Award-winning film composer Brian Tyler is no stranger to franchises, having helmed seven installments of the Fast & Furious, The Expendables Trilogy, and multiple Marvel projects. Tyler joined Nintendo's Mario video game franchise with his score for the computer-animated adventure film The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Incorporating new melodies with the original themes from longtime Mario composer Koji Kondo, Tyler infuses the past with a fresh coat of paint, turning 8-bit motifs into epic orchestral moments. Also included are the singles "Mario Brothers Rap" and "Peaches," the latter of which was co-written and performed by Jack Black. © James Christopher Monger /TiVo

A relentlessly bleak cornerstone of mid-'90s hip-hop, the Queens duo's second album has all the foreboding atmosphere and thematic sweep of an epic crime drama.© TiVo

One of the cornerstones of the New York hardcore movement, The Infamous is Mobb Deep's masterpiece, a relentlessly bleak song cycle that's been hailed by hardcore rap fans as one of the most realistic gangsta albums ever recorded. Given Mobb Deep's youthful age and art-school background, it's highly unlikely that The Infamous is drawn strictly from real-life experience, yet it's utterly convincing, because it has all the foreboding atmosphere and thematic sweep of an epic crime drama. That's partly because of the cinematic vision behind the duo's detailed narratives, but it's also a tribute to how well the raw, grimy production evokes the world that Mobb Deep is depicting. The group produced the vast majority of the album itself, with help on a few tracks from the Abstract (better known as Q-Tip), and establishes a spare, throbbing, no-frills style indebted to the Wu-Tang Clan. This is hard, underground hip-hop that demands to be met on its own terms, with few melodic hooks to draw the listener in. Similarly, there's little pleasure or relief offered in the picture of the streets Mobb Deep paints here: They inhabit a war zone where crime and paranoia hang constantly in the air. Gangs are bound together by a code of fierce loyalty, relying wholly on one another for survival in a hopeless environment. Hostile forces -- cops, rivals, neighborhood snitches -- are potentially everywhere, and one slip around the wrong person can mean prison or death. There's hardly any mention of women, and the violence is grim, serious business, never hedonistic. Pretty much everything on the album contributes to this picture, but standouts among the consistency include "Survival of the Fittest," "Eye for a Eye," "Temperature's Rising," "Cradle to the Grave," and the classic "Shook Ones, Pt. 2." The product of an uncommon artistic vision, The Infamous stands as an all-time gangsta/hardcore classic.© Steve Huey /TiVo

Dave Mustaine revived Megadeth in the mid-2000s, remastering and reissuing his band's entire Capitol catalog and hitting the concert circuit in earnest. Greatest Hits is part of that revival. It's the second Megadeth best-of, replacing the one from five years prior, Capitol Punishment. Greatest Hits is an improvement, loaded with 17 selections, three more than its predecessor. There's also some fancy packaging and a hyperbolic "Love Live Megadeth" tribute written by Penelope Spheeris, the colorful director of The Decline of Western Civilization, Pt. 2: The Metal Years. It all adds up to a nice package, or more precisely, a sampler of Megadeth, from the band's pioneering thrash metal years to its later growing pains, with an unfortunate de-emphasis on the band's beginnings. Like the previous best-of released by Capitol, Greatest Hits overlooks much of Megadeth's prime years in favor of a balanced sample of selections from every album released by the label. There's going to be a large chunk of the market that is going to groan about this approach, since the early thrash years are the reason most Megadeth fans are fans in the first place, and also the reason why the band has been able to ramble on all these years despite some mostly dull new music. Since Megadeth released so many albums for Capitol, there's never room here for more than two tracks per album: Peace Sells, Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction, and Youthanasia get two representations, the rest get only one. Such breadth doesn't make for the best listening experience, especially because the disc hopscotches through time. That quibble aside, Greatest Hits does give you a sample of every Megadeth album, even duds like Risk. If you're serious about getting into this band, however, you're best off going through the albums one by one. The good ones are good all the way through; if you like "Peace Sells," you're going to like Peace Sells. But if you're just curious and would like a broad one-disc sampler, Greatest Hits is your ticket. You'll end up with a good understanding of Megadeth -- old and not as old, good and not as good -- and what to expect from each album, of which there are a couple stone-cold classics.© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo

On the chaotic path to post-punk revival, carried by inspirations from the ghosts of Jonathan Richman, The Fall, The Feelies, The Velvet Underground and a touch of Pavement, Parquet Courts is rather brilliant. With each album, Andrew Savage and his crew refine their square rhythmics and staggering guitars like in Human Performance, an impeccable treaty of indie rock released in 2016 that had its classics straight. Their fifth album, Wide Awake!, is moving further in that same direction. Most of the credit can surely be attributed to the production by Brian Burton a.k.a. Danger Mouse. “It’s pretty healthy to step out of one’s comfort zone, explains Savage. I personally liked the fact that I was writing a record that indebted to punk and funk, and Brian’s a pop producer who’s made some very polished records. I liked that it didn’t make sense.” In fact, it’s Danger Mouse himself, a fan of Parquet Courts, who approached them. The result is quite delightful as the post-punk DNA of the Brooklyn-based crew is − though intact − altered here and there by redeeming pop and groovy sparks that easily get all the hips in the crowd moving (see the hit-worthy single Wide Awake). All in all, without having sold its soul to the devil, Parquet Courts feels like its maturing and growing. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

At the height of Pulp's fame, Jarvis Cocker channeled all his existential dread about celebrity into a chilling epic called "The Fear." Ten years later, Lily Allen -- the funniest British pop star since Jarvis and perhaps the best -- uses the same title to explore paralyzing fame, but instead of turning inward, Lily deflects, pushing all her anxiety into a Paris Hilton wannabe, a "weapon of massive consumption" that we know isn't Lily herself because this girl "doesn't care about clever." Lily, of course, cares very, very much about clever: it's how she defines herself as an artist and as a persona. Her quips are precise in her lyrics and savage in public, as evidenced when she drunkenly baited her co-presenter Elton John at a British awards show. Such displays tend to obscure her considerable skills as a storyteller, a gift that also gets buried beneath tabloid headlines that place her among pop tarts and princesses. Lily is attracted and repelled by fame, adoring the limelight but neither the company or how it forces personal problems to the forefront, and all these contradictions fuel her second album, It's Not Me, It's You. Like many a bright pop star before her, Allen is feeling a little bit older than her 23 years, knowing that the landscape of her life is changing, and she's dreading her 30s, which still feel very far away. Lily doesn't state this outright, of course: she puts it into the character sketch of "22," just like how she deals with the blizzard of cocaine and pills on "Everyone's at It," registering her sneering disdain for a social scene she's outgrowing yet not quite ready to leave behind. Far from being a crutch, this narrative distancing is Lily's strength: unlike so many of her too-sensitive peers, she doesn't indiscriminately spill emotions onto the page, she picks her targets, choosing to reveal personal secrets we already know -- tellingly, she never addresses her 2008 miscarriage, but happily serves up her dysfunctional relationships with her parents, something that has provided endless column inches in gossip rags. If there's an element of Lily picking low-hanging fruit here and on "The Fear" and on the George W. Bush kiss-off "F*** You" -- or even "Not Fair," a cousin to "Not Big," where Allen laments a lover who is perfect in every way except his inability to make her scream -- the key to any story is how it's told, and telling is Lily's strength, how she ferrets out bypassed details or delivers a well-worn punchline. It's Not Me pushes this talent to the forefront, in part because she works with only one collaborator here: Greg Kurstin, half of the Bird and the Bee and responsible for several cuts on Alright, Still but not the big hits "Smile" and "LDN," which were produced by Mark Ronson. Without Ronson, Lily isn't quite so glitzy or glammy, she even flirts with adult pop without succumbing to tedium. Kurstin doesn't avoid pop hooks or cheeky camp -- "F*** You" galumphs by on a two-step, "He Wasn't There" is music hall pastiche, and "Never Gonna Happen" gives Lily plenty of room to be coyly disingenuous -- but It's Not Me, It's You streamlines Allen's eccentricities and bad habits, holding together in a way the gloriously messy Alright, Still never quite managed. There's a slight drawback to this cohesion -- It's Not Me never hits heights as blinding as "Smile" or "LDN" -- but this approach does wind up spotlighting just how special a pop star Lily Allen is, how she captures all that's wretched and glorious about her time without falling into any of its traps, probably because she's clever enough to avoid them in the first place.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo