suit her material and message.

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  Ray Of Light

  Madonna

  1998 | Warner Bros./Maverick

  Madonna was by now a mother of a child fathered by her fitness trainer/lover Carlos Leon, practicing yoga regularly, studying both Eastern mysticism and Kabbalah, and a far more accomplished singer. All of these emotional, physical and spiritual changes shaped 1998's Ray of Light. It's where she discovers tender elements of both her voice and personality: Where she'd generously multi-track her voice while favoring wit and strength over vulnerability, here she contributes... a careful and more caring delivery that's matched by co-producer/co-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist William Orbit's largely synthetic and finely tweaked studio backing. With songwriting and production help from her favored ballad co-creator Patrick Leonard, pop craftsman Rick Nowels, and keyboardist Marius DeVries, Orbit and Madonna craft an inward-searching singer-songwriter album disguised as an otherworldly electronica departure.
  
  Synths abound, but there are plenty of strings and electric guitars as well: The steady-driving smash title track ranks as one of dance music's smoothest rock appropriations. Madonna had repeatedly proved herself a consummate singles act, but here her ability as an album artist peaks. There's not a whiff of filler: From the fame ruminations of album opener "Drowned World (Substitute For Love)" to her mourning failed relationships in "Frozen" and "The Power of Goodbye" to the closing mythological parable "Mer Girl," every cut feels lyrically and musically committed and coherent within a diverse but sustained and well-sequenced whole. Before the year's end, Madonna and Leon would separate, but Ray of Light would live on as her most accomplished and finessed album.

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  Music

  Madonna

  2000 | Warner Bros./Maverick

  At the early height of her popularity, Madonna polarized listeners like few pop phenomena. But 1998's Ray of Light gave her broad respect, and its synth-driven introspection proved more popular internationally than any of her studio albums since 1986's True Blue. That approval empowered the singer to dive even deeper into electronics and self-exploration on 2000's Music. Through Maverick Records, she had received a demo by Mirwais, former guitarist of French New... Wave band Taxi Girl, who became her largely unknown primary collaborator here. His Daft Punk-y quirks blend seamlessly with her early-'80s disco-funk for Music's title track, one of her most joyous singles ever. Elsewhere she embraces acoustic guitars, both straightforward ("I Deserve It") and glitchy (the nearly country-ish hit "Don't Tell Me," written by her singer-songwriter brother-in-law Joe Henry). The risks she takes on wayward album cuts like "Paradise (Not For Me)" are balanced by concise, well-written ballads like "What It Feels Like For a Girl," one of her gentlest, yet most-barbed feminist statements. These different directions didn't collectively match Ray of Light's unity, but they add a worthy plateau to that album's peak. Nothing suggested that another backlash loomed right around the corner.

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  American Life

  Madonna

  2003 | Warner Bros./Maverick

  Launched by the second most expensive video ever, Madonna's appropriately tense 2002 Bond theme "Die Another Day" scored her another Top 10 victory. So it must've come as a shock to all involved that none of the subsequent singles on 2003's American Life got higher than No. 37 in the US. The album's criticisms of the title's subject matter couldn't have been more timely and ill-timed: The US invasion of Iraq had... begun, and the Dixie Chicks suffered an instant, massive boycott for an anti-Bush remark just as Madonna planned to unleash a crazy war/fashion video for "American Life." Although she substituted a tamer replacement right before the video's release, this album's artwork depicting her as a glam Che Guevara combined with the single's clunky rap interlude about her soy latte, Pilates, her many employees, and her dissatisfaction with those privileges rubbed most US media the wrong way during a key post-9/11 moment when the slightest criticism of Uncle Sam was considered anti-patriotic. Unlike its eclectic predecessor Music, American Life is mostly one thing — not particularly fun or catchy electronic folk. This second Mirwais/Madonna pairing isn't a total dud; no doubt inspired by her new husband Guy Ritchie, the strummy yet thumpy "Love Profusion" clicked abroad, but wasn't released as a single here after its predecessors flopped spectacularly. Moreover, the album's Re-Invention World Tour became the highest grossing concert attraction of 2004. Suddenly a split widened between what the US mainstream would accept from Madonna and what her longtime international fans expected.

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  Confessions On A Dance Floor

  Madonna

  2005 | Warner Bros.

  Given that nearly all of her catalog has been squarely aimed at clubs or at least remixed for them, it was a bit wacky that Madonna's late 2005 album was widely hyped as a return to her disco roots. Confessions on a Dance Floor avoids the folk guitars of her last few albums, but otherwise it's not drastically different. Soul-searching themes still get set to computer beats — only this time they... pound harder with less syncopation and, apparently, greater commercial intent. She may have renounced her celebrity-centric ways with American Life, but the fact that she started this album with a prominent ABBA sample ("Hung Up"'s "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)") instantly recognizable to millions of Europeans, club-pop connoisseurs, and gay men surely suggests she was nevertheless eager to catch the attention of her fan base.
  
  Confessions embraces the Eurodisco tradition from Donna Summer to Pet Shop Boys to David Guetta via her new primary collaborator Stuart Price, combining eternally hip synthpop paradigms with hands-in-the-air trance anthem gaucheness. Although only "Hung Up" clicked on US Top 40, Confessions did so well overseas it was as if American Life never happened. Here, its success was more moderate, as it came a couple of years before Gaga brought the stadium-dance formula employed by most of it back to radio. The highlight, though, is "I Love New York," which suggests early Liz Phair jamming with LCD Soundsystem covering the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog." Yes, it's that good.

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  Hard Candy

  Madonna

  2008 | Warner Bros.

  If Confessions was Euro-centric and classic, 2008's Hard Candy is all-American and of its moment. Like its predecessor, Candy suggests that the clock was ticking on her marriage to Guy Ritchie and, indeed, the pair filed for divorce late that year. The giveaway is that Madonna's lyrics on the happy songs — particularly the smash Justin Timberlake duet "4 Minutes" and its less successful follow-up "Give It 2 Me" — are rote... and over-generalized, whereas the anxious cuts "Miles Away" and "She's Not Me" are honed and precise. Her collaborators Timbaland, Timberlake, the Neptunes and Danja created much of the greatest hip-hop, pop, and R&B of the past 20 years, yet what should've been monumental is often shockingly slight. Sometimes a brilliant bridge offsets a shoddy chorus ("Beat Goes On"), but too much here seems phoned in, as if no one dared to prod these masters — Madonna included — to reach their full potential. Unconsciously, the star acknowledges the coasting: Over the album's far-funkiest groove, "Dance 2night," she sings, "You just gotta give more, more, more than you ever have before." No one's doing that here.

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  MDNA

  Madonna

  2012 | Interscope

  It's telling that after 2012's MDNA harsh Europop, Hard Candy's largely stale R&B tastes better in retrospect. There's so much here that should be beneath Madonna, and the desperation is palpable: "Gang Bang" crosses a line simply because its violence is so mindless, and although she's made a career out of pop-art provocation, she's never before stooped. She's written simply at times for decades, but there's a world of difference between "Into... the Groove" and "Girls Gone Wild." Despite the now-ness of big name DJs like Benny Benassi and Martin Solveig, much here recycles earlier themes and sounds: "I Don't Give A" retreads "Human Nature;" "I'm a Sinner," one of several tracks to reunite her with William Orbit, revisits the psychedelia of "Beautiful Stranger" while dumbing down everything smart, spiritual, and sexy about "Like a Prayer." MDNA rallies on its final three cuts, "Love Spent," "Masterpiece," and "Falling Free," which bring the substantial melodies elsewhere repressed, and the deluxe edition adds welcome lyrical depth regarding her latest connubial mishaps ("I Fucked Up," "Best Friend"), but even here she hits her nails too squarely on their heads. This is Madonna at her most blatant, and it's not flattering.

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  Freak Out!

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  To procure the funds to release Freak Out! intact, Frank Zappa took a cut in his publishing rate so Verve could press the 60-minute monsterpiece onto two vinyl slabs — making it rock's first double-album and one of the most audacious debuts ever. Lyrics like opening tirade "Mr. America walk on by/ Your schools that do not teach" (from freak-flag anthem "Hungry Freaks Daddy") illustrate the album's explicit political objective; but the... far, far more subversive agenda was represented musically through broken doo-wop, dissonant avant-rock and maddening detours. Zappa's boldest move was side four, the 12-minute noisescape "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet," bashed out on $500 worth of rented percussion by an armada of Sunset Boulevard freakazoids.

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  Absolutely Free

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Frank Zappa quarantined his catchier numbers from his neuron-frying experiments by two separate pieces of wax on his debut, but seamlessly combined the two (along with elements of improv jazz and inharmonious transmutations of "Louie Louie") on the (relatively) tidy follow-up Absolutely Free. This concept album about American consumer culture kicks off with a seven-song cycle revolving around a daunting vegetable metaphor and closes with the schizophrenic "Brown Shoes Don't Make It,"... a seven-minute anti-school, anti-work, anti-suburbia rock opera that showcases Zappa's imaginative tape-splicing abilities and ability to cram hundreds of disparate ideas into a tiny space.

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  We're Only In It For The Money

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Distancing himself from the so-called "freaks" associated with the previous year's Summer of Love, Frank Zappa envisioned We're Only in It for the Money as a scathing satire of hippie culture, exposing their fashion and drugs as a uniform no less constricting than the one tightly squeezing the straights. Although it's an answer to Sgt. Pepper's — down to its parody cover art (relegated by the label to the inner sleeve) —... it's far more musically adventurous, full of violently shifting time signatures, gurgling musique concrète, early experiments in sampling, punchy jazz and, somewhere in this mangled cornucopia, some of his catchiest songs ever. Widely regarded as the ultimate Zappa experience, Money hit No. 30 on Billboard and even won a Dutch Grammy (which Zappa turned down after finding out the album was lyrically vivisected by an MGM censor before its release).

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  Uncle Meat

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Uncle Meat was, as the note on the cover explained, "most of the music from the Mothers' movie of the same name which we haven't got enough money to finish yet." Mostly instrumental, this hypothetical soundtrack is full of jittery guitar solos, coffeepot marimba torture, in-jokes and "Louie Louie" (again!) played on the Royal Albert Hall pipe organ. Rhythmically complex and compositionally "serious," Uncle Meat was the last gasp of the song-based... early LPs, and the earliest example of Zappa's impossibly intricate scores, quickly establishing his role as "composer."

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  Hot Rats

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  His first record sans Mothers (save the hyper-experimental tape-manipulation tornado Lumpy Gravy), Hot Rats is a jazz-fusion essential, mixing deviously complex rockers like the classic Rimsky-Korsakov funk of "Peaches En Regalia" with sprawling jams like the sizzling 16-minute skronk-boogie "The Gumbo Variations" (featuring seven minutes of rabid saxophone seizures from Mother Ian Underwood). A surprise hit in England considering its jazz lilt and instrumental content (the one vocal track is coarsely ribbited... out by Captain Beefheart, no less), this is a venerated gateway to the Zappa catalogue and a great place for his searing guitar solos to shine, completely unadorned by wonky time-signatures and jarring tape-edits.

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  Weasels Ripped My Flesh

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  As the darkly comic evisceration victim on the cover would imply, Weasels Ripped My Flesh is Frank Zappa and crew gleefully ripping through odd time signatures and bent melodies in a particularly heavy and sinister fashion. A mix of live and studio gems, Weasels is most notable for the herky-jerky ostinatos of "Didya Get Any Onya?" and "Toad of the Short Forest" that predate the mathy thud of prog-metal ("At this very... moment on stage, we have drummer A playing in 7/8, drummer B playing in 3/4, the bass playing in 3/4, the organ playing in 5/8, the tambourine playing in 3/4 and the alto sax blowing his nose"). Not that Weasels is short on melody: Little Richard's "Directly From My Heart to You" is reverently covered via Don "Sugar Cane" Harris's vocals and howling electric violin.

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  The Grand Wazoo

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  A wheelchair-bound Frank Zappa, recovering from a broken leg and fractured skull after being shoved off a London stage, disbanded the Mothers and focused on studio work, penning the glossier Hot Rats sequel Waka/Jawaka and its companion, the fiery big-band workout The Grand Wazoo. Working with a group of 19 West Coast jazzers, Zappa occasionally sings (his crushed larynx lowered his voice a third) and occasionally solos, but the main focus is... Zappa conducting the crew from his chair. This bitchin' brew is a chance to hear seasoned virtuosos like trumpeter Sal Marquez (who'd previously worked with Buddy Rich and Woody Herman) play off Zappa's trademark rhythmic restlessness in a cooler, more reserved environment.

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  Apostrophe (')

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Zappa's equally essential 1973 album Over-Nite Sensation was an unexpectedly catchy, occasionally filthy set of tunes that flowed into one another both musically and conceptually, establishing the sound Zappa would evolve over the next decade. Follow-up Apostrophe', however, cemented it, and even provided Zappa with a bona fide hit: the scatological 7/8 gutter-groover "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow," which became his first charting single (and drove the album to become his first... gold record). The lyrical threads are beyond absurdity (dog-doo snowcones, saintly pancakes, one-celled Hammond organisms), but somewhere under that sea of non sequitur lay solid themes of religious skepticism and anti-materialism.

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  Zappa In New York

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  On In New York, Zappa proves his ingenious musical improvisations are a perfect analogue to his impeccable comic timing. His dry, hilarious banter reaches new heights in a run-though of "Titties and Beer," a "Devil Went Down to Georgia"-esque tale where he faces off with Satan himself. Drummer Terry Bozzio (who must have sold his soul to churn out drum solo "The Black Page" from this set's second disc) uproariously plays the... role of the Unholy One and returns later to express his love for Punky Meadows of metallers Angel in the giddily lewd "Punky's Whips" (a song pulled from the original pressing by litigation-fearing Warner suits). This is the ultimate Zappa live experience, full of virtuosic excursions and riotously perverse antics — although "I Promise Not to Come in Your Mouth" is, thankfully, an instrumental.

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  Sheik Yerbouti

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Zappaphiles bemoaned Frank's post-"Yellow Snow" obsession with ultra-hooky novelty songs and potty humor, but it exposed him to his biggest and broadest audience ever — and it enabled him to afford orchestras for his more serious work. But for fans of Zappa's smuttiest material, Sheik Yerbouti is Frank at his bawdy best. The notorious album received many dubious honors: disco send-up "Dancin' Fool" was Zappa's first Grammy nomination and a Dr. Demento... staple, synthy S&M snark-fest "Bobby Brown Goes Down" rankled American gay rights groups and became a Norwegian chart-topper and his most controversial track ever, the unrelentingly offensive (not to mention catchy-as-hell) "Jewish Princess," garnered an FCC protest from the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith. Cash-in from misunderstood artiste or daring experiment from First Amendment champion, Sheik's dumbed-down hooks are still some of Zappa's most addictive.

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  Make A Jazz Noise Here

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  One of three double albums chronicling Zappa's final tour, Make A Jazz Noise Here focuses solely on the most challenging rock compositions in the Zappa catalogue, making it the essential listen for chops-geeks engrossed by his band's technical prowess. Nailing every twist and turn of Zappa's shape-shifting syncopation, his 11-piece band sounds like they are linked by extra-sensory projection, attacking Zappa classics like "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" at dizzying speeds... and craftily working their way through labyrinthine pieces like "King Kong" — throwing in snatches of Stravinsky, Bartók, "The 1812 Overture" and Synclavier noise along the way.

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  The Yellow Shark

  Frank Zappa

  2012 | Zappa Records

  Frank Zappa focused most of his final years on art music, working with Pierre Boulez's Ensemble InterContemporain, composing dozens of works for Synclavier and releasing The Yellow Shark, his work with German classical group the Ensemble Modern and, ultimately, his final album. An ideal entry point into Zappa's classical works, Shark pits Zappa classics (Uncle Meat's title track and "Pound for a Brown") against his modern compositional stylings, running the gamut from... chunky repeating patterns like those of Rite Of Spring (or, say, rock music) to exhilaratingly formless note runs to wild sound effects. After years of complaining about shiftless orchestra union members being unable to devote the proper time and energy to his work, Zappa's string-torturing sonatas finally got the treatment they deserved.

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The Boy King

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  Singin' the Blues + More B.B. King (Bonus Track Version)

  B.B. King

  2012 | Soul Jam Records / The Orchard

  This is essentially B.B. King's first album, released five years after his first hit single, minus one song and plus 14 more. It is jam-packed with early hits, from the slow and anguished "3 O'Clock in the Morning," with its kinetic interplay between King's voice and guitar, to the nervous energy of "Every Day I Have the Blues," from the gleeful explicitness of "You Upset Me Baby" and "Sweet Little Angel" to... the uncertainty and insecurity of "Please Love Me" and "Did You Ever Love a Woman." In his earliest days, B was arguably more a singer than a guitarist. His use of gospel-style melisma (singing the same syllable over several notes) was unforced on even these early records, while his voice was naturally sonorous; his vocal style and sound was his own. But his guitar work was still very much under the sway of T-Bone Walker, even if a bit fuller sounding, the better to boogie Memphis-style. More than anything, it's his persona that sets King apart from the era's blues peers; ultimately, he has little of their swagger, but responds to life's pains and pleasures with a realistic kind of vulnerability.

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  King of the Blues + My Kind of Blues (Bonus Track Version)

  B.B. King

  2011 | Soul Jam Records / The Orchard

  This compilation collects two of B.B. King's early LPs (plus some bonus tracks). He has said that My Kind of Blues (tracks 11-20 here) is his favorite of his albums, and it's easy to see why. Backed only by bass, drums and piano, he cut it in one session, and it represents the unembellished B.B. King — spare, clean and to the point. It has both the sound and feel of a... relaxed, live set. "You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now" opens with his bristling guitar and then gives him extra room to stretch out on his solo; "It's My Own Fault, Baby" is a stirring vocal showcase. King of the Blues is a more arranged affair, and perhaps also a tad more upbeat than much of his early output. He's still working towards his jazzy, "classic" guitar style of fluid, immaculate bent notes and the like — the tone and attack here are harder and fuller — but he's definitely getting there. None of the hits featured — "I've Got a Right to Love My Baby," "Partin' Time," "Walkin' Dr. Bill" — are among his signature songs, but they're far from being throwaways, too. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more well-rounded collection of early King.

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  Heart And Soul

  B.B. King

  2006 | POINTBLANK

  Unlike some bluesmen, B.B. King always understood and embraced show biz, and for all the grit he could bring to a song he also had — and has — a fair amount of crooner in him. That's the whole point of this album, and despite the surprise of hearing him make like a late-night, West Coast balladeer, he pulls it off with panache. He can swing ("Don't Get Around Much Anymore"), he... can sigh ("I'll Survive") and he can swoon ("I Love You So"). The band is superb, the horn players full of empathy. The piano man gets more of the spotlight than B's guitar, but that's okay too; the guy can really drive a sentiment home. The strings rarely get in the way — yes, B.B. sang with strings way before "The Thrill Is Gone" — though the backup singers are hit and miss. If you have any taste for blues balladeers like Charles Brown, give this a try — it's not for everyone, but until you've immersed yourself in this side of King you don't really know the man and his music.

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  Do The Boogie! B.B. King's Early 50s Classics

  B.B. King

  2003 | POINTBLANK
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  BB King Blues Boy

  B.B. King

  2008 | Marathon Music International / Second Wind
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  My Roots

  B.B. King

  Unique Jazz / The Orchard
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  My Sweet Angel

  B.B. King

  2006 | POINTBLANK
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  B.B. King Rarities

  B.B. King

  Jazz Co / The Orchard
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  The Best Of B.B. King

  B.B. King

  1991 | POINTBLANK

King of the Blues

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  Spotlight On Lucille

  B.B. King

  1992 | POINTBLANK

  Perhaps this compilation of early-'60s instrumentals falls into the "not for everyone" category, but few albums achieve their desired effect the way this one does. B.B. King's guitar style combines the country blues techniques he learned from his cousin Bukka White with the swinging jazz of Django Reinhardt and the single-string electric soloing of Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker. You can hear that singular fusion coming into its own here; nearly everything... he's done with his ax since the early to mid '60s has been a refinement and polishing, like continuing to sharpen an arrow until it has the point of pin while retaining its original deadly force. Backed by a blasting horn section that gives a jazz overlay to the music, he hasn't quite perfected his approach on every track yet. But from the guitar precision of the first four cuts to the relentless swing of "Powerhouse" to the wild abandon of "Just Like a Woman," it's difficult to listen and not instantly recognize the signature B.B. King sound.

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  Back In The Alley

  B.B. King

  2007 | Geffen

  A slapped-together compilation of live and studio recordings that put a '60s spin on even the '50s material, this is short (just over 42 minutes) but satisfying. For starters, if you were to limit yourself to just one King track that definitively laid out the fully-developed range of his guitar playing, from the raunchy to the refined, you'd be crazy not to take "Lucille," a good-natured love song to his instrument. ... "Don't Answer the Door" and "Paying the Cost to Be the Boss" are B.B. at his most defiant and paranoid, the former slow and spare, the latter jumpy and full; "I'm Gonna Do What They Do to Me" adds an exclamation point to both. All of these tracks are beautifully arranged, with each one boasting an exciting big band sound that still leaves the spotlight on B's expansive voice and razor-sharp guitar.

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  Live At The Regal

  B.B. King

  1997 | Geffen

  Long celebrated as the ultimate live urban blues album, this 1964 set captures a master musician and showman at his peak. B.B. King paces his set magnificently, opening with "Every Day I Have the Blues" in high gear and then slowing things down and building to climax after climax, the band behind him turning on a dime; by the mid-set "Please Love Me" his roaring vocals and the steamrolling band are an... unstoppable juggernaut, and even when they rush the tempos, it's impossible not to get caught up in the frenzy. By this point, King had honed his guitar work so finely that each note is like a sharp diamond with a bit of a rough edge; the sustained notes shimmer with rare beauty. The feeling is intimate and conversational throughout; "this is the part I like," he confides as he enters a new verse of "It's My Own Fault." The simpatico between artist and audience, the way they feed off each other, is astonishing; from beginning to end, this is the blues as you never hear them anymore.

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  Great Moments With B.B. King

  B.B. King

  1987 | Geffen
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  Blues Is King

  B.B. King

  2002 | MCA Special Products
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  Live And Well

  B.B. King

  1987 | Geffen
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  Why I Sing The Blues

  B.B. King

  2007 | Geffen
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  His Best: The Electric B.B. King

  B.B. King

  1998 | Geffen
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  Blues On Top Of Blues

  B.B. King

  2012 | Geffen

Blues Crossover King

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  Live In Cook County Jail

  B.B. King

  1998 | Geffen

  More than a few artists cut live albums behind bars in the wake of Johnny Cash's galvanizing Folsom Prison triumph, but none came closer than B.B. did to approaching Cash's impact. If King's band for the Regal performance simply plowed through the audience, this lean-sounding crew is more like a hot knife effortlessly cutting through butter. The set features some of King's most expressive and diverse guitar work, especially when he stretches... out on the likes of "How Blue Can You Get" (where he injects a little horror into humor without undermining the lyrics) and "Worry, Worry." "Please Accept My Love" has a sexy, Gulf Coast flavor absent from studio versions. But this take on "The Thrill Is Gone" is the capper; he's not just sad or angry or disillusioned, he's contemplating the complexity of the matter and trying to figure out what it all means. This also has more '50s material than most of his live albums, as if being inside the prison walls has inspired him to philosophically look back in wonder. All this, plus you get to hear the inmates boo the warden when he's introduced.

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  Live / Fillmore East - New York, NY June 19, 1971

  B.B. King

  2009 | Geffen
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  Indianola Mississippi Seeds

  B.B. King

  2005 | MCA Special Products
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  Blues On The Bayou

  B.B. King

  1998 | Geffen
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  Completely Well

  B.B. King

  1998 | Geffen
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  One Kind Favor

  B.B. King

  2008 | Geffen

The King and His Court

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  Blues Summit

  B.B. King

  1993 | Geffen

  The collaborative album is another concept that seems to work best when tackled by a real veteran like King. How else to explain the devastating melancholy between B's guitar and Etta James's voice on "There Is Something on Your Mind," or the barroom jousting between King and swamp queen Katie Webster on "Since I Met You Baby," or how delightful Ruth Brown's sassiness is on "You're the Boss"? King and Albert Collins... try to burn each other down on "Call It Stormy Monday" and succeed mainly in bringing out the best in one another. The whole album is like that, whether King's teaching a lesson to relative newcomers like Robert Cray and Joe Louis Walker or digging down to the roots with old masters like John Lee Hooker. Credit producer Denny Diante (an unlikely choice) for preserving the chemistry by not forcing marquee-name rockers on B.B. The star performs with more authority than he showed at any other time in the last 20 years.

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  Riding With The King

  Eric Clapton/B.B. King

  2000 | Reprise
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  Together For The First Time...Live

  B.B. King

  1986 | Geffen

King of Kings

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  King Of The Blues

  B.B. King

  1992 | Geffen

  It's so easy to take an artist like B.B. King for granted, especially this late in his career, when his timing, dexterity and vocal chops aren't what they used to be. Most box sets confuse "best of" with "greatest hits," but of the multi-disk packages available, this one is the best, even though it's still vulnerable to criticism. Older listeners would doubtless like even more tracks from his RPM/Kent years, for example,... and fewer from the '80s. But then, this box does include a healthy sampling from the '50s and early '60s that, at the time of this release had never appeared anywhere before (though many have since been issued elsewhere). In all, there are some 30 tracks here that were new at the time — a handful still appear nowhere else — and there's still room for the hits and assorted other gems. Arranged chronologically from 1949-91, they document an astonishing career — one that never stopped evolving even as it stayed within strictly-defined parameters. That's the thing about King that can't be over-emphasized: His singular style was there in embryonic form from the beginning, and was fully realized within a few years of his first hit. He's dedicated the rest of his life to exploring every possible nuance, no matter how subtle, of that style. In doing so, he's leaving behind an unmatched — and instantly identifiable — body of work.

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  Complete Collection

  B.B. King

  2008 | Geffen
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  Gold

  B.B. King

  2006 | Geffen

In Chronological Order

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  Fleetwood Mac

  Fleetwood Mac

  2004 | Blue Horizon Records

  Although they were nearly a decade away from their American commercial breakthrough, Fleetwood Mac were, in the late '60s, an overnight UK success. They had a pedigree: Guitarist Peter Green, bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood were all veterans of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, a London hardcore blues band akin to the Rolling Stones before Mick and Keith wrote hits. With the addition of slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, who also... traded vocals with Green, the foursome became Fleetwood Mac. Unlike Eric Clapton, whom Green had replaced in the Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac initially resisted the temptation to psychedelicize: Their two 1968 albums are thoroughly traditional blues, and have little in common with the studio-finessed pop-rock for which they'd become famous.
  
  These records are so traditional that four Mr. Wonderful cuts — a cover of the Elmore James/Robert Johnson standard "Dust My Broom," "Doctor Brown," "Need Your Love Tonight" and "Coming Home" — begin with the same James riff, and are more or less the same song. The notable addition to this second album is that Christine Perfect played piano on the songs Green led; she soon married McVie, and after Green left, officially joined the band. Years later, her smooth, mellow style formed a template for the band's more familiar future.

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  Blues Jam In Chicago - Volume 1

  Fleetwood Mac

  2004 | Blue Horizon Records

  Many things changed for Fleetwood Mac right before and after the early 1969 sessions that created these albums, split into two volumes. Because slide guitarist Jeremy Spence didn't want to participate in tracks written and/or sung by guitarist Peter Green, the latter drafted 18-year-old guitarist Danny Kirwan, and the band decamped to Chess Records' Ter-Mar Studio for what would be their last purely bluesy blast. Joined by such famed Chicago players... as pianist Otis Spann, guitarist Buddy Guy, harmonica player Big Walter Horton, and songwriter Willie Dixon on acoustic bass, the augmented quintet play hard and loose on blues oldies and songs of their own that are so influenced by their masters that the distinctions are nearly as minimal as the differences between the multiple takes included here. Then "Albatross," a nearly ambient instrumental recorded just before this session, topped the charts back home. Green dropped lots of acid, freaked out, and aimed to give all of the band's money to charity before he quit. Soon after, Spencer fled for the notorious Children of God cult. Now married to John McVie, Christine McVie contributed to more Mac albums and became a fully-fledged member around the same time American singer-guitarist Bob Welch joined in 1971. Kirwan left the next year, finalizing Fleetwood Mac's transition from blues purists to transatlantic FM-rock space cadets.

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  Fleetwood Mac

  Fleetwood Mac

  1977 | Warner Bros.

  From the late '60s to the mid '70s, Fleetwood Mac changed members so many times that nearly every album features different musicians. So it wasn't that much of a switch when in 1975 this album featured two singer-songwriters based in Mac's adopted Los Angeles, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The difference, though, was profound: Now there were pristine harmonies, a consistent emphasis on voices and rhythm, far tighter arrangements, cleaner production and,... most surprisingly, a newly interactive band dynamic that complemented disparate writing and singing styles. This lineup meshed like crazy; old-timers Mick Fleetwood and John McVie now played telepathically, keyboardist/singer Christine McVie wrote and sang far more pointedly, and the newbies each had a presence far more individual than any of their accomplished predecessors: Almost overnight, Fleetwood Mac morphed from troupers to superstars.
  
  Hitting that sweet spot between AM catchiness and FM creativity, the new Mac began generating classic singles that defined their era: "Over My Head," "Rhiannon" and "Say You Love Me" pushed this album to the top of Billboard's chart more than a year after its release. More importantly, Fleetwood Mac gels as a coherent statement; its sequencing accentuates the band's varying attributes by playing up its contrasts: Buckingham's galloping "Monday Morning" announces a rocking new beginning, then McVie's "Warm Ways" maintains Mac's post-blues mellow center. Her jaunty piano is front and center in "Sugar Daddy," then Buckingham's haunted, multi-tracked guitars take over on the culminating "I'm So Afraid." Throughout, the band achieves a rare balance of feminine and masculine attributes. Fleetwood Mac now personified the liberation of '70s-style gender equality, one that would heat up even hotter on Rumours.

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  Rumours

  Fleetwood Mac

  2013 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

  Everything enticing about 1975's Fleetwood Mac, all the contrasts and connections, are jacked to the hilt on Rumours. The unexpected triumph of the new lineup, and the heavy toll demanded by constant touring and recording meant that both of the band's long-term couples – Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, as well as John and Christine McVie – split up. Mick Fleetwood was also divorcing his wife, and would soon have an affair... with Nicks. Drug and alcohol excess enabled by newfound fame also exploded within the group. Yet Buckingham's pursuit of musical and audio perfection, and Fleetwood's managerial ability to keep the usual business wolves at bay helped cohere the quintet into creating a cross-biographical masterpiece.
  
  Every song here is about the songwriter's relationship to other band members, or to newfound fame and its consequences. And because there are three authorial perspectives, each fluctuating between hope and despair, the result is like Rashoman, the classic samurai film where the same story is told multiple times, but with the added wrinkle that each member is participating in and playing/singing on the others' narratives.
  
  The myth of this album is such that many who know it now understand its real-life roots, but back in 1977 Rumours was primarily celebrated for being chock full of incredibly relatable, compulsively catchy songs that fleshed out universal emotions with intimate details. Epitomizing late '70s West Coast pop-rock, it hit when slick disco producers and similarly lavish art-rockers alike pursued sonic perfectionism at the end of the analogue age. Avoiding the excesses of both camps, its core is so immaculately clean that when Buckingham's guitars swarm and rage at the end "Go Your Own Way," the progression from calm to chaotic truly seems violent.
  
  Rumours made Nicks a superstar, one who eventually fell prey to the trappings of her own success, but she's thoroughly on-point here; her songs, particularly "Dreams," are the smartest on an album hammered together via the hard knocks of experience. "When the rain washes you clean, you'll know," she sings deceptively sweetly. "You will know." Fleetwood Mac here knew.

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  Tusk

  Fleetwood Mac

  1979 | Warner Bros.

  Whereas '77's Rumours captured the reconfigured Buckingham/Nicks-era band cohering even tighter while personally unraveling, '79's Tusk defined the quintet's discordance in musical terms. Christine McVie's opening "Over & Over" couldn't be more serene, but Lindsey Buckingham's demo-quality "The Ledge" is rattled and rough, the sound of chart-topping smoothies thwarting expectations by embracing a New Wave eager to dethrone them. Featuring 20 songs across two vinyl discs, Tusk was created much like the... Beatles' similarly eclectic yet often raw White Album – in fragmented combinations of players overseen by largely autonomous songwriters who independently pursued widely divergent ends. It famously cost a million dollars, which made it the most expensive album of the '70s, and so it still represented the old guard at a time when upstarts like Elvis Costello, Talking Heads and the Clash were hitting their confrontational and far more economical stride. Heard, today, though, it still sounds like a radical, willfully anti-categorical album. Mick Fleetwood thinks it's his band's best. It's certainly their most diverse.
  
  Listen to his exuberant drumming on "What Make You Think You're the One" – there's nary a predictable beat. Stevie Nicks's "Sisters of the Moon" pushes the singer's spacey remoteness as far as it'll go until Buckingham finishes with one of his most extreme solos ever; he may be a quintessential studio rat, but here he wails on his instrument with an intensity that rivals rock's most lauded guitarists. The arrangements are typically more concise than what this lineup achieves elsewhere, and not just on the Buckingham-led cuts; McVie's "Honey Hi" and Nicks's "Beautiful Child" take a semi-acoustic approach that's as musically naked as Rumours was lyrically intimate, one that points in the direction of what would decades later be known as "unplugged." But still there's "Sara," as lush as most everything else is lean, and the tooting title track, one of the most singular songs ever to crash the U.S. Top 10. Like Peter Gabriel, Buckingham absorbed the freedom of New Wave without pillaging its sounds: The total absence of click-y, clack-y Cars guitars – which some old-timers of the era embraced in a half-hearted attempt to be hip – helps Tusk stand the test of time. So does the fact that what's here is so fearless.

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  Bella Donna

  Stevie Nicks

  2005 | Rhino Atlantic

  Blatantly commercial, glossy, and booming, Stevie Nicks's 1981 solo debut was everything Tusk was not. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, the Eagles' Don Henley and Don Felder, Roy Bittan of the E-Street Band, Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker T. & the M.G.'s, top session guitarist Waddy Wachtel, and future Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine are among the rock royalty employed on a record diametrically opposed to then-cresting New Wave; where there would... ordinarily be one or two guitars, there's seemingly a half a dozen. The opulence is almost operatic; recalling Bob Ezrin's work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed, Iovine's production offers the femme-fronted leather and lace answer to glam rock's sequins and glitter, one that would no doubt inspire Hedwig & the Angry Inch. Although Iovine, then her paramour, lacks Buckingham's thorough synergy with Nicks, this nevertheless remains her most consistent solo album; the ornate title track, the rumbling "Edge of Seventeen," and Petty's pained "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" are nearly as flattering as her Mac best.

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  Law And Order

  Lindsey Buckingham

  1983 | Reprise

  1981's Law and Order is truly a solo album: Lindsey Buckingham plays and sings nearly every part on it. The production is meticulously super-tweaked: Every guitar and vocal overdub glistens as though it was recorded with the best of microphones in rooms with impeccable acoustics; there are times when everything is so bright and shiny that the effect is Disney surreal, as if Buckingham and his Mac studio collaborator Richard Dashut had... sped up the tapes or at least sprinkled them with pixie dust. The fluidity of his guitar runs in "Trouble" is amazing, but it's part of a bigger, twinkly picture full of tinkling triangles, cracking castanets, and cooing background cries. This song and most others here revisit the innocence of late-'50s/early-'60s pop, but the ultra-vividness of Buckingham's technique estranges his output from his models, just as lounge lizards like Les Baxter distilled bachelor pad exotica from world music.

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  Mirage

  Fleetwood Mac

  1982 | Reprise

  1982's Mirage is as much a response to the inevitable drop-off in sales for 1979's Tusk as the daredevil art of that album was a reaction to Rumours' astronomical success. It continues in the Brill Building vein of Lindsey Buckingham's then-recent solo disc Law and Order; his "Oh Diane" could've begun as an outtake from that album, and even Stevie Nicks's "That's Alright" sports a retro country vibe. But beyond the hits... "Hold Me" and "Gypsy," the songwriting isn't as impactful as Mac's mid-to-late '70s output, and the arrangements are similarly restrained. Ordinarily far more driving than the soft-rock norm, the John McVie/Mick Fleetwood rhythm section here dials down the band's R&B foundation – the one constant in its many permutations – on several tracks. Fortunately it's still there in Nicks's "Straight Back" and in Buckingham's "Eyes of the World," and it helps the lesser material gain traction. "Empire State" is a welcome Tusk throwback and a continuing New Wave acknowledgement. But elsewhere there's the strong suggestion that Buckingham is withholding both his studio magic and his ability to twist West Coast adult pop conventions into something intrinsic to this unusual band's idiosyncratic chemistry. Mirage's best still works, but the rest is lighter and more ordinary.

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  The Wild Heart

  Stevie Nicks

  1983 | Rhino Atlantic

  Following Fleetwood Mac's 1982 Mirage and brief U.S.-only tour to promote it, the band went on hiatus, and this was its first fruit. Whereas Stevie Nicks's 1981 solo debut surrounds the singer in dense rock, her 1983 follow-up balances the guitars with keyboards, more propulsive drums, and a welcome feminine touch. The lineup is the largely the same; even Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers drop by again for a second duet, "I... Will Run to You," but the addition of new collaborator Sandy Stewart, who sings, plays keys and co-writes a couple of tracks, helps contemporize the star. Nicks gives her strongest performances where the melodies require the least embellishment, like on the Stewart co-written "Nightbird." Several tracks, particularly the opening "Wild Heart" and "Beauty and the Beast," give her too much room to pile on the raspy vibrato that's just beginning to generate self-parody. But then there's "Stand Back," a synth-led dance track inspired by Prince's "Little Red Corvette," one that fires on every cylinder and features Prince himself. It's so powerful and so far away from Nicks's SoCal comfort zone that she'd never recapture its magic.

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  Christine McVie

  Christine McVie

  1996 | Warner Bros.

  Having written and sung many of Fleetwood Mac's smashes, including "Over My Head," "Say That You Love Me," "Don't Stop," "You Make Loving Fun" and "Hold Me," Christine McVie could do this kind of thing in her sleep, and that's essentially what the keyboardist does here. Although it made Billboard's Top 30 album chart and produced a Top 10 single, McVie's 1984 solo album – the only one recorded while she was... a full-fledged Mac-er – has faded from both popular and critical consciousness for good reason. She teams with Average White Band drummer Steve Ferrone, former Hall & Oates guitarist Todd Sharp, Kenny Loggins bassist George Hawkins, and famous friends like Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Winwood, and Eric Clapton to merge the Mac's pop-rock with boilerplate '80s MTV clatter; check those pseudo-Police riffs in "Keeping Secrets." There are ample chops, but little swing and even less intimacy; stiff drums, brittle guitars, and harsh sonics abound. Most tempos are sprightly, but at no point does anyone seem to break a sweat: McVie strikes her hit-making marks so easily and so squarely that the abundant hooks, even on the actual hit, "Got a Hold on Me," rarely grab.

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  Go Insane

  Lindsey Buckingham

  1984 | Reprise

  Whereas 1981's Law and Order often evoked rock's pre-Beatles past, this 1984 disc was distinctly of the moment: Featuring such quintessential '80s toys as the LinnDrum and the Fairlight CMI, Lindsey Buckingham's second solo album shares more in common with New Wave Brits than any earlier record by his band. His guitars evoke the choppy buzz of the Psychedelic Furs, while his keyboards echo Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark; "Bang the Drum"... blatantly apes their "Souvenir," and he samples himself throughout. That's pretty radical for a L.A singer-songwriter of his vintage.
  
  Although his musical style may sometimes be second hand, the material that Buckingham draws from lyrically is not: At the time of its release, he revealed that the first eight songs deal with the breakup of a relationship that began at the height of Mac's popularity, and the final one, "D.W. Suite," celebrates the Beach Boys' late Dennis Wilson, the former lover of his bandmate Christine McVie. Both Buckingham's ex and Wilson struggled with addiction; in "I Must Go," he goes so far as to sing, "Hey little girl, leave the little drug alone." Although the singer's own substance abuse is well-documented elsewhere, he doesn't cop to that here; for such personal subject matter, the singer remains fairly remote throughout. But the sharply laconic title track, which Of Montreal has deftly covered in concert, yields a blueprint for the dark yet snappy pop of Fleetwood Mac's final commercial and artistic triumph, 1987's Tango in the Night.

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  Tango In The Night

  Fleetwood Mac

  1987 | Warner Bros.

  What began as Lindsey Buckingham's third solo disc morphed into one of Fleetwood Mac's biggest and best albums because the guitarist wasn't happy with the idea that 1982's Mirage, an effort he considered substandard, might otherwise be their last. Like that record, this 1987 smash is blatantly commercial: It spawned four Top 20 singles in the U.S. and went triple-platinum; in the UK, it was the seventh-best-selling album of the '80s. But... unlike Mirage, it doesn't feel like a compromise: Buckingham, Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie all contribute forceful material and performances, and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood's rhythmic interplay may be at its all-time tightest: The pounding opening cut, Buckingham's "Big Love," rightly remains a club favorite. Despite whatever discord that might've taken place behind the scenes (Buckingham exited shortly before the Tango tour), Mac's chemistry is once again palpable.
  
  Nowhere is that synchronicity more compelling – and more telling – than on what became the band's final American smash, McVie's "Little Lies." All three songwriters contribute their own distinctive vocal styles, and still manage to harmonize as one. Yet the song describes how a lover would rather be deceived than hurt by the truth, which might as well be a mantra for the band: Both it and the rest of this distinctly nocturnal Tango is full of tingly pop touches offset by chords that are just slightly discordant, sounds both meticulously gentle and subtly unsettling. Like the synth line that snakes through "Little Lies," there's something beautifully off about the whole album, a haunting quality that not only complements the soft rock on display but also threatens to dislodge it completely.

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  Behind The Mask

  Fleetwood Mac

  1990 | Warner Bros.

  The only Fleetwood Mac album to feature Stevie Nicks without Lindsey Buckingham, 1990's Behind the Mask, starts with unreasonable optimism, and goes downhill from there. Christine McVie singing "The sky is the limit now/ We could hit it on the nail" in the absence of the member most responsible for their studio magic is patently delusional, even if opening track "Skies the Limit" provides one of two musical highlights. Rolling Stone's claim... that "the addition of Rick Vito and Billy Burnette is the best thing to ever happen to Fleetwood Mac" is similarly absurd. Guitarists Vito (a Bob Seger sideman) and Burnette (a country singer-songwriter) steer the Mac into unflattering heartland rock territory: The feisty pop of "Save Me" – the other worthy cut written by McVie and her then-husband, "Little Lies" co-author Eddy Quintela – is undercut by a double dose of Vito's wank-y soloing. The rest is also highly polished, but far less memorable, a combo that yields an even worse outcome on the band's next album, 1995's Time.

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  Time

  Fleetwood Mac

  1995 | Warner Bros.

  Capturing yet another short-lived phase in this ever-changing ensemble, 1995's Time is notable for the absence of both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. In their place is ex-Traffic guitarist Dave Mason, a solo star during the '70s, and singer Bekka Bramlett, daughter of rock duo Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. Mac producer extraordinaire Richard Dashut returns, but with little effect: Time lacks the fleeting highlights of 1990's Behind the Mask. Even Christine McVie... falters in the songwriting department, and most everyone performs like dispassionate session players, not a coherent band. Despite Fleetwood Mac's longtime reputation as a reliable brand, Time thoroughly – and justifiably – flopped.

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Early Years/New Brutality

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  Circus Mort

  Circus Mort

  EP/SINGLE

  After discovering punk rock in Los Angeles, Michael Gira played briefly in a local band, the Little Cripples, before moving to New York and teaming up with his friend Rick Oller to form Metal Envelope, which became Circus Mort. With Gira singing and Oller playing guitar, the band was rounded out by the brothers Dan and Josh Braun, later of the Del Byzanteens, on bass and keyboards; future Swans drummer Jonathan Kane... joined before they recorded their lone release, a 12-inch EP released in 1982. It sounds nothing like Swans, with echoes of surf rock, milky organs, period flange effects and a herky-jerky sense of groove indebted to the Contortions and Wire – the very epitome of the era's "angular," Cubist guitar rock. (Here Kane proves himself a remarkably dexterous drummer, far more fleet of wrist than on any of Swans' turbulent early recordings.) Gira's lyrical preoccupations already gravitate towards chants and sneering imperative commands ("Curse you, curse you, curse you"), but his delivery, alternating between shouts and whispers, is far more conventional for the time. The band was "not a very consequential enterprise," Gira admitted in a 2010 interview. "We made an EP. It was kinda new wave or something. In any case, it wasn't very good."

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• 

  Filth / Body To Body, Job To Job

  Swans

  Young God Records / Revolver

  Swans came out of the same Lower East Side cauldron that birthed No Wave, but the band's negativism was more complicated. In place of No Wave's arty abstraction and arch intellectualism, Swans favored brute physicality and visceral, blood-and-guts essence: pounding repetition, savage tunelessness, feedback bubbling like lava, or bile. As Michael Gira told the East Village Eye in 1983, "The best rock 'n' roll for me is like a big enema…Our music... should be as physical and unavoidable as possible…I like anything that seems to nullify the sense of being…or nullify consciousness."
  
  To that end, lyrics that might have come off as sloganeering in the hands of another singer became more like mantras, turning power dynamics into something sublime, a kind of transubstantiation in violence. Gira's lyrics flipped seamlessly between abuser and abused, master and slave – "Big strong boss/ Break my back/ Blood runs black/ Cut my throat/ Kill me snake/ Do what I say/ You're the boss" – while Harry Crosby's bass bulged like the neck veins on the cop who's about to beat you with his nightstick, and Norman Westberg's guitar and Roli Mosimann's drums exploded with the force of a migraine.
  
  But the band's multifarious refusal also extended to the formalist Puritanism of American hardcore, with its distrust of any kind of artifice; subtle tape effects accentuated the alien qualities of the band's profoundly un-musical sound. And where hardcore bent double into the wind, Swans slowed down, showing that a dirge-like stomp could be even more powerful than hardcore's breakneck pace – stranger, uglier, even more messed up.
  
  Released in 2000, this double-CD edition combines the band's debut LP, 1983's Filth, with 1991's Body to Body, Job to Job, "a collection of 16-track recordings, previously unavailable 24 track studio recordings, live cassette recordings, and sound loops from the years 1982-1985"; it's rounded out with 24 minutes of a live performance from the Kitchen. Taken together, it's the locus horribilis of the entire Swans project.

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• 

  Cop/Young God, Greed/Holy Money (1984-1985/6)

  Swans

  Some Bizzare

  It's hard to believe, but 1984's Cop and Young God are even uglier than Filth-era Swans. Norman Westberg's riffs had become more atonal, gesturing only glancingly at conventional key signatures – for a totally anachronistic comparison, imagine DJ Screw remixing Greg Ginn's guitar solos – and with slow glissandi drooping like dying flowers on the vine. "Half Life" boasts the same pitched-down low end and bracing squeals of feedback that New Orleans's... Eyehategod would popularize as "sludge metal" nearly a decade later – and yet, incredibly, Eyehategod sound positively quick-stepping when compared to Swans' dying-elephant gait. And Michael Gira, rising (or perhaps descending) to the music's orgasmic nihilism, lets loose with even more blood-curdling growls and roars, luxuriating in debasement with songs like "Your Property": "I give you money/ You're superior/ I don't exist/ You control me/ You're corrupt/ You deform me/ You own me/ You own me."
  
  But Young God also finds the band experimenting with a newfound sense of space, with ringing, wide-open guitars blasting through the walls of Cop's dank, claustrophobic torture chamber and paving the way for the totally unexpected shift that would follow with 1986's Greed and Holy Money. (This 1999 compendium includes all four records along with selected songs from the related singles "Time Is Money (Bastard)" and "A Screw.") On the drum-free "Fool," Gira wraps himself in opulent piano like some kind of Mars in furs; "Money Is Flesh" and "A Screw" adopt the mechanical rhythms and synthesizers of European industrial music, while "Nobody" mirrors liturgically-inspired chants with what sounds like a harmonica's low wail – an early intimation of what Gira will later develop as his own brand of Southern gothic.
  
  Jarboe, a Swans super-fan who moved to New York with the sole purpose of getting close to the group, had joined the band by this point, and she prostates herself on songs like "You Need Me" ("I'm sorry/ I'm sorry/ I won't do it again/ I'm sorry/ I'm sorry/ I love you more than myself"). Her vulnerable presence is the first sign of a softening Swans: Not so much singing as sighing, she taps a previously unexplored vein of tenderness that would soon explode across Children of God and the almost maudlin The Burning World, with its Mapplethorpe photo of a calla lily on the cover.
  
  Before that transition was complete, however, Swans would record one of the most terrifyingly beautiful songs in their entire career: "A Hanging," from Holy Money. The rhythm section beats out a turgid, tribal rhythm that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex, with the bass and guitar ringing like church bells; Jarboe's multi-tracked voice rises in a pained devotional chant, and Gira addresses himself directly to his creator, promising, "Dear God in heaven, I'll hang for you," proving as skillful a chronicler of hell on earth as Hieronymus Bosch.

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Faith, Failure, Redemption, Finality

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  Children of God/World of Skin

  Swans

  2003 | Young God / Revolver

  Up until 1987, the last place in the world you might have expected to hear an acoustic guitar was on a Swans album. But with Children of God, the band augmented its brute physicality with a "New Mind," as the opening track put it, and a new palette to match. ("I will be there/ With my eyes wide open/ I will be there/ I will be ready/ To receive/ The new mind.")... From the cover alone, with its puce-and-fuchsia color scheme, its swirls and crosses, you could guess that Swans had entered a new phase, and the album's first three tracks made that abundantly clear. "New Mind" sounded more or less like the Swans of yore — more cleanly produced, perhaps, but still displaying the same doomy riffs, the same war-dance drums, the same call-and-response vocals — but the "In My Garden" came from a different universe entirely, with a high-necked bass melody inspired by Joy Division, limpid pianos reminiscent of Harold Budd, and a wraithlike Jarboe intoning, "In my garden/ We'll never die." "Our Love Lies" completed their transmutation with strummed acoustic guitars and tambourine and Michael Gira not just growling but singing, his baritone sinking to the lower limit of his register like a body weighted by stones. The rest of the album alternates between slow-motion head-bangers, like "Our Love Lies" and "Like a Drug," and deathly folk songs judiciously touched up with synthesizers and effects, like "Blood and Honey" and "You're Not Real, Girl." On the hypnotic title song, Jarboe's ecstatic mantra ("We are children/ Children of God") swirls above see-sawing guitars and stark, metallic drum beats; there's little doubt that, whatever their previously nihilistic outlook, Swans finally see the light of redemption, however fleetingly.
  
  A few months before Children of God, Gira and Jarboe explored even more gentle textures on a pair of albums recorded under the name of Skin. Jarboe's voice carried Blood, Women, Roses, while Gira assumed center stage on Shame, Humility, Revenge, but both albums shared the same downy textures, forsaking Swans' usual sturm und drang in favor of strings, acoustic guitars, hushed synthesizers, and echoing electronic drums — a mixture that could almost have been mistaken for This Mortal Coil. Both records were repackaged in 1988 as the double LP, The World of Skin, and 14 songs were selected for 1997's Children of God / World of Skin reissue.

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• 

  Various Failures: 1988-1992

  Swans

  Young God Records / Revolver

  The period covered by 1999's Various Failures: 1988-1992 is a curious one in Swans' history. On the one hand, not only was Michael Gira preoccupied with failure as a lyrical theme, but it also seemed to dog the band's efforts to realize the expansive vision first articulated on Children of God. For the first and only time, Swans signed to a major label for 1992's The Burning World, produced by Bill Laswell... – a haunting, heavily acoustic album notable, in particular, for the unremittingly bleak "God Damn the Sun" and a shockingly pretty cover, fronted by Jarboe, of Steve Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home." But the record sold poorly, and the band was soon dropped; the experience soured Gira on the entire endeavor. "That record makes me cringe," he told an interviewer in 1995; "Often, I wish I'd never made it."
  
  The next few years were beset with problems with their subsequent labels, Rough Trade and Sky Records; nevertheless, Swans seemed incredibly energized in this period, recording a pair of back-to-back albums – 1991's White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and 1992's Love of Life – that channeled the band's assaultive force and full-spectrum dynamics into an overwhelming wall of sound that fused acoustic and electric, tenderness and violence, agony and ecstasy. In 1990, Gira and Jarboe also revisited their Skin project (now called the World of Skin) with Ten Songs or Another World, a more stripped-down and acoustic approach to similar ideas; of particular note is a haunting cover of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog."
  
  For 1999's Various Failures, Gira cherry-picked the best of all four records and their attendant singles. The double-disc collection may not do justice to the four albums, all of which are stronger than Gira seems to remember – particularly White Light and Love of Life, which fused feathery acoustic and electric guitars, bells, thunderbolt drums, Jarboe's angelic vocals and Gira's soul-scouring scowl into a sound that feels like the sky being ripped open by serrated rainbows.

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  The Great Annihilator

  Swans

  Young God Records / Revolver

  After White Light and Love of Life, Swans had found their groove, and The Great Annihilator, their ninth studio album, promises more of the same – only grander, more sumptuous, more enthralling. You have to marvel over the fact that a band this intense, with its share of label difficulties, could turn out nine albums (not counting EPs and side projects) in a dozen years – and could keep subtly reinventing itself... without losing its core. In many ways, the way The Great Annihilator wraps up Swans' history and strengths into one totalizing package presages 2012's The Seer, a similarly all-encompassing work. Part of the quintessential Swans-ness of the album probably stems from the fact that, after a period of shifting personnel, the band refocused on a core lineup including longtime members Algis Kizys (bass), Ted Parsons (drums), and Norman Westberg (electric guitar), who imbue the album with its sinewy, muscular movement. Guitarists Clinton Steele and Bill Rieflin round out the group's rippling waves of guitars, with both Rieflin and Michael Gira using 12-string acoustics to ignite the furthest corners of the spectrum, where they shimmer like fireworks.
  
  While they occasionally take a step back into softer, gentler material in the spirit of Children of God's more reflective moments ("Blood Promise," "Warm," "Mother's Milk"), the thrust of the album is generally full-on; what's remarkable is how they summon a sound so forceful without ever sounding hard, or even particularly loud – at least, not in the way that years of over-compressed rock recordings have conditioned us to think of volume. They can still be savage – "Alcohol the Seed" tears at its monotone chords and tight snare rolls like a dog shakes a rag – but even at their most ferocious, they sound buoyed by feathers and porous as a sponge.
  
  From the howling winds that accompany "In" to the ragged acoustic blues of the closing live take of "I Am the Sun," the word that seems to sum up the whole album is "elemental." It seems only fitting that Gira spent the three months of the album's recording sessions living in a mosquito-infested tent inside the Chicago studio. It's as though he was wringing out his blood on tape to ensure that the bugs didn't suck it from him first.

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• 

  Soundtracks For The Blind

  Swans

  Young God Records / Revolver

  Soundtracks for the Blind, released in 1996, was meant to be the Swans' final album, and it was, until Michael Gira revived the band for 2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It represented a curious sort of coda to the band's career, however, stepping away from the full-band maelstrom of the previous records and delving into the collage methods of Brian Eno and Teo Macero.
  
  The album... gathers together new sessions featuring Gira and Jarboe's Great Annihilator tourmates (Iggy Pop drummer Larry Mullins, American Music Club guitarist Vudi, and bassist/guitarist Joe Goldring) along with 15 years of band recordings, tapes, found sounds – including eerie spoken-word passages culled from the private collection of Jarboe's late father, an FBI agent – and more, all "reassembled, looped, mangled, and in many cases overdubbed upon to create new pieces of music," as Gira explained. Twelve years later, the perennially dissatisfied musician recalled, "There was SO MUCH material to deal with, to sift through (whole trunks full of decomposing, moldy cassettes and discs with samples and sounds), and the task of making it into something coherent was at times debilitating. Really like climbing up a mountain of sand. I don't remember why I set this goal for myself, to somehow incorporate such a ridiculously disparate amount of material. I think maybe it was so I could justify throwing all that crap into the local dump, which is what I did when I finished the album."
  
  It's easy to understand Gira's frustration: The double-CD album, 142 minutes long, is truly epic, and it covers a staggering amount of stylistic ground, from lysergic musique concrete to metal-tinged goth and foreboding death folk. In many ways, it's as representative of the Swans' master vision as The Great Annihilator, but in reverse: Where that album was a summation, Soundtracks for the Blind captures the band's definitive unraveling, one strand at time, into a messy pile on the floor.

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Rising from the Ashes: Angels of Light

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  New Mother

  Angels Of Light

  Young God Records / Revolver

  Rising from the ashes of Swans, Angels of Light emerged in 1999 and would occupy Michael Gira for the next decade, both in the studio and on the stage. Featuring many former Swans collaborators – Bill Rieflin, Phil Puleo, Larry Mullins, Christoph Hahn – the band represented a continuation of Gira's interest in acoustic music and American folk idioms. At the same time, the sound they conjured – and "conjured" seems to... be the only word to describe music so full, so deceptively complex, that unrolls so effortlessly – was unlike anything else at the time. (The closest comparison to Angels of Light's rippling, spectral wash might be Jim O'Rourke's Eureka, from the same year, right down to Gira's similar fusion of hillbilly rounds, Reichian arpeggios, and Van Dyke Parks-inspired harmonic overflow.) They were not a "roots" band, certainly not retro, and never as self-consciously outré as the strain of music that eventually became dubbed "freak folk," but there were overlaps with that loose scene – just consider the fact that Gira signed freak-folk flag bearer Devendra Banhart to his own Young God Records.
  
  New Mother came together with the assistance of 19 musicians, but in comparison to the Body Lovers, which felt like a solo project with assistance from others, Angels of Light's debut album sounds like the output of a cohesive unit. What's amazing is that a band front-loaded with percussionists (Larry Mullins, Thor Harris, Phil Puleo) could turn out so feathery and soft; in fact, there are few traces of rock drumming on the album, which instead bristles with mallet instruments, bells, and cymbals. Gira is the calm at the center of the storm, and sometimes vice versa – particularly in the album's latter half, where the music collapses like a deflating balloon around his lone frame, which rages quietly in every direction.
  
  He adds honest-to-goodness singing to his repertoire of vocal styles, along with his usual growling, muttering, and creaky Sprechstimme, often sounding like a rustier Scott Walker or a more detached Mark Lanegan. Lyrically, he seems like he's allowing the stripped-down music to lead him to a rapprochement with his past, as with an unusually frank confession to his late father: "Thank God you never saw the person I've become."

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  How I Loved You

  Angels Of Light

  Young God Records / Revolver

  Two years after Angels of Light's debut, Michael Gira and his new group returned with How I Loved You, a collection of love songs – yes, love songs – that began as sketches for voice and guitar and gradually developed into the huge, full-ensemble pieces that they are. (Some songs, like "My Suicide," mimic that process of becoming in their arrangements, beginning as skeletal, unadorned meditations and gradually growing into full-band rave-ups.)... What felt shaky on the Angels' debut is here swollen; what felt spindly is sleeker, sturdier, brimming with power and heartbroken pathos. Much of that surely has to do with the solidifying dynamics of the group, which again features Christoph Hahn, Larry Mullins, Thor Harris and Birgit-Cassis Staudt; "Our combined sensibilities feel very natural at this point," said Gira at the time, "which I guess comes from having played most of the songs live a lot." Bassist Dana Schechter, a member of the Angels' touring lineup at the time, also appears on the record; a more surprising addition is Kid Congo Powers (of the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), who plays electric guitar on "My True Body" and "New York Girls." If there's any single player who stands out, however, it's Hahn, whose lap steel guitar extends throughout the album like a glowing filament.

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• 

  Everything Is Good Here / Please Come Home

  Angels Of Light

  Young God Records / Revolver

  The Angels of Light were never polite, but their first two albums were nevertheless marked by restraint. Not so number three, a wild, flailing monster that pursues its folk interests deep into the ragged heart of what Robert Christgau called the "old, weird America." From the outset, the organs and guitars of "Palisades" suggest a subtly more psychedelic dimension, and that shimmering dissonance grows across the St. Vitus dance of "All Souls'... Rising" and the harried call-and-response of "Nations." Banjos strum, harmonicas wail, and fiddles saw chillingly through the meat and bones of the music; it is among the most unhinged of all Michael Gira's records.
  
  Upon its release, Gira, sounding too wound-up for niceties like punctuation, recalled, "It started innocently enough with the intent of being a simple collection of well-written songs performed by the musicians who played them live for the last few years with the addition of a few acoustic songs lightly colored. Instead as things often seem to go around here I ended up saturating every available molecule of the recording tape with sound then hacked cut poured sonic fertilizer/salt on the resultant wounds and it finally metastasized into this raging/weeping BEAST which in the end succeeded in slowly biting off my head leaving this album behind as evidence." Somewhat paradoxically, then, the album also shows the Angels of Light fully in their comfort zone – nesting in the root notes like fat sparrows before whipping up to ringing open fifths as though feeding from the eaves, then darting back to shelter once more.

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  The Angels Of Light Sing: Other People

  Angels Of Light

  Young God Records / Revolver

  The ever-restless Michael Gira switched things up once again with the fourth Angels of Light record, replacing most of the now-familiar lineup with the members of another band, Akron/Family, whose debut album he had co-produced. He adopted a new constraint for the project, too: no drums. The results, set free from that percussive anchor, are more ragged and even more expansive, in their own way – not pushing against the sky, but... running roughshod over cracked ground in thin rivulets of banjo and dulcimer and the kind of wild, erratic vocal harmonies you might hear in an old-time revival meeting. Even the lyrics are more worldly: "Michael's White Hands" presents Michael Jackson as a vengeful god and a symbol of America's undoing, while "Destroyer" channels Gira's longstanding apocalyptic obsessions into a thinly veiled 9/11 frame. Brimming with choruses, yelps, and even, on "Purple Creek," the sound of crickets, it's a campfire album – but one for the days after the cities have burned down, when "We'll walk freely through the mountains and the trees/ And we'll breathe deep again where the air is pure and clean / And we will drink freely from the milk of our revenge."

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• 

  Akron/Family and Angels Of Light

  Angels of Light and Akron/Family

  Young God Records / Revolver

  Upon returning from an extended tour together, Michael Gira's Angels of Light and Akron/Family – actually one and the same band, at this point – took to the studio and banged out this album in just nine days. Listeners unfamiliar with Akron/Family's own music will quickly realize that the band is a very different kind of beast when not backing Gira; their portion of the record mulls over a spidery, ruminative chord... progression of the sort you'd be unlikely to hear from Angels of Light; the next song, "Moment," begins with an unbridled explosion of free-improv noise freakout whose energy is the antithesis of Gira's brand of controlled chaos. Like a vagabond Grizzly Bear on uppers, they dedicate their half of the record to an exuberant strain of psych-rock, what Gira called "Beatles meets Beefheart backwoods midnight incantation." On Gira's side, he picks up the old-timey baton for uncharacteristically rootsy songs like "I Pity the Poor Immigrant," a country-blues number in which he assumes the mantle of Woody Guthrie – however unlikely that might sound. The best of his batch might be "Mother/Father," a ragged mantra for whooping, multi-part vocal harmonies and dangerously syncopated toms.

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  We Are Him

  Angels Of Light

  2007 | Young God Records / Revolver

  Gira's final album with Angels of Light started out simply, with Gira and Akron/Family laying down bare-bones arrangements on drums, guitar, piano, and voluminous backing vocals, and Gira bellowing his heart out, by now fully comfortable in his role as a kind of unholy barroom bandleader. He's unafraid to go hard here – "My Brother's Man" is a white-knuckled post-punk blues reminiscent (save the harmonica) of Swans' hypnotic churn – but he... also sounds uncharacteristically relaxed: Just listen to his easy drawl on "Star Chaser," a lanky victory lap of a closing tune. (He's spent the album bridging the gap between the soil and the stars, and yet here he sounds like he's barely broken a sweat.)
  
  As we've learned by now, though, Gira doesn't really do simple. Feeling like the songs sounded "thin and tentative," he roped in a dozen of his usual cohorts – including lap-steel guitarist Christoph Hahn, the multi-instrumentalist Bill Rieflin, and various friends bearing violin, trombone, and hammer dulcimer – to beef up the music. What's striking, then, is how different the album sounds from any of Angels of Light's previous recordings, marrying the group's rootsy meanderings to a drone-focused intensity not heard since The Great Annihilator. In retrospect, a change was coming; Gira's internal pendulum was swinging back towards his most primal instincts.

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The Rebirth

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  My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

  Swans

  2010 | Young God Records / Revolver

  And then they returned. Even given the decade's fetish for punk and post-punk reunions, few ever thought that Swans would lumber the earth's surface again, once they snuffed out the flame in 1997. And yet they came back.
  
  The opening "No Words/No Thoughts" begins the only appropriate way they could kick off such a monumental return, with three and a half minutes of feedback, tremolo, pick-slide jibber-jabber, and a sound that might... be an electric saw slicing through the sides of the band's coffin; finally, in slowly building open fifths and pealing bells, the band assumes its full shape, tearing into a monotone rave-up as focused as anything in their history, beating a single chord into a million bloody colors while Gira chants, "Long may he live/ Long may his children drift through the wind/ To think is a sin/ To think is a sin." Gira rarely dips into the realm of the meta, but it's hard not to read his ode to hollow men as a cry of victory, having turned nothing inside out and produced this unimaginable vastness.
  
  Gira turned to long-time collaborators for the reconstituted lineup, including Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Phil Puleo, and Thor Harris, along with newcomer Chris Pravdica, on bass. (That core lineup would remain the same for 2012's The Seer and the live album We Rose from Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head.) The well-tempered intimacy of the crew undoubtedly contributed to the deeply intuitive force behind the record, in which guitars, bass, and drums seem to roll in relentless, ceaseless waves. Given that the musicians were scattered across the world, Gira sent them basic demos and then assembled the band in New York for intensive sessions that might be described as crash courses in the material, recording one track per day across a week of 12-hour sessions. "Once they'd reached a peak, having hashed the songs over (and over) and reconfigured them from their original demo form into something unique to the group," recalls Gira, "the engineer hit record." The album is steeped in the most muscular kind of immediacy, particularly on surging post-punk anthems like "My Birth," "Inside Madeline," and "Eden Prison," but never at the expense of the American-primitive psychedelia that marked Angels of Light's work; on "You Fucking People Make Me Sick," that tendency rears its fire-haloed head in dizzying explosions of mandolin, piano, and funereal horns, while Devendra Banhart and Gira's three-year-old daughter Saoirse articulate the song's vision of love and terror.

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  The Seer

  Swans

  2012 | Young God / Revolver

  There's a lot to absorb on The Seer, Swans' triumphant 2012 follow-up to their 2010 return: two hours of music, including two 20-minute songs and another, the title track, that stretches more than 30. But even so soon after the album's release, it's not hard to recognize it as one of the finest in the band's entire career, quite possibly Michael Gira's crowning achievement to date. Making good on his assertion that... the reborn Swans would be no mere revival act, The Seer doesn't just push forward; it does so while rolling up everything that ever made Swans great into a single, all-encompassing package. It feels totalizing, like every Swans album ever made played all at once; it feels like something you could actually live inside – and, given both its length and the way it almost compels you into repeat listens, it sort of is.
  
  It's as varied an album as any in the band's catalog; "Song for a Warrior," featuring the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, is a quiet, acoustic, country lament; "93 Ave. B Blues" connects Gira's fascination with Southern blues to the most searing kind of No Wave skronk; "The Seer" brings together bagpipes, Sunn O)))-caliber heavy metal drone, and the swarming buzz of Glenn Branca's brutalist electric-guitar symphonies. There's lap steel and contrabassoon and jaw harp; Jarboe returns for appearances on "Mother of the World" and "The Wolf," and Low's Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk lend their own voices to "Lunacy." Even the laptop-enabled noise musician Ben Frost is on board, contributing "fire sounds (synthetic and acoustic)."
  
  For all its sweeping, crashing grandeur, The Seer is also a profoundly intimate album: You don't marvel at it from distance, you become a part of it, thanks to chanted invocations like those of opener "Lunacy," or the writhing, full-body chug of "Mother of the World," which sucks you in like a riptide. The album is one long, extended trance, refracted internally into infinity dimensions.

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Side Projects

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  Drainland

  Michael GIRA

  2002 | Alternative Tentacles / Revolver

  Does Michael Gira ever sleep? In 1995, having wrapped up The Great Annihilator (and toured in support of it), and about to embark upon the sprawling, soul-draining collage project Soundtracks for the Blind, he somehow found time to release Drainland, a solo album featuring contributions from Jarboe and Bill Rieflin, recorded mostly at the latter's Seattle home. (Reflecting Gira's fondness for dichotomy, Jarboe released her own solo album, Sacrificial Cake, as a... companion piece.) Without Swans' gale-force rhythm section behind him, Drainland is a quieter, more intimate record, characterized by hypnotically strummed guitars, chiming bells and eerie swirls of synthesizer and sound effects; singing and muttering through what sounds like a permanently fixed grimace, Gira sounds not so much restrained as numb. It's a bitter and at times bilious album, an unsparing self-portrait of the artist as an ugly man: In the very first song, a tape recording captures Jarboe confronting Gira over his growing alcoholism, and his spontaneous, slurred counterattack is far more unsettling than any of his customary invocations of hellfire and damnation.

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• 

  The Body Lovers / The Body Haters

  The Body Lovers / The Body Haters

  Young God Records / Revolver

  In 1998, with Swans officially over, Michael Gira set about attempting to find a new way forward. Before throwing himself into his next band, Angels of Light, he adopted a new solo alias, the Body Lovers, for an all-instrumental collection of home recordings, Number One of Three. (In 1999, it was followed, in true Gira style, by a complementary release from his alter ego the Body Haters; both are included here, along... with a previously unreleased Body Haters track.) Of course, also in true Gira fashion, the definition of "solo" is a loose one. Pan Sonic, Deathprod, James Plotkin, Ultra Vivid Scene's Kurt Ralske, Jarboe, and various former Swans all contribute sounds and ideas, which Gira mixes into brooding drones and stark, acoustic meditations. Of all his albums, it's the closest he ever came to pure ambient music, and in terms of sonic experimentation, it's one of his most adventurous releases.

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  What We Did

  M Gira / D Matz

  Young God Records / Revolver

  One of the quietest albums in Michael Gira's catalog, What We Did is a collaboration with Windsor for the Derby's Dan Matz; the pair recorded the record at Matz's home, in pieces, over the course of two years. It sounds like it; their acoustic guitars and voices are swathed in the natural reverb of wooden-floored living rooms, and the hushed quality of the recording gives the impression of songs recorded fleetingly at... night, trying not to wake the neighbors. For once, Gira plays second fiddle, figuratively speaking – it's Matz's voice that tends to dominate, soft and wavering, with Gira's cracked baritone trailing like a shadow. But you can certainly hear Gira's fingerprints on the shape of the songs, which play skeletal chord progressions above stolid pedal tones. And for all their unplugged nakedness, there's a wealth of sound – organ, piano, harmonica, banjo, toy percussion, even the occasional drum machine – hidden deep within its folds.

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  The Milk Of M. Gira: Collected Solo Home Recordings 2001 - 2010

  Michael GIRA

  2011 | Young God Records / Virtual

  If it's an audience with Michael Gira himself you seek, this is the record. Taken from limited-edition CDs sold to the band's super-fans, the proceeds of which helped fund the recording of studio albums by Swans and Angels of Light, these songs are nothing but Gira and his guitar, recorded at home with a single stereo microphone. "Just a casual performance in my office at home," he has explained, noting that many... of the songs were recorded immediately after writing them (and originally intended as demos for his collaborators to learn from). Stark and unadorned, they make for quietly harrowing listening, and they really come alive when compared to their eventual realizations by Swans and Angels of Light; listening to the fleshed-out songs and then Gira's demos feels like tracking a river back to its source high above the tree line, where water courses unbounded over jagged shale.

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In Reverse Chronological Order

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  Centipede Hz

  Animal Collective

  2012 | Domino Recording Co

  The word on the street is that Animal Collective's ninth studio album – yes, ninth – is a red-blooded response to the sunshine and puppy dogs of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Which is true in regards to its approach (bashed instruments rather than stacked samples) and overall vibe (wild and wooly), but it's not like the group's core quartet is back to baking batches of incoherent noise rock. To understand where they're coming... from this time around, it helps to first cue up the podcasts that Animal Collective leaked in the weeks leading up to Centipede Hz's release; namely Geologist's set, which is based on an elaborate mix he made for producer Ben Allen before Animal Collective hit the studio.
  
  "We put together a list of songs that either encompassed the overall sound and vibe, or just had specific things we liked, such as drums sounds, or vocal effects," Geologist wrote in his Mixcloud notes. "For the final show of AC Radio we thought it'd be cool to play this inspirational mix and the album back to back."
  Sure enough, Animal Collective's leading loop surgeon offers more than a few clues about the background of what's initially a very bewildering listen, from Barrett-era Pink Floyd and latter day Portishead to slivers of psych, rarified garage rock and manic world music. None of which are immediately apparent on the first or 50th spin. Instead, Centipede Hz unfolds like a series of scrambled radio transmissions, right down to the tortured transitions between each track. It's as if the band's tapping into a broadcast from the great beyond, with little regard for the amphitheater-ready hooks that made Merriweather Post Pavilion such a joy. Where that album's leadoff single ("My Girls") flooded the endorphin levels of anyone within earshot, this one is prefaced by the stuttering rhythms and ravenous "let, let, let, let, let, let GO!" choruses of "Today's Supernatural." Listen to any of these songs loud enough and you'll be forced to step back a few feet; it's that harsh and heavy, from the trash compactor intro of "Moonjock" to the skittish synths of "Wide Eyed," the first song to feature lead vocals from the group's guitarist, Deakin.
  
  In conclusion, do not take the brown acid at your next Animal Collective show. Your synapses will thank you.

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  Transverse Temporal Gyrus

  Animal Collective

  2012 | Domino Recording Co

  It's probably best to approach this limited Record Store Day LP as a parting gift for anyone who witnessed Animal Collective's Guggenheim Museum "performance" on March 4, 2010. A co-production with longtime A/V partner Danny Perez (see also: such deliciously demented music videos as "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "Today's Supernatural"), Transverse Temporal Gyrus presented abstract sound collages in a "kinetic, psychedelic environment" of "video projections, costumes and props, rendering the... band members and performers into intense, visual abstractions." That's convoluted art school speak for what was basically a living, breathing art installation – frustrating for some, and further evidence of Animal Collective's multi-medium brilliance for others. Stripped of its visual spectacle outside of a special websiteit's not the group's most rewarding half-hour musically, but hey, it's better than a bloated gift shop book about postmodern aesthetics and abstract expressionism, right?

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  Merriweather Post Pavilion

  Animal Collective

  2009 | Domino Recording Co

  When Animal Collective's guitarist (Josh "Deakin" Dibb) decided to skip the sessions for Merriweather Post Pavilion, the group treated his hiatus as an excuse to embrace the loop-led sounds of their favorite electronic artists (people like Pantha Du Prince and Wolfgang Voigt) and Panda Bear's own mesmerizing solo album, Person Pitch. Tapping Ben H. Allen as their co-producer – a hip-hop head who's worked with everyone from Gnarls Barkley to artists on... Bad Boy Records – the trio applied their trademark Beach Boys harmonies to bass-heavy arrangements caught somewhere between a K-hole-addled dance floor and one hell of a lucid dream. Meanwhile, Panda Bear shared his thoughts on (indie) rock stardom throughout "My Girls," a tribute to his wife, daughter and the "proper house" that awaits him across the Atlantic in Lisbon. What could have been a completely corny nod to fatherhood instead became one of Animal Collective's most undeniable anthems, a heat-seeking single that threatened to melt the snow that surrounded the record's January release.

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  Strawberry Jam

  Animal Collective

  Domino Recording Co

  The protracted leak – clusters of cuts, rather than the whole record – of Animal Collective's seventh LP led Panda Bear to beg the then-nascent blogosphere to "put up those other three songs, man, pronto." An understandable request given that Strawberry Jam is one of their most cohesive albums, a tightly wound ball of nervous energy and hooks that are as sticky and bittersweet as the extreme Smucker's closeup on its Avey... Tare-conceptualized sleeve. (The singer/multi-instrumentalist was apparently inspired by a surreal pat of airline jelly.) In a testament to the group's growing popularity and the narrowing gap between the underground and mainstream, Strawberry Jam was also the first Animal Collective release to put a dent in Billboard's Top 200 chart, landing at No. 72 despite such challenging – yet oh-so-satisfying – temper tantrums as "Peacebone," "For Reverend Green" and "Fireworks." And so begins one of the strangest success stories of the Y2K era…

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  Feels

  Animal Collective

  2005 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

  Getting off to a gate-crashing start with the steady build of "Did You See the Words" and the blood-thirsty choruses of "Grass," Feels rallies against the psych-steeped folk of Animal Collective's previous record (Sung Tongs) and presents one of the group's most powerful and mournful visions of love and loss. At least that's what we think Avey Tare is talking about, as he shifts between soft-spoken tales of swimming pools, study halls,... and girls who reek of "fruity nuts and good grains," and restless, free-associative fits that capture growing pains and crippling bouts of nostalgia better than the many 'chill-wave' acts that'd form in Animal Collective's wake – memories of Feels dancing in their head – five years later.

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  Prospect Hummer

  Animal Collective (feat. Vashti Bunyan)

  2005 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

  Aside from having a similar fashion sense – lots of paisley prints and loose fits – one of the only uniting forces in the freak-folk hype machine was a shared love of Vashti Bunyan's long-lost Just Another Diamond Day LP. The 30-year-old recording was a benchmark and/or bible for many singer-songwriters in the mid '00s, which makes Prospect Hummer a crucial, cross-generational meeting of the minds. "I loved having the freedom to... sing as I wanted," Bunyan said of the three-day sessions that went into the one-off EP. "I was still finding my voice after burying it for years." Now confident for the first time in decades, Bunyan finally released her second full-length in the same month as Feels, making this the sedate puzzle piece between Sung Tongs and Animal Collective's comparatively aggro follow-up.

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  Sung Tongs

  Animal Collective

  2004 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

  Defiantly weird but wildly tuneful, Animal Collective's first major critical breakthrough was filed alongside Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom in the country's emerging "freak-folk movement." And, like the early releases of those two unfairly tagged artists, Sung Tongs is more than just an excuse to move to Laurel Canyon with flowers in your hair and acid tabs in the back of your bellbottoms. It's arguably the most beautiful album Animal Collective ever... released, bringing an actual focus to the back-porch folk bent of Campfire Songs and delivering some immediate fan favorites in the process ("Who Could Win a Rabbit," "Kids on Holiday," and "Winters Love," which was featured in a Simpsons episode and the soundtrack of Shortbus, John Cameron Mitchell's porny follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Nothing against the rest of the guys in the group, but we can only hope that Panda Bear and Avey Tare cut another record like this all by their lonesome before the band goes their separate ways for good.

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  Here Comes The Indian

  Animal Collective

  2003 | Paw Tracks

  In a 2005 interview with Wire magazine, the group's headlamp-wearing sound sculptor (Brian "Geologist" Weitz) admitted that the first album to feature all four members and the Animal Collective name – their previous three LPs were credited to whoever played on them – was one of their darkest periods, creatively and personally. "We were in this cramped room, equipment everywhere, not soundproofed, so noise from other bands came through the walls," he... told writer Simon Reynolds. "So there were issues of trying to find your space in the music. That's why the album's so hectic and chaotic. It was trying to shove all this weird energy into one recording." No kidding. Claustrophobic and creepy, Here Comes the Indian is as close as Animal Collective ever came to a nervous breakdown. It's a necessary part of their story nonetheless.

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  Campfire Songs

  Animal Collective

  2010 | Paw Tracks

  While it's now filed alongside all of Animal Collective's other albums, Campfire Songs was actually credited to that very name in its original Catsup Plate pressing. A truth-in-advertising title, considering all five songs were tracked live in one take on a Maryland back porch in the middle of November. Some ambient noise was added later, but most of this drone-on disc sounds like exactly what it is: three close friends (presumably) stoned... out of their gourd, stepping into the light with spellbound harmonies and crystallized guitar chords. When Animal Collective reunites for family gatherings 20 years from now, this will most likely referred to as the "that magical night before everything changed" – as pure as it gets, really.

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  Hollinndagain

  Animal Collective

  2006 | Paw Tracks

  As mentioned in our eMusic Icon intro, Animal Collective's early shows were downright mad and willfully off-putting. The proof is in the reissue of this rare live record. Originally released in a limited run of just 300 handmade copies, it's full of time capsule tracks that capture some of their strangest transmissions. For serious fans only, or anyone who wants to understand the sonic potential of effects pedals and chain-linked MiniDisc players.

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  Danse Manatee

  Animal Collective

  2003 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

  When FatCat Records reissued Danse Manatee alongside Animal Collective's debut album (2000's Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished), the group's early fans were left scratching their heads. Unlike its predecessor's glimpses of locked grooves and magic mushroom melodies, this record is completely off the rails, a fetishistic exploration of high and low frequencies that's absolutely aimless in certain areas. We blame the band's burgeoning friendship with Black Dice, a group that understands... the innate power of macerated noise music a little better.

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  Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished

  Animal Collective

  2003 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

  Largely a solo album – written entirely by Avey Tare and rounded out by Panda Bear's jittery drum lines – Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is what happens when a sensitive boy from Baltimore moves to the Big City. Shit's dark, in other words, showing hints of the hooks to come in such career standouts as "Chocolate Girl," a meandering trip through the enchanted forest that only exists in Avey Tare's... troubled mind.

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  Randy Newman

  Randy Newman

  1995 | Reprise

  Released in 1968 (the same year as debut albums from James Taylor and Leonard Cohen), Newman's first LP set the tone for the next 40-plus years of his career, and established him as a singer-songwriter doing something very different from his contemporaries. The record brims with charming little melodies that startle the listener who happens to catch the wicked lyrics – it's funnier than Cohen, more ironic than Taylor and more steeped... in Tin Pan Alley pop than Bob Dylan. The songs tell exquisite little stories. "Love Story," for instance, takes just over three minutes to follow a couple from the time they met to the time they die, but what you remember is the addictive "you and me, babe" refrain. The jaunty "Beehive State" is sung as a conversation between pork-barreling political delegates. "Davy the Fat Boy" witnesses a man turning his tubby friend into a sideshow act, inviting passersby to guess poor Davy's weight: "You've got to let this fat boy in your life!" Newman cries, singing in character, and seducing the listener into a guilty laugh. Cruel? Maybe. But it's such a catchy tune.

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  Sail Away

  Randy Newman

  2005 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

  Newman's first political album and the ambitious opening bookend of two straight masterpieces, Sail Away opens with the words "In America…," and proceeds to attack that colossal subject from angles rarely found in popular song. (The famous title song, for instance, is sung from the perspective of a slave trader. In a typical Newman twist, the melody is heart-wrenchingly gorgeous.) Meanwhile, "Political Science" packs a cutting, laugh-out-loud-funny colonial satire into just 122... seconds. And "God's Song," a dirge that may be the single best song in Newman's entire catalog, imagines the Lord's deep bemusement – "How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me" – at human behavior down on Earth. The litany of classic songs goes on and on: "Lonely At the Top," which would've been a completely different song if Frank Sinatra had sung it, as Newman originally intended; "You Can Leave Your Hat On," the fetish anthem that became a hit for Joe Cocker; "Burn On," an ode to Cleveland's notoriously fire-prone Cuyahoga River. The album's positioned Newman as a major songwriter, and remains a remarkable example of pop music as carefully crafted as literature.

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  Good Old Boys

  Randy Newman

  2005 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

  Arguably Newman's strongest album, and certainly one of the definitive creative works about the American South, 1974's Good Old Boys is a meditation on race, politics, marriage, booze and pride. The cast of supporting musicians (Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Glen Frey) is impressive, but no more so than the cast of characters woven throughout these dozen songs. There's Lester Maddox, the racist Georgia governor who appears on a television show in the... opening song, "Rednecks," thus stirring some complicated feelings from a Southerner watching at home, who says "He may be a fool, but he's our fool." There's Huey Long, the populist Louisiana governor who inspired Newman to write "Kingfish," and who actually penned "Every Man A King" (which precedes "Kingfish" on the album). There's Marie, the jilted lover, whose drunk husband is too much of a bum to treat her right, and knows it. There's a textile machinist and a naked man, a black dog whose name is Dan, and "a Polish girl with a space between her teeth." These people and more stumble and brag their way through Newman's world, which comes to life in piano-driven songs that might be called "chamber pop" if that didn't suggest something so precious. Yes, there are strings. And yes, the music is carefully composed. But this is no soft-focus nostalgia trip or condescending head-pat to America's backwater. It's an empathetic, but not uncritical look at the kind of people who endure a great flood ("Louisiana 1927") and assume someone's out for revenge. That the song resurfaced as a Hurricane Katrina anthem serves to prove just how us-versus-them the South can still be – and how right Newman got the place the first time around.

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  Born Again

  Randy Newman

  1989 | Warner Bros.

  With punk, disco and prog-rock swirling in the air, it's little wonder that Newman's 1979 album sits awkwardly in his pantheon. Always a square peg in a round hole, Newman was especially out of place at this moment in music history. Still, it's difficult to imagine him getting angry enough at Electric Light Orchestra to write a song ("Story of a Rock & Roll Band") that gleefully mocks the "Mr. Blue Sky"... rockers in both style and lyric. And for that matter, what's up with the KISS makeup on the cover? While those references feel dated now, "It's Money That I Love" stayed relevant through Gordon Gekko and Occupy Wall Street. And in keeping with Newman's knack for romantic misadventure, the album gives us "You Just Got Married" (a kind of sequel to "Love Story," from Newman's first album) and "The Girls In My Life, Pt. 1" (which bemoans a woman who borrowed the narrator's car, and then plowed over a man in Mexico).

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  Trouble In Paradise

  Randy Newman

  1983 | Warner Bros.

  While no one would confuse Trouble in Paradise with a serious concept record like Dark Side of the Moon (or, for that matter, Newman's own Good Old Boys) the album still comes off as a postcard from the go-go 1980s. Never before or since did Newman write so much about quintessential rock 'n' roll subjects like sunshine and girls. "There's A Party At My House" feels like such big, dumb fun that... it's almost out of character – and then Newman cracks a joke about bondage. The cheerful and half-joking "I Love L.A.," which kicks off the record, would become a kind of theme song for the singer, and rightfully so – it's a perfect mix of genuine affection and faux ignorance, and it comes paired with a similar (if lesser) song called "Miami" for everybody back East. Anyone bothered by the cheesy, deeply '80s production style can turn for relief to "Real Emotional Girl," a ballad performed with just voice and piano.

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  Land Of Dreams

  Randy Newman

  1988 | Warner Bros.

  Perhaps the most underrated album in the career of an underrated artist, Land of Dreams captures Newman in a charming mood. (Okay, there's a vicious ballad called "I Want You To Hurt Like I Do" – it's still a Randy Newman record – but most of its memorable songs are easygoing larks.) Four stand out: "Dixie Flyer" and "New Orleans Wins The War" are utterly delightful nostalgia trips about Newman's beloved birthplace;... "Falling In Love" has an addictive seven-note hook that can hover in your head all day; and "Something Special" is a Newman rarity – an unabashedly happy love song. Together these highlights constitute an extremely strong batch, highly recommended as a second step after the essentials of Sail Away and Good Old Boys.

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  Faust

  Randy Newman

  2003 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

  At this point, the musical production Faust (like Cop Rock, the ill-fated, Newman-scored TV musical about singing law-enforcement officers) remains pretty unheralded. Any career this long is going to have its footnotes and pitfalls, and maybe this is Newman's. And yet, even here amid an album that's tough to play all the way through, there are songs worth plucking. For instance "Glory Train" is a lovely bit of call-and-response gospel voiced largely... by James Taylor. (Other guests on the project include Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and Elton John.) And almost as good is the spry "I Gotta Be Your Man," which bops along with a nervous high-hat rhythm and a careening piano line that dips and swerves like a roller coaster.

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  Toy Story

  Randy Newman

  2006 | Walt Disney Records

  Although Toy Story is arguably the most famous of Newman's countless original film scores, and although it contains the instant-classic buddy anthem "You've Got A Friend In Me," the album still couldn't quite break Newman's famous bridesmaid's streak at the Academy Awards. (He wouldn't win until his 16th Oscar nomination, for Monsters Inc., in 2001). In any event, the album – which is largely instrumental compositions – stands as an approachable entry... point for parents looking to introduce children to orchestral music. And it also contains another pop song (the wistful "I Will Go Sailing No More") that ranks among the most beautiful tunes Newman has ever written.

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  Bad Love

  Randy Newman

  2009 | HIP-O (PG)/Fontana

  By this point in his career, Newman had already released his most famous material. He was no longer a young man, no longer the Next Dylan, or for that matter, the next anything. He was just himself. And so Bad Love may come off as more of the same — more witty piano-pop about sex, death and regret, with a dash of political imperialism for good measure — and how you feel... about that may depend on whether you've been on the bandwagon all along. In any case, as usual, the songs aren't all depressing, as the subject matter might lend you to believe. This is Newman, after all, who treats his unsympathetic narrators (in this case, the guy who sings the sugar-daddy's lament "Shame") with mercy, and who cares enough to play at least a few of his ballads (like "I Miss You" and "Every Time It Rains") straight. Fans of "Political Science" can get their dose of social commentary on "The Great Nations of Europe" and "The World Isn't Fair" (which cheekily describes Karl Marx as "a public-spirited man"). But unlike some of Newman's previous offerings, Bad Love is less about individual songs and more of an album — consistent, and not his best, but a respectable continuation of the themes he's dealt with all along.

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  Harps and Angels

  Randy Newman

  2008 | Nonesuch/WBR

  After almost a decade releasing film scores instead of pop songs, Newman returns with an album that could be said to show his age (after all, it's about lost love, mortality and parenting), except that those subjects have been in his wheelhouse all along. In fact, the album feels quintessentially Newman-esque, with "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" playing like the third song in a trilogy with "Political Science" and... "The Great Nations of Europe." "Korean Parents," meanwhile, is a biting Tiger Mother send-up, and the sunny "Laugh and Be Happy" is so blithe that you think Newman, the irony king, can't possibly be serious. But the real standout is the title track – a droll tale of one man's brief visit to the afterlife, with a melody and a lyric that could've been written by anyone else.

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  Leisure (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree first started playing together in 1989 at London's Goldsmiths College — it was the first time Coxon, James or Rowntree had lived in so cosmopolitan and possibility-rich a city. They were initially called Seymour, a reference to J.D. Salinger or the Swell Maps, depending on who you believe. All of which is to say they shared the same story as... countless other bright, slightly pretentious, hopeful young things in the post-Madchester era. A deal came quickly, they were renamed Blur (at their label head's behest) and they found themselves on the pop assembly line before they had perfected a full repertoire of songs. Much of Leisure was written and recorded on the spot, which explains the album's immature, generic sound and occasionally insipid lyrics. The stringy guitars and baggy beat of "There's No Other Way" was their lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and "She's So High" was an able approximation of dreamy shoegaze. But for every pensive moment like the slow-aching "Sing," one suffered through three unimaginative, "Bang"-style by-numbers dance tunes. Leisure's modest success meant they were pantomiming along to "There's No..." and "She's So High" for months to come, and an American tour was successful only in accelerating their burgeoning alcoholism. When they returned, Leisure couldn't sound more antiquated to a British public infatuated with loud, American guitars.

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  Modern Life Is Rubbish (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  It certainly didn't have to turn out this way. Blur's 1991 debut, Leisure, was an enjoyable but somewhat vacuous assemblage of the era's dance-pop clichés. It did not suggest four men with great artistic ambitions, let alone the ironic wit necessary to produce a masterpiece like Modern Life is Rubbish. Originally titled Britain Vs. America, and inspired by a disastrous tour of the States, Blur's second album is a rugged, sentimental embrace... of Britishness — as well as a critique of how that ethos had been perverted by a doggedly American consumerism. From its melancholy, Kinks-like opener, "For Tomorrow," to the pastoral "Chemical World" to the two-tone stomp of "Popscene," this was a band uninterested in trading on their charm and good looks. Albarn luxuriates in his sentences, at times sounding as though he is admiring his own, extra-elongated accent. The same self-consciousness coursed through his lyrics, populated by sketches of uniquely late-century English characters like "Colin Zeal," "Julian" ("Pressure on Julian") and the dull suburbanites of "Advert" and "Sunday Sunday." Despite its title, this was not a nostalgic, backwards-sounding record. It might have borrowed its ragged, punky energy and mod imagery from other times, but this was an album about what it meant to embrace one's station as a British band in 1993, on the cusp of great changes.

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  Parklife (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  "Call it London" was the most usable piece of advice given Blur by their label boss — he thought the band's third album sounded like a mistake. There's something charmingly clunky about Parklife. Its songs are obtuse, willfully awkward and far more playful than the career-reset fury of Modern Life. Where their previous album suggested four men trading the straitjacket of expectation in for tailor-made mod suits, the open, diverse Parklife infiltrates... a wider set of locations, as on their packaged-holiday-ridiculing, synth-pop hit "Girls and Boys." Alex James's bass frolics alongside Albarn's seemingly nonsense rhymes while Graham Coxon's intermittent shards of guitar remind us: approach the nightclub with caution, and a bit of self-awareness. Albarn's instincts as a cultural critic had matured. New characters populated his songs — "Tracy Jacks," the staid middle class citizenry of "Parklife," a solitary soul on the cliffs of Dover, "Jubilee," the self-loathing Brits of "Magic America," as well as London itself, the unkind city of "London Loves." And even Albarn's own ambitions and anxieties were scrutinized on "Badhead" and the glamorous "To the End."
  
  Parklife helped inaugurate an era of "Britpop" pseudo-nationalism — what else would you expect from an album that featured a song called "Bank Holiday" and a prominent guest spot from British actor Phil Daniels, of "Jimmy in Quadrophenia" fame? But, as with Modern Life, this was not a celebration of the British present: An acerbic chauvinism remained; but this time, you could dance to it, pogo along at the concert, etc. From "Girls and Boys" to the astounding concert-closer "This is a Low," Parklife was the most complete album Blur ever made. By 1995, they had somehow pulled off an unlikely trick: they had become pop stars on their own terms, ascending the very populist charts that their songs suggested a philosophical opposition against. "Tracy," "Jubilee," "Bill" from "Magic America" — they buy records, too.

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  The Great Escape (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  By 1995, Blur had become bona fide stars — the kind who would be profiled on the nightly news or featured on schoolgirls' folders and binders. But rivals had emerged from a different corner of the British experience, and they would make for tougher opponents than Suede. From Manchester came Oasis, the uncouth, hard-working, laborer-toughs to Blur's clever, middle class students. In the run-up to The Great Escape and Oasis's bafflingly titled... (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, the two bands were pitted in a battle for singles chart supremacy. Both singles were fairly unmemorable: Blur's "Country House" — the single that thwarted Oasis, if momentarily — was a wobbly, self-caricature of a single, lacking the verve of their older material. The rivalry weakened Blur significantly — their tussle with Oasis had stained them as elitists, and stresses within the band began surfacing as well. This context helps explain why The Great Escape is an absorbing but patchy work. Despite their triumphant run, Blur continued to mine their well-worn fascination with modern alienation: "Mr. Robinson's Quango," "He Dreamed of Cars" and "Ernold Same" reprised familiar Blur themes, the latter featuring a Daniels-esque guest turn from MP Ken Livingston. But such a critical vantage seemed less thoughtful when lobbed from atop the charts. It's still rich with enthralling moments: "Yuko and Hiro" is one of their most gorgeous tunes, an exhausted, cosmic dispatch from a Japanese factory, while "The Universal" is quite possibly the most captivating ballad ever composed about the new docility that await us in the next century.

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  Blur (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  Blur had achieved clarity of purpose following their disillusioning Leisure tours, self-identifying as an antidote to American culture. By 1997, they had begun to revisit this stance. Their self-titled fourth album wasn't a refusal of old dogmas, but it did seem less interested in the knowing, self-aware hijinx that defined their reign as "Britpop" icons. "Beetlebum" was a downcast lead single, its choppy guitars and bruised, drug-hangover lyrics suggesting a shift in... Blur's sound as well as their perspective. "You're So Great" owed a debt to American indie rock, with its patina of gristly, lo-fi feedback, while the soon to be ubiquitous "Song 2" both lampooned and regaled in the cathartic stomp of American grunge. They still sound like Blur, of course: "M.O.R." was a fine Bowie homage, and they seemed to have regained their sense of whimsy on "Country Sad Ballad Man" and the John Peel favorite "On Your Own." Their lives no longer resembled a non-stop party, and perhaps this was for the best. The deceptively cheery, Parklife-sounding "Look Inside America" re-approached their favorite villain, this time with a bit more humor and maturity — "I'm not trying to make her mine," Albarn sings, almost with a hint of relief.

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  13 (Special Edition)

  Blur

  2012 | VIRGIN

  There's an ambition to 13 which suggested that Blur — still living down their part in the rise and fall of "Britpop" — was finally beginning to regain their identity as a band. Just in time for their dissolution, as it was. 13 was the last album that would feature the contributions of Graham Coxon, whose modest pop gem, "Coffee and TV," remains one of Blur's brightest moments. Thanks partly to William... Orbit, who took over from longtime producer Stephen Street, a sense of exploration courses through tracks like the ethereal "Trimm Trabb" and "Mellow Song," while "1992" came across like an unhinged version of their Leisure favorite "Sing." Deep into a career built on studying the whims and habits of others, Albarn scrutinized his own failed relationship with longtime girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica for two of Blur's greatest-ever moments. Album opener "Tender" was a staggering, soulful number featuring heartening interplay between Albarn and Coxon — a last gasp at two relationships. The heartbreaker, though, was the deflated future-blues of "No Distance Left to Run," an unafraid admission of total defeat that lingers longer than its three-and-a-half minutes.

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  Gorillaz

  Gorillaz

  2011 | VIRGIN

  The premise of the "virtual band" Gorillaz came to Albarn and his then-roommate, artist and Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, as they sat in front of the television, tranquilized by MTV's parade of images. One guesses that the idea of make-believe band mates might have appealed to someone whose relationship with his actual band was growing strained. At the very least, this was an opportunity for Albarn, whose strong will had guided... Blur through their crusades, to reset his image, or at least disappear behind a screen. A radical departure from the Blur aesthetic, Albarn, the only permanent Gorilla, chose producer Dan the Automator and rapper Del tha Funkee Homosapien for the "band's" 2001 debut. As such, Gorillaz sounds like an album-length amplification of the trio's previous collaboration, "Time Keeps on Slipping," from Del's visionary 2000 Deltron 3030 album. Albarn is only nominally the front man. He comes across as vague, inscrutable and unaffected, the spry Del appearing every now and then to riddle him with playful, exaggerated counterpunches. Automator's sense of humor permeates everything: The hummable "Clint Eastwood" is distant but never forlorn, the sampled horns of "Rock the House" call to mind a perverse TV quiz show and Albarn's slacker cheer on "19-2000" is matched by a cloyingly clunky, advert-ready keyboard jig. On the strength of Automator's hip-hop-as-pop vision and Hewlett's intricate, distinctive music videos, Gorillaz was wildly successful. Perhaps it worked so well because Albarn understood exactly what it was: a deeply stylized critique of the celebrity culture that had made him famous in the first place, with just enough cartoonish mystery to make it onto MTV.

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  Mali Music

  Malian Musicians & Damon Albarn

  2004 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  To those who had maintained a passing interest in Damon Albarn's solo material — usually reserved to an instrumental shuffle on a Blur album or soundtrack — the triumph of Mali Music was truly unexpected. Albarn traveled through Mali as part of an Oxfam delegation, jamming with local kids and musicians — most notably Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabate. Albarn's involvement seems to be minimal, humming along to furiously plucked guitars, imagining... harmonies in unfamiliar keys and filling in spaces with plumes of melodica. These sketches of song collected on the road were then reassembled in the studio, though the fragmentary, textured feel of the original recordings remain: wisps of haunted chants, bursts of strident, sawing strings, mysterious drops of kalimba. Some bottom-end is added to "Kela Village" while a dance track emerges to absorb the strident chorus of "Makelekele." A common melody smoke-rings through "4 A.M. at Toumani's" and "Institut National Des Arts." In a rare spotlight turn, Albarn grabs onto that evocative shard for the stunning, hopeful "Sunset Coming On," Mali Music's most conventional moment. This is a mesmerizing and intimate album that benefits from Albarn's ear, as well as his ultimate willingness to surrender his front-man status.

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  Think Tank (Explicit)

  Blur

  2003 | VIRGIN

  By the time Blur reconvened to record Think Tank in 2002, both Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn had begun crafting distinct identities as solo artists. Where Coxon committed his jagged, lo-fi compositions to a bedroom four-track, Albarn's ambitions for musical collaboration continued to expand, thanks to his Oxfam-sponsored travels. Revitalized by a new set of influences, Albarn captained Blur toward looser song structures, a greater reliance on sampling and keyboards and, thanks... to Coxon's departure early in the Think Tank sessions, a less guitar-based sound. It's a bewitching, modest album rich with texture and imagination. At times, its triumphs are deeply unexpected: A Moroccan orchestra accompanies them on the lovely single "Out of Time" while a dubby ambience suffuses "Ambulance." Yet they still sound like Blur. The trio looked elsewhere to replace Coxon's lost heft: "Brothers and Sisters" is built on layers of delicately overdubbed vocals; bright, '80s synths shoot through the joyous "Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club"; and Fatboy Slim's machinery helps fill out the chaos of the unusually generic "Crazy Beat." "So I wean myself off slowly," Albarn sings with an affected airiness on the radiant "Sweet Song." He's anticipating the band's impending dissolution. But between Think Tank's fragile, globetrotting sound and its weary, lightly post-9/11 lyricism, his latest reinvention was already under way.

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  Demon Days

  Gorillaz

  2004 | VIRGIN

  For the second Gorillaz album, Albarn traded Del and the Automator in for producer Danger Mouse. Fresh off his Jay-Z-meets-the-Beatles Grey Album success, Danger Mouse repaid Albarn's confidence with imagination and verve. Spookier, denser and darker than Gorillaz, Demon Days recounted the tale of the last primates to survive the apocalypse. It's a versatile crew, the ones who saw the light and lived through it: De La Soul chase the... madcap rhythms of the excellent "Feel Good Inc.," M.F. Doom lends the sparse "November Has Come" a bruised ambience, Roots Manuva — with assistance from Martina Topley-Bird — tames the frenetic, almost-dubstep rhythms of "All Alone" and Danger Mouse proves to be an able, patient heir to Automator on the Think Tank-sounding "Dirty Harry." And then there are the true survivors. A straight-faced Dennis Hopper delivers the Gorillaz creation/destruction myth like a bedtime story on "Fire Coming out of a Monkey's Head," before Albarn saunters in with a casual cool. A suggestion that the end might actually be near: a rehabbed and bedraggled Shaun Ryder, whose late 1980s records with the Happy Mondays inspired Leisure and countless others, shows up for an off-kilter cameo shadowing the tipsy melody of "Dare."

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  The Good, The Bad and The Queen

  The Good, The Bad and The Queen

  2007 | VIRGIN

  A sense of curiosity has guided the past decade of Damon Albarn's career. During Blur's heyday, he used his celebrity to collaborate with predecessors like Ray Davies of the Kinks or Terry Hall of the Specials. Without the stability or readymade expectations of Blur, he began to choose his collaborators more randomly, treating each new project as a challenge. For The Good, the Bad and the Queen Albarn assembled... the kind of line-up usually reserved for telethons or rock critic confabs: Paul Simonon of the Clash on bass, the underrated Simon Tong (formerly of the Verve and Blur) on guitar, Afrobeat legend Tony Allen behind the drums and Danger Mouse behind the glass. It shouldn't have worked, and they certainly shouldn't have sounded this natural, restrained or coherent as a unit. But The Good, the Bad and the Queen was a surprisingly strong marriage of different histories and styles. Most of the songs are carried by a single element: Tong's elegant waltz carries "80's Life," Allen's hypnotic drum patterns propel "History Song" and the wondrous "Nature Springs," while Simonon's understated bass lends "Kingdom of Doom" an edge of menace. "The Good, the Bad and the Queen," the final track, explains it all, a vaguely uplifting tale of crackheads and royalty sharing the same unprejudiced sun, climaxing in three minutes that finally delivers solos and chaos aplenty.

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  Rocket Juice & The Moon

  Rocket Juice & The Moon

  2012 | Honest Jon's Records / Finetunes

  Amid Blur's Union Jack-draped anointment — first at the Brit Awards, and then as the unofficial send-off to the 2012 Olympics — it's worth reminding the world that Damon Albarn is one the U.K.'s arch internationalists. His work with the underrated Mali Music and DRC Music projects, the Afro-Albion supergroup the Good, the Bad and the Queen, and, of course, Gorillaz, has shown him to be a gracious and dextrous ringleader, drawing... on a global palette of sound without it feeling like mere tourism.
  
  He continues his run of form with his new band, Rocket Juice & the Moon, featuring Flea on bass and Tony Allen on drums. "Fusion" music generally conjures nightmarish visions of dreadlocked white trustafarians loping around in daddy's field, but the blend of funk, highlife, dub and psychedelia is perfectly judged throughout. Dub techno master Mark Ernestus mixed the record, and doesn't let it turn into 1970s Lagosor King Tubby pastiche, instead keeping the production clean and aerated. While lesser bands might choose to put a plodding breakbeat behind these brass-laden tracks (augmented by the ever-skilful Hypnotic Brass Ensemble), Allen keeps everything polyrhythmically on its toes — as you might expect, he and Flea make a potent and danceable rhythm section.
  
  The vocal contributions seal the album though. Ghanaian rapper M.anifest is a revelation, unfolding extended sets of bars in a voice and flow reminiscent of Roots Manuva; Fatouma Diawara brings keening desert blues to "Lolo" and "Follow-Fashion"; Erykah Badu weaves her way expertly through the shimmying "Hey, Shooter." And Albarn comes to the fore on "Poison," singing his best post-Blur song with an unforgettable weather-beaten melody of heartbreaking simplicity. Released on the Honest Jon's label that Albarn co-owns and which has sketched out "world music" in imaginative new shades, this is a seamless, sunlit meeting of cultures, a reminder that "fusion" need not be a dirty word. — Ben Beaumont-Thomas

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  Dr. Dee

  Damon Albarn

  2012 | VIRGIN

  Stability and Damon Albarn might as well be antonyms. Throughout his two-decade career, the forward-thinking singer has maintained an unrelenting desire for progressive off-the-cuff experimentation. The success of his most cherished acts, Blur and Gorillaz, gave him the license for such sorcery. But even these now have a less-than-certain future. Albarn has tried it all: There's Rocket Juice & the Moon, his Flea and Tony Allen-assisted Afrofunk crew; last year the singer... traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to record a benefit album with local musicians; dude has even made an iPad album. Unsurprisingly, his latest concoction is no less ambitious; Dr. Dee, the score to a folk-opera inspired by Dr. John Dee, a 16th-century philosopher, astrologer and once-believed-to-be madman, is a sprawling collection of orchestral movements, elegiac choral accompaniment, and manic asides woven together by Albarn's alternately soothing and chilling vocals. Fewer than half the 18 tracks feature Albarn, and several are strictly instrumental. Yet, there are surefire nuggets here: "Apple Carts", a tempestuous lullaby, and "The Marvelous Dream," a typically droll, Albarn-ian dirge on the fog that eclipses our wildest ambitions, both fit snugly into the singer's ever-expanding choose-as-you-go musical repertoire. The only question is: What's next? — Dan Hyman

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All Writing Is Re-Writing, or, The Maestro Who Cannibalizes Himself

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  Boulez: Dérives 1 & 2 - Mémorial

  Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain

  2012 | naïve / Naive

  For a certain type of "modern classical" fan, this disc emerged as one of the earliest (pleasant) surprises of 2012. After starting out as a miniature in the 1980s, and then being recorded by the composer himself in a 25-minute "revised edition" circa 2005, a Boulez fan could be forgiven for thinking that all the tinkering on "Derive II" had been completed.
  
  Not so. For here we have Daniel Kawka and the Ensemble... Orchestral Contemporain with a version of "Derive II" that stretches over 50 minutes in length — the biggest single drop of new Boulez orchestral music in many years. (According to the composer, he's otherwise been busy orchestrating his early "Notations" for solo piano, a few of which dribble out in recordings every so often.)
  
  So what's in there? Some ravishing writing for woodwinds, for starters — contrapuntal lines for bassoon, oboe and clarinet abound here. There are even flecks of insouciance you'd almost call jazzy, if not for the cold-water-dumping icy quality of the piano part (which harkens back to some of those original "Notations").
  
  New Yorkers heard this new version of Derive II during the maestro's 85th birthday concert, in 2010. At the local premiere performance, I wasn't convinced of the structural necessity of opening up "Derive II" in this way, but Kawka's command of the newly conceived piece has made me into a convert. By turns harsh and lush, it's required listening for any Boulez devotee, and possibly also for other kinds of classical fans who don't regard themselves as anything of the sort.

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  Boulez: Pli Selon Pli; and Livre pour Cordes

  Pierre Boulez

  1996 | Sony Classical

  "Am I the only listener who finds Pli selon pli both pretty monotonous and monotonously pretty?" So asked Igor Stravinsky of his last interviewer, from the New York Review of Books, in 1971. The composer would have heard this version, completed in 1969 (and revised for a Deutsche Grammophone disc in 2002). And sure: Stravinsky is correct; it's a long piece, and one dedicated to a certain clenched aesthetic. But this version... is preferable for this very reason — particularly to those who find the composer's late-'80s revision too pretty and not nearly monstrous enough. Halina Lukomsa's soprano punches through the mix more so than in the latter recording (which features Christine Schafer), as do the amplified mandolin and guitar parts. Coupled with the occasionally hard-to-find "Livre pour cords," this '60s-era Boulez offering has hung in the catalog for good reason. If you don't want Boulez's late-period gracefulness, the punch you're looking for can be found here.

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  Benjamin: Antara - Boulez: Dérive, Memoriale - Harvey: Song Offerings

  London Sinfonietta

  2012 | Nimbus Records / The Orchard
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  Webern, Silvestrov, Boulez:Variations

  Ingrid Karlen

  2008 | ECM
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  Wien Modern

  Wiener Jeunesse-Chor

  2005 | DG CD
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  Mahler, Boulez: Symphony No.9 - Rituel, Notations

  SWR Sinfonieorchester BadenBaden und Freiburg

  2005 | haenssler CLASSIC

Serial Electronica: Boulez’s Experiments with Manipulated (and Multi-Tracked) Instruments

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  Boulez: Répons; Dialogue de l'ombre double

  Alain Damiens

  1999 | Deutsche Grammophon

  When French president Georges Pompidou asked Boulez to start a center for musical research in the 1970s, the composer dreamed up with technologically oriented IRCAM (or Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Repons, completed in 1984 but not recorded until 2000, the 40-minute piece Repons has thus far represented Boulez's own high-water mark of engagement with electro-acoustic composition. Scored for a small orchestra, six soloists and a synthesizer that reacts in real-time... to live performance, the piece has a dreamy quality that has eluded some of Boulez's more savage writing for purely acoustic forces. As piano chords are refracted and spit back into the mix by IRCAM's "4x" synthesizer/processor, with a slight phasing effect, the listener may become conscious of an irony: Did it finally take electronic interference to make Boulez's music more human sounding, and less fanatically precise than the sound he goes for as a conductor? Sure. But no matter which side of the human/digital divide for which characteristic — as in the blend of fleeting piano notes and panned woodwinds in Section 5 — the blend of pristine sharpness and odd decay proves fascinating.

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  Boulez: Sur Incises; Messagesquisse; Anthèmes 2

  Ensemble Intercontemporain

  2000 | Deutsche Grammophon

  "Sur Incises" — for three trios of pianos, harps and percussionists, respectively — is the headliner here, but "Anthèmes 2" is the real stunner. For a solo violinist and a sound manipulator (who feeds the live sound back, after some processing), the piece is the cleanest representation of what Boulez has been up to at IRCAM all these years. The massed forces of pieces like "Repons" and "...explosante-fixe..." mean that it's sometimes... difficult to discern where the electronics end and the live performance begins. Not so here; the bevy of tweaked sounds — airy sustains, chopped-and-screwed pizzicato moments, and kaleidoscopic glissando runs — are all clear and exposed.

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  Alto / Multiples

  Christophe Desjardins

  2010 | Aeon / IDOL
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  Berio & Boulez : Dialogue, Chemins, Récit...

  Vincent David / Ensemble Quaerendo Invenietis

  2008 | Aeon / IDOL

The Composer’s Band: Boulez Conducts the Ensemble Intercontemporain

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  Boulez: Le Marteau sans maitre; Derive 1 & 2

  Hilary Summers

  2005 | DG

  The title translates to "The Hammer Without a Master" — and yet this is the piece of Boulez's that, more than any other, has sealed his compositional reputation. Graduate students are still puzzling out its theoretical structure, but lay listeners can hear what distinguishes the work. The poetry chosen by the composer, from the pages of the surrealist-inspired René Char, fits neatly within Boulez's whimsical soundworld — one populated by six instrumentalists... who make up a bizarre chamber ensemble of viola, guitar, alto flute, vibraphone, xylorimba and percussion. (There is no player to carry anything like a baseline, contributing to the composition's brittle quality.) The feeling of sonic-heft sensuality is therefore left to the single vocalist; on this recording, Hilary Summers evokes the proper mystery from the song-texts with a lushness of sound.

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  Pierre Boulez Conducts His Own Works

  Pierre Boulez

  Sony Classical

  Here's your one chance to hear "Eclat/Multiples for 25 Instruments." In the decades after this early recording with the band founded at IRCAM, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Boulez has yet to revisit the piece in the studio. It's perhaps not the sort of piece that the composer's more sensual late style could even begin to accommodate. Without a text to anchor him (as with Pli Selon Pli and Le Marteau Sans Maitre), the... thing seems unwieldy — even for Boulez. But it still stuns; the attack of the Intercontemporain players sets the standard for the brutalism Boulez was after at the time. When paired with the otherwise hard-to-find "Rituel (In Memory of Bruno Maderna)" — a grieving farewell to a composer colleague, played here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra — this disc amounts to an essential document of Boulez's compositional fascinations during the 1970s.

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  Boulez: ... Explosante-fixe...

  Pierre-Laurent Aimard

  2005 | DG
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  Pierre Boulez: Pli selon Pli

  Christine Schafer

  2002 | Deutsche Grammophon

Solo and Duo Flights

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  Boulez: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-3

  Paavali Jumppanen

  2005 | DG

  "A master who worked with a very small hammer" is how the American neo-Romantic/post-Minimalist composer John Adams described Boulez upon the occasion of the maestro's 80th birthday. If this slightly tortured form of praise doesn't seem to have made much allowance for Boulez's later-period compositions, that makes sense: In a way, it was the pointillistic jugular-stabbing of these early piano sonatas that first brought Boulez attention as a composer and theorist. The... bigger the forces, the more generous Boulez's sound world can seem. When it's solo instrument time, especially from the era in which Boulez's critical prose was at its polemical height, the listener may want to brace for an attack.
  
  This is the one recording available that unites all three of the composer's piano sonatas — including the unfinished (and slightly chance-based) final sonata. And though the reputation of Boulez's Second Piano Sonata as "unplayable" has, by now, been disproven half a dozen times on record, Boulez's face on the Deutsche Grammophon cover here suggests that this traversal, by Paavali Jumppanen, has pride of place in the composer's own record collection.

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  Terrestre

  Claire Chase

  New Focus Recordings

  As the executive director of the New York City-based International Contemporary Ensemble — a group that often appears to be everywhere, commissioning new pieces by the likes of Steve Lehman while rescuing neglected operas by Hans Werner Henze — flutist Claire Chase has done as much as anyone to rehabilitate the reputation of European-informed modernism in the city that Pierre Boulez once scandalized with much the same aesthetic.
  
  How has she done it?... Part of the answer is that Chase and her ICE cohorts are just that talented; the breath control required by a piece like Kaija Saariaho's titular work on this program isn't just a technical issue, but an interpretive one. And Chase makes the timbral subtleties of avant-garde, extended technique really sing through this program, and soulfully.
  
  Even though no electronics are involved on the album, it feels as though the legacy of abstracted, manipulated instrumental textures has inspired much of the playlist. Kaija Saariaho's experimentations flow, after all, from Pierre Boulez's early IRCAM explorations, and so it's fitting that his early "Sonantina" is on the same program. Chase's playful mastery with the piece is a generational landmark, in that the piece doesn't feel played out of anything resembling duty (like either that of a monk to a religion, or a child to a plate of spinach). Hery playing comes off so joyfully, it almost makes you forget that you're supposed to think this music is hard going.

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  Bach: Partita in D major, French Suite in D minor/Boulez: Douze Notations pour piano, Incises

  David Fray

  2007 | EMI Classics
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  Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen: Dal Niente

  Eduard Brunner

  2011 | ECM NEW
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  Stravinsky: Three Dances from Petruschka'/ Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No.7 / Webern: Piano Variations

  Maurizio Pollini

  1996 | Deutsche Grammophon

In Chronological Order

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  Monster Movie

  Can

  2005 | MUTE

  Crude keyboard electronics, circular bass guitar riffage, nervous one-chord guitar drones, steady non-syncopated drumming, and stream-of-consciousness poetry signifying everything and nothing: The first few seconds of Can's debut album present a laundry list of Krautrock signifiers. But what's amazing on this 1969 disc is hearing the band essentially inventing a genre. Having been exposed to the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol's Factory art bunker on a trip to Manhattan the year before,... keyboardist and classical composer Irmin Schmidt leads his band to take on rock with the radicalness of the contemporary avant-garde.
  
  Like bassist Holger Czukay, Schmidt was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the 20th century's most theoretical and controversial composers. Guitarist Michael Karoli studied under Czukay. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit had previously played free jazz. American ex-pat sculptor Malcolm Mooney struggled with mental illness. Monster Movie is larger than the sum of this unlikely combination; it's essentially brutal, psychedelicized garage rock, but fueled by ideas, chops, and chemistry that far exceed the stoner norm.
  
  Its four tracks contain only a suggestion of melody. Instead, there's propulsion, and the anxiousness that came with making it up as they went along. Where their contemporaries pursued harmoniousness in collective spontaneous composition, Can finds anxiety and, paradoxically, the fearlessness of the groove in its aptly named Monster Movie. "You made a believer out of me," the key line in the sprawling 20-minute-plus behemoth "You Doo Right" is elevated from throwaway line to manifesto through repetition, keen dynamics, and sheer force of will. Can believes in the artfulness of savagery, and it pursues both here in equal measure.

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  Soundtracks

  Can

  2005 | MUTE

  Can's 1970 release captures the most important transition in an ever-evolving band. It contains the final material from the quintet's original singer Malcolm Mooney until the band's 1989 reunion disc Rite Time, as well as the recorded debut of his successor, definitive Can vocalist Damo Suzuki. Although it's ostensibly a collection of cuts created for European cinema, Soundtracks plays out like a quintessential acid rock LP: Michael Karoli's shrieking guitar is the... album's featured instrument, and although keyboardist Irmin Schmidt called the shots, there's little of his atmospheric keys that the album's title suggests; only the brief, über-Gothic instrumental "Deadlock" resembles a traditional soundtrack.
  
  Just as producer Teo Macero edited the work of Miles Davis and his musicians into trailblazing compositions, bassist Holger Czukay structured hours of Can improvisation in a way that predated sampling. On Soundtracks, his editing is remarkably brusque: "Deadlock" and "Tango Whiskyman" fade abruptly; "Soul Desert" ends with a dead stop, and the epic "Mother Sky" starts full-tilt, as if in mid-jam. The edits throughout its 14-and-a-half minutes are obvious, but they give the sprawl its pacing and crucial dynamics; without them, the repetition would be unbearable. Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit lock themselves into in a severe, dead-simple dance groove that suggests disco, post-punk, and all points between while Karoli throws a fit and Suzuki mumbles and cries cosmic soul. This is the first time that Can truly becomes itself, a fitting precursor to the band's most mountainous milestone, 1971's Tago Mago.

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  Tago Mago (40th Anniversary Edition)

  Can

  2011 | MUTE

  A major leap beyond the Cologne band's earliest output, Can's 1971 double album is radical as it is large. Recorded at its newly assembled Inner Space studio, Tago Mago marks the beginning of Can's communal creative peak: Each member's contributions mesh so seamlessly into an organic, interactive whole that they're almost unimaginable in a different context. Many albums of the era were created in revolutionary hippie enclaves, but this is one of... the few that truly feels democratic and is all the better for it.
  
  Inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley, Tago Mago is Can's most foreboding work, and although the band intended it as a journey from light to dark and back, it's mostly crepuscular and distinctly autumnal; Halloween without the candy. Ominous opening track "Paperhouse" repeatedly creeps and climaxes like a serial killer stalking and violating its prey. Suddenly it caps, subsides, and segues into "Mushroom," an anguished, astonishing dance cut that links James Brown beats to Can's successor, Public Image Ltd. Singing "I saw skies are red/ I was born and I was dead" in an unmistakably Japanese accent, Damo Suzuki suggests the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit manage to be both funereal and funky while guitarist Michael Karoli picks slowly stinging notes and Irmin Schmidt plies grim organ chords. "Oh Yeah" follows with what's either bomb blasts or cracks of thunder. Suzuki sings backwards, and then in Japanese as propulsive rhythms hasten.
  
  "Halleluhwah" brings Godzilla-sized psych-funk that fades into a gentle but fleeting interlude then starts up again, building steadily and more menacing until it roars and then slinks off. The drones and dissonance of "Aumgn" evokes ritual sacrifice before culminating in a tribal drum circle jerk. "Peking O" showcases Czukay's most unpredictable jump cuts; it's more collage than composition. Suggesting a mystical Indian raga, "Bring Me Coffee or Tea" supplies a relatively cloudless coda to an otherwise turbulent journey. While most other '70s double albums dawdle, Tago Mago tramples into tomorrow.

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  Ege Bamyasi (Remastered)

  Can

  2011 | MUTE

  If you're new to Can, this is the best and easiest place to start. Containing an actual Top 10 single (in West Germany, of course) with peaks akin to Tago Mago's most pointed cuts, yet with little of that sprawling double album's excess, 1972's Ege Bamyasi is the German band's most solid and groove-intensive work. Given that this is Can, there's still plenty of weirdness. Opening track "Pinch" announces this set's sinister... funk tone with a feedback shriek and one of drummer Jaki Liebezeit's most frenzied syncopations. While he rattles full-tilt, bassist Holger Czukay creates tension by holding back as guitarist Michael Karoli applies shards of broken chords; keyboardist Irmin Schmidt adds nearly imperceptible drones, and singer Damo Suzuki growls equally incomprehensible Beat babble. The result is an interlocking puzzle of rhythm and noise.
  
  Post-punk and no-wave groups like Gang of Four and the Contortions, as well as countless current indie bands, would follow Ege Bamyasi's template, but this was supremely/uniquely freaky stuff at a time when the Carpenters ruled the airwaves. While most progressive rock peers supplied head trips to stoned fans who couldn't get up from their bean-bag chairs, Can created full-body psychedelia for the discos of tomorrow. "Sing Swan Song" provides a respite ballad and the second half of "Soup" thoroughly freaks out, but the rest ranks among the most radical dance music of the '70s — so radical that it would take decades to find sympathetic club DJs beyond German boarders. The first Can album to get a US release, Ege Bamyasi nevertheless ended up in bargain bins.
  
  This is Liebezeit's greatest work, and while he plays like the maestro that he is, the others seem bent on unlearning their chops, although few of the non-musicians Can inspired could ever summon the restraint of "One More Night." Like Picasso approximating a caveman's scrawl, Can's savagery is rendered with skill. The guitars, the keyboards, even Suzuki's feral vocals are rendered as if they were percussion. In "Vitamin C," everything becomes a drum, and while "I'm So Green" introduces the Madchester sound nearly two decades before Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, the German gangster TV show theme and resulting pop hit "Spoon" takes Sly Stone's contemporaneous experimentation with crude early drum machines and marries it to pseudo-Arabic rock exotica — the beginnings of what Can would later name its Ethnological Forgery Series.

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  Future Days

  Can

  2005 | MUTE

  If 1972's Ege Bamyasi is Can's most extroverted and eager-to-please work, their next offering is the German band's most introverted and alluringly aloof. 1973's Future Days isn't the proto-ambient work that some critics have claimed it is: Drummer Jaki Liebezeit still hammers like a funky octopus; singer Damo Suzuki gets as close as he ever could to crooning conventional pop-rock melodies, and there's way too much tension played far too in-the-pocket for... Can to comfortably recede into the background. But there's a palpable, sexy sense of restraint here, and although it doesn't approach Brian Eno's subsequent Spartan random drones, it points in that direction. A sleeper album that reveals its nuanced depths over time, this is Can at its coolest.
  
  The minimalism Irmin Schmidt learned from Steve Reich and Terry Riley comes to the fore: It takes bassist Holger Czukay six minutes to deviate from the one note he plays through most of the introductory title track. Although the band is still generating most of this stuff live in the studio and capturing it with simple stereo recording, there's much more sound manipulation: The volume drops suddenly on "Future Days" to build back up, and that chugging hum throughout remains a mystery. (Is it a guitar pedal? A crude synth? A mechanical ghost?) The free-form jams of Tago Mago's second half are here refined into the far more structured "Spray," which accelerates, switches into languid 6/8 time, then speeds up again. "Moonshake" similarly untangles Ege Bamyasi's lunar discothèque funk. While those records boil, Future Days simmers.
  
  Nowhere is this shift into subtlety more apparent than on its opus, "Bel Air." Where Can's other side-long cuts sprawl, this one is arranged as a symphonic suite of related movements, one that ends as it begins. "Spinning down alone, you spin alive," Suzuki chants enigmatically as his cohorts achieve multiple orgasms of Krautrock lava love. Despite its reserve, Future Days radiates a tenderness that Can would never recapture: This was Suzuki's swan song; he'd soon become a Jehovah's Witness and retire from music for years. There's a sense of finality here, but also a gentle spirituality. Can's five members here synchronize as if their limbs were strings plucked by the same cosmic deity.

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• 

  Soon Over Babaluma

  Can

  2005 | MUTE

  1973's Future Days marked the end of the band's stretch with singer Damo Suzuki, but '74's Soon Over Babaluma extends Can's golden era for one more disc. Reduced to a quartet, its members shift duties and stretch psychedelia further from its source: When he isn't augmenting his guitar with violin, Michael Karoli plays it as if it were one. He and Irmin Schmidt — who uncharacteristically pounds a regular piano on a... couple of cuts — contribute vocals that recede to the background after the first two tracks. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit's beats deviate from their usual funk, and bassist Holger Czukay holds back even more than usual, giving to the band's space rock additional spaciousness. Can has never been cluttered, but here it's finely defined.
  
  Opening track and single "Dizzy Dizzy" begins Can's recurring excursions into reggae so unconventional it's rarely recognized as such. Karoli takes the mic to twist James Brown catchphrases into abstract pillow talk, but his violin — popularized in contemporaneous rock by Roxy Music, Cockney Rebel and ELO — is the focal point. He plays it in gypsy style while his bandmates swoop and skank as if the Jamaica of their dreams lacked gravity. "Come sta, La Luna" merges their galactic reggae with tango; guitar remains in a supporting role, waves of rhythm float in and out, and the undulating sonics mimic dub. "Splash" and "Chain Reaction" presage Can's near-thorough immersion into jazz-rock fusion that would soon grow standard; here it's wild and foreboding. "Quantum Physics" mutes where Future Days left off: Still too nervous and percussive for true ambient music, it feels as though it's taking place on a distant planet. Brian Eno would soon smooth these drones for himself; Factory and 4AD Records would later fetishize their dislocation. This is the last time Can would be unquestionably influential.

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• 

  Landed (Remastered)

  Can

  2005 | MUTE

  Although Can's previous work, 1974's Soon After Bamaluma, debuted the German group as a quartet after the departure of its most essential singer Damo Suzuki, this 1975 album signals a more significant shift. This was the band's debut for England's Virgin Records, initially a prog-rock indie that generated U.K. hits with resolutely non-commercial releases from Can's Krautrock brethren Tangerine Dream and Faust. This was also Can's first album recorded with a 16-track... console, which meant that the band didn't need to sing and play most of its parts at the same time in the same room; now it could fix, overdub, or trash individual performances as needed.
  
  Landed is still a strange record by 1975 standards, but when measured against Can's previous output, much of it is far more straightforward. Jaki Liebezeit's previously masterful drums are usually buried in the mix, and what can be heard is much simpler than his usual polyrhythmic funk. Minimalism had served the band well, but now guitarist Michael Karoli plays many more notes, and when coupled with casual two-chord compositions like "Vernal Equinox," the resulting lopsidedness suggests jam bands like Santana where the soloist is king. If it weren't for Holger Czukay's studio tricks, "Full Moon on the Highway" would nearly be generic boogie. Only the concluding beat-less collage "Unfinished" ties this relatively conventional Can to its freak-form past.

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  Flow Motion

  Can

  2006 | MUTE

  After the relatively regular jam-band fare of the previous year's Landed, Can's 1976 album takes a 180-degree turn away from rock. Ramping up the space reggae introduced on '74's Soon Over Babaluma, Flow Motion opts for a far cleaner sound while returning to the German band's polyrhythmic approach. It yielded the band's U.K. hit (and sole success outside Germany), "I Want More," which splits the difference between Roxy Music's glam proto-disco and... Kraftwerk's pioneering synth-pop. The band's unison vocals suggest a menacing male counterpart to the breathy babes of fellow German disco act Silver Convention, while the fuzz guitars and dreamlike keyboards play Can's prettiest melody by far. "I Want More" (and the track's second half, "... And More," a nod to James Brown's many two-part singles) is a little piece of perfection, and although the rest isn't as tightly focused, Flow Motion is easily the band's most welcoming record in the '70s second half.
  
  As suggested by song titles like "Laugh Till You Cry, Live Till You Die," it's also distinctly lighter. Although the droning Bali-esque drums of "Smoke (E.F.S. No. 59)" link Can's then-current incarnation to its far darker Tago Mago past, there's a tropical, even sunny vibe to cuts like "Cascade Waltz" and "Babylonian Pearl," trifles that may trip up fans of its previous work yet clearly rejuvenate the group. Bassist Holger Czukay's sonic manipulation now figures nearly as prominently as the instruments themselves: Flow Motion was engineered using "Artificial Head," a recording technique employed so that headphone listeners could perceive a three-dimensional effect. Once again Can is an experimental band, only this time the musical trials yield merrier results.

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  Saw Delight

  Can

  2006 | MUTE

  Here's where the Can discography truly deviates. The addition of latter-day members of the otherwise British psych/prog/fusion band Traffic — Jamaican bassist/vocalist Rosko Gee and Ghanaian percussionist Rebop Kwaku Baah — together with Holger Czukay abandoning his bass to focus on production and sound effects means that the Can-ness of this 1977 record is distinctly diminished. The best of the Rosko/Rebop era, Can's ninth album boasts some forward-thinking thrills: Opening cut "Don't... Say No" suggests what Talking Heads would sound like in their expanded '80s incarnations, while the sprawling "Animal Waves" similarly suggests King Crimson's future transformation with Adrian Belew. "Sunshine Day and Night" even beats Paul Simon to the Afrobeat punch.

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  Inner Space / Out Of Reach

  Can

  2007 | Synergie OMP / The Orchard

  Combining Can's 1978 disc Out of Reach, with its 1979 album Can aka Inner Space, this twofer release captures the German band at its least Can-ish.
  
  Out of Reach (tracks 9 through 15) isn't even included in the band's own official discography. Both latter-day ex-Traffic members, Saw Delight additions Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee do all the singing here, and founding member Holger Czukay isn't involved at all; he quit the band... in '77. Rebop is a dexterous player, but his percussion often overwhelms Jaki Liebezeit's drums rather than augmenting them. Bassist Gee is similarly aggressive and technique-intensive, a sharp contrast to Czukay's minimal yet empathetic previous basslines. Out of Reach is far more akin to the virtuoso flash of American jazz-rock groups like Mahavishnu Orchestra than to the intellectual, intrinsically Germanic Krautrock of yore.
  
  The third and final album Can album recorded with Gee and Rebop, Inner Space (tracks 1 through 8) improves upon 1978's Out of Reach by dropping much of that album's frantic jazz-rock excess, restoring guitarist Michael Karoli as vocalist, and employing Holger Czukay's editing skills. 1979's Can (issued here as Inner Space) nevertheless comes cluttered with filler: A goofy fuzz-tone cover of the melody from Jacques Offenbach's opera Orpheus in the Underworld most associated with the can-can illustrates how far the band had ventured from its avant-garde beginnings. But the strongest material — particularly "Aspectacle," a menacing quasi-disco track akin to contemporaneous cuts by James White and the Blacks — restores that essential mystery in Can's core.

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  Rite Time

  Can

  2006 | MUTE

  Can's remaining members went their separate ways after recording Can (aka Inner Space) in 1978. In late '86, the original lineup briefly reunited in sessions that would three years later yield the band's 12th and final studio album. For a loose unit that could tighten up righteously if it saw fit, this quintet goes distinctly off-kilter on 1989's Rite Time: Few elements in opening cut "On the Beautiful Side of a Romance"... fully synchronize, and reinstated vocalist Malcolm Mooney evokes Captain Beefheart's lunacy without the wit. On brooding tracks such as "Like a New Child," the gated drums, brittle guitar, and liquid bass suggest the '80s productions of kindred jazz fusionist Bill Laswell. Elsewhere, Can picks up where it left off in the late '70s — lighthearted and untethered.

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  Lost Tapes Box Set

  Can

  2012 | MUTE

  Can's relationship to contemporary alt-rock and pop is so elemental that they have penetrated the DNA of acts as diverse as Happy Mondays, Wilco and Radiohead, plus innumerable others who have worshipped at their groovy altar rather more cravenly over the past 44 years. Frankly, it would be easier to name those that hadn't soaked up Can's stew of psychedelia, free jazz, prog rock, funk, avant-electronica, African high-life and musique concrete.
  
  Following on... from the reissue last year of Tago Mago comes this three-CD box set of previously unreleased material, the master tapes of which were rediscovered when Can's Weilerswist studio was dismantled prior to sale. Thirty hours of music — recorded between 1968-77 — were edited and co-compiled by original member Irmin Schmidt, providing further evidence of Can's unclassifiable genius.
  
  Given their disregard for boundaries, The Lost Tapes is as rampantly diverse as you'd expect. Alongside "Blind Mirror Surf" — where smashing glass, a sound like mooing cows and unintelligible muttering suggest an episode of The Goon Show taped in Bedlam — sit groovy raga "Your Friendly Neighborhood Whore", pastoral sci-fi epic "Dead Pigeon Suite" and the live "Mushroom," where a distressed vocal and needling guitar subtly shift its gears by thrillingly malevolent increments.
  
  Three discs is a lot to digest in one sitting, but to plunge into The Lost Tapes at any point is to be rewarded with a reason to rhapsodize afresh about Can's everlasting, inspirationally bonkers vision. — Sharon O'Connell

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The Beginning (Country Willie)

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  The Early Years

  Willie Nelson

  2009 | CAPITOL NASHVILLE

  Shoe shiner, member of a polka band, guitarist in his brother-in-law's western swing band, disc jockey in both San Antonio, Texas, and Portland, Oregon — Willie Nelson was many things before he got $100 for the rights to his song "Family Bible," making him a bona fide paid songwriter. But he'd been writing songs since the age of four, so when he relocated to Nashville in the early '60s, he wrote three... hit singles in a matter of a few weeks: "Hello Walls" for Faron Young, "Crazy" for Patsy Cline and "Funny How Time Slips Away" for Ray Price. But he was cutting many more songs than that and this box set documents the man's proficiency. His wit is evident on numbers like "Mr. Record Man," "One in a Row" and "Half a Man" and his own peculiar way of delivering a song vocally is already evident. Seemingly flat as if talking rather than singing, Nelson's dragging behind on the beat showed him as much a jazz singer as a country singer.

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  Country Willie - His Own Songs

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | Buddha Records
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  Texas In My Soul

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | Legacy Recordings
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  Country Favorites - Willie Nelson Style

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | Legacy Recordings

The Country Outlier

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  Yesterday's Wine

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | RLG/BMG Heritage

  "Do you know why you're here?" With that question begins one of history's strangest country records, especially when Willie's answer comes: "There's great confusion on earth…and the voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest and I have been selected as the most likely candidate." Buyers were confused by Yesterday's Wine as well, a mystical record on birth and mortality cloaked in a roughneck country sleeve. Yes, Willie's voice is imperfect... on his first concept album, and more mystical than the others that followed, Phases & Stages or Redheaded Stranger. But some of his gentlest songs come to the fore here, be they the lilting waltz medley of "These Are Difficult Times/Remember the Good Times" or the melancholic "December Day." Even the celebratory title cut feels repentant while "Me and Paul" is one of his finest odes to friendship.

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  Words Don't Fit The Picture

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | RLG/Legacy

  One glance at this gaudy cover photo of Willie Nelson and you'd think he'd already rebelled against the strictures of Nashville: leather jacket, bug-eyed goggles, bellbottoms, chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Yes, this oft-overlooked RCA album was released between Willie's retirement from Music Row, his relocation to the more mellow climes of Austin, Texas, and his revival as a long-haired hippie outlaw. Depicted as a rock star, this album is instead a composed, carefully... gradated album of mostly acoustic country-folk numbers, from future hit "Good Hearted Woman" to the mellow travelogue of "London." The title track is a hidden gem of the man's hefty songbook though, a plain sung break-up number where the pain looms larger than the explanation.

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  Willie Nelson And Family

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | RLG/Legacy
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  Laying My Burdens Down

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | RLG/Legacy
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  Both Sides Now

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | Legacy/CBS/Sony
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  Naked Willie

  Willie Nelson

  2009 | Legacy Recordings

The Country Outlaw

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  Red Headed Stranger

  Willie Nelson

  1987 | Columbia Nashville

  Music critics are a notoriously lazy bunch. Take the critical shorthand that accompanies Willie Nelson's stark and trailblazing Red Headed Stranger. Often referred to as both the first "Outlaw Country" album and the first conceptual country album, in reality, it's neither. For the former claim, Willie's riding partner Waylon Jennings beat him to the punch with 1973's Honky Tonk Heroes. As for the latter, hell, it's not even Willie's first concept... album (see the he said/she said of 1974's Phases and Stages, 1971's cosmic-tinged Yesterday's Wine, or even the gimmicky country fair fare of 1968's Texas in My Soul).
  
  
  
  Even shorn of such hyperbole, Red Headed Stranger remains a classic, not just for country music but singer-songwriters the world over who always seek to strip things to essentials. His first album recorded for Columbia (after two classic and genre-expanding albums Shotgun Willie and Phases for Atlantic — not to mention an early career toiling in the country-politan salt mines of RCA and Liberty), Willie made a risky gambit right out of the gate. Rather than embellish his already polished songcraft or put down more of the fine soulful country songs he had steadily been releasing throughout the decade, Willie took his crack touring band (consisting of sister Bobbie Nelson, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, bassist Bee Spears and others) to an out-of-the-way studio in Garland, Texas and stripped everything to the bone. Entwining a skeletal tale about a murderous preacher around a minor song from the Acuff-Rose songbook ("Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"), Willie then juxtaposed it with gentle instrumental waltzes like "Bandera" and "Just As I Am" to make a haunting and subtle song cycle that remains a touchstone to this day.

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  Shotgun Willie

  Willie Nelson

  1987 | Rhino Atlantic

  The moment Willie Nelson was dropped from RCA's roster, Atlantic Records' sharp-eared Jerry Wexler went a-courting down in Texas. While Nashville producers like Felton Jarvis and Chet Atkins knew only to cloak everything that went through their hit factories with countrypolitan sheen, Wexler knew Willie Nelson wouldn't take to such studio polish. He signed him to Atlantic Records' short-lived country division and brought him up to New York City to record. Most... crucially, he let Willie handpick his players. The result is Shotgun Willie, the funkiest of country records. The title track, about a speed freak "biting on a bullet and pulling out all of his hair" gets delivered with a horn-punched slink. Elsewhere, brewhaus polka, roadhouse funk, and Django's jazz emerge from the grooves. With this album, the true Willie began to emerge from country music's chrysalis and crest.

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  Wanted! - The Outlaws

  Various

  1996 | RCA Records Label Nashville
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  Phases And Stages

  Willie Nelson

  2005 | Rhino Atlantic
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  The Sound In Your Mind

  Willie Nelson

  1987 | Columbia Nashville

The Collaborator

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  Waylon & Willie

  Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

  2001 | Buddha Records

  The Bash Brothers of '88, the murderous 1927 tandem of Ruth and Gehrig — those are the true peers for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings by the mid '70s. Even the most casual of swings was a hit, every hit froze-roped to the top of the charts and stayed there. (See Wanted: The Outlaws, a compilation album cobbled together from previously-released studio scrapple that became the first country album to go platinum).... From Redheaded Stranger on through casually tossed-off affairs such as this 1978 album, Willie and Waylon are just having fun. There's the instant classic "Mama Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys," meticulous ballads like "It's Not Supposed to be That Way" and crude yet charming fare like "I Can Get Off On You." Almost all of Willie's collaborations would feel as laissez-faire but not all of them are as fun a ride as this.

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  The Great Divide

  Willie Nelson

  2002 | Lost Highway Records
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  San Antonio Rose

  Willie Nelson

  2003 | Columbia/Legacy
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  Pancho & Lefty

  Merle Haggard & Willie Nelson

  2003 | Epic/Legacy
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  The Essential Highwaymen

  The Highwaymen (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson)

  2010 | Columbia/Legacy

The Great Interpreter

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  Stardust

  Willie Nelson

  1999 | Columbia/Legacy

  By late 1977, the outlaw movement, headed up by Willie and Waylon, had not only roared into Nashville shooting up the place, but also shot to the top of the country charts, with Wanted! The Outlaws being the first country album to sell a million copies. But once outlaws are hailed as heroes, setting up as the new establishment, what's left to rebel against? In the case of Willie, he rebelled against... his own rough-hewn persona with Stardust, an endearing and sterling set culled from the pages of the Great American Songbook. Tin Pan Alley chestnuts, jazz standards and frothy pop were all channeled through Willie's voice to great effect, even if record executives thought it was a terrible idea certain to scotch the Outlaws' sales momentum. With a delivery that once sounded odd and erratic — but now seems preternatural in hindsight — it established Nelson as his generation's great song interpreter and Stardust rose to be a stratospheric success, going platinum some 18 times over.

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  American Classic

  Willie Nelson

  2009 | BLUE NOTE
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  Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson

  Willie Nelson

  1989 | Columbia Nashville

The Traditionalist

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  The Troublemaker

  Willie Nelson

  2004 | Columbia/Legacy

  Recorded at Atlantic Recording Studios in 1973 in between the country-funk of Shotgun Willie and the more conceptual boot-scoot of Phases & Stages, but not released until after the success of Redheaded Stranger, The Troublemaker marks Willie's first foray into tackling a songbook, presaging efforts like To Lefty From Willie and Stardust. For this, he dusts off the old family hymnal for an album's worth of gospel. But don't think that Willie... is gonna adhere to a certain perspective though, as the title track makes clear. Foregrounded is the jazzy interplay of his band rather than the solemn message of the Lord. Be it James Clayton Day's steel guitar licks on "Uncloudy Day," the quick shuffle of "There is a Fountain" and the harmonizing of Sammi Smith and Doug Sahm on "Where the Soul Never Dies" not to mention the man's own licks on the freewheeling "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," Willie and Family come first on this album.

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  To Lefty From Willie

  Willie Nelson

  2003 | Columbia/Legacy
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  Always On My Mind

  Willie Nelson

  1983 | Columbia Nashville

The Road Warrior

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  Willie Nelson & Family Live

  Willie Nelson

  2010 | Columbia/Legacy

  "Willie & Family" is always an umbrella: true kin, close friends, bandmates, musicians in town, drinkin' and golfin' buddies. And it was on the strength of the muscular live shows that Willie & Family would throw every Fourth of July and at the Armadillo World Headquarters that convinced a record label like Columbia to sign him. Live, Willie's band was a variant of the Allman Brothers Band, with two bassists, two drummers,... dueling guitars that could rock enough for the rednecks yet jam into the stratosphere enough for the longhairs. Yet Willie's studio albums never could quite harness that live horsepower, so this double-album set (recorded at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe in 1978) is the best document out there. They shift into overdrive on "If You've Got the Money," take sharp hairpin musical turns (see the "Red Headed Stranger Medley"), then downshift into "If You Can Touch Her at All" and some solemn gospel numbers. Guests like Johnny Paycheck and Emmylou Harris join in and this remains one of the more rewarding double live albums in an era full of them.

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  Live Country Music Concert

  Willie Nelson

  2008 | Legacy/CBS/Sony
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  Willie Nelson & Friends - Live And Kickin'

  Willie Nelson

  2003 | Lost Highway Records
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  Outlaws And Angels

  Willie Nelson

  2009 | Mercury Nashville

The Confounder

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  Countryman

  Willie Nelson

  2005 | Lost Highway Records

  "To live outside the law you must be honest," the Dylan lyric goes, and Willie Nelson, outlaw that he is, has always been honest with his loves, musical or medicinal. Musically, he loved standards and gospel, so that he did the unthinkable at the height of "Outlaw"-mania in cutting albums of that genre rather than boot-scuffing honky-tonk. And in case you've been in a cave since Willie burned one on the White... House roof during the Carter Administration, Willie likes the weed. So much that he finally tackled the lone musical form he had never previously imbibed, reggae. It's not great by a long shot, but Countryman does have its moments. There's the mix of pedal steel and chicken-scratch guitar on "How Long is Forever," the dubbed-out spaces of "Sittin' Here in Limbo" and a fine read of "The Harder They Come." In a career of detours, this is one of the most unexpected.

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  Rainbow Connection

  Willie Nelson

  2001 | ISLAND RECORDS

The Renaissance

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  Teatro

  Willie Nelson

  1998 | ISLAND RECORDS

  Willie Nelson's chart run nearly coincided with his much publicized IRS problems. But after the Feds were paid, of more concern was that much of his '80s and '90s studio output didn't quite equal the caliber of his previous work. Signed to Island near the end of the '90s, he released the somber and sparse (and highly recommended Spirit) and then convened in an abandoned movie theater in Oxnard, California, with his... sister and longtime bandmate Bobbie, harmonica player Mickey Raphael, singer Emmylou Harris and famed U2/ Peter Gabriel producer Daniel Lanois. Lanois, a master of atmosphere, surrounds Willie with plenty of new textures: spaghetti western dust clouds, nourish guitar lines, Latin as well as Afro-Cuban rhythms. The percussion gives many of these Nelson standards an invigorating lilt: there's a two-step for "Darkness on the Face of the Earth," a tango for "My Own Peculiar Way," rolling snares on "I Never Cared for You." Some 40 decades into his recording career, it showed could still embrace change while remaining unchanged himself.

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  Spirit

  Willie Nelson

  1996 | ISLAND RECORDS

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  White Music

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  The XTC that recorded its January 1978 debut is barely recognizable as the polished studio-only ensemble remembered for "Dear God" and other '80s and '90s college-rock hits. This one is frantically fast, herky-jerky, super tight and lacking the overdubbed layers that eventually helped define XTC. Guitarist Andy Partridge puts his punk voice on; like the frontmen of most contemporary young English bands, he sings as if emulating Johnny Rotten's bug-eyed stare. Barry... Andrews's carnival-organ-on-speed riffs distinguish the band during an era that had only begun to embrace the keyboards that would soon shape New Wave. Most of the melodies are considerably simpler than what the band would produce only a year later when Andrews was replaced with second guitarist Dave Gregory, but enthusiastic hooks are abundant, particularly on the singles "Statue of Liberty" and "This Is Pop." XTC plays each frantic note as if willing itself out of Swindon, a South West England town so sleepy it's yet to produce another significant rock band.

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  Go 2

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  XTC's second album of 1978 is only marginally less agitated and aggressive than its first. But Go 2's tempos are markedly more varied than White Music's, and the band is already reaching beyond punk in ways that predate most of their peers: Opening track "Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go!)" lyrically references the Munich disco sound that would inspire New Romantics like Duran Duran while its jagged syncopations anticipate Gang of Four. Concert... favorite "Crowded Room" similarly accelerates ska a year before the Specials hit the U.K. charts. And while both Devo and Talking Heads worked with Brian Eno, the deadpan weirdness of "Battery Brides (Andy Paints Brian)" proves XTC could evoke the producer's renegade creativity on its own. (Eno — who at one point contemplated joining XTC — admitted as much.) Keyboardist Barry Andrews's revenge-sex fantasy "My Weapon" is lyrically regrettable, but it does point to the darker mood of his future dance band, Shriekback. Although Go 2 is kindred to its predecessor, its experimental cuts confirm XTC as a band to take chances: The catchiest and most fully realized track, "Are You Receiving Me," was initially left off the LP.

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  Drums And Wires

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  With this 1979 breakthrough, XTC replaces its most distinctive player and gets much better in the process. Out went keyboardist Barry Andrews, who then played in prog-rock maestro Robert Fripp's short-lived New Wave band the League of Gentlemen before fronting punk-funk's Shriekback with ex-Gang of Four bassist Dave Allen. In came guitarist Dave Gregory, who'd soon affirm his own art-rock chops on Peter Gabriel's 1980 album Peter Gabriel 3. Gregory buttresses frontman... Andy Partridge's staccato guitar attack while bassist Colin Moulding and drummer Terry Chambers expand their parts with slightly slower but far more unorthodox rhythms. Like Talking Heads with their contemporaneous Fear of Music, XTC here evolves into a dance band just as the first New Wave discos sweptNew York. The huge bass and drum sound achieved here with producer Steve Lillywhite would become a sonic template of the '80s.
  
  Moulding also comes into his own on Drums and Wires both as a songwriter and singer; his "Making Plans for Nigel" becomes XTC's first U.K. Top 20 achievement. Moulding's smoother vocal delivery and newfound melodic facility shifts XTC in the unique position between suddenly hugely successful power pop bands like the Knack and uncompromising post-punk acts like Public Image Ltd. Chambers lays on the tom-toms, and the guitars maintain the tightness of the previous two albums while gaining complexity and drama; original album closer "Complicated Game" gets as angst-ridden as anything from Siouxsie and the Banshees. Drums and Wires remains one of the most pleasurable albums of its era because XTC's joy in discovering its true identity here is palpable. On "Helicopter" or practically any other cut, the precise yet elated interaction of sticks and strings prove these guys had a ball inventing this brainy, beguiling stuff.

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  Black Sea

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Everything great about 1979's Drums and Wires gets bigger and brighter on 1980's Black Sea. XTC had evolved into a vivid and invigorating live band, and it shows on their first successful record in theU.S.; the four members play together as one, even as star New Wave producer Steve Lillywhite studio-hones their wallop. Having scored their first substantial U.K. pop success the year before with bassist Colin Moulding's "Making Plans for Nigel,"... XTC's confidence substantially increases, along with their ambition. As that single confirmed, social commentary routinely found a place on England's late-'70s/early-'80s hit parade, and both Moulding and leader Andy Partridge contribute several smart ones here. Partridge's opening "Respectable Street" in particular evokes the Kinks' at their peak and presages Blur's Brit-pop best, even if the BBC wouldn't touch its references to abortion and sex positions.
  
  Moulding's "Nigel" success may have inspired some competition in Partridge, who contributes his most politically inspired lyrics ("Living Through Another Cuba") as well as his most upbeat testimonials ("Burning with Optimism's Flames"). The biggest hit was Partridge's least favorite of his songs, "Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me)," in which an anxious teen turns to comic books (or maybe even rock 'n' roll) to give him the confidence he lacks with girls. Although the original LP ended with the band's most abrasive track (the Joy Division-ish "Travels in Nihilon"), Black Sea is XTC's most immediate and New Wave-iest disc. Nearly every cut sounds like a hit from a time when crunchy but perceptive rock was potential (if not always actual) pop.

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  English Settlement

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Before working on XTC's much-loved 1982 double album, leader Andy Partridge gave away his acoustic guitar in a TV contest. He wrote a batch of songs on a new one, and its presence freed up sonic space to fill in ways the band hadn't yet attempted. English Settlement was the first XTC album to ignore the parameters of what a four-member band can accomplish onstage, and it was recorded while the quartet... was still a live band. But when it came time to tour it, Andy Partridge's wife tossed away the Valium to which the singer had long been addicted. The sudden withdrawal triggered panic attacks, a nervous breakdown, and the end of XTC as a touring ensemble.
  
  Where there were once jagged post-punk riffs, there are acoustic, 12-string, Rickenbacker and fretless bass guitar intricacies. The result is cleaner, more spacious and dynamic: XTC's sole Top 10 U.K. single "Senses Working Overtime" starts out quiet, builds with some Who-like flourishes, and then explodes into the first of the band's many Beatle-y choruses. The tension that aligned XTC with contemporaries like Talking Heads dissipates as the group strengthens its bond to Brit-pop's past. Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding still write social commentary songs ("Ball and Chain," "Melt the Guns," "It's Nearly Africa"), but with a gentler touch. English Settlement is XTC's most timeless album; its hooky songwriting is still very much New Wave, but less direct, more finessed sounds position it some heavenly world above.

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  Mummer

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Disheartened and economically diminished by leader Andy Partridge's decision to quit touring and discouraged by a de-emphasis on rhythm, longtime XTC drummer Terry Chambers left early in the making of this pastoral and strikingly low-key 1983 disc: He appears only on the first two tracks and on the bonus cut "Toys," and it's obvious that this home-run-hitter was forced to punt.
  
  Chambers's exit isn't the only reason Mummer is XTC's least physical album.... Recovering from a nervous breakdown and the sudden realization that the band had been robbed of a great deal of money made during the constant touring he hated, Partridge dials down most of the band's most compelling elements — its unrelenting hooks, nearly telepathic instrumental interaction, and limitless enthusiasm that together made XTC's art-pop exceptionally playful. Without Chambers, Colin Moulding seems lost; the bassist's three contributions ("Wonderland," "Deliver Us from the Elements," "In Loving Memory of a Name") lack his usual snappiness. Mummer is much more enjoyable if you accept it as a collection of bucolic B-sides from a band that had crafted album after album full of quirky but pleasure-packed A's.

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  The Big Express

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Whereas XTC's Mummer sounds better than in did in 1983 because its rural aural greenery seems to exist out of time, The Big Express hasn't aged well because it's packed with the clattering industrial drums of 1984. It's much more energetic than its predecessor; the angular guitars that first distinguished XTC return at slower tempos. But the songs rank among the band's least memorable; there's little in the way of hooks, and... the lyrics lack the band's characteristic wit: Neither revealing much about their creators nor speaking eloquently about the world, they're either unnecessarily convoluted, bitter, or both. Bassist Colin Moulding hasn't yet returned to writing classic singles and attention-grabbing album tracks; his cautionary opener "Wake Up" isn't ostensibly aimed at the band or himself, but this was XTC's second album in a row without hits or major contributions to its formidable songwriting cannon, the second to have lost momentum. Drastic measures were necessary; they arrived via a pushy record company, an unlikely American, and 1986's Skylarking.

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  Skylarking

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  By the mid '80s, years of Reagan and Thatcher had worn down the resistance of many a countercultural U.K. musician. Initially edgy acts like Eurythmics, OMD, Thompson Twins, Simple Minds, Billy Idol and even Public Image Ltd. had all by mid-decade released slick albums that blatantly courted Yanks. So when Virgin Records pressured XTC to work with a pre-approved producer who might return the band to the U.K. charts and put it... in touch with the American mainstream once nearly in its reach, it wasn't violating the compromising spirit of the times: The same indie recently squeezed flattering if out-of-character hits out of the Human League and China Crisis by respectively hooking them up with R&B smash-makers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and Steely Dan's Walter Becker.
  
  XTC chose Todd Rundgren, a wildly eclectic solo artist and producer of everyone from Hall & Oates to the New York Dolls. Picking up stylistically where the threesome left off on 1985's 25 O'Clock EP pseudonymously released by the Dukes of Stratosphear, Skylarking exchanges flower-power parody for sincerity. Sequenced as a quasi-concept album that begins with the summer's morning sun and ends at night, this 1986 release evokes the Beatles, Beach Boys and Kinks of 20 years hence while restoring XTC's own strengths. Bandleader Andy Partridge and Rundgren may have clashed during its creation, but the friction brings out the best in all involved; both Partridge and bassist Colin Moulding contribute their catchiest melodies since '82's English Settlement, and Rundgren helps to present them in contexts both more nuanced and accessible than even that band milestone.
  
  The highlights are many, but the connections between songs are just as key; the trio — here joined by the Tubes' Prairie Prince, the most empathetic of the post-Terry Chambers studio drummers — play the knockout transition from "Summer's Caldron" to "Grass" without pause or tape edits. Like most New Wave vocalists, Partridge typically favors character over chops, but he here sings sweeter and smoother, matching Moulding's subtler delivery to the point where their voices nearly merge like the Hollies and other British Invasion heroes.
  
  All this makes Skylarking XTC's most serene album, so it's ironic that its most famous song, "Dear God," is the band's angriest ever. A non-LP B-side swiftly added to the disc when it became an unexpected rock radio hit, Partridge's denunciation of sins committed in the name of a higher power puts him on par with his idols.

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  Chips From The Chocolate Fireball

  The Dukes Of Stratosphear

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Released pseudonymously by the Dukes of Stratosphear on April Fool's Day 1985, 25 O'Clock — a six-track tribute to psychedelia's heyday — is catchier, funnier and far more energetic than what XTC had been releasing under its own name for its last couple of albums. And although 1986's Skylarking re-established the band as a major creative force, it was difficult to make and a hard act to follow. So the threesome and... fellow Duke, Ian Gregory (guitarist Dave Gregory's drummer brother), reunited for another paisley-fueled blowout, 1987's Psonic Psunspot.
  
  Chips from the Chocolate Fireball combines the two records in straightforward consecutive order, and the result ranks among the most consistent sets in the later half of XTC's discography. From the non-sequitur lyrics to the extreme stereo separation of the era, these simulations of psychedelic pop — largely the British variety, but also the Byrds and the Beach Boys at their trippiest — are extraordinarily exacting: "25 O'Clock" starts with a thrillingly accurate recreation of the Electric Prunes' pioneering psych-punk "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night"; "Have You Seen Jackie?" revisits the mischievous titular tranny of Pink Floyd's very first single "Arnold Layne," and "The Mole from the Ministry" goes whole hog for the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus." All that's missing from XTC here is the LSD.

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  Oranges & Lemons

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  A rare logical occurrence for a band too clever to regularly achieve them, XTC's 10th and most accessible album brought it closest to the American mainstream. As suggested by its title and artwork, Oranges & Lemons is bright, sweet, tart and fabulously groovy; the psychedelia of the band's Todd Rundgren-helmed Skylarking and spoofing but sharp Dukes of Stratosphear output keeps coming, but here it's shaped into fizzy and recognizably late-'80s pop.
  
  The sound... is particularly trebly; Rickenbacker guitars, snappy snares, tambourines, woodblocks, handclaps, sitar-like effects, and horns both synthetic and actual abound. Mr. Mister/King Crimson drummer Pat Mastelotto brings syncopated swing that suggests the era's new jack R&B, and the band maintains the fun of its Dukes records. Even if bassist Colin Moulding sings, "You've got to help me get through these cynical days," the overall feeling here — like the sound mix itself — is light and unclouded. XTC once sang of burning with optimism's flame; here they're consistently doing it.
  
  The vibrant opening salvo of "Garden of Earthly Delights," "The Mayor of Simpleton" and "King for a Day" is the closest XTC ever got to pop-rock commercialism, but they do it on their own crafty terms. Promoted with a suitably Anglo-whimsical video, "Mayor" became a major modern rock radio hit, and deservedly so; it's blatantly Beatle-esque and disarmingly guileless.

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  Nonsuch

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  As announced upfront by the MLK/JFK/Jesus-alluding modern rock radio hit "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead," 1992's Nonsuch is considerably darker than its predecessor, '89's Oranges & Lemons. Longtime Elton John collaborator Gus Dudgeon occupies the producer's chair, but aside from the greater emphasis on piano, the instrument on which Andy Partridge for the first time wrote many of his songs, the results suggest that all concerned aimed not to make a typically... lush Dudgeon production. (Thankfully, that apparent rule is beautifully broken on "Wrapped in Grey," which suggests prime-era Elton backed by the Beach Boys, and "Bungalow," which echoes the complex chords of Burt Bacharach.)
  
  Former Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks rarely syncs into a satisfying groove with bassist Colin Moulding, and although there are far fewer guitars, jarringly ordinary arena rock solos punctuate "That Wave" and "Books Are Burning." Although Partridge and Moulding's lyrical smarts are still in place, their melodies are sometimes substandard, and although several songs are linked with crossfades, Nonsuch lacks XTC's usual momentum. Still, "The Disappointed" ranks among its latter-day best; it's certainly the saddest.

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The Albums

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  Sleater-Kinney

  Sleater-Kinney

  Chainsaw / Revolver

  Released the year after Kurt Cobain's suicide, Sleater-Kinney's first album signaled an evolution not just for guitar rock from the Pacific Northwest, but for anyone who cared about underground music. Riot grrrl was a fully fledged genre, and S-K's self-titled debut embodied the sound: angular guitars, feminist lyrics, howled vocals, stripped-down sonics and an electric current channeling palpable (here's an antiquated word) angst. The first song, "Don't Think You Wannna," aped Nirvana's... loud-soft-loud dynamic, and the band's screamy vocals plus lo-fi production can't help but be compared to Bleach. Nirvana, though, was seldom as explicitly political as "A Real Man" ("I don't wanna join your club/ I don't want your kind of love") or "Sold Out," two kiss-offs to the male gender. The album's confrontational edge was sharpened by the decision to subordinate Brownstein's sweeter vocals to Tucker's ("How to Play Dead" is an exception). Weiss hadn't yet joined the band and, in retrospect, her absence is deeply felt — Laura MacFarlane's tempos were sludgy where later discs felt spring-loaded with surprises. Simply put, this is a loud, young, angry rock record by a band that had yet to coalesce: Only two tracks exceeded three minutes long, and "Slow Song" could get away with that title because it was so unusual in context. Nuance would come later.

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  Call the Doctor

  Sleater-Kinney

  Chainsaw / Revolver

  Without losing any bite, Sleater-Kinney's sophomore release was more fun, more self-assured, rangier and just plain better than the band's self-titled debut. The band showed real growth, especially considering how quickly this record followed the first one, and Call the Doctor hinted at the full-on awesomeness of Dig Me Out, which was right around the corner. Weiss's drums help immeasurably, keeping listeners guessing with playful misdirection, while Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein... were beginning to understand how to fuse punk-rock anger to infectious melodies. "Little Mouth" is an absolute rager, with Tucker wailing through the chorus as though she's been scalded by hot water, but it's also a catchy tune with a halting rhythm that begs replaying. "Stay Where You Are" inches closer to the bobbing-and-weaving Tucker/Brownstein vocal dynamic that would become a signature, and Brownstein herself steps out with "Heart Attack," a melodic album-closing classic that she sings gloriously off-key.

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  Dig Me Out

  Sleater-Kinney

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Sleater-Kinney makes a very fine mixtape band — you can cherry-pick tracks from throughout their catalog and wind up with an all-killer, no-filler compilation. But if you could only have one complete album, this would be the one, for Dig Me Out represents the truest distillation of the band's sound. It's the precise moment when the group mastered their sonic template and made clear that they had so much more to give.... Janet Weiss, the band's secret weapon, conjures her inner Bill Berry on "Dance Song '97," reminding you that her drums are not merely timekeeping — they're the band's heartbeat. Meanwhile, Tucker's wail reaches full boil on "Words and Guitar," and tangles perfectly with Brownstein's voice on the candy-coated pop nugget "Little Babies." Their songs just keep on coming. Without ever sounding like anyone other than themselves, the women of S-K deliver blistering rock ("The Drama You've Been Craving"), old-school pop (the hand-clapping "Turn It On"), syncopated verses with anthemic choruses ("One More Hour"), and a raucous track ("Not What You Want") so well executed that it seems almost effortless. From here the band would expand its boundaries in some exciting directions, with individual songs that even surpassed the best stuff here. This album, though, remains the fullest and most perfect expression of Sleater-Kinney's prowess. They'd realized at this point that they were a band with some weapons. On Dig Me Out, every gun was drawn; every blade was sharp and glinting.

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  The Hot Rock

  Sleater-Kinney

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  With their third record in three years, Sleater-Kinney showed signs of fatigue. The hooks here are dulled, the energy feels blunted. It's as though the band finished off its masterpiece Dig Me Out and wasn't exactly sure what to do next. That said, the album's not without its rewards. "Burn, Don't Freeze" hit an especially high watermark, with Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker's vocals dueling intricately on two separate melody lines. "One... Song For You" works similarly (though not quite as well,) and maybe that's a microcosm for The Hot Rock as a whole. It's rough compared to what came before and after, though Sleater-Kinney on an off day was still better than most bands would ever be.

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  All Hands on the Bad One

  Sleater-Kinney

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Of all Sleater-Kinney's albums, this one probably best illustrates the sweet-and-sour vocal interplay between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. Their voices are all over each other — overlapping, competing, popping up, dropping out, adding up to far more than the sum of their parts. Witness for instance "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun," the closest this band ever came to The Donnas. Or check "Leave You Behind," one of the band's great... (and too rare) power ballads, with a chorus to melt your heart. Above all, do not miss "Youth Decay," a 160-second punk-rock bottle rocket that's arguably most exciting track in S-K's catalog. Brownstein hangs back in brooding monotone, while Tucker throws herself into a performance that scorches the earth.

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  One Beat

  Sleater-Kinney

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Released in 2002 and bristling with nervous energy, One Beat may always be known as Sleater-Kinney's "9/11 album." The band had spent years thriving on the tension between euphoria and paranoia, and here that mixture boils over. (Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, Tucker has described herself as "exploding like the sun," a pretty good self-assessment of her vocal presence here.) For sardonic commentary on American life after the... attacks, you can skip directly to "Combat Rock," which snaps back at Republican leadership. Or you can dance the pain away, which is not this band's usual suggestion, but the exhilarating "Step Aside" (complete with blaring horns and cooing background vocals) goes all in for the idea, delivering protest punk by way of Motown.

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  The Woods

  Sleater-Kinney

  Sub Pop Records

  Sleater-Kinney's sound was always instantly recognizable (Tucker's voice made certain of that), but The Woods represents the band's biggest sonic departure. Riffs are more expansive, melodies more atmospheric. (Don't miss the squalling feedback solo of "What's Mine Is Yours.") Where Weiss once drummed like she was popping balloons, now she sounded like she was beating down a door (see "Entertain" for proof). Other standouts include "Let's Call It Love," an 11-minute sex... jam complete, at the climax, with a ringing bell. Brownstein fans will also appreciate "Modern Girl," a sweet ballad which she sings solo over liquid guitar and Dylanesque harmonica. It'd be a stretch to call this swan-song album prog-rock, but it's the wooziest record Sleater-Kinney ever made — the sound of three restless musicians trying something new before they unplugged their amps.

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The Albums

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  Autobahn (2009 Digital Remaster)

  Kraftwerk

  2009 | Astralwerks - Caroline

  Kraftwerk's fourth German album and groundbreaking first international release combines the prog-rock mindset of 1974 with synth-played pop and self-built electronic percussion. Lacking the chops of Pink Floyd and Yes, Kraftwerk compensate with tunes, beats and concept. Autobahn's 23-minute title track is Hütter, Schneider and sleeve artist/lyricist Emil Schult's impression of a lengthy journey on Germany's famous speed-limit-free motorway. The tempo fluctuates to suggest differing pressures on the gas pedal while generating... impressions of passing cars, wind in the hair, overhead birds and the warmth of a shimmering sun. Reverb-drenched surf guitar and sonically treated flute surface fleetingly, but the overall feel is synthetic because Kraftwerk's vision of man's machine-enabled journey through nature is dreamlike, otherworldly.
  
  "Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn," Hütter and Schneider repeatedly sing, and when they turn on the radio, they hear their own vocoder-treated voices repeat the same words that translate to "We're drivin' drivin' drivin' on the Autobahn," but sound like "We're fun, fun, fun on the auto bun," an unconscious and apparently accidental allusion to the Beach Boys' 1964 ode to teenage driving, "Fun, Fun Fun." Even on the highway of their own imaginations, these German separatists cannot escape American culture, and the history of popular music is all the better for it.

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  Radio-Activity (2009 Digital Remaster)

  Kraftwerk

  2009 | Astralwerks - Caroline

  The puns exist on so many levels. Kraftwerk's 1975 follow-up to its surprise international hit Autobahn is a concept album about both radioactivity and activity on the radio. After years in the German underground, these Düsseldorf experimentalists were now actually on the radio; a drastic edit of its 23-minute "Autobahn" received bona fide Top 40 airplay even in the United States, from which the quartet strove to stylistically distance itself. And so... Radio-Activity features songs and noise snippets that reveal in code — at one point, actual Morse code — Kraftwerk's new ambivalence toward radio while the band generates more foreboding impressions of radiation.
  
  The title track ingeniously drifts between the two: "Radioactivity is in the air for you and me…tune in to a melody," Ralf Hütter croons quietly and remotely, never once revealing if he thinks radioactivity — or even radio-activity — is a good or a bad thing. With a slight change in pronunciation, he slides into German, but remains elusive and allusive. All traces of Autobahn's fleeting acoustic instrumentation have been dropped, and the result is much more severe. "Antenna" offers another masterstroke, a love song between an antenna and his transmitter. The lyrics are nothing more than factual ("I'm the antenna catching vibration/ You're the transmitter, give information"), but the arrangement implies sensuality through a liberal dose of echo on Hütter's vocal, an undulating bass riff, and boing-ing sounds that suggest robot orgasms two years before Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." The roles reverse; suddenly Hütter is the transmitter, and his beloved is the antenna. Don't judge; that's just the way these men-machines roll.

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  Trans Europe Express (2009 Digital Remaster)

  Kraftwerk

  2009 | Astralwerks

  Autobahn is split between a milestone title track and a less memorable flipside. Radio-Activity pads a knockout single ("Radioactivity"/"Antenna") with conceptually savvy window dressing. 1977's Trans-Europe Express, however, marks the beginning of an artistic peak that brings Kraftwerk to the dancefloor as it substantially expands the quartet's influence. Its sumptuous textures, jagged beats and retro-futurist style would be revisited, sampled, and imitated by artists as diverse as David Bowie, Donna Summer, the... Human League, Afrika Bambaataa and just about anyone who's ever programmed a synthesizer to shake its groove thing.
  
  Trans-Europe Express is an album about identity in which Kraftwerk situates itself between the European classical composers of the past and the future musicians of the world: The melodies are as rich and romantic as its rhythms are stark and skeletal. While its octave-jumping bassline and strict pulse links disco and marching music, the violin-like synths of "Europe Endless" reach back to 19th-century Romantics like Franz Schubert (who has a song named after him here), Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and many others. "The Hall of Mirrors" pushes the narcissism of Romanticism to Expressionistic extremes. "The artist is living in the mirror with the echoes of himself," Ralf Hütter declares as the sounds of feet walking through an echo-drenched hallway keep time. "Showroom Dummies" twists a criticism of Kraftwerk's anti-stage presence into a badge of pride: We are mannequins; we will dance, and so will you.
  
  All of this is abundantly clear on the title track and its continuing medley cuts "Metal on Metal" and "Abzug." Here the effect is much more ominous; had they been played in a traditional disco arrangement of symphonic soul, these horror-evoking synth riffs would probably clear the floor. Instead, they're both cool and hot like synthetic James Brown; a combination Kraftwerk takes to greater extremes in its next album, 1978's The Man-Machine.

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  The Man-Machine (2009 Digital Remaster)

  Kraftwerk

  2009 | Astralwerks

  Even more so than Kraftwerk's other albums, 1978's The Man-Machine is both of its time and several years ahead. It's not incidental that group leaders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider here share their songwriting credits with their electronic percussionist Karl Bartos. Following the cutting-edge club success of 1977's Trans-Europe Express, this successor released at disco's peak features six tracks, all of them danceable. Here is where Kraftwerk's lingering progressive rock consciousness completely... vanishes, and where these electronic conceptualists consummate their transition into full-fledged dance band.
  
  "Spacelab" and "Metropolis" acknowledge the smooth, synthesized Eurodisco that the Düsseldorf quartet helped pioneer but could not yet crack commercially: Donna Summer, her producer Giorgio Moroder, and others like France's Cerrone and Space were at this point far more club-savvy. "The Robots" and the concluding title track downplay the European classicism of "Trans-Europe Express" while emphasizing its syncopation: That sinuous bassline at the forefront of "The Robot" is pure funk, and the synth line animating "The Man-Machine" would be replayed for one of hip-hop's first electro hits in 1982, the Fearless Four's "Rockin' It."
  
  The remaining tracks bare the hallmarks of what would soon be synth-pop. "Neon Lights" provides a blueprint for nocturnal, distinctly urban, and typically melancholy beat ballads like Gary Numan's 1979 U.K. chart-topper "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and Ultravox's massively melodramatic 1981 single "Vienna." "The Model" didn't click beyond Germany when initially released, but its abundant glamour and Weimar Republic-evoking melody eventually made it a natural on London's New Romantic scene. When reprised as the B-side for 1981's "Computer Love" single, savvy U.K. DJs flipped it, and Kraftwerk's record label rereleased it. Nearly four years after The Man-Machine's initial appearance, the jaunty tune became in England one of 1982's biggest hits, and Kraftwerk's sole No. 1 single.

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  Computer World

  Kraftwerk

  1987 | Elektra Records

  More than rock and its hard-to-budge sense of history, African-American popular music typically concentrates on the present — probably because the past wasn't such a great place to live in if your skin wasn't the right shade. Kraftwerk had ranked among the palest dance bands on the planet (a fact accentuated by 1978's Man-Machine artwork), but on the cover of 1981's Computer World, the quartet's faces were as black as a computer... screen, and their R&B profile rose exponentially. Nothing but electronic rhythms, multi-lingual counting and ricocheting sound effects, "Numbers" wasn't even released as a single, but it became a massive hit on WBLS,New York's pioneering and hugely popular black-owned urban contemporary station. There was rarely a moment during the summer of 1981 when someone wasn't breakdancing to a boombox blasting "Numbers" and "Computer World." By the following year, hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa and his collaborators combined the Düsseldorf foursome's earlier "Trans-Europe Express" with "Numbers" and came up with "Planet Rock," one of hip-hop's most influential early records. Within a few months, R&B and rap alike was synonymous with synths and drum machines.
  
  But if Computer World shaped future R&B, it also suggested Kraftwerk listened to Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and other early black synth adapters. Out went overt references to European classical melodies that shaped albums like Trans-Europe Express, and in came jazzier chords and streamlined melodies. "Computer World," "Home Computer" and "It's More Fun to Compute" all evoke the spy movie themes of John Barry and Quincy Jones, while the tricky syncopations and spry contrapuntal synth lines of "Pocket Calculator" nearly swing. "Computer Love," though, is where Kraftwerk shows its newfound emotional depth. Assisted by spearheading touch-sensitive keyboards, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider make their synths positively sing while percussionist Karl Bartos builds his rhythms in kind. If there was any doubt that synthesized music could have soul, Kraftwerk beautifully refuted it here.

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  Electric Cafe

  Kraftwerk

  1987 | Elektra Records

  Whereas 1981's Computer World coincided with a huge escalation in the new wave, R&B, post-disco and hip-hop worlds for synthesized grooves, late 1986's Electric Café arrived when much of popular music was already electronic. The German quartet started working on Computer World's successor in 1982, but when key member Ralf Hütter suffered a serious injury while practicing his newfound cycling hobby, its successor was delayed and repeatedly reworked. When Electric Café finally... appeared, its largely digital sounds were no longer cutting edge; hip-hop, Latin freestyle, hi-NRG, and synth-pop were all heard regularly on Top 40 radio while house music raged in the underground.
  
  Aside from the slower, more skeletal and aggressive rhythms of Run-D.M.C.-era hip-hop that dominate its nearly non-stop first side, the album barely reflects or acknowledges any of this. Mostly, it picks up where Computer World left off with percussive vocal samples taking the place of most sung vocal lines and telephone sounds where pocket calculator noises once buzzed. Returning to the symphonic classicism of Trans-Europe Express, "Sex Object" is the most startling track. Whereas early Kraftwerk cuts like "Antenna" danced around sexuality and 1983's "Tour de France" single sang about cycling while its heavy breathing implied a journey to orgasm, this atypically frank track features Ralf Hütter in the role of a reluctant lover who craves for emotion and respect; he's human, after all.

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  The Mix

  Kraftwerk

  1991 | Elektra

  Released five years after 1986's Electric Café, The Mix answers criticisms that its predecessor didn't keep up with dance trends. Essentially a replayed greatest-hits collection released in conjunction with the group's return to live performance, the album presents Kraftwerk's most enduring tracks in digital form. Rather than playing most of their synth lines and electronic percussion by hand, many elements here were created through sequencers, and the result is smoother, more automated.... Reflecting then-popular club tempos, several cuts are considerably faster than their typically analog originals, and many pound with the four-to-the-floor bass drum thump of house music while suggesting the iciness of Depeche Mode, the synth-pop successors particularly evoked on a rewritten rendition of "Radioactivity." Whereas the original spun puns of radio waves and radioactivity, this far more forceful remake cites nuclear disasters. "Chain reaction and mutation/ Contaminated population/ Stop radioactivity," Ralf Hütter warns without a shred of his earlier ambivalence.

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  Tour De France (2009 Digital Remaster)

  Kraftwerk

  2009 | Astralwerks

  When your biggest song on what was the biggest station in the world is nothing but beats, counting and sound effects, you probably think you can get away with anything. That was Kraftwerk on its 1981 Computer World track "Numbers," which was championed by New York's WBLS at the height of its trendsetting R&B powers and immediately became a breakdancing anthem along with its similarly minimal 1983 single "Tour de France," the... soundtrack for a key dance in the 1984 b-boy film Breakin'. So when the Düsseldorf quartet two decades later built a new album around that standalone '83 track, writing substantial new melodies probably didn't rank high on its artistic agenda: Several cuts are compositionally nothing more than accelerated, modernized or merely rerecorded versions on "Tour de France," and most of the rest are melodically minimal variations on each other. But the sound of the band's 2003 album — its only studio disc since 1986, and the first crafted on software synths — is distinctly and extraordinarily visceral; it feels like a cycling journey through Kraftwerk's digitized Europe.

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  It (2012) [Remastered]

  Pulp

  2012 | Fire Records / The Orchard

  Five years into their career — and with only a couple of members, notably frontman Jarvis Cocker, left from their original lineup — Pulp finally got around to making their first mini-album (the title is a pun on "pulpit") in 1983. It's fascinatingly far away from what they'd become, and a curious game of spot-the-influences: Cocker's nasal baritone recalls Scott Walker (who would later produce the band) and Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins... in turn, there's a bit of ragtime on "Love Love," and "Looking for Life" hints at Blue Orchids' garage-organ trudge. Mostly, though, it's worth hearing for fans to get a sense of how much the band grew in its early years, how clearly Cocker knew from the get-go that he wanted to strike exactly the right aesthetic pose, and how hard he had to struggle to find it. The 2012 reissue appends two more songs and two alternate mixes from that era, including the single version of their heavily Postcard Records-inspired debut single "My Lighthouse."

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  Freaks (2012) [Remastered]

  Pulp

  2012 | Fire Records / The Orchard

  Two key members of Pulp's classic lineup joined in time for this uneven but promising 1987 set: keyboardist Candida Doyle and guitarist/violin-scraper Russell Senior, both of whom gravitated toward unnerving, slow-creeping parts. (Senior also sings the two creepiest songs here, "Fairground" and "Anorexic Beauty.") Jarvis Cocker hasn't quite found his voice yet as a lyricist or singer, but he's working on it, paraphrasing the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" as "I Want You"... and working up to a frenetic minor-key polka on "Master of the Universe." The one thing he's worked out for sure is that he's got a talent for cruelty that will serve him well later. The 2012 reissue's extra disc adds two singles from that era, both of them also variants on the "Femme Fatale" template — "Little Girl (With Blue Eyes)," a bombastic portrait of a woman in a sex-and-money bind, and the slower-then-faster "Dogs Are Everywhere" — as well as a pile of B-sides, most notably the eight-minute, two-chord garage-rock piledriver "Tunnel."

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  Separations (2012) [Remastered]

  Pulp

  2012 | Fire Records / The Orchard

  The third Pulp album, released after a bit of delay in 1992, brought on new bassist Steve Mackey, and its first half was their most rhythmically limber take yet on Jarvis Cocker's aspirations to Scott Walker-style balladry with an arched eyebrow. Its second half, though, introduced a new sound for the band: In the years since Freaks, the acid house phenomenon had overtaken Britain, and all of a sudden Pulp, like seemingly... every longstanding rock band in the country, was experimenting with the grooves and textures of dance music. Cocker, though, was as interested in undercutting the precision and relentlessness of club beats as in figuring out what they could do for his new songs, with their themes of mortality and frustration. Separations' highlight "My Legendary Girlfriend" is effectively an inside-out "Love to Love You Baby," with Cocker gasping and panting across the beat in what sounds more like pain and disappointment than ecstasy. (The bonus tracks on the 2012 reissue are remixes of songs from the album.)

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• 

  Intro: The Gift Recordings

  Pulp

  2009 | HIP-O (PG)/Fontana

  The three 1992-93 EPs collected here were Pulp's moment of transition from scrappy underdogs to significant Britpop force, although it helped that Britpop as a concept became a big deal at the same time. "Babies," in particular, became an enduring staple of their repertoire, but Jarvis Cocker's fascination with the frantic tango of desperate sexuality and suburban domesticity also emerges in "Razzmatazz" and the three-part suite "Inside Susan" that first appeared as... its flip side. And "O.U." might have been the first time they were comfortable playing disco without putting quotation marks around it.

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  His N Hers

  Pulp

  2009 | ISLAND RECORDS

  Over the course of the early '90s, Pulp had become a much more lithe, glossy rock band than they'd ever been before. Jarvis Cocker, meanwhile, had pinpointed both his favorite lyrical topic — the way sex warps the edges of everything it comes near — and a new way of singing: stretching toward the whooping top of his range rather than the bottom, enunciating his words as if utterly strung out on... lust, trying to play Casanova while unable to conceal his baser impulses. The group had also internalized the ideas from dance music that they'd carefully tinkered with on Separations, and didn't try to ironize their songs' beats and riffs and flights of grandness any more. ("She's a Lady" even lifts its chord progression from "I Will Survive.") 1994's His 'n' Hers was where Pulp toughened up their already-ferocious satires of the way people talk and think about pleasure by making them overtly fun — a contrast that's especially powerful on "Do You Remember The First Time?," a thrilling fit of jealousy whose narrator hopelessly declares "I don't care if you screw him/ Just as long as you save a piece for me." The deluxe edition's extra disc features a handful of demos and B-sides, songs from radio sessions that never made it to studio recordings, and three songs from the Sisters EP that extend the themes of "Babies."

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  Different Class

  Pulp

  1996 | ISLAND RECORDS

  1995's Different Class was one of the peaks of the Britpop era and the high point of Pulp's career, and its secret ingredient was right there in its title: What Jarvis Cocker added to his already fearsome critique of his 'n' hers desire was a laceratingly smart awareness of how class affects the equation. That comes out most of all in its masterpiece "Common People," in which a rich girl tries to... pick him up to fulfill her fantasy of how the other 99 percent lives, and he responds with a six-minute crescendo of fury. Still, it's all over the album: Cocker's vision of a unified underclass launching a cultural uprising in "Mis-Shapes," his remembrance of a love-object's childhood house being "Very small/ With wood-chip on the wall" in "Disco 2000," the jealous narrator of "Underwear" quipping that "if fashion is your trade, then when you're naked/ I guess you must be unemployed," the language of drug-addled ravers in "Sorted for E's and Wizz." (In that context, even the lush strings in the self-referential, apparently earnest love song "Something Changed" and the reggae gallop that underscores the first half of "Monday Morning" serve as class signifiers.)
  
  On top of all that, Different Class is Pulp's most muscular rock record, thanks in part to new guitarist Mark Webber; it's their only disc on which both Webber and Russell Senior play. Glorious enough to serve as a psych-up to a big night out and cruel enough that it could provide a soundtrack for the next morning's walk of shame, the album elevated Pulp to a different class of their own in England — which, unsurprisingly, threw them for a loop. The 2012 bonus disc's B-sides and demos are fascinating mis-shapes and mistakes, notably "We Can Dance Again" (a recast impression of Blondie's "Atomic") and a bizarre, somewhat off-key take on "Disco 2000" bellowed by Nick Cave.

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  This Is Hardcore

  Pulp

  1998 | ISLAND RECORDS

  "I am not Jesus, though I have the same initials," Jarvis Cocker drawls at the beginning of "The Dishes," by way of response to being anointed as the savior of British rock. If Pulp had been a typical band, they'd have followed their commercial breakthrough by making a record along the lines of Different Class: playful, snarky, detached, poppy. But they'd never been a typical band, and following the departure of longtime... guitarist Russell Senior, they made this slithering, introspective 1998 album, whose jokes are mostly at Cocker's own expense when they're not simply bitter about fame. Its single "Help the Aged" finds him playing a sleazy old man trying to inveigle an ingénue into the sack; "Party Hard" is a Bowie-ish rocker about partying too hard and its aftermath. The album's centerpiece is its ingenious, relentlessly creepy title track, on which stuttering orchestral loops flicker across the mix like strobes, while Cocker describes an artist's career in the spotlight as intimacy transformed into brightly lit pornography, passion stripped of meaning for its participants and then recharged with sick new meaning by voyeurs. (The "deluxe edition" is augmented with a set of B-sides and sketched-out demos from that era that are mostly broader, but not much less cutting.)

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  The John Peel Sessions

  Pulp

  2008 | HIP-O (UC)

  Pulp's first recording was the spiky, inchoate 1981 session for John Peel's BBC radio show that opens this set. Then it jumps forward to 1993, by which point they'd opened themselves up to dance music and Jarvis Cocker had turned his attention to sex, class and escapism. Half of The Peel Sessions, though, comes from the final few months of the band's original incarnation, the 2001 We Love Life tour on which... they were in top form.

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1993-96: Organic, Hip-Hop, or Jazz?

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  Organix

  The Roots

  2005 | Groove Distribution / The Orchard

  Organix offered the first glimpse of how the Roots' blend of limber rhythms and deft rhymes could seduce coffee shop and dive bar patrons alike, launching a bidding war among six record labels. Black Thought and emcee Malik B often passed the mic back and forth over nothing more than ?uestlove's crackling snares and a tiptoeing bass line, urging listeners to sink into their seats as the band refuses to take itself... too seriously. Interlude "There's a Riot Goin' On" is actually 13 seconds of rude snoring. Black Thought slurs his catchiest call-and-response chorus ("Essawhamah?"), and drummer ?uestlove and keyboardist Scott Storch match his nonsensical spitting note for note. The Roots only crank up the volume on a seemingly aimless spoken word, as a bassline and cymbals jitter in anticipation before Black Thought eases up with the punchline: "Damn! I missed my spot — Writer's Block."

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  Do You Want More?!!!??!

  The Roots

  1995 | Geffen

  In November 1995, Malik B stepped off a bus in Düsseldorf, Germany, abandoning the rest of the Roots in the middle of a European tour. Geffen had just signed them to a seven-figure contract, which prompted the Philadelphia band to crank out Do You Want More?!!!??!, a headliner-length setlist from a budding opener. Among persistent chatter, a nonchalant soundcheck evolves into a full-blown jam in five minutes — a polished skit The... Roots had perfected since Organix. The group goes in on infectious choruses like pre-game hurdles. They also introduced another new member: beatboxer Rahzel the Godfather of Noyze, whose agile spitting style crashes like ?uestlove's cymbals and crackles like Rice Krispies in milk. All of this made More precisely that — spit-shined proof that the Roots were ready to take on the world, even if Malik B wasn't.

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  Illadelph Halflife

  The Roots

  1996 | Geffen

  Sustained Morse code notes fade in and out before Black Thought buzzes in, rattling off a minute-long eyewitness account of a neighborhood shooting. The Roots may have signed to Geffen, but instead of celebrating its newfound success, illadelph halflife has the Roots filing a sobering, 20-song report of its hometown, drug-fueled warfare, and reveling in its own narrow escape. Parts of illadelph is the Roots reaching a compromise between what '90s-rap listeners... wanted to hear and what the band wanted to deliver; most notably, in hopes of mimicking the increasingly-popular MPC, ?uestlove's sanded down his snare beats to mind-numbing monotony. In comparison, other parts of illadelph quiver. A piano shivers uncontrollably as Black Thought challenges competition in "Respond/React," before operatic moans heighten the strings-driven tension in "Concerto of the Desperado." The emotionally removed beats, the fearful rest — it all collides to devastating effect on Black Thought, who's capable of counting his cousins among other losses to Philadelphia gunfire without losing a beat. He's a detached reporter, even when he touts his own lyrical annihilation. "Used to rap for sport/ Now the rhymes sayin' rent, paying life support," he says, as matter-of-fact as he could muster.

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1999-2004: Before and After its Tipping Point

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  Things Fall Apart

  The Roots

  2004 | Geffen

  In February 2000, the Roots won their first and only Grammy for "You Got Me," the lead single from fourth studio effort Things Fall Apart. In its chorus, Erykah Badu sings as if she's already lost hope in her tour-diary romance; remorse breaks her words into two. But Things' Grammy-winning single barely indicates just how much the Roots had learned to illustrate the hip-hop stories they'd grown so adept in telling —... tales of a pained, conscious existence rather than a drugged-up one, orchestrated by mellowed-out arrangements far more nuanced than even Badu's masterful aching. In "Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)," ?uestlove's cymbals whirr as if being sucked into a vacuum cleaner as Black Thought ricochets across his retelling of the band's origins in South Philadelphia. A playful tit-for-tat with Mos Def ("Double Trouble") simmers and pops around gently pulsing chimes. Scott Storch's fingers listlessly drag their way through a keyboard melody over which a fraught Black Thought cries: "Building his fifth foundation in the wilderness/ thoughtless, trespassing into the Thought's fortress." "You Got Me" helped the Roots sell more than 900,000 copies of Things Fall Apart — more commercial attention than the Philadelphia band's ever received before. But as soon as the Grammy-winning single thrust the Roots into mainstream airwaves, the band decided to stray as far from Top 40 territory as possible. The result? The genre-bending Phrenology.

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  Phrenology

  The Roots

  2011 | Geffen

  After the Roots won their first Grammy in February 2000, the Philadelphia band dissected its formula for award-winning pop balladry — and nearly destroyed it — with Phrenology. As bait, the Roots cast plenty of hooks; "Thought @ Work" has the Roots revamping the Incredible Bongo Band's incredibly recognizable "Apache," and at the start of "Rolling with Heat," ?uestlove's introductory beats nods toward Orange Crush's "Action." Black Thought's flow and guest vocalist... Cody ChestnuTT's crooning meld together perfectly in Phrenology's first single (the threadbare jam "The Seed 2.0") and the resulting combination's as complementary as chocolate and sea salt. But Phrenology's strongest cuts are its left turns, acts of defiance against both hip-hop and R&B conventions. "Rock You" has Black Thought rocking not to a crisp boom-bap beat, but what sounds like an endless locker slam, punctuated by whizzing, bouncing racquetballs. Interlude "!!!!!!!" throws a punked-out fit. And with three flicks of a lighter, the 10-minute "Water" slips into a murky wilderness anchored only by a throbbing heartbeat before taking a nosedive into shrieking chaos. Because of these cross-genre stabs, Phrenology was a commercial failure compared to Billboard 200 contender Things Fall Apart, which, in some ways, is what the Roots wanted. After all, as ChestnuTT sings in "The Seed 2.0": "If I drop my baby girl tonight/ I'ma name her Rock 'N' Roll."

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  The Tipping Point

  The Roots

  2004 | Geffen

  Diehard Roots fans cried foul when Black Thought mumbled nonsensically in the hook of The Tipping Point's lead single, something ?uestlove didn't even expect. ("Roots diehards should be used to this zaniness," he wrote in its liner notes.) But as a front-to-back listen makes clear, their first and last effort for Interscope is a straightforward, lyrically-driven return to hip-hop as the Roots once knew it — aimed directly at the mainstream. Introduction... "Star/Pointro" allows its samples of Sly and Family Stone hit "Everybody is a Star" to take shape in between Black Thought's observations on the current hip-hop climate ("'Young brothers on the grind/ holding something in they spine/ Bowling for Columbine"). "Boom!" is a pounding, merciless three-minute rumble that laces the lyrics from Kool G. Rap's "Poison" over ?uestlove's ammunition belt of garbage-can clanging. And, stripped to little more than a drum beat and lyrical zingers, "Web" is a nonchalant reminder of when the band was just a streetside duo catering to Philadelphia passers-by, studying the same influences ?uestlove lists in The Tipping Point's liners: the Pharcyde's "For Better or for Worse," Tuff Crew's "She Rides the Pony" and De La Soul.

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  Game Theory

  The Roots

  2006 | Def Jam Records

  Game Theory is the first in a pair of phenomenal, paranoid records in which the Roots transformed their ire over their commercial misfortunes into acrid polemics against stasis in national culture and the still-looming spectre of racism. "America's lost somewhere inside of Littleton," goes the hook to the ominous "False Media," "11 million children all on Ritalin." It doesn't get much brighter from there. "It Don't Feel Right" may have a slithery... R&B hook, but the lyrics to that hook are, "It don't feel right, it don't feel right." This is furrowed-brow music a firebrand corrective in a year when a chart-topping hip-hop single went, "Shake that Laffy Taffy. Shake that Laffy Taffy. Girl, shake that Laffy Taffy." This kind of thing could get tiresome quickly, but the Roots know how to construct the kind of nuanced arrangements such bludgeoning lyrics require. "Here I Come" sounds like it's set inside a Satanic rave, with zooming synthesizers slathered across a heart attack drum track and weird, spastic sitar; "Clock With No Hands" is lighter relaxed, coffeehouse R&B with twinkling piano and crackling rhythm as Black Thought, without blinking, announces, "I'm like Malcolm out the window with the weapon out." Ultimately, though, Roots songs aren't about hooks but atmosphere, composing densely layered instrumental tracks that either complement or offset Black Thought's dry, occasionally slack vocals. On Game Theory, they edge further away from the mainstream, crafting songs that quiver and shake and grind aggressively against the grain of popular culture. J. Edward Keyes

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  Rising Down

  The Roots

  2008 | Def Jam

  Rising Down opens with an argument between Black Thought, ?uestlove and the group's manager, and ends with a track that attacks commercial radio. Are we having fun yet? This is a sweaty, bloodshot, frantic record a 45-minute scowl that lunges just to watch you flinch. "Look: my squad half Mandrill, half Mandela/ My band 'bout 70 strong, just like Fela/ Part Melle Mel, part Van Halen," Black Thought declaims over a synth... like that sizzles like flesh in a frying pan. Rarely has he sounded so pissed-off: Everything's broken in Thought's world, every shadow is a murderer waiting to strike. So, fittingly, he's brought backup: The terribly-named P.O.R.N. stammers his way through "I Will Not Apologize," a song so murky it sounds like it could have been lifted from Tricky's Maxinquaye. Malik B, back in the fold after a crippling battle with drug abuse, snarls and spits on the doomy, throbbing "I Can't Help It." The obvious points of comparison are There's a Riot Goin' On and Fear of a Black Planet, but Rising Down somehow feels meaner and more cynical than both. Because they are a hip-hop band, a disproportionate amount of attention is put on the skills and shortcomings of MC Black Thought and, consequently, the Roots often don't get credit for their true strength as visionary sonic architects. No other band, except maybe Radiohead, is as fascinated by the possibilities of sound, and each Roots record comes hard-wired with a breathtaking amount of detail and a dizzying array of novel sounds. Listen to the boiling funk number "Criminal," the dry thunk of ?uestlove's drumming, the way the guitar line just twitches, or the way weird, groaning atmospherics enter and leave like the rush of air in a David Lynch movie. On predecessor Game Theory, the sun occasionally peeked in from behind the clouds. Rising Down is endless night. J. Edward Keyes

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2006-11: How The Roots Got Over

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  How I Got Over

  The Roots

  2010 | Def Jam Records

  How I Got Over's title track begins with a determined drum-and-bongo shuffle, ideal for navigating grocery store aisles, city traffic or even a flooding inbox. But then the Roots plunge into what they're actually thinking: "We're so young and all alone/ We ain't even old enough to realize we're on our own." The Roots are still looking out cautiously from the high-rise — getting their hopes up, albeit cautiously, as they watched... Barack Obama's popularity rise in the polls. In its Monsters of Folk revamp "Dear God 2.0," the Roots step back as Yim Yames's voice breaks and wavers, only for ?uestlove and Black Thought to forcefully repair his resigned prayer. Radio frequencies land scuff up keyboard notes that peek out from beneath Phonte's distressed proclamation, "I gotta get my shit together/ it's now or never," Even "The Fire" breaks the illuminating John Legend's belting into a series of staggered calls, sounding like protest chants hollered through a megaphone. In a heartbreaking turn, Black Thought confesses how much he's cried even on his best days. He's never sounded so openly resigned.

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  Undun

  The Roots

  2011 | Def Jam Records

  When Philly rap legends The Roots signed on as house band for Jimmy Fallon's late night show, certain fans shuffled the "sell-out" card, worried the crew's gritty street edge would soften in the face of corporate fluff. Instead, they delivered 2010's outstanding How I Got Over, silencing doubters with a tight, striking set of melancholy gems. Three years into their talk show tenure, The Roots sound even sharper with their 13th album,... Undun. The band's dexterous live punch has never sounded mightier on album, and there's nary a second of filler here. Expanding upon How I Got Over's spaced-out sonics, Undun is dominated by vintage keys (soothing Wurlitzer, purring Hammond) which pulsate ominously over ?uestlove's hard-hitting beats. No Roots album is complete without eclectic guest stars: Sufjan Stevens pops up to re-hash his Michigan instrumental "Redford" and piano virtuoso D.D. Jackson lends a free-jazz freak-out to Undun's closing suite. Highlights overflow (Check the throbbing, organ-drenched soul of "The OtherSide" or the bass-driven atmospherics on "Lighthouse"), even if the album's vague concept which traverses (in reverse) an inner city thug's rise-and-fall doesn't hold water. As always, the guest rappers are overshadowed by Black Thought's poignant, mesmerizing flow: On "Make My," the band's most quietly beautiful single to date, he's a defeated street-poet staring Death straight in his beady eyes: "To whoever it concern, my letter of resignation / Fading back to black, my dark coronation." Ryan Reed

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Eclectic Origins

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  Black Angels

  Kronos Quartet

  2005 | Nonesuch

  In 1973, David Harrington was still an aimless artist-type with a vague sense of having something important to express — until late one night, when an epiphany arrived by radio. "You have to remember Vietnam and the feeling of hopelessness," he says. "Suddenly on the radio there was this music that didn't sound like anything I had grown up with, and it felt so right."
  
  The piece was George Crumb's 1970... "Black Angels," for electric string quartet: a gloomy, gritty, even nihilistic work full of furious sounds: Microphones attached to each instrument magnify every note and scrape, tremolos scurry everywhere, bows are drawn across gongs and the rims of crystal wine glasses filled with water. Crumb's music is hallucinatory and pessimistic, but it is also gripping, theatrical and emotionally transparent, and Harrington immediately formed the Kronos Quartet to play it.

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  White Man Sleeps

  Kronos Quartet

  1987 | Nonesuch

  From the beginning, the members of Kronos Quartet were listening to music from all over the world and finding common DNA in the most disparate and far-flung forms. Charles Ives was a New England insurance man, Kevin Volans a South African avant-gardist, and Bela Bartók a Hungarian ethnomusicologist. But on this disc, their interests in various folk traditions vibrate in sympathy. The Kronos worldview is an idealistically reductive one: Historical periods, geographic... distances and racial animosities collapse into a soundtrack of intricate rhythms, shared harmonies and fluid scales. Ben Johnston's arrangement of the ubiquitous hymn "Amazing Grace" goes slipping into microtonal territory, as if the intonations of some other, ancient continent had infiltrated a tune central to the history of Africans in America. The title track, by Volans, is based on a choreographed moment of quiet in music of the South African townships, but it also alludes to the sense of discovery that this collection embodies: This is the music that thrums across the globe while the white man sleeps.

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  Kronos Quartet

  Kronos Quartet

  2005 | Nonesuch

  The Kronos Quartet had already been in existence for more than a dozen years when it began recording for Nonesuch, and it celebrated the new relationship with a portrait album that captured the exploratory feeling of their concerts. In their vast embrace, the amiable trancelike murmurs of Philip Glass snuggle comfortably against the manic rhythmic intricacies of Conlon Nancarrow, a composer of music so complex that he assumed only a machine —... a player piano — could perform it adequately. But the group's real calling card was an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." What might have been nothing but a kitschy gimmick, a chamber music version of "orchestral rock," instead managed to smuggle Hendrix's noisy, insurrectionist spirit into a medium associated with tuxedoes and cherub-bedecked concert halls.

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  Short Stories

  Kronos Quartet

  1993 | Nonesuch

  John Zorn's "Cat o' Nine Tails" buzzes with a manic, practically psychotic energy, which whips through spastic tremolos, hushed pluckings, saloon dances, cartoon whiz-bang music and crushed-glass dissonances. Its fever-dream narrative inflects the spirit of the whole recording. This is an album of differences and disjunctions, not of easy trances, and the music in it bristles with extreme gestures and spurts of expressive energy. That doesn't mean it shuns beauty: Scott Johnson's... "Soliloquy" verges on the endearing and Sofia Gubaidulina's String Quartet No. 2 thrums with a bleak loveliness. This disc was released in 1993, during a volcanic burst of productivity that captured the group's sense of urgency and mission. Twenty years after its founding as a rebellious upstart, the Kronos Quartet had reinvented the genre, commissioned hundreds of new pieces and infused the once-parochial new music world with a global spirit. But Short Stories also reflects some ambivalence about those developments. Upending tradition can be fun; leading is scary.

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Minimalists

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  Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam

  Kronos Quartet

  2001 | Nonesuch

  Terry Riley's In C, from 1964, is the scriptural text of the minimalist movement, and when the adolescent Harrington encountered it in the late 1960s, he was mesmerized by its serene luminescence. Later, when the quartet was in residence at Mills College in Oakland, where Riley was teaching, Harrington badgered him to a write a piece for Kronos, even though the composer, who was absorbed in the improvisational tradition of North... Indian classical music, was reluctant to notate his ideas. He did, though, and he has remained the presiding spirit of the Kronos aesthetic ever since. When Harrington's 16-year-old son Adam died during a hiking expedition in 1995, Riley wrote Requiem for Adam, an uncharacteristic, unsettled work full of poignant agitation. The second movement, "Cortejo fúnebre en el Monte Diablo," is an angry funeral march, woven together with a furious clangor played on a synthesizer.

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  Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint

  Steve Reich w/ Pat Metheny

  2006 | Nonesuch

  If there is one achievement that distills the Kronos Quartet's quarter-century of experiments, it is Different Trains. The group had to coax the piece out of a reluctant Steve Reich, who prefers inventing his own genres to adopting stale ones, but the result is a landmark mixture of oral history, musical theater, electronics and expressive minimalism. The work is actually written for a quartet of quartets - three on tape, the fourth... live and amplified - and snippets of recorded speech fuse with the counterpoint of strings. Reich spent the years between 1939 and 1942 being shuttled across America from one divorced parent to another, and the piece is the product of the thought that had he, a Jewish boy, been living in Europe at that time, he would have been riding very different trains. Sawed-off reminiscences, clipped from their contexts but still loaded with history bob in and out of the texture: "one of the fastest trains," "lots of cattle wagons there," "they tattooed a number on our arm." They are like ripped corners of grainy old snapshots with just enough detail to suggest a date and place. The score specifies that the crudely recorded speech should always be clearly understood, but in performance, the hissing, crackling lines seem to fade into the music, as if the memories they represented were dissolving. Reich parses the phrases for their natural melodic inflexion - the oscillating minor thirds of Reich's governess saying "from Chicago to New York," the rising broken chords of an ancient Pullman porter describing "the crack train from New York" - and each motive is heard in one of the strings before it is spoken. The speech shapes the contours of the piece, and with each new line, the piece flickers, flares and reforms like a fire. The imagery is subtle and the treatment sparing, but the effect is unmistakably tragic.

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  Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet

  Kronos Quartet

  2005 | Nonesuch

  Harrington describes lovingly the experience of learning about plucking a violin string from the composer Morton Feldman, who wrote a string quartet for Kronos that is an uninterrupted, four-hour meditation on shades of quiet. "We had a late-night rehearsal and he was talking about pizzicato and feeling the string leave the skin of your finger, and the way he was describing it was in such slow motion, but so amazingly sensual and... infinitely gentle, that his words have become a part of my playing." In bowing technique, too, Feldman left his mark. Instead of the juicy, throbbing vibrato most string players are raised on, Feldman asked for paler shades of sound, different brushstrokes made by using less (or no) vibrato in the left hand and varying the speed and pressure with which the bow slips across the string.

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Mavericks

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  Osvaldo Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

  The Kronos Quartet

  1997 | Nonesuch/WBR

  The composer Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentina-born son of Russian Jews and longtime resident of the Boston suburbs, has a lot of different traditions packed in his musical luggage. He spent years making string-quartet arrangements of Latin pop tunes and folk songs for Kronos, packing as much of his own technique and personality into the three-minute numbers as he could. (It's his handiwork that gives the album Caravan its exotic elegance, and... on Nuevo he translates the unkempt sounds of raucous brass into four-part counterpoint without losing the street-band energy. That experience of tinkering with Latin rhythms and classical ensembles eventually produced his magnum opus, La Pasión según San Marcos, an oratorio laid out in a dizzying sequence of rhythms and melodic styles.
  
  Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind comes from a different world, one of shtetl stories and village bands that evoke the Jewish Europe that Hitler effectively extinguished. Klezmer, with its alternately plaintive and giddy flights of clarinet music, was already a hybrid of jazz, Slavic folk music, and ancient Semitic inflections. Golijov hybridizes it further, writing ornate and mournful perorations for the clarinetist David Krakauer.

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  U.S. Highball

  The Kronos Quartet

  2003 | Nonesuch/WBR

  The history of American music is replete with ornery composers who objected to one European convention or another and just decided to hammer out a new one. Harry Partch, a missionary's son raised in an assortment of small southwestern towns, developed his own tuning system, musical structures, text-setting technique and "instrumentarium" — his word for the menagerie of music-making contraptions that he developed over the course of his lifetime. During the Depression,... he took a journalistic approach to composition, and joined the country's nomadic tribe of freight-train hoppers. The result — well one of them, anyway — was U.S Highball, a meandering chronicle of a hobo's travels, which he originally performed on a microtonal guitar and later expanded.
  
  For the Kronos Quartet's version — drawled, acted, and semi-sung by vocalist David Barron — the Partch protégé Ben Johnston arranged the score for string quartet, which might either have ruffled the composer's anti-traditionalist feathers or gratified his taste for adaptability.

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European Modern

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  Lyric Suite

  The Kronos Quartet

  2003 | Nonesuch

  Alban Berg was the most outwardly impassioned member of Vienna's modernist triumvirate. His teacher, Arnold Schönberg, developed the 12-tone technique that Berg adopted and that Anton Webern used to distill terse whispers of music — pieces that sometimes lasted no longer than 30 seconds. Berg had song and opera coursing through his veins, though. For 50 years, the world knew the 1925-6 Lyric Suite as a six-movement string quartet, pulsing with high-minded... romance and bruised, tender harmonies. Then, in 1977, the composer and Berg scholar George Perle not only discovered that the piece commemorated an adulterous love affair with one Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, but unearthed the last movement's hidden vein of vocal melody, setting a poem by Baudelaire ("Have pity, my one love and sole delight!"). This recording is the fruit of that research: Dawn Upshaw sings the soprano part that Perle reconstructed and the Kronos quartet plays as if they understand Berg's struggle simultaneously to conceal and express the passion that infused his days.

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  Alfred Schnittke: The Complete String Quartets

  Kronos Quartet

  2008 | Nonesuch

  Long confined within the Soviet Union by a cantankerous musical bureaucracy, Alfred Schnittke was a celebrity in Russia by the early '70s; abroad, his reputation grew slowly at first, and then spectacularly in the last decade of his life. In the West, he seemed an insubstantial figure who somehow produced works that were as weighty and palpable as iron and brick. We know little about the man, but it's impossible to ignore... the music. The Kronos Quartet's recordings of Schnittke's string quartets reveal him to have been an architect of pain, someone who understood how to marshal primal emotions into complex structures. Take the Second String Quartet, from 1980, in which the desolate, frozen prayers of the first movement explode in the second into a frenzied ecstasy of tremolos and then buzzing, stinging scales. There is no transition, just one of Schnittke's sudden, terrifying about-faces. The second movement is marked "agitato" — not just a tempo marking, but a clinical description of the music.
  
  There is an ironclad logic to his non-sequiturs. The Third String Quartet (1983) begins with a lilting, Renaissance cadence — a little closing formula written by Orlando di Lasso — followed by a just-recognizable fragment from the opening of one of the most original pieces of music ever written: Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge" for string quartet. Perhaps it is only in Schnittke that Lasso, one of the late custodians of the High Renaissance, and Beethoven, the progenitor of Romanticism, could meet so convincingly. Like the "Grosse Fuge" itself, the Third String Quartet is a collision of the radical and the academic, of history and private torment. Schnittke makes suffering beautiful.

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  Liszt / Berg / Webern

  The Kronos Quartet

  1993 | Nonesuch

  No composer left a broader, deeper, more inescapable, or more troubling legacy than Richard Wagner. His infinite ambitions and aesthetic radicalism left their mark even on musicians who resented or ignored his influence, from Debussy to Thelonious Monk to John Adams. This album gathers a few of his immediate apostles. The title comes from a brief memorial bouquet by Franz Liszt, scored for string quartet and harp, but the core of the... program is music by Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who in the early years of the 20th century followed the trail of Wagner's roving, restless harmonies and expressive dissonances into utterly new atonal territory. Wagner's scores had implied that the tonal system would soon flame out spectacularly like Valhalla at the end of Der Ring des Nibelungen. In the event, its demise was unapocalyptic and temporary, but around 1910 its apparent finality produced a clutch of modernist masterworks. Berg's sole string quartet has wormed its way into the heart of the repertoire, and Webern's Op. 5 (later re-scored for orchestra) distilled the spirit of the avant-garde into five tense and compressed exhalations.

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  Wijtold Lutoslawski: String Quartet

  Kronos Quartet

  2005 | Nonesuch

  From time to time, the Kronos Quartet has released a one-piece recording, which allows the group to retreat to the sylvan tranquility of Skywalker Studios in the hills near San Francisco and immerse itself in one composer's expressive world. Wijtold Lutoslawski's only string quartet dates from 1964, when the Polish composer was exploring ways for a creative artist to relinquish control over the products of his imagination and turn it over to... the performers. That, it turns out, is not an easy thing to do. Classical musicians are trained to interpret instructions, and the clearer and more detailed a score is, the more comfortable they are. "Play it your way" is a difficult order to follow. Accordingly, composers have resorted to various tricks to get players to take over part of the responsibility for a how a piece sounds. Lutoslawski initially wrote out the four parts of the quartet separately and refused to provide a complete score so that the musicians wouldn't be tempted to slide into synch. Later, he relented and came up with an elaborate system of notation intended to coax reluctant musicians into a limited degree of improvisation. The result, paradoxically, is a piece that sounds tightly wound and supremely controlled, a dark, sepulchral work buzzing with dissonance and bristling with choreographed expressions of Atomic-Age angst.

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Travels

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  Caravan

  Kronos Quartet

  2000 | Nonesuch

  The Kronos Quartet's trajectory is a reproach to musical purists everywhere. "Authentic" traditions have always mingled, splintered and overlapped; nowhere with more promiscuous zeal than in the countries encircling the Mediterranean. Caravan celebrates that legacy of hybrids with a series of cross-cultural collaborations curated by the one-man-melting pot Osvaldo Golijov. Among the most startling tracks is "Turceasca," a collaboration with the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, who are a high-intensity improvisational... ensemble that changes directions in miraculous sync like a flight of starlings. Kayhan Kalhor, the globetrotting master of the Iranian kamancheh (a Persian string instrument) contributes "Gallop of a Thousand Horses," which really does evoke a fleet and graceful herd. The album's smorgasbord of scales and tunings and rhythmic structures is a vivid reminder that the technology of the string quartet originated in the Middle East and that musicians and instruments plied the highways and trade winds along with spices, warriors and religions.

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  Tan Dun: Ghost Opera

  Kronos Quartet

  1997 | Nonesuch

  It was inevitable that the Kronos Quartet, with its aesthetic of global eclecticism, would one day work with Tan Dun. Born in Hunan in 1957, Tan spent his formative years during the Cultural Revolution that wracked China for a decade. Separated from his parents at 11 and left to fend for himself in the city of Changsha, he became part of a ragtag gang of kids who formed themselves into a musical... troupe. They taught themselves to sing, played and built their own fiddles and flutes and performed in schools, meeting halls and public squares. At 17, Tan was shipped off to the countryside to pick rice, and there, too, he organized the locals into an opera troupe. Later, Tan attended the Beijing Conservatory and Columbia University, and wrote for the Metropolitan Opera, but at heart he remains what he calls "a little shaman." His 1994 Ghost Opera, written for the Kronos Quartet plus pipa (a Chinese lute) and an elaborate installation of noisemakers, opens with the sound of plashing water, a snatch of Bach, the antique growl of a ghostly monk, a Chinese folk tune sung as if in a quiet reverie and the eerie, piercing whistles of a violin bow being drawn across a gong.

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  Night Prayers

  Kronos Quartet

  1994 | Nonesuch/WBR

  To a Cold War generation reared to believe that only official arts could flourish in the harsh cultural climate of the Soviet Union, the discovery of a vast and fantastically varied world of music came as not just one surprise, but many. Even during the dark Brezhnev years, the part-Tatar, part Russian Sofia Gubaidulina was improvising with a group of unapproved folk musicians and developing a musical language for her even more... strenuously unauthorized Russian Orthodox faith. In Georgia, Giya Kancheli was producing music of quiet theatricality, and explosive reverence. In Azerbaijan, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh was charging down two simultaneously un-Soviet paths: Viennese modernism in the spirit of Arnold Schönberg, and mugham, the classical folk music of her homeland. In the 1990s, after the Soviet empire collapsed, the Kronos Quartet was quick to capitalize on the newly popular rubric of Eastern European mysticism, which included, somewhat awkwardly, composers who had little more in common than a spirit of non-materialistic transcendence. Night Prayers is not so much a collection of religious music as a mood album, a document of a time when composers found refuge from their historical era in an elaborately constructed sense of timelessness.

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  Astor Piazzolla: Five Tango Sensations

  Kronos Quartet

  2005 | Nonesuch

  Everyone knows what a tango is: a stiff-backed, bent-knee glide, a dance of oily elegance and formalized seduction. But it was never just that. Like the blues, the tango was something raw and randy, a form of shantytown lament that worked its way up to concert hall chic. Of uncertain birth but bred in Argentina, it was refined, perverted, diluted, reconstituted, exported and reclaimed. The form's modern hero, the man who did... for the tango what Chopin did for the mazurka and the polonaise — distill it into concert music — is the Argentinian composer, bandleader and bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazzolla. An enthusiastic and promiscuous collaborator with musicians of all different stripes, Piazzolla wrote Five Tango Sensations for himself to play with the Kronos Quartet, and they offer a tour both of universal emotional responses ("Sleep," "Love," "Anxiety," "Wakefulness" and "Fear") and of the wistful sophistication of his style.

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Travels in Time

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  Early Music

  The Kronos Quartet

  1997 | Nonesuch/WBR

  The Kronos Quartet is named for the Greek god of time, and Early Music leapfrogs over the centuries, touching down in the 14th for a brief Kyrie by Guillaume de Machaut, in the 9th for a little Byzantine hymn, in the 20th for a smidgen of latter-day antiquity by Arvo Pärt and a quick "Quodlibet" by John Cage. Kronos time moves in all directions without seeming to move at all, and what... constitutes early music depends on where you start.
  
  The present is represented by Alfred Schnittke's 1985 Concerto for Choir, which violinist David Harrington excerpted, reduced to string quartet format and placed near the end of this recording as a beacon to everything that comes before it. The single, eight-minute movement is a magnificent piece of contrapuntal writing, full of mystery. Even without words, this is deeply religious music that both renders worldly pain and provides its own consoling balm. It is a rare, gorgeous glimmer of redemption in Schnittke's pessimistic world.
  
  The multiple pasts that come before the Schnittke are there not to establish his lineage, but to bring out relationships buried in randomness. Throat singers from Tuva follow an ecstatic chant by the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, and the quartet is supplemented by an eclectic coterie of friends: a nychelharpist, a zhong ruan player. Strange kinships are bared and history conflated.

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1992-98: Queen of Hip-Hop Soul

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  What's The 411?

  Mary J. Blige

  1992 | Geffen

  Mary J. Blige and executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs didn't invent hip-hop-inflected, female-sung R&B in 1992 — En Vogue and Soul II Soul had beat them by a couple years in a tradition stretching back to Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You." But Blige was hip-hop in a new way: vocally tough and emotionally frank, with an unmistakable New York walk and evident roots in both all-night Pentecostal gospel and African American... radio's Quiet Storm heart. Catching the ear of Uptown Records via a taped karaoke cover of Anita Baker's "Caught Up in the Rapture," Blige was like fire through a window compared to Baker's smoke under the door, her mezzo-soprano as womanly, but short-circuiting technique for brutal, eloquent feeling.
  
  So the bad notes and dirty drum loop of the single "You Remind Me" reached the charts first, while much of the rest of her debut album — "Reminisce," "Love No Limit," "Slow Down," "Changes I've Been Going Through," her cover of Khan's Rufus hit "Sweet Thing," and the title track, featuring Blige rapping with Grand Puba — is down-home and gritty. But the all-time statement of purpose is "Real Love," written and produced by Prince Markie Dee of the Fat Boys and Mark C. Rooney, who took a broke-off beat from Audio Two's "Top Billin'" to build out an Elton John-sized corner-stoop of madly swinging piano rock and buoyant synthesizer strut, the wail-along chorus something few other singers could pull off.
  
  The song went Top 10 pop and No. 1 R&B, maybe because Blige's yearning accepted her impulse to fall too hard and fast, establishing a dynamic of audience sympathy before it would seem cultivated. To watch her MTV Unplugged performance of "I Don't Want to Do Anything" with K-Ci Hailey of Jodeci is to see a woman painfully in love with a man unable or unwilling to reciprocate.
  
  The album sold 3.3 million copies in the U.S. without any Grammy nominations, the biggest long-player of Blige's career. A remix collection followed in '93 compiling the "Hip-Hop Mix" of her signature song, featuring the Notorious B.I.G. ("Big E. Smalls").

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  My Life

  Mary J. Blige

  1994 | Geffen

  Both singer and sound were more confident on this second album from Mary J. Blige, the first she co-wrote, and considered by many fans her best. Out went the chilly New Jack Swing echo and synth deco of her debut; in came an extended heart-to-heart with fans by the fire over a beat that meant business.
  
  Let it be admitted that the sound is more conventional: The '70s soul samples of... the title track and "Be Happy" are seamlessly blended or recreated rather than recontextualized in a rap way — the direction executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs and frequent studio guest the Notorious B.I.G. were taking hip hop in general. But if D.C.-hired producer Carl "Chucky" Thompson was brought in to make Blige sound like a true soul singer at home in her mother's music, he did his job: Blige makes Rose Royce's "I'm Goin' Down" her own, in part because down was exactly where she was going.
  
  Or as she would sing 11 years later, "'94 was My Life, and my life wasn't right, so I reached out to you and told you what I been through." She also told you what she was still going through: "I'm satisfied even when I cry," she sings on "No One Else," presumably to the track's co-producer K-Ci Hailey, whom she later described as the inspiration for much of My Life's blueness. "Mary's Joint," with its longing melody later borrowed for Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely," sounds like hopelessness kidding itself, while the No. 1 dance hit "You Bring Me Joy" seems unconvinced. Most double-edged of all is "I Love You," with its repurposed Isaac Hayes piano line and dog-whistle synth (a nod to Dr. Dre), as funky and resigned as Marvin Gaye at his most autumnal. Has the title sentiment ever sounded more doomed?
  
  Blige put the question to herself squarely on "Be Happy": "How can I love somebody else, if I can't love myself enough to know when it's time, time to let go?" The album sold 2.8 million copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy in the R&B album category. But it marked the twilight of Uptown Records and a parting of ways with Puffy.

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  Share My World

  Mary J. Blige

  1997 | Geffen

  The case could be made for every Mary J. Blige album after her first two as an atmosphere to be bathed in, essential — and probably too long — the primary variable being the quality and the number of "nobody loves you better" hits and "why do I love so hard in the first place?" deep cuts. Which is another way of saying this first record without Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs (on... Uptown parent company MCA) doesn't miss him; not because he had no influence but probably because he had so much, both on her and on contemporary R&B in general in 1997.
  
  So the Trackmasters executive-produce for elegant intimacy, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis keep it upscale-emo, and others smooth out Blige, but not by much. And there are more hits than ever, half of them slow jams for an improving singer now apparently out from under a cloud. "Missing You" sounds giddy with desire after Sunday morning mass. Malik Pendleton's "Seven Days" is both complicated in a real-life way and pop-happy in how it lists off the days of the week. And the Rodney Jerkins-crafted title track is lushly harmonized full-band Valentines soul, rephrasing the melody of "Mary's Joint" as if to say, I'm not that desperate girl anymore. Babyface's masterpiece "Not Gon' Cry," a No. 2 pop and No. 1 R&B smash, must have contained some truth about that cloud: "While all the time that I was loving you, you were busy loving yourself," Blige sings, maybe envying the latter ability.
  
  The album sold 2.8 million in the U.S. — as well as My Life — and cracked the U.K. Top 40, while picking up another Grammy nomination for R&B album. If it was too slow to expand her appeal, that was the world's loss, not R&B's.

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  The Tour

  Mary J. Blige

  1998 | Geffen

  Working a Los Angeles crowd with her tectonic voice and hotly responsive live band as much as her "What's up, L.A.?" patter, Mary J. Blige asserts mastery over three albums' worth of R&B hits because where others say they give it all for the fans, Blige in her moment actually seems to be giving it all for her fans. Ad-libbing over a snippet of Kool & the Gang's "Summer Madness," she introduces... "You Gotta Believe" by saying, "this segment of the show is for everybody that went through the struggle with me during the It's My Life album" (she can re-title it how she wants). After leaving some of herself on the floor for "Not Gon' Cry," she interjects, "Was he worth it, ladies? Hell, no!," and later dedicates ["you're my"] "Everything" to the audience.
  
  She's a pro even when singing her mind out, years past living down an early rep for clumsiness. So additional songs recorded at Sony Studios in New York fill out the sequence rather than paper over gaps, letting her bond with her parents' generation by rendering Aretha Franklin's "Day Dreaming" and Dorothy Moore's "Misty Blue" as forcefully as anything else. If the 1998 release containing these tracks now seems quaint beside her studio albums, it was everywhere then, solidifying Blige's status as a voice of comfort on long bus rides into the night, and offering one of contemporary R&B's few essential live albums.

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1999-2004: Just Mary

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  Mary

  Mary J. Blige

  1999 | Geffen

  Lauryn Hill wrote and produced the wonderfully lackadaisical "All That I Can Say," and her connection to the song helped press Mary J. Blige further on the consciousness of bohemia and white critics, even as the diffuse 1999 album it opened sold fewer copies (2.1 million in America). The tune was an inspiration, yet apparently slight, just a few jazzy keyboard chords from the blissed-out template of Michael Jackson's "I Can't Help... It," tossed over a variation of the steppers beat that launched "Real Love." But Blige found something beautiful and valuable, even soulful in the vocal equivalent of luxuriating. And did Hill touch anything as great again in the '00s?
  
  Sir Elton John rendered his "Bennie and the Jets" riff for "Deep Inside," one of the more candid and absorbing singles about the loneliness of a rich and famous person, while Gerald Isaac's "Your Child" put Blige in one of her best wronged-woman roles: meeting the baby that her man has never mentioned having, in the arms of the mother at the door, whom the narrator can't help but respect. (It spun off a No. 1 dance remix.) A duet with K-Ci Hailey allowed the exes to place cards on the table behind his chorus "I'm not looking to fall in love with you." And a duet with Aretha Franklin became a study in contrast true to the song's shared sisterhood between an older and younger learner in love.
  
  None of which was the equal of "All That I Can Say," but Blige by now was a mood to explore and a talent to catch up on. She earned three Grammy nominations without any raps and not many more hooks.

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  No More Drama

  Mary J. Blige

  2001 | Geffen

  Some kind of distance — if not yet sobriety — allowed Mary J. Blige to step back from her holding pattern of lengthy emoting and return with shorter, catchier affirmations of the good decisions she had in her. And if this fifth album also introduces the less personal idea that contemporary sounds go better with Mary, the hits allowed her to talk to more girls than ever.
  
  So "Family Affair," her... first pop No. 1, is about neither family nor affairs, but instead its Dr. Dre-produced state-of-the-club funk lope, and the mild notion that losing your mind on the dance floor might be an act of discipline and peace-making; love the beat, don't beat the lover. "Steal Away" escapes with the Neptunes, while the title track formalizes the view of her life as a soap opera needing a channel-flip by lifting the theme from The Young and the Restless and giving it a gospel climax. Even the ostensibly personal "PMS" feels light, rewriting Al Green's "Simply Beautiful" to vent with ladies about "the worst part of being a woman." "Dance for Me" (sampling the Police's "The Bed's Too Big Without You") is a return to hip-hop soul, and provided the title for a remix collection in 2002.
  
  But except for the Chucky Thompson-produced "PMS," it all feels like minor Blige, tentative and slick where her past fusions were so bold. The album marked another dip in sales (1.9 million units), so a skittish MCA re-released No More Drama in 2002 with a new cover (another white background) and song selection, deleting "Crazy Games," "Keep It Moving," and "Destiny" to add "Rainy Dayz" (featuring Ja Rule), the cheater ballad "He Think I Don't Know," and a bonus Sean "P. Diddy" Combs remix of the title track, while swapping out the album version of "Dance for Me" (with Ahkim Miller) for the single featuring Common — four new tracks in all. The company could take it as vindication that "He Think I Don't Know" won a Grammy, and the re-release sold 1.2 million. But MCA was soon swallowed by Geffen anyway.

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  Love & Life

  Mary J. Blige

  2003 | Geffen

  Mary J. Blige has said that the moment she got serious about getting clean and sober was getting the call that R&B singer Aaliyah had died in a plane crash, a few days before the release of 2001's No More Drama and a couple weeks before 9/11. Blige wanted to live, and began acting and loving accordingly. But making hits is tough enough when your creative circuitry isn't wired for misery, and... the artist played catch-up with the person.
  
  So her 2003 reunion with Sean "P. Diddy" Combs stalled on the radio — "Love @ 1st Sight," with Method Man, felt downright awkward — while the accompanying album was a commercial disappointment by Aaliyah standards (1 million units sold). It was also Blige's most underrated as a result: of a piece, consistently beautiful, and always with a sliver of painful complication. Diddy's samples are noticeable again as patches of vinyl records, rougher than even her classic hip-hop soul on "Don't Go," "Friends," "When We" (just a bridge short of immortality), and the irrepressible "Ooh!" Then the acoustic closer "Ultimate Relationship (A.M.)" suggests Blige's hardness has as much to do with how her voice is recorded as with beats — she would remain high and naked in the mix from here on out.
  
  In love and life, Blige decided she could have both, and married co-producer Kendu Isaacs. She also parted ways with Combs again, having fought over the production.

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2005-2009: The Breakthrough

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  The Breakthrough

  Mary J. Blige

  2005 | Geffen

  After three straight albums of commercial decline, Geffen pushed for a Mary J. Blige best-of in 2005. Instead she came back with her biggest album since her debut, a work of popular soul so bracingly assured in its Blige-ness that the title — as autobiographical in its way as all the others — would have provided a readymade headline had critics not been slow to come around.
  
  The R&B No.... 1/Pop No. 3 "Be Without You" was only the entry point, though it was her most joyful since "Real Love," a kind of call-and-response Million Couple March crafted by Bryan-Michael Cox and set to tinkling piano, with Blige working an imagined audience of dancers ("put your hands up/ Fellas, tell your ladies she's the one") and FM listeners ("Call the radio if you just can't be without your baby"). The heart of the album was this therapeutic uplift at a more focused level of self-consciousness — part Oprah Winfrey, part Atmosphere's Slug. Blige really was doing it for the fans now.
  
  Had she waited to fully unload until the music was right? Credits list a dozen-plus producers, but for once Blige sounds fully in charge. The album opens with a show of production force (the sped-up-O'Jays of "No One Will Do"), closes with a show of vocal force (a kamikaze "One," with U2 backing), and annexes the Game's "Hate It or Love It" in between for one of 50 Cent's better choruses and a "Glass Onion" on Blige's discography. These gestures made, the singer turns to those who understand her best: "Good Woman Down" is "for all my troubled sisters," in whom she confides about her father's abuse of her mother, while "Take Me As I Am" romanticizes the bond this confidence creates. "Baggage" and "Father in You" address her husband, or anyone else who ever cared for an abused heart, so maybe those are for fans too.
  
  The album sold 3.1 million copies in the U.S., and was nominated for eight Grammys, winning three. Her best-of came the following year with four new tracks.

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  Growing Pains

  Mary J. Blige

  2007 | Geffen

  Each Mary J. Blige album in the '00s after The Breakthrough sold less than its predecessor, but this was also an era when moving 1.6 million copies (or 1, or .6) meant more than it used to, and when discrete designations such as hip-hop and soul meant less. Modern Top 40 was now the amalgam Blige helped create, ruled by the younger women she'd helped empower. But for listeners who stuck with... her, it was a period of more strident peaks amid noblesse Blige.
  
  So this 2007 album's "Grown Woman," with a lusty Ludacris, somehow conjures a more hip-hop and soulful hip-hop soul, while "Work That" retreats from neither big-sisterhood nor her apparent determination to make no two funk beats alike. (Of a dozen producers, just a few stayed on from The Breakthrough.) Tricky Stewart's "Just Fine" finds Blige liking what she sees in the mirror on her way out to the club, even if its bridge is too breezy to suggest what might threaten her self-image.
  
  But the classic is "Roses," half-spoken by Blige with a blues-actress's flair, admitting over one of Stewart's more techno pulses, "It ain't all candy/ This love stuff is demanding," before shouting, "You go figure it out. You suck it up." If love is a beginning rather than a happily-ever-after, making peace might mean accepting how messed up you are.

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  Stronger withEach Tear

  Mary J. Blige

  2009 | Geffen

  Would Mary J. Blige's sumptuously harmonized "Hood Love" have been a bigger hit four years earlier? One of her great singles (an R&B No. 25 under the title "We Got Hood Love"), it had the same production team as "Be Without You" and a similarly dancing vocal, but with the ache of love fought for rather than the glow of love surrendered to. That might be the difference right there, but it's... hard to escape the feeling that pop wanted less to do with Blige or the 'hood in general by 2009.
  
  For the album, her first since her debut to escape Grammy recognition, she personalized the club production so thoroughly you'd think the latest styles were invented for her. A gorgeously insistent "Tonight" offers urgent assurance that all marital problems can be put off by, if not resolved in, the bedroom. "I Am" loves you better than Share My World's "I Can Love You." And "I Can See in Color," her best collaboration with Raphael Saadiq, is a retro slow-builder for the Precious soundtrack, a project close to Blige's heart.

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  My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1)

  Mary J. Blige

  2011 | Geffen

  When the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul recorded her second album, 1994's rightly revered My Life, she was in a bad personal place - struggling with depression, drug addiction, alcoholism and an abusive relationship with Jodeci's K-Ci. But somehow she managed to repurpose that pain to create the rare smash R&B album of its era with a pervasively introspective, often melancholy tone. Its many samples, cover versions and interpolations of classic soul conjured... an image of Blige turning to her favorite records for guidance through her darkest hour. "How can I love somebody else/ if I can't love myself enough to know when it's time, time to let go?" she asked in summation of the album's central struggle in "Be Happy," the concluding track on a song suite that plays out like one sustained prayer for sobriety and serenity.
  
  Suggesting both a return to that creative apex and a contrast to its many emotional lows, Blige's largely celebratory 10th studio release comes heavy with hip-hop cameos in its first and late-second-act tracks, then rallies with wiser and far stronger ballads. She may have famously vowed to turn her back on drama, but its gravitational pull lingers: "Bad boys ain't no good, good boys ain't no fun," she laments in the Drake-featuring "Mr. Wrong." And she's still turning to vintage jams for sustenance: Producer Darkchild brings a pounding house beat to an otherwise reverent rendition of Rufus & Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody."
  
  The track that most convincingly argues that she has moved on from her embattled past is a stunning cover of Justin Timberlake associate Matt Morris's "Someone to Love You," here titled "Need Someone." It's an acoustic country-soul slowie in which she offers a newly fortified shoulder to lean on, one that won't stray or falter. It's Blige's quiet strength that here speaks loudest. - Barry Walters

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The Barfly

The early part of Waits’s career was given over to bourbon-drenched, jazz-inflected piano-bar blues.

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  The Heart Of Saturday Night

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  Tom Waits is still finding his voice on his second album, literally and figuratively. The smooth croon of "Shiver Me Timbers" and "Drunk on the Moon" bears little resemblance to his familiar apocalyptic rasp, although it's got just enough sand to scuff up the former's swelling French horn. The after-hours trawl of "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night" veers close to sentimentality, but Waits's romanticism is cut with weariness, as if... he keeps searching only because he prefers failure to defeat. The cool-cat spoken word of "Diamonds on My Windshield" points the way to future glories, swinging crime-novel patois like a bebop Raymond Chandler. Stacked next to Nighthawks at the Diner or Heartattack & Vine, The Heart of Saturday Night inevitably feels a tad unformed, but the melancholy beauty of "Semi Suite" and "San Diego Serenade" is unassailable, no matter who's singing.

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  Nighthawks At The Diner

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  The best of Waits's early records captures him in front of a live audience at the fictitious Rafael's Silver Cloud Lounge, actually a recording studio turned into a makeshift speakeasy. Like the setting itself, Waits's booze-addled persona is both real and staged, a performance so effortless that it seems to inhabit him rather than the other way around. Apart from the bachelor anthem "Better Off Without a Wife" (memorably covered by Buzzcocks'... Pete Shelley), the songs lose something out of context, but they thrive in Nighthawks' tobacco-stained atmosphere. Waits's interstitial patter is as engaging as the songs themselves, rife with hepcat lingo and dive-bar jokes. The supple jazz quartet are clearly in on the joke; Jim Hughart's upright bass acts as a counterpoint to Waits's sleepy drawl. Prefiguring the otherwordliness of Waits's later recordings as well as his interest in theatrical spectacle, Nighthawks conjures a world as seductive as any film noir.

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  Foreign Affairs

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  A mixed bag of slick jazz and sprawling narratives, Foreign Affairs is a well-traveled collection that takes a handful of wrong turns. Recorded and mixed directly to two-track tape, the album strives for spontaneity, though it's hard to swing when there's a studio orchestra in the mix. "I Never Talk to Strangers" is a near-miraculous fusion of styles, a giddy, barbed duet that pits Waits's disheveled growl against Bette Midler's acid-tongued warble.... Not every odd-sock combination comes together: "Potter's Field" tries to bridge the album's disparate halves, but the full-scale orchestration clashes with the spare contours of Waits's spoken-word slur. "Burma Shave," however, is a miniature masterpiece, an impressionistic story of lovers running from the law scored to Waits's fluid piano and a late-breaking muted trumpet; it's like Bonnie and Clyde as told by Miles Davis. Waits's lounge lizard persona is starting to wear thin, but he punches right through the holes and surges on to something more mysterious and mercurial.

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  Heartattack And Vine

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  The apex of Waits's Island Records run is his most self-consciously degenerate, trading slinky jazz for distorted guitar and swampy beats. "Heartattack and Vine" and "Downtown" find him on familiar turf, but he's moved from sitting on the curb to stomping through the gutter. Waits hasn't ditched his wise-cracking barfly persona so much as subsumed it into a larger cast of characters. The blue-collar romantic of "Jersey Girl" isn't a doomed sucker,... just a working stiff taking inspiration from the corny conviction of a doo-wop "sha la la." (Waits's original is, not surprisingly, more internal and less triumphalist than Bruce Springsteen's better-known cover.) It's doubtful Waits knew it would be three years until his next album, but Heartattack still has the feel of a summing-up, the period at the end of a bleary-eyed sentence. It's a climax and a prelude at the same time.

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• 

  Closing Time

  Tom Waits

  1990 | Rhino/Elektra

  Tom Waits began his career at the end, portraying a washed-up saloon singer with a barrel full of a broken hearts and tip jar stuffed with dreams - at the ripe old age of 24. A little bit Sinatra and a little bit Kristofferson, couched in an early '70s orchestral soft-rock milieu, Waits' debut demonstrates a precocious mastery of songwriting conventions that would form the basis for his later innovations.
  
  "I Hope That... I Don't Fall in Love with You" is a barroom first-sight romance ("I turn around to look at you, you light a cigarette/I wish I had the guts to bum one, but we've never met") with a twist at the end worthy of a seasoned Nashville pro: the dreaded deed in the title only happens once she's walked out the door. "Old Shoes (and Picture Postcards)" is a king-of-the-road farewell song with a jaunty shuffle rhythm and singalong chorus; "Midnight Lullaby" is windowsill wooing told in slurred, lascivious nursery rhymes as a trumpet player serenades in the back alleys below. In "Ol' '55," the weatherbeaten protagonist revs away in his trusty clunker; in "Martha," he desperately dials an old flame four decades after their glory years. "We were all so young and foolish," he declares with drunken aplomb. "Now we are mature."
  
  For all its formalism, Closing Time isn't without quirks: Waits invents words at will ("lickety-splitly") and, in "Ice Cream Man," offers up the sleaziest reinvention of a childhood icon since the evil clown. But in skipping prematurely to an imagined old age, Waits managed to outfox time. These songs feel as gorgeously musty and familiar today as they did when he unpacked them from his magical trunk for the first time. - Karen Schoemer

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  Blue Valentine

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  Tom Waits's characters aren't the kind of saps to wrap their gums around a cheap and easy word like love. In "Kentucky Avenue," an idealistic derelict creatively comes on to his crippled sweetie: "Let me tie you up in kite string," he suggests, "and I'll show you the scabs on my knee." The anti-heroine of "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" builds a fantastic scaffold of lies to impress a loyal... former john before confessing the truth in the final verse: "I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer and Charlie, hey/ I'll be eligible for parole come Valentine's Day." "Wrong Side of the Road," a burlesque blues number embellished with saxophone and organ, is the world's most deranged marriage proposal. "We'll do 100 miles an hour spendin' someone else's dough," Waits promises his lucky moll. "We'll drive all the way to Reno on the wrong side of the road."
  
  Waits's sixth album is easy to overlook - caught between the peaks of his early crooner phase and the avant-garde theatrical clatter of his 1983 reinvention Swordfishtrombones, it offers subtler charms and a more brooding tone than his benchmarks. But just because he's not known for understatement doesn't mean he can't pull it off. "Blue Valentines" is a guitar-and-voice jazz ballad modeled on Julie's London's low-key 1955 hit "Cry Me a River"; "$29.00," about the slow and steady ruination of an innocent arrival in Hollywood, is one of the nastiest sagas in his catalog, but he sings it without breaking a sweat. That is, until the fade out, when he backs away from the mike and lets rip with a couple of "ay-yi-yi"'s and an inexplicable "cuckoo." But these are borderline inaudible and barely count. - Karen Schoemer

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  Small Change

  Tom Waits

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  Audiences love a grim spectacle, and by his fourth album Tom Waits was pretty much a one-man lowlife circus. Between the cover photo of a strip joint dressing room, the lubricated jazzbo arrangements, the gargling-razor-blades vocal tone and the scenes set in tattoo parlors, soggy night clubs and wee-hours bus depots, he barely seemed willing to raise his head out of a puddle of stale beer and spilled martinis.
  
  The semi-spoken title track... opens with an amplified flick of a match and a deep inhale; rather than counting down "one, two, three, four," "I Wish I Was in New Orleans" kicks off with a series of rhythmic grunts. But like Dean Martin's boozehound schtick, Waits-as-souse is a sleight-of-hand routine that requires brilliant timing, comic genius and impeccable musical chops. For all its bald humor, "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" is a cliche-upending literary tour-de-force of the dissipated mindset: "The jukebox has to take a leak/And the carpet needs a haircut/And the spotlight looks like a prison break," he growls. "Jitterbug Boy" is a no-goodnik character study so flawless, it's almost Hemingwayesque. Only on the opening track, "Tom Traubert's Blues," does he set aside the bad-boy act and reveal the wounded romanticism that is his true stock in trade. When an orchestra swoons and that rugged voice breaks into tenderness, he's incomparable. Waits may have loved his whiskey, but he never forgot his bread and butter. - Karen Schoemer

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The Showman

Waits’s live performances and collaborations for the stage create a bridge between the warring halves of his career.

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  Music From The Original Motion Picture "One From The Heart"

  Tom Waits, Crystal Gayle

  2004 | Columbia/Legacy/Sony Soundtrax

  While he was reinventing himself in the three-year gap between Heartattack and Vine and Swordfishtrombones, Waits signed onto Francis Ford Coppola's doomed musical One From the Heart, penning a set of songs that hearken back to the ariose romanticism of Blue Valentine. Paired with Crystal Gayle, who takes the lead vocal on "Old Boyfriends," "Take Me Home" and "Is There Any Way Out of This Dream?" Waits drops the wolfish howl he... unveiled on Heartattack, undermining the implausible claim that his voice had simply changed. The lush romanticism is an awkward fit, as much for Waits as it was for Coppola, although fans longing for one last crack at Waits's first period will want to investigate with care.

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• 

  Big Time

  Tom Waits

  1990 | ISLAND RECORDS

  The soundtrack to Waits's 1988 concert film is as notable for what's not included as what is, namely all but a token representation of his pre-Swordfishtrombones catalogue. Drawing mainly from that album, as well as the ensuing Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years, Big Time strips down the songs without sacrificing any of their lumbering clatter. (There's one ringer, the previously unreleased studio track "Falling Down.") If anything, the relative spareness of... a song like "16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six" only makes it creepier, as if some misbegotten laboratory experiment has been accidentally released into the wild. Without the ambient atmosphere of Nighthawks at the Diner, the album doesn't stand on its own, and the live versions are too different from the preceding albums for it to serve as a compact introduction. Like most live albums, it's a worthy footnote, intriguing on its own terms but not a replacement for the source materials.

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  Franks Wild Years

  Tom Waits

  1990 | ISLAND RECORDS

  Soundtracking a theatrical production authored with wife Kathleen Brennan, Franks Wild Years (subtitled "un operachi romantic in two acts") is a travelogue shadowing the titular figure — presumably the fugitive furniture salesman of Swordfishtrombones' "Frank's Wild Years" — on a shambling journey round the world. In the context of a bona-fide stage show, Waits's Brecht-Weill fixation is in full bloom, with eccentric keyboard instruments like pump organ and Optigan echoing the hurdy-gurdy... of The Threepenny Opera's "Mack the Knife." Although there's substantial stylistic overlap with its predecessors, Franks truly stands on its own, or at least it did until The Black Rider came along six years later.

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  The Black Rider

  Tom Waits

  1993 | ISLAND RECORDS

  The first of three collaborations with avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson — Alice followed in 1992, Woyzeck a decade later — The Black Rider also plays off Waits's lifelong fixation with the Beat poets (see Foreign Affairs' "Jack & Neal/California Here I Come") by throwing William S. Burroughs into the mix. The carny barker of "Lucky Day Overture" is a demonic cousin to the fast-talking pitchman of "Step Right Up," which is... part of the problem. Waits seems at times to be performing himself, intensifying previous personae to the point of self-parody but not staking out new territory of his own. The songs, which would have been spelled by Burroughs' dialogue on stage, run together on record, their Germanic overkill growing almost oppressive over the long haul. For those who dig Waits's at his doomiest, The Black Rider is a gold mine, but the rest will wait in vain for a second act.

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  Blood Money

  Tom Waits

  2004 | Anti/Epitaph

  The retitled soundtrack to Robert Wilson's stage production of Woyzeck is the best of Waits's theatrical efforts, at its height the equal of anything on Bone Machine or Mule Variations. Perhaps having the spine of Georg Büchner's play to build on freed Waits to compose at will, or perhaps he'd simply gotten the hang of collaborating with Wilson, but Blood Money feels like a full-throated Tom Waits album rather than an adjunct... to an unseen story. "Misery Is the River of the World" raises the curtain in familiar sturm und drang style, but "All the World Is Green" broadens the palette to include the saw of a melancholy cello. Reading up on Büchner's play might deepen your appreciation, but it's not a necessity; the songs tell their own stories as well as fitting into a larger one. "God's Away on Business" leans closest to the Waits-by-numbers of The Black Rider, but it's infused with a knowing wink, as if Waits knows we've all been here before.

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  Alice

  Tom Waits

  2004 | Anti/Epitaph

  An effective children's story depends on a perfect balance of menace and wonder. Disney golly-gee'd Lewis Carroll's Alice stories into toothlessness, while Jefferson Airplane overplayed their darkness - the ominous "White Rabbit" is practically an anti-drug commercial. But Tom Waits is the ideal carnival barker to lure kiddies to the other side of the looking glass. His voice suitably animated and wheezy as a dilapidated accordion, his spirit possessed by a giddily... insatiable appetite for decadence, Waits offers a temptation that's equal parts alluring and terrifying, a balance of excitement and fear best summed up when he asserts, "Everything you can think of is true."
  
  Waits's version of Wonderland is like a Bowery flophouse transplanted to Weimar Germany, populated by two-faced boys ("Poor Edward") and ranting Teutons ("Kommienezuspadt") instead of manic rabbits and murderous queens - in short, a place recognizable to anyone who's followed his career-long fascination with what he once dubbed "a world going on underground."
  
  Originally composed for a 1992 Robert Wilson stage production, the songs here occasionally feel programmatic and, as a piece, can lack narrative flow. But most of the material stands on its own, even out of context, especially the title track, one of his finest love songs to date. - Keith Harris

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The Prophet

For the latter part of his career, Waits became a cross between carnival barker and doomsayer, calling down fire with his scorched-earth voice.

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  Swordfishtrombones

  Tom Waits

  1990 | ISLAND RECORDS

  It's hard to imagine how fans accustomed to the boozy romanticism of Waits's Island years might have reacted to the opening clangor of Swordfishtrombones' "Underground," but one imagines a freshly clobbered Wile E. Coyote with birds circling his head. Chalk it up to his recent marriage to Kathleen Brennan, whose record collection was as rich in Captain Beefheart as Waits's was in Mose Allison, or a long-simmering restlessness, but it remains one... of the most startling and successful reinventions in the history of music. The sheer breadth of the album's inspirations is staggering; in a contemporary interview, Waits cited Charles Bukowski, Howlin' Wolf, Nino Rota, Cuban nightclub music, the Salvation Army, Dr. Zhivago, the film noir Nightmare Alley and a kind of "Oriental Bobby 'Blue' Bland approach." Rhythm has supplanted harmony as the primary structuring element, from the lurching, industrial beat of "16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six" to the marimba pulse of "Swordfishtrombone." The lyrics run to open surrealism, leaving the nightclubs and dive bars behind for a world of his own invention. With its lulling horn fanfare, "In the Neighborhood" goes a way towards bridging the distance from Heartattack and Vine, but the song won't stay put; the neighborhood is only a state of mind. A trio of instrumentals ("Dave the Butcher," "Just Another Sucker on the Vine," "Rainbirds") underline the preference for mood over melody: "Dave" is a dissonant organ dirge, while "Sucker" sounds like the score to some lost Charlie Chaplin short. Waits burned his oeuvre to the ground; he could have been left with only ashes, but instead he found unspoiled earth that was his and his alone.

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  Rain Dogs

  Tom Waits

  1990 | ISLAND RECORDS

  The touchstone for Tom Waits's second act, Rain Dogs consolidates the gains of Swordfishtrombones and extends them with the help of an all-star cast. The key addition is guitarist Marc Ribot, whose spindly leads yank the songs in unexpected directions. On "Singapore," his percussive plucking sets up a conflicting rhythm that bleeds into the mix like a drunk seeing double. It's saying something that Ribot makes the biggest impression on an album... that also features guest spots by Keith Richards ("Big Black Mariah") and Robert Quine ("Blind Love"). Waits's arrangements are unceasingly inventive — check the combination of banjo, upright bass and hand drums on "Gun Street Girl" — and he's increasingly aware of his voice as an instrument. On "Cemetery Polka," he sounds as if his throat is clogged with graveyard dirt, while on "Hang Down Your Head" it's heavy with more sorrow than his words can bear. It's telling that "Downtown Train," subsequently travestied by Rod Stewart, is left until nearly last, despite being the album's most obvious commercial prospect. Waits starts off by breathing fire in the listener's face; refreshments will be served, but only for those who stay 'til the end.

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  Bone Machine

  Tom Waits

  1992 | ISLAND RECORDS

  Released after a five-year break between albums — then the longest in his career — Bone Machine marks the beginning of a era in which Waits's records are isolated and self-contained, as if he goes dormant after each session and reemerges only after he's come up with something to say. The marionette march of "Earth Died Screaming" recalls the clatter of Rain Dogs' "Singapore," but Waits strips the songs bare as he... goes, paring away the excess; "Jesus Gonna Be Here" is just upright bass, dobro, and Waits's voice echoing in what sounds like an empty warehouse. On "In the Colosseum," he sounds as if he's been to hell and back and might just consider repeating the journey, the clanking percussion forging a concrete link to the album's title. Like the contemporaneous The Black Rider, Bone Machine risks falling into a fire-and-brimstone rut, but "Black Wings" shifts the album into a slightly less apocalyptic register. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" could be a demented Disney theme, and "That Feel" closes with a dash of ghostly gospel harmony. It's hardly Waits's most approachable album, but its skeletal embrace is surprisingly welcoming.

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  Mule Variations

  Tom Waits

  1999 | Anti/Epitaph

  After another lengthy break between albums, Waits emerged with an album that sums up his post-Swordfishtrombones career without breaking much in the way of new ground. Given that there's no one else working his turf, the lack of innovation isn't an issue; the title, with its allusions to stubbornness and repetition, proclaims as much. "What's He Building" is a distorted, paranoid monologue delivered atop radio squeals and disembodied whistles, as if Waits... was constantly fiddling with the frequency, trying to tune in his own signal. "Get Behind the Mule" draws on a bluesy well not much tapped since Heartattack and Vine, and there's a gentleness to "House Where Nobody Lives" that had largely slipped out of his repertoire, but they're variations on a theme and not strides forward. By this point, Waits has made so many consistently surprising records that it's almost disorienting to come across one that's tweaking the formula rather than changing it up. There are still great moments, but they're great in the ways we've come to expect.

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  Real Gone

  Tom Waits

  2004 | Anti/Epitaph

  Opening with the swish of turntables worked by his son Casey, Tom Waits's 17th album wastes no time throwing down the gauntlet. If The Mule Variations leaned on past advances, Real Gone kicks away the crutches, forcing Waits to find his footing again. There's not a note of keyboard on the entire album, and though there's no disguising his voice, Waits buries it in distortion and puts it low in the mix,... forcing it to fight its way to the top. "Shake It" distills the distorted stomp of Bone Machine to its infernal essence, while "Metropolitan Glide" fulfills Waits's desire to create a "dance craze," albeit one that by the sound of it can only be engaged in by skeletons. "Circus" is just warped music box and record-player static, an end-times take on one of Waits's pet subjects. The 10-minute "Sins of the Father" is the boldest step, a slowly building narrative built on a minimalist riff, less "Burma Shave" than it is "Desolation Row." Even after so many years, the old conjurer still has a few tricks left.

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  Bad As Me

  Tom Waits

  2011 | Anti/Epitaph

  Arriving seven years after Real Gone, Bad As Me busts out of the gate with the churning horns of "Chicago." But with the lagging tabla beat of the next track, "Raised Right Men," Waits steps on the brakes, and he more or less keeps his foot down for the rest of the album. The word "relaxed" is nowhere in Waits's lexicon, but there's an unhurried ease to songs like "Talking at the... Same Time" and "Back in the Crowd." Waits sings away from the beat, as if even his rhythm section can't set his pace. "Last Leaf" confronts mortality with fleeting defiance, and "New Year's Eve" is a mandolin-tinged waltz, not a time signature that gets much play in his repertoire.
  
  That's not to say Waits has mellowed, exactly. "Hell Broke Luce" extends his interest in the lives of soldiers, with baritone sax so low it sounds like the rumble of mortars and a little simulated machine-gun fire for extra PTSD. "Satisfied" ponders death as a release from the body — "Lay my vertebrae out like dice/ Let my skull be a home for the mice" — but not before its needs are fully met. He even invokes the patron saints of rock 'n' roll dissatisfaction: "Mr. Jagger, Mr. Richards/ I will scratch where I been itchin'." It is perhaps not coincidental that Richards also plays on the song.
  
  Waits scratches plenty of itches on Bad As Me, no two songs are alike, although most draw on templates he's laid down over his long and varied career. The album never quite settles on a mood for long enough to cast the kind of sustained spell as Bone Machine or Small Change do, but with so much time between recordings, it's not surprising Waits feels the itch to dance with as many partners as he can.

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  Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

  Tom Waits

  2006 | Anti/Epitaph

  Orphans is so chock-a-block full of Tom Waits trademarks - bangings, clangings, swamp hollers, jailbreak recipes, hobo manifestos, starlit waltzes, dime-store valentines, last-call singalongs - that it's easy to overlook how seriously out of character it is: For the first time in the 33 years he's been making records, Waits is looking backward instead of forward, honing instead of innovating. And yet what could have been just a simple career-spanning collection of... outtakes, B-sides and compilation tracks has sprawled into something weirdly akin to a statement: an instruction manual for how his mind works, a voluntary sheaf of contact sheets.
  
  Disc one, "Brawlers," dismembers rockabilly, juke-joint blues and gospel testifiers with Waits's usual avant-garde aplomb, muddling obsolete sounds and progressive visions; "Road to Peace," a chilling, moaned snapshot of failed Israeli-Palestinian relations, is the sole effort to rise out of the atemporal stew and attach itself to current events. Disc two, "Bawlers," offers an embarrassment of sentimental riches: unabashed odes to natural wonders ("You Can Never Hold Back Spring"), corner-bar breakup ballads ("It's Over"), banjo-plucking moongazers ("Shiny Things") and a pedal-steel-draped take on a pop standard ("Young at Heart"). Disc three, "Bastards," collects compilation rarities like Kurt Weill's "What Keeps Mankind Alive," an industrial-hell version of Disney's "Heigh Ho" and the classic-car monologue "The Pontiac."
  
  Liberated - at least for the time being - from the tremendous, self-imposed pressure to be inventive all the time, Waits is pinning himself down instead of propelling himself onward. But the quality is so stunningly high throughout, the scale so overwhelming and the scope so ambitious, that the slight air of redundancy vanishes on the breeze. - Karen Schoemer

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  Glitter And Doom Live

  Tom Waits

  2009 | Anti/Epitaph

  Tom Waits is in a profoundly unimpeachable position. He is perceived as grizzled and crazed and magnificently out-of-step. And, most crucially, a genius. An inscrutable iconoclast, with a hobo's sense of style and a coal miner's voice box. Over time, he has begun to resemble a video game villain - dark, rarely seen, unbeatable. The Legend of Zelda's Ganon, basically. So hearing him on Glitter and Doom, a live album, is both... a treat and a curiosity. Here is this unknowable artist, perpetuating the folkloric artifice, and perhaps even stretching it into full-blown myth. Waits's growl is deeper, his stories more cracked and poetic, and his band more lurching and lockstep. He is only himself, without context or contemporaries.
  
  In 2008, Glitter and Doom was the first Waits tour in three years and he and his band traveled through the underserved Southwestern swath of America - places like Mobile and Tulsa and El Paso. So the fans in attendance, often traveling a great distance to see Waits, are rapturous, slurping down much-loved compositions, like Rain Dog's "Singapore" with the same verve as the never-before-heard story song, "Live Circus." Most of the time Waits's howlish singing style can verge on the grotesque and hilarious. "What does it matter, a dream of life, a dream of lies?" he woofs on Bone Machine's "Dirt in the Ground." It is terrifying, melancholic and logical at the same time - one of Waits great, uncelebrated gifts. On a restructured "Falling Down," one of Waits's best and most heartbreaking songs, he is almost freakishly hoarse. Which, we suppose, is by design.
  
  Glitter and Doom is an unsurprisingly defiant work, culling mostly from stellar later albums like Real Gone and the odds 'n' ends compilation Orphans. It's a stopover until the beast grows bigger and darker, but suitably menacing no less. - Sean Fennessey

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Wilco, Etc., In Chronological Order

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  No Depression

  Uncle Tupelo

  2003 | Columbia/Legacy

  In retrospect, it seems unlikely that so many musical stories would be launched by this unassuming if impressive 1990 debut by a Midwestern trio of friends in their early 20s. Uncle Tupelo was, at its heart, an underground rock band, born of the same MTV-averse community that gave rise to such 1980s club-circuit champions as Dinosaur Jr. and Soul Asylum. The hard-hitting tracks "Graveyard Shift," "Before I Break" and "Factory Belt" settled... comfortably into the post-punk-dominated playlists of that era's college radio landscape; still, there was something else going on here. The title track was a cover of a song popularized by country music forebears the Carter Family in the 1930s, and the album's most dramatic moments came from songs with acoustic backbones: "Whiskey Bottle," a pedal-steel-driven dive into the bottom of the glass, and "Life Worth Livin'," a soul-searching declaration for the down and out. Uncle Tupelo at this stage seemed primarily to be guitarist Jay Farrar's band; the handful of contributions from bassist Jeff Tweedy ("That Year," "Train," "Flatness," "Screen Door") carried their weight but didn't necessarily suggest a future star in the making. One might have guessed, in 1990, that these guys would fade away as innocently as they rose. History had other ideas.

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  Still Feel Gone

  Uncle Tupelo

  2003 | Columbia/Legacy

  If Uncle Tupelo's 1990 debut No Depression had suggested Jay Farrar was the band's focal point, the first track on the band's 1991 follow-up served notice of Jeff Tweedy's arrival. The raw emotion of Tweedy's "Gun" catches fire amid Uncle Tupelo's power-trio abandon, creating his first great moment on record; indeed, the song has remained a fan favorite throughout his subsequent Wilco years. Tweedy's sweeter side shines on the album's bookend, "If... That's Alright," a quiet number with atmospheric keyboard washes that hint at some of his future explorations. In between, Farrar serves up a few more gems that have stood the test of time, including the aching acoustic ballad "Still Be Around" and "True To Life," a country-ish rambler which signaled where the band's next two albums would venture. Along the way, they paid tribute to punk rock mentors the Minutemen with "D. Boon," and on "Looking For A Way Out," their voices united in anthemic glory: "There was a time — that time is gone." Taken as a whole, Still Feel Gone was slightly more hit-and-miss than No Depression, but its high points made clear that Tweedy and Farrar were destined to leave an indelible mark on American music.

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• 

  March 16-20, 1992

  Uncle Tupelo

  2008 | Columbia/Legacy

  Most great artists in contemporary popular music have taken a sharp turn against the grain at some point, showing themselves to possess a range and depth which allows them to escape shorthand categorization. Here is where Uncle Tupelo made their move: As modern-rock radio was breaking toward the jet-engine sounds of Seattle, the trio retreated to a Georgia studio armed with acoustic instruments for a weeklong session with R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck... at the helm. The result was a strikingly understated album that looked backward as much as forward; nearly half its tracks were taken from traditional songbooks dating to the early 20th century. They touch on deep, dark themes with "Coalminers" and "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down," though their voices harmonize with gospel-style inspiration on the Louvin Brothers' pointedly ironic "Atomic Power." Of the originals, Jay Farrar's leadoff track "Grindstone" — which might have sounded at home on the band's first two records with an electric arrangement — is the standout, though Jeff Tweedy's hushed, haunting "Fatal Wound," fleshed out with subtle string touches, marked a sign of growth for him as a songwriter. A minor revelation is the hypnotic instrumental "Sandusky," with their good friend Brian Henneman of the Bottle Rockets on mandolin.

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  Anodyne

  Uncle Tupelo

  1993 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  On March 16-20, 1992, Uncle Tupelo had found a way out of the post-punk trappings of their origins. Acoustic guitars and traditional music had provided a back door into an entirely different world, and if stepping through that door meant turning their back on alt-rock just as Nirvana et al. had opened the floodgates, the artistic epiphany that bloomed on Anodyne was well worth the road-less-traveled journey. Gone was the power-trio format;... both Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy were on guitar now, with bassist recruit John Stirratt joined by new drummer Ken Coomer and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, whose fiddle touches on the gorgeous opener "Slate" announced that a new day was rising for the band. Tweedy's "Acuff-Rose," a tribute to the legendary Nashville publishing team, sketched out the bridge Uncle Tupelo was building to the past; a cover of Doug Sahm's "Give Back The Key To My Heart," with Sahm himself chiming in on the second verse, set that bridge in stone. By the time they hit Farrar's blazing Civil War metaphor "Chickamauga," it was clear they'd made one of the decade's great albums. There's a bit of retrospective irony in the bitter "We've Been Had," when Tweedy declares with a sneer, "Every star that hides on the back of the bus/ Is just waiting for his cover to be blown." Soon enough, he'd face that fame-bound reality firsthand.

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• 

  Down By The Old Mainstream

  Golden Smog

  2006 | Ryko/Rhino

  The call Jeff Tweedy received from a handful of Minneapolis pals in 1994, shortly after Tweedy's band Uncle Tupelo had splintered, was a godsend. In the midst of picking up the pieces and putting together Wilco, Tweedy had the pleasure of convening in the studio with the Jayhawks' Gary Louris, Soul Asylum's Dan Murphy and others to record the full-length debut of Golden Smog, a self-described "stuporgroup" that had recorded a modest... EP of covers a few years earlier. The focus this time around was on originals: Louris and his Jayhawks cohort Mark Olson served up the exquisite pop gem "Won't Be Coming Home" (which hinted at the direction Louris would steer the Jayhawks in the near future), while Tweedy contributed the whimsical sing-along "Pecan Pie." Kraig Johnson of Run Westy Run had a primary role, writing three originals and collaborating with Louris on the leadoff track, "V," an instantly catchy tune highlighted by vocal harmonies and piano melodies. Fittingly enough, given the band's origins, the highlight was once again a cover: Tweedy and Louris proved to be quite charismatic duet partners on Ronnie Lane's classic Faces ballad "Glad And Sorry." In the end, Down By The Old Mainstream was just a minor diversion for these artists, but it remains a welcome and lovable tributary.

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• 

  A.M.

  Wilco

  1995 | Sire/Warner Bros.

  Jay Farrar's decision to leave Uncle Tupelo in 1994 thrust Jeff Tweedy into a new role, though it helped that the rest of the band chose to stick with him under the rechristened name Wilco. That their debut was a relatively safe and modest affair was understandable; Tweedy was ambitious, yes, but the new band had to learn how to walk before they could run. On the one hand, A.M. is noticeably... different from Uncle Tupelo's records; the loss of Farrar's writing and vocal presence is keen. But the camaraderie evident among the returning players (plus longtime friend Brian Henneman of the Bottle Rockets guesting on lead guitar) lends the album an easygoing charm akin to early-'70s SoCal country rock. There are curveballs here and there a Stonesy kick on "Casino Queen," quiet reflection on "Dash 7," a lead vocal and songwriting turn for bassist John Stirratt on "It's Just That Simple" but mostly the band keeps an even keel, finding comfort in simple rootsy pleasures. The quirky "Passenger Side" seemed like a throwaway at first but has become a fan favorite over the years, while "I Must Be High" and "Box Full of Letters" provided early snapshots of the melodic pop brilliance that would radiate on the next couple of Wilco records.

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• 

  Trace

  Son Volt

  1996 | Warner Bros.

  Given the long-term career trajectory of Jeff Tweedy's band Wilco after he and Jay Farrar laid to rest Uncle Tupelo in 1994, it's easy to forget that Farrar's band Son Volt was a much stronger horse out of the gate. On the heels of Wilco's enjoyable if unspectacular 1995 debut A.M. came Son Volt's Trace, a near-perfect collection of 10 originals and a Ron Wood cover that suggested Farrar was one of... the finest singer-songwriters of his generation. Son Volt's mode was an equal-parts balance of countrified acoustic ballads and fully-charged electric rockers, with Farrar's elusive, enchanting lyrics and rich, warm voice at the center. The album's opening track, "Windfall," sounds as if it has existed forever, a simple but beautiful ode to the road floating effortlessly on currents of pedal steel and fiddle: "Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel/ May the wind take your troubles away." When Farrar and the band — original Uncle Tupelo drummer Mike Heidorn plus brothers Jim and Dave Boquist — kick it into high gear, as on the catchy minor radio hit "Drown" and the urgent "Loose String," they're flawlessly in sync, as if they'd been playing together for years rather than months. "Too Early," a touching caution to legendary songwriter Townes Van Zandt, is followed by the Wood cover, "Mystifies Me" a free-and-easy finale to a record with a tight focus and zero filler.

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• 

  Being There

  Wilco

  1996 | Reprise

  This 19-song double album is where Jeff Tweedy starts showing off. Why record the same song twice first as a straight-up rocker ("Outtasite (Outta Mind)"), then as a Pet Sounds pop fantasia ("Outta Mind (Outta Sight)") except to show how much you've expanded your range? Not only had Tweedy grown comfortable as a bandleader, but with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, he had an actual band to lead a band equally... adept at feedback-strafed drone-pop ("Misunderstood") or bouncy bluegrass ("Forget the Flowers"), but feels most at home with the Stonesy swagger of songs like "Monday," powered by a full horn section. Still, Tweedy's heart belongs to the mid-life losers, whether the sad sack rocker stuck back in his hometown on "Misunderstood" or the sympathetic fan of "The Lonely 1." Nor does the band take the name of the Peter Sellers' flick in vain: Tweedy's narrators often sound like adrift nafs whose moments of wisdom are wholly accidental. And if that doesn't excuse occasional clunkers like "I guess all this history/ Is just a mystery/ To me" but suggests that "You've been taking me/ Way too seriously" may be a cute wink toward his more adoring fans. Keith Harris

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• 

  Summerteeth

  Wilco

  1999 | Nonesuch

  Having broken open the Wilco mold on 1996's Being There, Jeff Tweedy went all-in with the exuberant pop tendencies of his new compatriot Jay Bennett on Summerteeth. Perhaps because the band's 1998 collaboration with Billy Bragg on the Woody Guthrie project Mermaid Avenue had played up their roots-folk inclinations, they seemed eager to push in an entirely different direction on this 1999 disc, which largely closed the door on their alt-country/Uncle Tupelo... past. Fiddle and pedal steel are supplanted by keyboards and synthesizer; most of the tunes are Tweedy/Bennett co-writes, with bassist John Stirratt also having a hand in a few. Buoyant choruses abound, from "A Shot In The Arm" to "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway" to "ELT." They pull out all the stops on "Pieholden Suite," a Jimmy Webb-esque tour de force complete with horns and synthesized strings. But the album's heart is "Via Chicago," an elusive, swirling odyssey of melody and noise that feeds off the creative energy of the band's adopted hometown. Not everything is so aggressively modern: "When You Wake Up Feeling Old" is a jaunty throwback that might have fit well musically on the Mermaid album, while the bonus track "Candyfloss" has a carnival-calliope charm. Viewed in context with Wilco's oeuvre, Summerteeth could be considered the band's Revolver: a pop-phase pinnacle, with a full-scale game-changer looming just over the horizon.

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• 

  Mermaid Avenue Vol. II

  Billy Bragg & Wilco

  2000 | Elektra Records
• 

  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

  Wilco

  2002 | Nonesuch/WBR

  The Wilco catalogue breaks down fairly cleanly into before-and-after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot segments. Such is the landmark nature of this album, which attained mythical status after it was initially rejected by the band's label; when it finally saw the light of day a year later, it vaulted to the upper reaches of the charts. The entire process was detailed in the documentary film I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, which is... also the title of the album's first track, a seven-minute testament to Wilco's decisive turn away from pop convention and toward art-rock experimentation. The making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was marked by turmoil — in addition to the label hassles, leader Jeff Tweedy and key bandmate Jay Bennett had a professional meltdown during the sessions (documented in the film), and longtime drummer Ken Coomer was replaced by Glenn Kotche, coveted by Tweedy for his unconventional approach to percussion. The result was an album with a lot more open space than its predecessor, the densely-arranged Summerteeth; the emphasis is less on melody and more on mood. The first few songs suggest a soundscape for a sci-fi film about a bleak futureworld; from that detritus blooms the delicate fiddle solo that frames "Jesus, Etc.," which can't help but bring to mind 9/11 when Tweedy sings, "Tall building shake/ Voices escape/ Singing sad, sad songs," even though the album was recorded a few months before the WTC attacks. That sorrowful sentiment carries over to the next track, "Ashes of American Flags," before Tweedy delivers the lighthearted and playful "Heavy Metal Drummer" as a sort of antidote to the proceedings. When Tweedy acknowledges on the album's serene, shimmering final track, "I've got reservations/ About so many things/ But not about you," it feels like a personal reckoning, and a way forward for both the art and the artist.

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• 

  Down With Wilco

  The Minus 5

  2004 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Jeff Tweedy's longtime friendship with Scott McCaughey, ringleader of the R.E.M. side-project the Minus 5, led to McCaughey's recruitment of Wilco as the backing band for this 2003 disc. The ties run even deeper, actually; R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, McCaughey's primary Minus 5 collaborator, produced an album for Tweedy's former band, Uncle Tupelo, way back in 1992. Down With Wilco was a welcome low-key breather for Tweedy and company amid the pressures... of following up their 2001 breakthrough Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; a spirit of carefree solidarity shines through in the joyful bounce of "The Town That Lost Its Groove Supply" and the sardonically witty "I'm Not Bitter" (in which McCaughey answers the title declaration with the assurance, "Not at all...just a lot"). McCaughey's writing tends toward the '60s-pop classicism of the Kinks and the Zombies, and Wilco proves plenty able to relate on that level, while helping him to push the envelope on the sonically adventurous bookend tracks "The Days Of Wine And Booze" and "Dear Employer (The Reason I Quit)."

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• 

  Circles

  The Autumn Defense

  2005 | Arena Rock Recording Company / Redeye

  Though Wilco bassist John Stirratt had a songwriting credit and lead vocal on the band's first album, subsequent releases proved the band would be Jeff Tweedy's vision, so Stirratt sought a side-project outlet for his own material. He teamed up with Mississippian Pat Sansone in the Autumn Defense, mining a vein not dissimilar to Wilco's but with a more intimate feel. Circles, their second album, is a wondrously low-key record; guitar strings... and pianos intertwine softly to create slightly jazz-inflected folk-pop landscapes colored by the sweet voices of Sansone and Stirratt. The empty-streets scene of the melancholy opening track, "Silence," is set at 2:45 a.m.; ringing stringed instruments ricochet against gentle strains of feedback, bringing the wee-hours vignette to life. Everything flows from that beginning; the mood is never broken through a series of mesmerizing numbers ranging from the ever-so-slightly uptempo dreamer "The World (Will Soon Turn Our Way)" to the lounge-flavored reverie "Tuesday Morning." They cast their spell so subtly but effectively that when they reach the title-track conclusion and its horn-accented echoing mantra — "All these thoughts that fill my head, begin to grow" — their music has indeed transcended from the head to the heart and soul.

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• 

  A Ghost Is Born

  Wilco

  2004 | Nonesuch

  In the wake of their popular and artistic breakthrough on 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco headed even further into uncharted territory on A Ghost Is Born, largely eschewing conventional songcraft in favor of conceptual expressionism. By this point, only leader Jeff Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt remained from the early days; the rest of the band consisted of drummer Glenn Kotche, multi-instrumentalist Leroy Bach and keyboardist Mikael Jorgenson, but an even larger... presence on A Ghost Is Born was experimental musician Jim O'Rourke, who co-produced the album with the band and steered the proceedings toward his free-noise background. At the extreme end of the spectrum are "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" and "Less Than You Think," which clock in at 10 and 15 minutes, respectively; the former is difficult to follow despite intriguing lyrics, while the latter devolves into an impenetrable barrage of synthesized squalls. Not everything is so far out: "I'm A Wheel" is two and a half minutes of tight, clean, straight-up rock 'n' roll, and the piano-based pop gem "Theologians" harks back to the band's Summerteeth heyday. If the result is an uneven collection, that didn't seem to matter to music industry voters who gave Wilco their first-ever Grammy, for Best Alternative Music Album.

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• 

  Mobile

  Glenn Kotche

  2006 | Nonesuch/WBR

  The audience for instrumental albums by drummers is inevitably a bit limited, even when that drummer plays with one of the world's most popular bands — Wilco, in Glenn Kotche's case. If you appreciate the innovative influence Kotche has had on Wilco's music over the past decade, or if you're simply inclined toward avant-garde sounds, his solo outings may well hold some intrigue. For starters, though Kotche's role in Wilco is percussion-centered,... there's a good deal more than percussion on Mobile. While everything is heavily dependent on rhythm, Kotche employs a range of melodic instruments to give voice to his visions on "Reductions or Imitations" and the three-tiered titular composition. And if it's nothing but thumping sounds you want, "Projections Of" serves up bangs and clangs and loops of beats woven together in a manner that stretches modern art well into a future realm. The album's centerpiece is "Monkey Chant," 11 minutes of tribal-meets-industrial conflagration guaranteed to freak out even the most ardent Wilco fan.

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• 

  New Monastery - A View into the Music of Andrew Hill

  Nels Cline

  Cryptogramophone

  That Wilco guitarist Nels Cline chose to spotlight the music of noted jazz pianist Andrew Hill on this collection seems fitting: Hill's push-and-pull between his grounding in traditional forms and his insistence in breaking out beyond them is a theme that's mirrored in Wilco's body of work. Cline assembled a sextet for this recording, with Bobby Bradford (cornet), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Andrea Parkins (accordion), Devin Hoff (contrabass) and Scott Amendola (percussion) accompanying... his guitar excursions. (Cline's brother Alex also appears on two tracks.) Transcribing piano compositions for a piano-less ensemble is both the challenge and the reward in such an endeavor; the music can't help but be reinvented in the process. But that was inevitable simply from the free-jazz approach the musicians take here; this, too, is a nod to Hill, who favored open interpretations. Cline's material selections tended toward pieces he found suitable for arranging into extended suites; an amalgamation of "No Doubt," "11/8" and "Dance With Death" stretches beyond 20 minutes. As an instrumentalist, Cline frequently takes a backseat here; the horns and winds tend to jump out on much of the record. If there's less of a spotlight on Cline's own virtuosity, New Monastery is no less enlightening as a further glimpse in to how his creative impulses both mesh with and influence the Wilco framework.

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• 

  Sky Blue Sky

  Wilco

  2007 | Nonesuch

  Where to go once you've gone off the deep end, and won a Grammy for it? For Wilco, the answer was a measured but brilliant retreat. Unlike its 2004 predecessor A Ghost Is Born, the band's 2007 album Sky Blue Sky contained no 10-to-15-minute tracks, no feedback indulgences, no high-minded concepts. Instead, there is beauty. Even the album's longest track, the six-minute "Impossible Germany," is gorgeous; its guitar sounds trade in the... previous album's Sonic Youth template for something closer to Steely Dan. Much of the shift is due to the continued evolution of the Wilco lineup: After the departure of Leroy Bach, leader Jeff Tweedy added guitarist Nels Cline and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, the latter from bassist John Stirratt's folk-pop side-project the Autumn Defense. Sansone and Stirratt likely had something to do with the kinder, gentler sound of tracks such as the warm, welcoming opener "Either Way" and the contemplative "Leave Me." Cline, known for jazz-tinged excursions on his own albums and other projects, helps the band keep a sharp edge on several tunes, serving up skronky rhythmic fills on the disjointed "Shake It Off" and barbed leads on "Hate It Here." Tweedy, meanwhile, reaches a new level as a singer; his voice sounds more mellifluous and effortless than ever, especially on the album's breezy title track. Is this the sound of Wilco mellowing as they ease into middle age? If so, the musical result becomes them.

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• 

  Wilco [the album]

  Wilco

  2009 | Nonesuch

  After a decade of recording in either their home base of Chicago or the nexus of Manhattan, Wilco had earned a working vacation, and so the excitingly titled Wilco (The Album) was recorded halfway around the world, in New Zealand. That they had to go Down Under to team up with Canadian chanteuse Leslie Feist is no small irony, but "You And I" may be the most immediately appealing track Wilco has... ever recorded; her voice blends perfectly with Jeff Tweedy's, and the band smartly stays out of the way, placing their harmonies front-and-center. If nothing else on the record rises to such heights, Wilco (The Album) still holds together quite well as a cohesive work. The darkly personal "One Wing" strikes an enchanting middle ground between the band's daring and tuneful tendencies, while the bright pop sheen of "You Never Know" sports a mid-song guitar break that's a dead ringer for George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" (almost certainly by design). And "Everlasting Everything" is probably the most appropriate closing number on any Wilco record; Tweedy's voice rings beautifully bittersweet with resignation as he acknowledges, "Everything goes, both the good and the bad."

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• 

  The Whole Love

  Wilco

  2011 | Anti/Epitaph

  What to make of Wilco with an established lineup? The Whole Love marks three straight albums on which original members Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt and 10-year veteran drummer Glenn Kotche have teamed with multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, guitarist Nels Cline and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen — an unprecedented run of stability for the band. Personnel evolution has been intertwined with Wilco's ever-shifting sonic identity since its 1995 debut; now the challenge is to... change from within. And there are new horizons here: The seven-minute leadoff track "Art of Almost" is a cacophonous diversion from the more conventional approach of the band's last two albums, affirming Wilco's continuing desire to challenge their listeners and themselves. Cline seems increasingly comfortable cutting loose within Tweedy's song structures, blazing caustic vapor trails in "Dawned on Me" and "Born Alone," while Sansone arranges swells of strings to deepen darkness of "Black Moon." Everything is a prelude to the 12-minute closer "One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)," an epic, elegiac tale about a father and son set to a recurring melodic phrase that ebbs and flows via graceful acoustic instrumentation as the story gradually unwinds. It may be the apex of Wilco's career, a shining moment when the band's artistic ambition becomes one with its instinctive musicality.

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In Chronological Order

• 

  Ten

  Pearl Jam

  1992 | Epic/Legacy

  Here's something that makes me totally and irrationally angry - and living in Portland, Oregon, so near to grunge's Ground Zero, I do continue to hear it said, more than 18 years after the album's release: "Ten sure has a lot to answer for: Matchbox Twenty, Everclear, Candlebox, Creed, hell, that whole brand of manly 'testosterone/action rock' can be directly traced to that album."
  
  Well, sure, but does that automatically make Nirvana responsible... for ripoff artists like Silverchair and Bush? Should we blame Led Zeppelin for the waves of crappy guitar-based bands that slavishly aped all their loudest, most macho moves, but completely missed the nuance, the light and shade, that made them great? It's a moronic argument: Ten stands proudly beside such epic works as Who's Next, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, Are You Experienced? and Let It Bleed as one of the finest guitar albums ever, while serving as a sonic starter's pistol for a band who've evolved, grown and turned into one of our most cherished artistic touchstones during the two decades they've remained a going musical concern. If others chose to imitate the elements that made it the classic it was, what could Pearl Jam do about that?
  
  What you can still hear most clearly on Ten is the sound of personal pain filtering its way through a then-unheard mixture of Black Flag and Black Sabbath, with a classic-rock sheen applied on the back end and a sly, Prince-like groove curling its way through the album's hook-laden riff-a-rama. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament had just lost their Mother Love Bone compatriot Andy Wood to a heroin overdose, singer Eddie Vedder was clearly channeling some demons of his own (Ten's lyrics touched upon such seldom-heard topics as abortion, suicide, psychiatric hospitals, childhood family traumas and the sort of doomy introspection more often associated with Ian Curtis or Robert Smith), drummer Dave Krusen drank his way through the sessions (eventually he would leave the band and check into rehab), and the group's songs spelled out in no uncertain terms the cathartic release all of them seemed to require at that moment.
  
  The subsequent public response to Ten was slow at first, but fans eventually lapped it up by the millions; the band toured relentlessly behind the record while turning in some legendarily incendiary live shows in the process; the singles "Alive," "Even Flow" and "Jeremy" turned them into radio and MTV megastars - launched the so-called grunge movement as a mainstream cultural phenomenon and made Pearl Jam superstars in the process, a turn of events they struggled to come to terms with (and spent much of the subsequent decade attempting to live down). But there's no denying, even now, that Ten's finest tracks ("Even Flow," the sublime "Black," the closing anthem "Release") are as resonant and unique today as they were back in 1991, before they'd launched a million imitators hoping to combine the band's ear for melody with its equally weighty gift for authentic interpersonal connection.
  
  The re-release of Ten adds some interesting b-side curios ("State of Love and Trust," "Just a Girl," "Brother," "Breath and a Scream," "2,000 Mile Blues" and "Evil Little Goat") but doesn't necessarily make it any better than it already was - no matter the cloak it wears or the adornments fitted onto it, Ten remains its generation's finest addition to the classic-rock canon. - Corey DuBrowa

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• 

  Vs.

  Pearl Jam

  2009 | Epic

  Most bands welcome fame. As Vs. proved, Pearl Jam is not one of those bands. When Ten hit it big, they opted to retrench. Instead of building on the messianic sonic cathedrals constructed by Ten producer Rick Parashar, the group went with Brendan O'Brien. While the future Bruce Springsteen collaborator was best known at the time for making Stone Temple Pilots sound very PJ-esque, O'Brien gave Vs. a more immediate and... rootsy sound that would make him Pearl Jam's go-to producer for many albums to come. Affable acoustic ballads like "Daughter" and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" went a long way towards establishing that vibe, as well as giving Pearl Jam's commercial viability some legs in a world that was about ready to move on from grunge. (Coincidentally, the best of the three bonus tracks on this reissue - an acoustic version of B-side "Hold On," and a cover of Victoria Williams's "Crazy Mary" from a 1993 tribute compilation, are kissing cousins of these kinder, gentler Pearl Jam tracks. "Cready Stomp," the third bonus track, is a decent enough grunge-funk instrumental.)
  
  The results were decidedly more mixed when Pearl Jam decided to kick out the jams. In between future setlist staples like "Rearviewmirror," "Go" and "Dissident" were all sorts of left-turns and dead ends: the primal-scream rage of "Blood" and "Animal," the condescending Public Service Announcements of "W.M.A." and "Glorified G," and the society-scolding Michael-Jackson-quoting I-really-hope-they're-joking "Rats." No member of the group was more affected by Pearl Jam's newfound popularity than Eddie Vedder, and the scattershot nature of his lyrics on Vs. certainly reflects that. For better or worse, Vs. proved that Pearl Jam was a group willing to follow the beat of its own drum. - David Raposa

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• 

  Vitalogy

  Pearl Jam

  2009 | Epic

  If Pearl Jam's previous album didn't successfully separate the diehard fans from the dudes expecting "Even Flow" 24/7, then Vitalogy certainly tried to finish the job. While it featured some of the group's best and most beloved songs - thoughtfully defiant anthems "Corduroy" and "Immortality," and the evergreen pop ballad "Better Man" - it also featured some of the group's strangest. And I'm not just talking about Eddie Vedder's spoken-word accordion-driven paean... to the wonderful world of insects. Nor am I talking about the oft-mentioned, rarely-listened-to seven-minute sound-collage that concludes the original album. As with the other Pearl Jam reissues, bonus tracks are tacked on to the album proper. For Vitalogy, that means three alternate takes of album tracks, with the guitar/organ version of "Better Man" outshining the only-vaguely different takes on "Corduroy" and "Nothingman."
  
  Despite the scattershot nature of the album - with an off-kilter rock tune like "Satan's Bed" sandwiched between polar opposites "Bugs" and "Better Man," and a proto-punk ode to vinyl ("Spin The Black Circle") sharing album space with a slithering instrumental like "Aye Davanita" - Vitalogy manages to cohere, ultimately as satisfying as it is confounding and uncompromising. Pearl Jam probably didn't know they wouldn't see the top of the Billboard charts for 15 years after Vitalogy, but by the sound of this record, they probably didn't care, either. - David Raposa

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• 

  No Code

  Pearl Jam

  Epic

  Coming after the surly, restless Vitalogy, No Code finds Pearl Jam continuing to expand their sonic palette. As its name implies, the band is operating without deference to any kind of sonic rulebook; thusly, the album veers from thrashing Husker Dü-isms to grizzled classic rock to lowing ballads laced up with Sufi chanting. But unlike its similarly adventurous predecessor, more of these forays pay off. "Smile" is a charred-around-the edges stomper worthy... of PJ's beloved Crazy Horse; "Off He Goes" inverts the gentle arpeggio from the Beatles' "And I Love Her" and uses it as a backdrop for a tender tale of an old friend fallen on hard times. Eddie Vedder's simmering discontent - which on Vitalogy gave birth to some particularly grievous fits of self-pity - no longer manifests itself in agonized contemplations of human powerlessness. Instead, Vedder seems more earnestly dedicated toward finding his way in a world that will never be fair. In the storm-the-gates "Hail, Hail" he sings, "I could be new - you underestimate me," and later, over ominous fret buzz in "Present Tense," he says, "You can't spend your time alone/ redigesting past regrets/…makes much more sense to live in the present tense." The fiery defiance of angry youth generally leads to one of two outcomes: either frustrated self-destruction, or more tempered methods of resistance, leavened by pragmatism and allowing for possibility. No Code warily but hopefully chooses the latter. - J. Edward Keyes

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• 

  Binaural

  Pearl Jam

  2008 | Epic

  Binaural is a solid record hobbled by two drawbacks: 1) mortifyingly two-dimensional production that nearly flattens McCready and Gossard's guitars into dueling sine waves, and 2) the soft-fall sensation that Binaural represents the moment where Pearl Jam ceased to matter to a large portion of the world. In outline, Binaural is the same sort of record as Yield; a mix of garage-rocker rave-ups, mid-tempo folk rockers, a sprinkling of tasteful diversions (the... ukulele ditty "Soon Forget," the rumbling saloon blues of "Rival") with pointedly democratic songwriting credits from most of the band. There are some powerful moments: The ballad "Light Years" is as open-hearted and vulnerable as Vedder had been in years; "Thin Air" is a pleasingly direct Everly Bros.-style pop tune; and the righteous, mangy "Rival," obliquely inspired by the hate-crime beating of Matthew Shepard, proved they still had bite. If it all added up to less than the sum of its parts this go-round, well, chalk that up to the passage of time. - Jayson Greene

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• 

  Riot Act

  Pearl Jam

  Epic

  Riot Act is the most contemplative, insular record of Pearl Jam's career; for the first time, they seemed to be speaking almost entirely to themselves. As such, it is the most overlooked, underappreciated moment in their discography. In its muted tone, the PJ record it recalls most powerfully is actually No Code, but this time, Vedder and the band feel genuinely comfortable in their own skin. The surfer-Zen koan "I Am Mine"... could be a gently affirmative echo of "Who We Are," right down to its modal chord progression. The similarly raga-like "Can't Keep" arcs gently upward to Vedder's pointed declaration "I don't live forever/ You can't keep me/Here." The specter of death, always a sad theme in Pearl Jam's career, looms over Riot Act: It was the first record since nine Pearl Jam fans were crushed to death and suffocated underfoot by a crowd at the Roskilde Festival. On the swelling multipart suite "Love Boat Captain," Vedder references it mournfully and directly: "Lost nine friends we'll never know/ Two years ago today." The song, held aloft by a graceful Hammond organ, remains one of their late-period masterpieces, the sound of a tragedy-scarred band embracing its crags. - Jayson Greene

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• 

  Pearl Jam

  Pearl Jam

  J Records

  It's no coincidence that, after 15 years, Pearl Jam waited until Album No. 8 to go the eponymous LP route. With the releases of rearviewmirror (a generous, albeit flawed, two-disc best-of) and Lost Dogs (an equally generous and flawed two-disc odds and ends collection), they concluded their association with Sony subsidiary Epic Records. Also, this record was the group's first album of new material in nearly four years, the longest they'd ever... gone between albums. Their distance from the oblique one-two punch of Binaural and Riot Act, coupled with their non-stop touring schedule, put the group in a decidedly no-frills rock 'n' roll mood when they re-convened with Riot Act producer Adam Kasper for this album's sessions. The finished product bears that impulse out. Singles like "World Wide Suicide" and "Life Wasted" find Pearl Jam doing their best imitation of their younger selves, successfully melding the full-on anger of their youth with the wisdom and focus they've since acquired. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned nostalgia trip also finds Eddie Vedder temporarily regressing as a vocalist. On otherwise capable tunes like "Comatose" and "Big Wave," his unfettered bellowing, while definitely impassioned, acts as a runaway steamroller. When the vocal nuance and restraint Vedder has carefully cultivated over the previous decade comes to bear on an unabashed blues number like "Come Back," it makes its absence on those other tracks that much more apparent. Given Pearl Jam's messy artistic growth, though, it's only fitting that an album named after the group, as good as it is at times, is imperfect in a noble manner. - David Raposa

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Live Albums and Compilations

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  Live On Two Legs

  Pearl Jam

  2009 | Epic

  In terms of song selection, the biggest surprise on Live On Two Legs (the group's first of many officially sanctioned live releases) might be the relative lack of Ten representation: It only gets two slots out of 16, and both of those tracks ("Black" and "Even Flow") are in the back end of the setlist. Despite that minor quirk, the Legs set doesn't lack for The Hits; if anything, it's disappointing that... the non-album tracks are limited to "Untitled" (an ersatz intro into "MFC") and their righteous cover of Neil Young's "Fucked Up." Both "Elderly Woman" and "Betterman" are included, as are the singles from No Code and Yield, while the group stretches out the outro of "Daughter" to let Eddie Vedder sing lyrics from Neil Young's "Keep On Rockin' In The Free World" and his own "W.M.A." Musically, the group sticks to the script, though the addition of a new cast member (then-temp drummer Matt Cameron) does add some wrinkles. He doesn't show off at the expense of the tunes, but still manages to find space to flash some skill and make his mark (especially on "Corduroy" and "Hail, Hail"). If this tour was meant to be an ersatz audition for Cameron to join the group, he passed with flying colors. - David Raposa

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  Lost Dogs

  Pearl Jam

  Epic

  As an actual front-to-back listening experience, Lost Dogs makes like a decade-spanning collection of outtakes, B-sides and other ephemera. It takes until the start of the second disc for any semblance of flow to emerge. In fact, a solid case could be made that disc's first nine tracks - among them, Binaural outtake "Fatal," "Dead Man" (the group's rejected contribution to the Dead Man Walking soundtrack), some fan-club singles cuts and shoulda-been... Vitalogy cut "Hard To Imagine" - are all the outtakes a Pearl Jam fan would need. But that would exclude their spirited Who homage (via Holland-Dozier-Holland nugget "Leaving Here"), a spirited run through surf-rock standard "Gremmie Out of Control," and two tracks that also found themselves on the group's best-of: their chart-topping cover of "Last Kiss," and alt-rock radio staple/shameless Hendrix homage "Yellow Ledbetter."
  
  If there's anything definitive to take from Lost Dogs, it's that the group cut a whole lot of tracks during the Binaural sessions. Six of the 31 tracks here - all previously unreleased - come from the making of that album, and a case for inclusion on the LP proper could be made for most of them. On the other hand, Jeff Ament's "Magic Johnson" rewrite called "Sweet Lew" (as in Alcindor, aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) might have been better off forgotten. At least it finds another RHCP knock-off, the Ten-era B-side "Dirty Frank," to befriend on the back end of Disc 2. Some folks might bemoan the exclusion of the two-song Merkin Ball EP or other fan-club offerings (among other omissions), but this thorough collection of has-beens, nice-tries, and what-the-hells more than does its job. - David Raposa

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In Their Tree: Associated Acts

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  Apple

  MOTHER LOVE BONE

  2010 | Polydor

  Listening to the scant amount of material recorded by the Seattle glam-punk act Mother Love Bone can often trigger feelings of, "What if?" What if, instead of passing away of a heroin overdose shortly before the release of his band's debut album, the grandiose Apple, lead singer Andrew Wood had lived? Would the band's gritty, yet achingly vulnerable take on arena rock have supercharged a cultural movement toward glitter eye shadow and... platform boots? Would pleather have taken the place of flannel? Would Eddie Vedder still be surfing?
  
  Mother Love Bone's music existed on a precipice between the larger-than-life hard rock that was just starting to fall out of favor in 1990 and the bleaker, more low-end-heavy music that would eventually be dubbed "grunge." But the catalytic factor was Wood, a self-proclaimed disciple of Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan who laid all his romantic dreams - of grandeur on the stage and in the bedroom, of meeting a woman who's "just like me, only beautiful" - absolutely bare in a way that, at its best, remains absolutely unnerving even on multiple listens.
  
  To be fair, Wood was backed by a top-notch band that helped drive along his vision: Bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard, late of the legendary Green River and later of the grunge-era icons Pearl Jam, helped lay the foundation, and squealing solos by Bruce Fairweather added the requisite amount of flash. (A live version of "I'm In Love With My Car" floating around proves that Wood's dreams of being Freddie Mercury Mach II would have been ably assisted by his bandmates.) Songs like the chugging "Heartshine" and the stormy "Mr. Danny Boy" stalk and preen, with Wood's slightly nasal vocals exhorting the audience to "value love supreme"; at his best, his frontman style was not unlike that of a particularly exhortative street preacher, someone encouraging as many followers as he possibly could to follow him to other astral planes.
  
  "Capricorn Sister" shows the band at its apex, with Wood's vocals multitracked in such a way that it sounds like his subconscious-inspired rantings are being beamed in from space while a trashy, wahing lead guitar skulks around in the background. (Note that the track also represents one of the few times in the history of rock when a band shouting out its own name actually works; this is probably because of the chaotic glee inherent in the track, as shown by liberal use of the wah pedal and Wood, at one point, letting loose a cackle.)
  
  The posthumous collection encompasses Apple and the bulk of the 1989 EP Shine, which has slightly rougher production (not to mention a Ricky Ricardo imitation from Wood). It closes with the two-part epic "Chloe Dancer/Crown Of Thorns," which is probably the band's most well-known composition thanks to Cameron Crowe's tendency to include it on his films' soundtracks and Pearl Jam's live versions; it's a resigned ode to romance, one that sings of "my kind of love/ the kind that moves on/ the kind that leaves me alone" as it builds to its climax with a big old jam session, the kind that could stretch out for days. That it has to end eventually is, of course, inevitable; that Mother Love Bone's career came to the premature close that it did, though, remains sad to this day. - Maura Johnston

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  Dry as a Bone / Rehab Doll

  Green River

  Sub Pop Records

  Here's the primordial slime out of which grunge crawled: the album, EP and compilation tracks that comprise the discography of a 1984-1987 metal-ish punk band (or perhaps a punkish metal band), named after a Washington State serial killer and populated by hair-tossing dudes who went on to Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Temple of the Dog, Mother Love Bone and Love Battery. As you might expect, the songwriting isn't quite there yet, and the... recording has a great big mid-'80s drum sound that hasn't dated well; Green River were more about attitude and style than craft. (The two covers here are the Dead Boys' "Ain't Nothing to Do" and David Bowie's "Queen Bitch," both by artists who invented dangerous identities for themselves - it's clear why a band interested in transgression, and trying to hone a sound that didn't quite exist yet, would be drawn to them.) But there are plenty of hints of what was to come, especially in Mark Arm's guttural yowl - his future Mudhoney bandmate Steve Turner co-wrote "Swallow My Pride," the song here that points the way forward most. - Douglas Wolk

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  Temple Of The Dog

  Temple Of The Dog

  1991 | A&M

  While this album is the first time that the core members of what would become Pearl Jam - former Mother Love Bone members Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, guitarist Mike McCready, and surfer-dude vocalist Eddie Vedder - got together in a studio, and also served as an unofficial preview of the group's post-Binaural line-up (with then-Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron), this album is primarily about Chris Cornell. He formed the one-off group with... Ament and Gossard following the death of Mother Love Bone frontman Andrew Wood (Cornell's friend and roommate), wrote all of the album's lyrics, and wrote the music for all but three songs on the album.
  
  For people that only knew Cornell's work from Soundgarden - remember, the group had yet to record Badmotorfinger - the strength and breadth of his songwriting on Temple of the Dog must have come as quite a shock. The rock-god poses he strikes on the album's two direct tributes to Wood ("Say Hello 2 Heaven" and "Reach Down") are nothing new, but this time around they come with a sense of humility and self-awareness. Meanwhile, slippery tracks like "Wooden Jesus" and "Your Savior" offered a glimpse into the interesting detours Cornell would soon take with his other group. This isn't to say that the Pearl Jam part of the Dog didn't make itself known. Apart from Vedder's vocal turn on "Hunger Strike," the Gossard/McCready connection gets made during the lengthy breakdown section of "Reach Down," and "Pushin Forward Back" (with music written by Ament and Gossard) offers a inadvertent preview of what Ten would soon offer to 10s of millions of listeners. - David Raposa

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  Mirror Ball

  Neil Young

  1995 | Reprise

  A 1995 collaboration with Neil Young, a skeptic could argue that Mirror Ball captures all the worst aspects of grunge: the macho pounding, the sea-shanty rhythms, the overdone guitar effects and solos, But those things are true of all rock & roll in general, so what can you do?
  
  "Song X" is a big opener, a proclamation That This Will Be Rock, but "I'm the Ocean" actually follows through on the promise. Most... of the record sounds like Young trying a bit too much to solidify his Godfather of Grunge title, but this song is simply a great Neil Young song, made better by Pearl Jam's youthful fire. It's enhanced by the sudden appearance of Eddie Vedder as a back-up singer midway through, his first of a very few appearances on the album.
  
  "Truth Be Known" is also great, instantly inventing country-grunge without batting an eyelash. The record builds to "Peace and Love," Mirrorball's one duet between Young and Vedder. (It makes you wonder what Vedder was doing during those sessions - was he a brooding coach?) There are also a lot of guitar solos because this was an age where you had to play a lot of guitar solos.
  
  There is one other keeper: "Throw Your Hatred Down," a nicely paced rocker that finds Young in a permanent snarl but stays jaunty all the same. - Yancey Strickler

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In Chronological Order

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  Queen

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  The most conventional of the band's early albums, Queen's 1973 debut nevertheless mixes glam metal anthems, folky balladry, a proggy gospel tune that might've fit in then-recent Jesus Christ Superstar (but not your average church), an ease with melody that doesn't yet approach pure pop, and enough ear-grabbing guitar flash and tra-la-la to announce that this was a group not interested in building a fanbase slowly with a realistic, road-tested sound. Judging... from its earliest output, Queen aimed to be Sgt. Pepper's Heavy Rock Club Band, and wanted the popularity that goes with it — right away.
  
  This debut's mix of ballast and light, darkness and luster shows an unmistakable Led Zeppelin influence: Vinyl side openers "Keep Yourself Alive" and "Liar" bring unabashed heavy metal riffs tempered by Zep's command of dynamics and structure, while "Son and Daughter" cops that foursome's trick of doubling a nasty guitar melody on the bass for added heft. Yet there's nothing remotely bluesy about Freddie Mercury's performance, no concern for rootsy authenticity or keeping every element as corpulent as possible. Instead there's inexhaustible exuberance and glorious excess. Where other groups would put one or two ear-catching riffs or memorable guitar sounds, Queen spit out several.
  
  Mercury yields his lead vocal position only once — not to guitarist Brian May, who'll soon become a steady vocal presence, but to Roger Taylor on the drummer's brief but ballsy rave-up "Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll." But there are already hints of the overdubbed choirs to come in the multi-tracked vocals of "My Fairy King," a piano-pounding Mercury extravaganza that in sound and sentiment points the way to the over-the-top splendor of Queen II.

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  Queen II

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  Halfway between glam and progressive rock, Queen's first album of 1974 is its most extreme. Inspired by prog's continuous LP sides (or at least Abbey Road), Queen II's rarely silent suites pay tribute to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound technique; not by packing a studio with musicians as Brian Wilson had done, but by layering overdub upon overdub of dense distorted guitar that suggests shoegaze 15 years before My Bloody... Valentine. Nowadays anyone can make their guitar hum like a violin with the right software, but in '74 many of the effects on Brian May's "Procession"/"Father to Son" were unprecedented. Note also the severe stereo panning on Roger Taylor's hyper-aggressive tom-toms; the microphones nearly recoil at the volume and violence of his strokes.
  
  Divided into a May-dominated "white" LP side and a Freddie Mercury-composed "black" side, Queen II overdoses on monarchy and mythology; every other song is framed in English folklore. Given the glam context of Mick Rock's iconic Marlene Dietrich-esque band photo on the album cover, "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" seems like a fairly transparent coding of Mercury's sexuality, but in actuality it's a detailed rendering of Richard Dadd's ridiculously ornate 19th-century painting of the same name, translated into resplendent vocal and guitar curlicues. "Funny How Love Is" goes for the Spector sound in a big, blatant way: There are so many acoustic guitars scraping away simultaneously that they feel like sandpaper on your ears. The album concludes with a rollicking "Seven Seas of Rhye," a mere snippet on the debut but the band's first U.K. hit single here. There'd be many more.

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  Sheer Heart Attack

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  Having achieved its breakthrough U.K. single earlier that year with "Seven Seas of Rhye," Queen reeled in the prog, upped the pop, and pushed its magpie ways to a higher level of willfulness with its second album of '74. Launched with its debut American hit, the glam-tastic "Killer Queen," Sheer Heart Attack makes room for an attention-grabbing Brian May guitar workout on its opening "Brighton Rock," but then condenses the arrangements into... pop-sized chunks and gives Freddie Mercury's piano more prominence. While May multi-tracks his solos in complex harmonies and overlapping echoes, the riffs that define guitar-led tracks like future live staple "Now I'm Here" and proto-speed-metal "Stone Cold Crazy" (famously covered in 1990 by Metallica) are now more straightforward.
  
  Part of this shift was practical: Queen had begun touring regularly, and a good chunk of Queen II was way too complex to ever be replicated live. Recording began while May recuperated from hepatitis and then an ulcer, so the band left him spaces that he now fills more judiciously. Bassist John Deacon makes his presence felt; his first composition to appear on a Queen album, the carefree Caribbean "Misfire," is a harbinger of the hits he'd soon score. Mercury's "Flick of the Wrist" doesn't name, but almost certainly attacks, former Queen manager Norman Sheffield, who would soon be lacerated with even less mercy on the lead track of the foursome's even more varied, much more popular '75 extravaganza A Night at the Opera.
  
  Most of all, Sheer Heart Attack is defined by its clean, music-hall-influenced vocal lines. No matter how many May guitars dart in and out of the mix, every melody is memorable. Even if you can't comfortably hit all the notes (and face it, mortals, you can't), your heart will sing along.

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  A Night At The Opera

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  One of rock's most famously eclectic and enduring monuments, Queen's fourth album is the one that'll forever define them. A Night at the Opera was the first record the quartet created in the wake of a significant international hit — Sheer Heart Attack's "Killer Queen" — and the band was clearly eager to top itself. ("Oooh, Freddie would've loved to have done that," producer Roy Thomas Baker once cracked when that phrase... was used to describe the band's ambition here.) Said to have been the most expensive album of its era (and certainly sounding like it) this late-'75 smash is revered not only because it's a milestone of analog overdubbing, but also because the fun Queen had outdoing itself is so obvious.
  
  Diss tracks are a dime a dozen today, but "Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to...)" — Freddie Mercury's second merciless attack on former manager Norman Sheffield — predated punk's vitriol by several months. Brian May's opening salvo of Spanish guitar leads masterfully translated to heavy metal reaffirms Queen's rock cred within seconds, as does Mercury's wrathful vocal, and the fact that both are joined by a choir declaring "You're a sewer rat swimming in a cesspool of pride" in impeccable four-part harmony makes the cut as funny as it is vicious.
  
  The jump cut into the frolicsome, Tiny Tim-ish "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon" is a joke only Queen and Paul McCartney could pull off, a we-can-do-anything-we-bloody-well-want move that's utterly rock 'n' roll, even when the music is anything but. A key to Queen's universality is that no matter how far it goes out on an effete limb, the quartet returns to dude-friendly rock; Roger Taylor's "I'm in Love With My Car" manages to be both macho and strangely melancholy because its singer acknowledges he can't sustain a relationship with a woman and an automobile at the same time. Even when dealt a rock track as direct and dumb as May's "Sweet Lady," Mercury both embodies the music and twists it, while John Deacon's "You're My Best Friend" remains Queen's greatest, sincerest pop tune.
  
  Of course, all of this is leading up to "Bohemian Rhapsody," rock's most famous and most fastidiously coded coming out song. It's so ridiculously and beautifully fanciful precisely because Mercury had to rely on abstraction: He was living and indeed still sleeping with his longtime girlfriend Mary Austin when he entered his first gay relationship shortly before writing the track. His old self is the man he's killed off; he fears going to hell for it, and yet he's determined to escape both his internal demons and society's condemnation. "I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all," is a line that every member of a minority that's been trained to hate itself understands.

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  A Day At The Races

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  How could a band follow a beast as monstrous as A Night at the Opera? Queen did it with one nearly as immoderate. Released at the closing of 1976, its fifth album lacks its predecessor's front-to-end songwriting strength; Roger Taylor and John Deacon's contributions here lack the memorability of their previous efforts, and the way A Day at the Races is packaged and sequenced so similarly to Opera undercuts some of its... impact.
  
  Races nevertheless ranks among Queen's finest because its high points are so lofty. "Tie Your Mother Down" is almost certainly Brian May's attempt at raising the bar of nastiness established with Opera's "Death on Two Legs," and his chugging, boogie-'til-we-puke guitar riff opened Queen concerts on a raucous note for years to come. Meanwhile, Freddie Mercury gets more daring: He covertly aims his obligatory music-hall ditty "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy" at another guy. His lead blends with the band's "Hey boy" background vocals to blur the difference between the song's protagonist and its object, thus enabling the singer's highly civilized yet not-at-all old-fashioned depiction of same-sex romance to sail over the heads of much of Queen's initial audience. Mercury's rapturous piano ballad "You Take My Breath Away" features some of his loveliest upper register singing, and May's Beatle-y "Long Away" ranks among the band's many hidden treasures.
  
  A secular gospel song that seeks salvation in earthly affection, the album's pop hit, "Somebody to Love," is one of the few Queen tracks that seem to invite cover versions. Although it boasts an overdubbed choir nearly as large as the one that animates "Bohemian Rhapsody," it relies not on guitar pyrotechnics, but on simple piano and voices. But its range of notes is extensive; Mercury wrote "Somebody" as a tribute to his beloved Aretha Franklin, and although George Michael nailed the tune at 1992's Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, few in his wake have. When considering a karaoke night out, don't say I didn't warn you.

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  News Of The World

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  When Queen's sixth album hit in fall 1977, first-wave U.K. punk was peaking: News of the World was released the day after Never Mind the Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Arguably the first punk retrofitting by a decidedly un-punk band, Roger Taylor's "Sheer Heart Attack" harnessed the genre's speed and fury even while snipping it, and much of the rest was decidedly leaner and meaner than the band's opulent standard:... "We Will Rock You" is nothing but voices, foot stomps, handclaps, and 30 final seconds of guitar. The closest Queen gets to music hall is Freddie Mercury's closing torch song "My Melancholy Blues," a stark cabaret number. Vocal choirs and guitar orchestrations linger elsewhere, but rarely dominate.
  
  What's left is solid hard rock that's particularly firm on Mercury's "Get Down Make Love," one of the most sexually explicit high-profile songs of its day. Despite its two flop singles (John Deacon's power ballad "Spread Your Wings" and Brian May's Bad Company-styled "It's Late"), Queen's least eclectic, most conventional rock album is also one of its biggest U.S. sellers. It's the first time May's songwriting contributions outnumber Mercury's, and the first time Taylor and Deacon chip in two songs each. It's tempting to say that its de-emphasis of Mercury's personality is key to News's success, but he sings most of it, and does so in high style.
  
  Few songs have aged as remarkably as his "We Are the Champions." Like "We Will Rock You," it was conceived to inspire audience participation. And, on the surface, it's a song for winners. But given that Mercury died in late 1991 of AIDS and that his homosexuality instantly became common knowledge and that students in conservative American towns still fight for the right to perform his songs for precisely those reasons, "Champions" has morphed into an anthem for the underdogs. The line "I've had my share of sand kicked in my face" almost certainly refers to those comic book ads for Charles Atlas's bodybuilding guides where the weakling is humiliated at the beach by the beefier, manlier bully. As if directly addressing future generations of bullied kids who would claim the singer as a hero, Mercury adds, "But I've come through." Few would argue otherwise.

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  Jazz

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Queen's first and most audacious four albums were co-produced by Roy Thomas Baker, a former sound engineer whose ability to get an aggressive yet intricate sound via countless overdubs became synonymous with the band. Having closely observed his work, Queen produced itself on A Day at the Races and settled for Baker's engineer Mike Stone on News of the World with at times less extraordinary, more conventional dividends. Meanwhile, Baker helmed the... Cars' 1978 debut, a new-wave milestone. The producer then returned, and although Jazz was panned at the time (most famously in Rolling Stone, where Dave Marsh proclaimed "Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band"), this late-'78 return to form ranks among the band's cheekiest achievements.
  
  Rolling Stone's fascist argument is flimsy and ridiculous. It's based on the claim that Queen asserts a condescending cultural superiority through what the magazine characterized as glib musical parodies that belittle both the source material and its audience. The magazine deemed "Mustapha," the opening Arabic track, "merely a clumsy and pretentious rewrite of 'Hernando's Hideaway,' which has about as much to do with Middle Eastern culture as street-corner souvlaki." Born Farrokh Bulsara, Freddie Mercury — a Parsi who grew up in Zanzibar and then India until completing high school — kept his ethnicity a secret and passed as a white Brit. But if any world-class '70s rocker could do justice to Middle Eastern music, it would be Mercury, whose "Mustapha" distills Arabic-Persian styles as masterfully as his "Bohemian Rhapsody" draws from opera.
  
  Built on the condensed song structures that harken back to Sheer Heart Attack, the rest of Jazz is just as accomplished. Mercury's "Bicycle Race" seems frivolous and pop, but its complex chords and fluctuating time signatures are total prog. The flip of its AA-side single, May's "Fat Bottomed Girls" employs folk-pop harmonies, churning rock guitar and Broadway razzle-dazzle without sounding like any one thing. Roger Taylor's funky "Fun It" points in the rhythm-driven direction of The Game and Hot Space, while Mercury's "Don't Stop Me Now" delivers piano-pounding, ABBA-level giddiness. This would be Baker's last Queen collaboration, but it's a blast.

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  The Game

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Back in the '70s, when rock acts largely stuck to rocking and American bands in particular strove to appear genuine, flitting about from one genre to the next flew in the face of cool. Restless, yet cred-heavy new-wave upstarts like Elvis Costello and Talking Heads changed all that. Pop — particularly in early-'80s England — also became considerably hipper and more experimental. With this 1980 blockbuster, Queen ramped up its... pop: The Game's two No. 1 singles — Freddie Mercury's rockabilly "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and John Deacon's flagrantly Chic and fantastic disco-funk "Another One Bites the Dust" — veered furthest from the band's hard rock foundation.
  
  Recorded in Giorgio Moroder's Munich studio with ELO's German producer Mack, the quartet's ninth album — its sole U.S. chart-topper — features far less fussy performances. The overdubbed layers that previously packed tracks are scaled back and reserved for crescendos, and the new-wave influence is unmistakable: Roger Deacon's "Need Your Loving Tonight" bobs and bops like the Knack; the chiming intro to Mercury's "Don't Try Suicide" is pure Police, while Roger Taylor's "Coming Soon" chugs away in jacked-up pub-rock fashion à la Nick Lowe.
  
  Most startlingly, Queen — a band whose command of studio effects and guitar pedal was so electronically advanced that each of their previous albums bore some variation on a "no synths" declaration in the credits — began embracing synthesizers: Opening track "Play the Game" generates a show-stopping Oberheim OB-X-generated solo that shoots like lasers in smoke-machine fog. It wouldn't be the last.

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  Flash Gordon

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Unlike most rock records connected to movies, Queen's Flash Gordon LP isn't a grab-bag of pop songs, but an actual film soundtrack. This means there are only two vocal cuts: "Flash's Theme," which is nearly the same crazy, flippant track as the "Flash" single included on Queen hits collections but with different dialogue snippets, and "The Hero," a crash-collision of the band's splendidly pompous '70s prog-rock and composer Howard Blake's equally florid... orchestral score. Most of the instrumentals lay heavy on the synths recently added to the quartet's arsenal on 1980's The Game. Aside from Freddie Mercury's "Football Fight," May's "Battle Theme," and the aforementioned vocal numbers, the band rarely plays as a unit, and nearly everything's brief, foreboding, and retro-futuristic. There are few guitar heroics, but heaps of intentionally hokey film lines. The deliberately daffy result hammers the first nail in the coffin of Queen's just-peaked U.S. popularity.

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  Hot Space

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  At the height of the disco boom, some of rock's biggest stars released club tracks. And although the old guard hated them, those particular Rod Stewart, Rolling Stones, Wings and Kiss hits were brilliant. This is not one of those records. Recorded in the wake of Queen's surprisingly streetwise chart-topper "Another One Bites the Dust," 1982's Hot Space is still routinely cited as disastrous, and this time the... haters are right.
  
  It's not really disco: The vinyl album's first side features dance-rock that skews in different directions — funk (John Deacon's "Back Chat") synth-pop (Mercury's "Body Language"), and new wave (Roger Taylor's "Action This Day"). The second side is pop-rock much like what appeared on 1980's The Game, only lighter: Mercury's "Life Is Real (Song For Lennon)" pays tribute with a pastiche of the late Beatle's solo ballads. The disc's most traditionally rocking cut, May's "Put Out the Fire," protest laws that facilitate gun ownership and excuse crimes of passion. But both sides are almost unrelentingly awkward because the tunes are negligible, the performances mostly non-committal.
  
  Released six months before the album, "Under Pressure" is everything the rest is not. It's mad-catchy: Deacon's opening bass riff made Vanilla Ice a star when the rapper sampled it in 1990's "Ice Ice Baby." The presence of David Bowie, who co-wrote it and shares lead with Mercury, provokes one of Queen's smartest, most passionate singles. Too bad he didn't stick around for the album.

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  The Works

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Queen's 1984 album benefits from lessons learned on 1982's Hot Space. It retains and improves upon that infamous dud's dance beats and synths — not enough to yield much club play, but this time the tracks that feature them aren't sequenced one after another. Most of the songwriting is considerably more substantial both musically and lyrically: Check the difference between The Game's goofy "Don't Try Suicide" and this one's far gentler "Just... Keep Passing the Open Windows."
  
  It still has its filler: Freddie Mercury's Elvis-y "Man on the Prowl" fails to recapture the offhand magic of "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and Brian May's "Tear It Up" strains too hard to follow its title's advice. But the best of The Works emphasizes Queen's reflective side, one that would continue to mature until yielding the quartet's late career apex, 1991's Innuendo.
  
  Opening track and lead single "Radio Ga Ga" looks back lovingly on radio's glory days while disdaining its then-current state with lasting consequences: The Roger Taylor-written song became Queen's final U.S. Top 40 title. The next single, John Deacon's simple yet soaring "I Want to Break Free," was justifiably just as big overseas, but its video featured the band in drag spoofing a U.K. soap opera Coronation Street that was unknown in America. MTV balked, and the band's American cachet faded until Mercury's late '91 passing.

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  A Kind Of Magic

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Although America had cooled on Queen in the mid '80s, the band experienced a second surge in popularity throughout the rest of the world following its legendary 1985 Live Aid appearance; a performance so galvanizing it was in 2005 voted by music industry insiders to be the greatest live gig ever. 1986's A Kind of Magic continues down the thoughtful path forged by '84's The Works with a largely inferior payoff: Although... Roger Taylor's title track betters his own "Radio Ga Ga" by employing a lighter touch, the opening riff-rocker "One Vision" gets ham-fisted with its rewrite of the previous album's "Hammer to Fall" John Deacon's "One Year of Love" mimics '80s easy-listening ballads so accurately that you'd swear it was recorded by Air Supply if not for Mercury's far richer cry.
  
  This time Brain May pulls the rabbit out of the hat: His "Who Wants to Live Forever" also firmly adheres to '80s power ballad formula — big drums, even bigger orchestra, and a positively massive crescendo. Akin to "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls and Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is," it's nevertheless so emotionally rich that it transcends its familiar design. Mercury charges into its melodrama like a bull confronts a matador, and the protracted denouement that follows his exit is presciently eerie, as if May knew something Mercury's doctors hadn't yet discovered.

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  The Miracle

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Queen's 1989 album was the first one recorded with the secret knowledge that Freddie Mercury had AIDS. At the time, such a diagnosis was almost always a death sentence, and Queen ceased to exist as a concert act. The result is a transitional album: On some level, the foursome forges ahead as if nothing had happened. Like its '80s predecessors, The Miracle is unabashedly commercial high-end rock. Lacking a playful pop anthem... like A Kind of Magic's title track or a lush ballad like that album's "Who Wants to Live Forever," it's strikingly heavier than Queen's last few discs, and suggests that all concerned were intent on keeping up a front. Its biggest hit, "I Want It Now," feels like a coat of armor.
  
  It's the first time Mercury is featured on every track for which there's a vocal, and although it's also the first album on which all cuts are collectively credited to Queen, this shift makes their later output more about Mercury. Although The Miracle doesn't yet reach the level of autobiography that would make 1991's Innuendo such a striking achievement, the movement in that self-reflexive direction accounts for its most compelling material. While "Scandal" lashes out at the tabloids that began leaking rumors of Mercury's illness, "Was It All Worth It" looks back on Queen's legacy as if the band was already history. Mercury sings it with so much bravado that it's obvious that the answer to the title's question is an affirmative one.

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  Innuendo

  Queen

  1994 | Hollywood Records

  Queen's final album completed and released during Freddie Mercury's lifetime is also the one that most closely resembles the records of its '70s hot streak. Mercury's lung power is sometimes compromised by the advance stages of his illness, yet his aura most certainly is not: The intensity and death-defying irreverence of 1991's Innuendo make this an exceptional, extraordinary album.
  
  Yes, the drum sound is at times abrasive, and it's regrettable the... synth strings that similarly date the arrangements weren't supplied by a real orchestra. But Innuendo's fiery performances and uniformly vibrant, substantial songwriting more than compensate. Mercury contemplates his life and what was to come, and the band responds with inspiration that suits the context. There's the unmistakable sense that this is the end, and so Queen with heroic grace returns full circle to its aesthetic beginnings.
  
  That duality pays huge dividends both musically and emotionally. The opening title track is pure prog: Even Yes's Steve Howe drops by midway for some virtuosic flamenco guitar runs that push Brian May to play faster and flashier than he had in years. "I'm Going Slightly Mad" features a bravura camp vocal from Mercury, who channels Noel Coward in both style and sentiment. An American rock radio favorite, "Headlong" kicks butt as if Mercury had been in the best of health, while "These Are the Days of Our Lives" and "The Show Must Go On" candidly form Innuendo's spiritual core. Delivered in one knockout vocal take when Mercury could barely walk, the latter presents a brave face while revealing the struggle to maintain that façade. The effect is devastating.

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  Made In Heaven

  Queen

  1995 | Hollywood Records

  In the wake of Freddie Mercury's death on Nov. 24, 1991, Queen's popularity surged. Featured in Wayne's World and on a reissued single right after Mercury passed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" became an international phenomenon all over again; 1992's star-packed and quite remarkable Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert stoked back catalog sales, and several more phenomenally successful hits collections meant that Mercury attained sainthood, not just for his music, but for publically acknowledging his illness... the day before he died.
  
  Released in 1994, Made in Heaven is comprised of underexposed and previously unreleased Mercury vocals set to instrumentation recorded by the other Queen members long after their singer's passing. After finishing 1991's Innuendo, Mercury recorded as much as he could, but could only finish the vocals on one song, the seasonal fantasia "A Winter's Tale." Consequently there's nothing here that was completed with Mercury's full participation. What the band assembled in his absence has an unmistakable religious and even moralistic tone — "Made in Heaven," "Let Me Live, "My Life Has Been Saved," "Heaven For Everyone" and, most notably, "Too Much Love Will Kill You." Until his diagnosis, Mercury was one of rock's most legendary hedonists: For him to be posthumously reconfigured and re-remembered this way is kind of weird.

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The Beginning

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  Once Upon a Time in Senegal - The Birth of Mbalax 1979 - 1981

  Etoile De Dakar

  2010 | Sterns / The Orchard

  Like Elvis's Sun Sessions or the earliest rap 12-inches, these 23 cuts document the rough and tumble forging of a new sound. Its creators called it mbalax, which means simply "rhythm" in Wolof, the native Senegalese language in which singers Youssou N'Dour, El Hadji Faye, Eric M'Backe N'Doye and Mar Seck sparred, adapting the declamations of Senegal's griot praise singers to a clamorous mix of modern and traditional music. Psychedelic guitar distended... and Senegalese tama hand drums disrupted the Afro-Cuban rhythms with which older groups like Orchestra Baobab had previously dominated Dakar nightclubs.
  
  The mellow "Jalo" knocked out U.K. listeners when it later surfaced on Island's 1981 compilation Sound D'Afrique. But the definitive Étoile track is "Thiely," which begins with a minor-key arpeggio and a liquid lead, provided by guitarists Jimi Mbaye and Tolou Badou N'Diaye, and continues as Rane Dallo's saxophone restates a melody of middle-eastern provenance. Then, during the final minute, the players — guitars, horns, drums and singers — race one another to the climax.
  
  Étoile de Dakar recorded six groundbreaking cassettes in three years, before N'Dour left, along with three other members, to form Super Étoile. The five of these recordings that Stern's Music made available are all worth investigating, particularly the earliest, Absa Gueye, recorded in an empty nightclub. But taken as a whole, on Once Upon a Time in Senegal, you can hear not just the birth of mbalax, or even of modern Senegalese pop, but the birth of Youssou N'Dour.

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The Crossover Years

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  Immigrés

  Youssou N'Dour & Le Super Etoile De Dakar

  Celluloid

  N'Dour recorded his international debut in Paris in 1984, but these four cuts (slightly remixed) didn't reach the U.S. until four years later. By then he'd sung on So and drummed on Graceland, embarked on the Amnesty International tour with Springsteen, U2, Gabriel and Sting, and released his stiff, tame U.S. debut, Nelson Mandela. (Its cover of the Spinners' "The Rubberband Man" could well define world-music crossover gone wrong.) On the title... track, N'Dour's new band Super Étoile show what they could do when they stretched out, while its rallying cry to his displaced brothers and sisters reveals his ambitions as a pan-African spokesman.

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  The Lion

  Youssou N'Dour

  2003 | VIRGIN

  With soundtrack producer and Peter Gabriel pal George Acogny behind the boards, N'Dour tailored his sound for the enlightened Boomer: This is stately-yet-polyrhythmic rock, maybe a little too comfortable with its significance and a little too uncomfortable with its synthesizers. But The Lion isn't as schlocky as that description suggests — even David Sancious's slick sax is a step up from David Sanborn (let alone Kenny G). Nor as pompous; the title... track is a rousing fight song for Senegal's football team. Still, he's not afraid to be sentimental or grand: "Shaking the Tree," a duet with Gabriel and the first of N'Dour's many sympathetic songs toward women, floats the progressive sentiment: "Do not follow your heart/ Know your destiny."

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  Set

  Youssou N'Dour

  2003 | VIRGIN

  Set is N'Dour's first great solo album for one simple reason: He figured how to integrate synthesizers into mbalax. Typically they hover melodically in the higher registers here, fluctuating tonally between flute and calliope. On "Sabar" he sings in unison with them, on "Medina," a keyboard bed allows playful saxophone to spring into an upward tumble, and on the title anthem, choppy synths mow though the beat from underneath.
  
  Not that... the synths carry Set on their own. Ornate horns, frenetic tabas and booming trap drums muscle their way into the mix, while "Xale" makes room for an elegant string quartet. Compact song structures — "Fenene" is the only cut to break the five-minute mark — add to the tumultuous density of the arrangements. But if Étoile de Dakar was an ensemble of competing equals, Super Étoile is a backup band whose disciplined members contribute inspired moments to an overall pattern. The few English lyrics here, such as the exhortation to "try to be strong" on "Miyoko," might arouse concerns about what uplifting vagueness N'Dour preaches about elsewhere in Wolof; righteous songs like "Toxiques," which calls upon poor nations to refuse the toxic waste the first world foists upon them, put those fears to rest.

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  Eyes Open

  Youssou N'Dour

  1992 | Columbia

  N'Dour's reliance on call-and-response, on vocal interjections echoed by horns or synth or tama breaks, flirts with cliché. And he's not above enlisting corny sound effects to make his point: The opener, "New Africa," begins with a beeping alarm and ends with a jet takeoff. But his delivery is so authoritative, his arrangements so dynamic, that these songs convey the hortatory vigor that he intends. Eyes Open lacks Set's exhilarating sense of... an artist's ideas finally coalescing, but compensates with the reassuring confidence of an artist hitting a groove he sounds capable of riding for years.

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  The Guide (Wommat)

  Youssou N'Dour

  1994 | Columbia

  Or, you know, not. N'Dour's first album recorded entirely in Senegal is also his clumsiest. His idea of Western taste had fallen disastrously behind — surely no one thought an early Dylan cover ("Chimes of Freedom"), a slick sax solo (Branford Marsalis this time) or a Neneh Cherry duet (the melodramatic "Seven Seconds") were necessary pop accommodations in 1994, raising the troubling thought that maybe N'Dour genuinely loved this schlock. His voice... remained a wonder, and the simplicity of his lyrical conceits could be thrilling, as when he lists various African countries' dates of independence on "How You Are." But mostly The Guide (Wommat) showcases world music's pop ambitions dead-ending.

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Back to Africa

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  Joko: The Link

  Youssou N'Dour

  2006 | Nonesuch

  Following The Guide, N'Dour set aside his grand crossover ambitions and returned to Dakar. Here, he constructed a state-of-the-art recording complex, Xippi Studios, and recorded the strongest music of his solo career. After a series of Senegal-only releases, he reintroduced himself to a global audience with Joko (The Link).
  
  On the opening track, "Wiri-Wiri," village noises burble and tamas palpitate before the snap of a drum machine reminds you that this... ain't folk music. "She Doesn't Need to Fall" and "Miss" are worthy additions to N'Dour's corpus of feminist compositions; his own charmingly awkward delivery of English lyrics on "My Hope Is in You" works better than Peter Gabriel incanting the title of "This Dream." Best of all is "Birima," in which guitars both brittle and bubbling bear the prettiest tune of N'Dour's career upward into a chorus illuminated by a glorious synthesizer sunrise.

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  Nothing's in Vain

  Youssou N'Dour

  2002 | Nonesuch

  The backup here is mostly acoustic — the kora (harp), the xalam (lute), the riti (one-string violin) — though producer Jean-Phillippe Rykiel lends subtle electronic touches. Aging Western musicians cut these "return to roots" discs all the time. But where those coots usually unplug because they can't keep up the kids' pace, the 42-year-old N'Dour was out to hold his own with a budding movement of youthful neo-traditionalists then sweeping West Africa.... />
  
  Nothing's in Vain cultivates a Gallic feel — N'Dour tackles a chanson (complete with accordion) and duets with French pop star Pascal Obispo — and a romantic one as well, with four song titles mentioning love. He kept one ear still cocked toward what was happening in Europe, then. But where in the '80s N'Dour consciously reached westward with his music, he now folded foreign music into his own homegrown style.

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He Is the World

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  Egypt

  Youssou N'Dour

  2004 | Nonesuch

  In 2001, N'Dour traveled to Cairo to record an album of religious-themed music with the 14-piece Fathy Salama Orchestra. This project was strikingly ambitious and idiosyncratic — an international pop star celebrating West Africa's Sufi Muslim sects in the Arab world's most cosmopolitan city. N'Dour and Nonesuch shelved the project after September 11; upon its release three years later, this polyphonic exploration of Islamic culture was even more resonant.
  
  Egypt showcases... N'Dour in high griot mode. He begins with the general incantation "Allah," proceeds to praise various Sufi holy men, and closes with a beautiful ode to the city sacred to N'Dour's own Mourde sect, "Touba — Daru Salaam." To hear the reeds, strings, and flutes of urban North Africa accentuate the muezzin-like edge of N'Dour's voice as it soars in tandem, the kora's earthy contrast with the elegant oud, and the intersecting crosscurrents of North and West African percussion, is to eavesdrop on a conversation between cultures whose nuances we can barely grasp from this distance. But though primarily directed to the Islamic world, Egypt had a message for the rest of us too: Not all Muslims are fundamentalist or even Arab, and not all humanists are Western or even secular.

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  Rokku Mi Rokka

  Youssou N'Dour

  2007 | Nonesuch

  Though less deliberately international in its ambitions than Egypt, Rokku Mi Rokka is hardly provincial. The cosmopolitan N'Dour looks past Dakar's city limits to the north, to the West African deserts, all the way to Mali itself. A reunited Super Étoile provides the musical backbone, but the music stretches beyond mbalax to acknowledge that style's Afro-Cuban roots (Orchestra Baobab's Balla Sidibe and Rudy Gomis sing on "Xel") and affinities with Malian blues,... as longtime Ali Farka Touré sideman Bassekou Kouyate adds ngoni to five tracks. N'Dour's lyrical scope also broadens over the course of the album, which kicks off with "4-4-44," a celebration of Senegalese independence, encourages geographical and mental growth with titles that translate as "Travel" and "Think," and concludes by addressing the world on "Wake Up (It's Africa Calling)," another duet with Neneh Cherry, who sounds right at home this time.

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  Dakar - Kingston

  Youssou N'Dour

  2011 | Emarcy

  Reggae is the lingua franca of the African diaspora, so it was maybe inevitable that the globally minded N'Dour would eventually try speaking it. He recorded these 14 tracks at Tuff Gong in Jamaica, with the Wailers' Tyrone Downie producing and renowned reggae sideman Earl Chinna Smith handling the guitar work. Nor do the album's ties to Jamaican musical tradition end there: Morgan Heritage, a group comprising the children of reggae star... Denroy Morgan, guest on "Don't Walk Away."
  
  N'Dour has long seemed to covet Bob Marley's mantle as musical prophet to African emigrants worldwide, and Dakar-Kingston lays his cards on the table. The opener, "Marley," is a praise song with awkward English lyrics that trail off into a list of song titles, on which the great dub poet Mutabaruka handily upstages the star; the finale is a version of Bob's "Redemption Song." But the album works best when the music speaks for itself. The Caribbean roots of mbalax are supposedly Cuban, not Jamaican, but that familiar reggae downbeat driving older N'Dour tracks like "Medina" and "Bamba" re-contextualizes Senegalese music exactly as such a project should.

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  Music From The Motion Picture I Bring What I Love

  Youssou N'Dour

  2010 | Nonesuch

  The soundtrack to a documentary that every N'Dour fan should seek out immediately also capably supplements and sums up his recent career. The doc centers on the recording and release of Egypt, particularly on the controversy generated in Senegal by a secular musician addressing sacred topics. This compilation's two new compositions are both vocal showcases — the modest title track and "Yonnen (The Messenger)," a duet with "the people's griot" Moustafa Mbaye... with which N'Dour hoped to overcome his countrymen's objections.
  
  But this hodgepodge is mostly noteworthy for its six live tracks showcasing Super Étoile. The band, which can really cook in concert, is uncharacteristically subdued here, but until N'Dour gives us a full live album, we can make do with a gently acoustic take on "Birima" and a re-imagined "Immigres." I Bring What I Love is a decent introduction for newcomers. Then again, so was everything else N'Dour recorded over the past decade.

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In Chronological Order

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  Something About Airplanes Deluxe Edition

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2008 | Barsuk Records

  Death Cab's first full-band album, and the first full-length to feature the band's driving creative partnership of Gibbard and guitarist/producer Chris Walla, is very much the product of the band's surroundings, at the time. Something About Airplanes sounds like a band that listened to a healthy amount of Built To Spill and played shows with the likes of 764-HERO, while certain tracks, like "Sleep Spent," owe their entire existence to the... then in-vogue slowcore movement.
  
  Latecomers to the band will be surprised to hear the presence of a Farfisa organ (on "President Of What") and the reliance on crash cymbals by then-drummer Nathan Good; what they'll be most shocked by is the sheer anonymity of the band.
  
  Something...is really a bridge album — Gibbard's transition from solo artist to band member/leader — with five of its songs appearing, in a more stripped down fashion, on the all-Gibbard-tracked You Can Play These Songs With Chords. You can imagine Gibbard frightened of his new musical surroundings, as tracks like "President Of What" find his voice cloaked in reverb and sounding confused, singing, "Entered the scene, I was told, on, I think it was a Monday."

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  We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2003 | Barsuk Records

  On their second full-band album, Death Cab For Cutie find their voice, even as their singer/songwriter is still finding his. We Have the Facts... sees the blossoming of Chris Walla's production talent, one that has proven experimental and adventurous enough to keep some of the band's more discerning listeners engaged, while never alienating the one's that just show up for the tunes.
  
  Walla's embellishments and the band's increasingly assured playing elevates... We Have the Facts more meandering tracks, wrapping a warm atmosphere around occasionally aimless songs.
  
  The album starts slowly, occasionally falls out of focus, but picks up in a big way with "Lowell, MA," "405" and "Company Calls" — all songs that would be staples of Death Cab's live set and something of templates for them for the next few years.
  
  Ultimately though, the pleasures of We Have the Facts... are found in its slowcore indulgences. Fans of Bedhead, Low and Codeine will recognize their beloved bands' dynamics and melodic dialects lovingly appropriated for the purposes of what are still, ostensibly, pop songs. But the quietness wouldn't last for very long.

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  The Photo Album

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2003 | Barsuk Records

  This one goes to 11. The Photo Album is where this previously demure and somewhat reserved band gets a little swagger; it's as loud as they've ever been, before or since, and finds a (by then) road-tested outfit truly flexing their muscle.
  
  Perhaps emboldened by his band's juiced up sound, Ben Gibbard finds his voice on The Photo Album, both lyrically and vocally. Maybe playing the wallflower was no longer an... option; a shy and retiring singer would have gotten lost in Death Cab's newfound storm and stress, so Gibbard grows up and, for lack of a better term, grows a pair.
  
  The Photo Album sees the first examples of what would become something of a Gibbard trademark: the striking, detailed opening line as emotional hook. His voice is one of the first sounds you hear on the album (after a single stroke of a guitar chord) and he immediately begins a new and more assured career as a narrator, sketching out a vignette in lead track, "Steadier Footing," that's just specific enough to be true and just general enough to touch a listener.

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  Transatlanticism

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2003 | Barsuk Records

  Transatlanticism is more or less about a long distance relationship, but it's also about a band letting go of its humble beginnings, its humble attitudes and opening up its sound to a wider world.
  
  Released in 2003, Transatlanticism was the right album from the right band at the right time. Gibbard might declare that he doesn't feel any different, as he does on the album's lead track, "The New Year," but... things sound different, more open, more direct and, finally, recognizing their strengths — their subtle production flourishes, Gibbard's ear-catching if occasionally cringeworthy lyrics and the band's simple and lovely way with a melody — and playing to them.
  
  Transatlanticism is Death Cab's strongest collection of songs, showing off both their ability to play upbeat, if slightly sad, pop as well as glacially-paced meditations, without ever forgetting there is someone listening.
  
  If earlier recordings were made for purposes of self-entertainment or self-therapy, Transatlanticism, despite its obviously personal resonance to Gibbard (the album ends with the line "this is fact, not fiction, for the first time in years"), is a record for listeners, both familiar and new to the band. Even songs that would ordinarily seem like indulgences, such as the seven-minute centerpiece title track, hang their hubris on a very relatable, as Gibbard repeats the mantra, "I need you so much closer," over and over again.
  
  Ultimately, it was "Sound Of Settling" that signaled this band was no longer settling for cult acclaim. It's practically Gin Blossoms-esque in its immediate likeability. Gibbard, translating his emotionally naked, finely detailed poetics into catchy lines, sings about a hunger and with the "ba-ba's" and fuzzed out chorus guitars, one gets the impression that hunger has something to do with reaching a bigger audience.

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  Plans

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2005 | Atlantic Records

  After Death Cab for Cutie's 2003 album Transatlanticism led to countless song placements in TV shows and films, it seemed like a natural progression for the band to leave longtime indie Barsuk for a major label - Atlantic. (Adding to the band's high profile: Give Up - the debut LP from the Postal Service, Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard's project with Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello - had been released only... months before.) Transatlanticism had been the group's cleanest work to date - lush, cinematic layers of sound had replaced the subtle fuzz that used to loom over every track - and Plans follows a similar formula. But where Transatlanticism was about the past - breakups, memories, long-distance relationships - Plans finds Gibbard looking to the future. Ultimately, it's a question of who's going to love you and, therefore, who's going to watch you die. That's to say: The lyrics haven't gotten much happier, but the band's found its sound and is sticking to it.
  
  Several of the songs revolve around love after death: In the ethereal single "Soul Meets Body," Gibbard sings "If the silence takes you/ Then I hope it takes me too;" in the stripped-down-acoustic "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," he croons, "If there's no one beside you/ When your soul embarks/ I will follow you into the dark;" and in the grim, piano-driven hospital song, it's "Love is watching someone die/ So who's going to watch you die?" as his character paces the waiting room. It might sound grim, but Gibbard's never been one for conventional happy endings.
  
  Though Plans is missing rock anthems akin to Transatlanticism's "The New Year" and "The Sound of Settling," its sound is just as a massive - much of which can be attributed to Chris Walla's increasingly sharp production work. Opening track "Marching Bands of Manhattan" begins with a stuttering reverbed guitar and an organ, then a series of steady chords and tambourine shakes before the drums and bass kick in. "What Sarah Said" is founded on arpeggioed, sometimes-layered piano chords; in "Your Heart Is An Empty Room," an organ warps together with shakers and slowly-building electronics. There are no big surprises on this go-around, and maybe Plans sounded, in a way, like settling. But what it really did was lay the groundwork - and give them the audience - for the experimentation that came next. - Laura Leebove

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  Narrow Stairs

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2008 | Atlantic Records

  If Death Cab's major-label debut, Plans, saw them reach a modicum of mainstream cache, Narrow Stairs is where they gambled with it, bravely experimenting and changing their sound, challenging their newfound audience along the way.
  
  You can almost imagine the band consciously following the work of forerunners like U2 and R.E.M., groups that had risen from the underground to achieve mass success and then testing their newfound audience with stylistic shifts.
  
  Narrow Stairs... is by no means Metal Machine Music — or even OK Computer, for that matter — but it is a dark and stormy Death Cab For Cutie, indulging in psychedelic, noisy flourishes and exhibiting, for the first time, some palpable anger. And it suits them.
  
  "Cath," will sound fine next to "Sound Of Settling" when the eventual Best Of... drops, but it's in no way indicative of the sound of this adventurous and complex album.
  
  "I Will Possess Your Heart," both as a song and in its status as the band's first single, is a brazen statement of intent. "You gotta spend some time with me," intones Gibbard and he means it; at eight minutes, this track sees Death Cab discovering, possibly, the first groove of their career.
  
  Written in California, the album has the windows down, with Gibbard surveying the new landscapes and his new life. And he's not exactly feeling at home, yet. "Bixby Canyon Bridge" might try to tune in with nature, but the pounding drums and careening guitars see something sinister lurking on the horizon.
  
  That's the thing: Narrow Stairs is about looking outwards, not inwards; with Gibbard observing a much wider world than the one he had seemed to previously constrict himself to (even when he was trying to love across an ocean). And the band is joining him in his journey, stretching out.

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  Codes and Keys

  Death Cab for Cutie

  2011 | Atlantic Records

  Somewhere along the line, Death Cab for Cutie got huge. The unassuming rockers from Bellingham, Washington, went platinum with 2005's Plans (a milestone even Arcade Fire haven't matched), topped the charts with 2008's Narrow Stairs, and even contributed the lead single (over Thom Yorke, the Killers and Muse) to the Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack. Oh, and Ben Gibbard, the group's lovelorn boy-next-door frontman, married actress/She & Him singer Zooey... Deschanel a couple years ago.
  
  It turns out hugeness becomes them. On Codes and Keys, the instinctively self-effacing band appears, for the first time, at ease with their steady, organic success; the result is the best Death Cab record since 2003's Transatlanticism. Where the bleak Narrow Stairs telegraphed its gestures toward adventurousness too obviously, here atmospheric electronics and foreboding bass lines lock together seamlessly in songs that find indie rock's quintessential Smart, Sensitive Guy finally coming to terms with everything he's secretly been afraid of: domesticity, comfort, Los Angeles.
  
  A lot of that is thanks to the band's guitarist and longtime producer, Chris Walla, who - with mixing help from alt-rock luminary Alan Moulder - has created a space for Gibbard's melodies that's as vast and conflicted as Southern California. When Gibbard played a stalker over motorik propulsion on Narrow Stairs' eight-minute first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart," he was stepping out of his comfort zone, and it didn't entirely work. When this still-recent honeymooner rejects womanizing on potential future single "Some Boys," tweaking the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" while subtly incorporating elements of 1970s art-rock, he's playing to his strengths. It's a refreshing change.
  
  Gibbard sounds most at home on joyful finale "Stay Young, Go Dancing," where he giddily embraces waltzing the years away with his wife in a city he once dubbed "the belly of the beast." The lyrics have a casualness that rings true - a touching contrast from the cloying self-deprecation of Narrow Stairs love song "You Can Do Better Than Me." There's even a quick nod to the Supremes in the line "When she sings, I hear a symphony."
  
  Gibbard's lyrics will always make or break the deal for many listeners, but what distinguishes Codes and Keys is its Walla-led emphasis on electronics. An extended keyboard meditation opens album centerpiece "Unobstructed Views"; on the penultimate "St. Peter's Cathedral," Gibbard murmurs over a minimal whir, with bum-bum backing vocals replacing a guitar line. Both songs do a good job of setting the concept of home life within an existential context: No God, no afterlife, only love. Love and song. An album obsessed with the concept of home, Codes and Keys sees Death Cab sounding at home within itself. On the title track, Gibbard repeats "We are one/ We are alive," through rickety keyboard and aching strings. It's unclear whether he's addressing his wife, the band, the listener, or all of the above. Till-death-do-us-part rock: It could be huge. - Marc Hogan

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