On the cover of his 2014 debut, Write You a Song, Jon Pardi seemed a bit like a metrosexual country boy but on California Sunrise, its 2016 sequel, he's decked out like an old-school cowboy, complete with a big hat and blue jeans. This is the major change in image, but the music on California Sunrise isn't markedly different than the debut. Like the high-octane Write You a Song before it, California Sunrise is produced by Bart Butler, but the album finds space for softer tones and slower tempos, a shift that opens the doors for a little experimentation with rhythms. "Heartache on the Dance Floor" bears a bit of R&B-friendly AAA pop sheen, and at its core "Lucky Tonight" is a soul song all gussied up with fiddles and blues guitar. A few other cuts are light on their feet -- "Head Over Boots" rolls along with its singalong chorus, "Cowboy Hat" trades upon the leering twilight of bro-country -- but California Sunrise remains grounded in sinewy, straight-ahead country, sometimes delivered by Pardi with a sly grin. Perhaps his cheer is a bit subdued -- his everyday persona can work against him, suggesting that he's not much more than a guy next door -- but this workingman's diligence is a key element in turning California Sunrise into a frills-free, sturdily crafted collection. © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Building off of the sound of his reckless and grimy debut, Hanni El Khatib returns with a somewhat more polished sound for his sophomore effort, Head in the Dirt. While the music retains the same eclectic quality El Khatib brought to Will the Guns Come Out, the practiced hand of the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach can be felt all over the production, with Auerbach reigning in El Khatib's sound without necessarily snuffing out his creativity. Like a garage punk version of Devendra Banhart, Hanni El Khatib freely drifts from style to style, taking what he likes and discarding the rest to build songs like "Nobody Move," where a wall of blown-out, bluesy fuzz gives way to an atmospheric reggae vibe. Head in the Dirt can feel a bit scattered at times, but in a way, that seems to be the point. This album isn't some kind of carefully planned cross-cultural experiment that one would expect from Vampire Weekend, but rather it feels like El Khatib is just smashing together the things he likes while barely holding the whole thing together with his own intensity and enthusiasm. That said, for all of its weirdness, this album feels more like a pop record than his debut, and while Auerbach certainly didn't scrub all of the dirt and grime off of the album, it feels a lot more put together, bearing a lot of resemblance to the Black Keys' later work. Fortunately for listeners, it takes a lot more than a little studio magic to snuff out a flame as bright and weird as El Khatib's.© Gregory Heaney /TiVo

When the Who initially attempted to tour Quadrophenia in 1974, the results were a disaster. The band performed the rock opera alongside a series of backing tapes containing synthesizers and sound effects, a decision that put the mercurial Who into a straitjacket and led to uncharacteristically restrained performances. For years, the legend that Quadrophenia didn't lend itself to the stage persisted but things started to change in 1996, when an all-star production was launched at London's Hyde Park. This was such a rousing success that U.K. and U.S. tours followed and, from that point on, the Who returned to Quadrophenia far more often than Tommy, which they essentially retired after it turned into a Broadway musical. Anchored by a July 8, 2013 performance, 2014's Quadrophenia: Live in London pays tribute to the enduring legacy of Pete Townshend's rock opera. The concert is available in a variety of iterations, the simplest containing nothing more than the 2013 show -- this is available as a double-CD set, a Blu-ray, and a DVD, plus a digital download -- the most lavish being a five-disc box that contains the concert in the CD, Blu-ray, and DVD formats, along with the first-ever 5.1 mix of the original 1973 album, a feature many fans wish was included in the 2011 deluxe box set reissue of the album (there, only eight songs were mixed into Surround). If there ever were a record that cried out to be remixed in 5.1 Surround Sound, it's Quadrophenia -- it's enveloping enough as stereo, but the synths and sound effects beg for an immersive experience -- so this mix (which is also available separately as a Blu-ray Pure Audio single disc) is a worthwhile enticement on its own terms, but the 2013 show is strong on its own terms, too. Working with their longtime touring band of drummer Scott Devours, bassist Pino Paladino, and rhythm guitarist Simon Townshend, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are tight and assured, substituting a weathered gravitas for the original's roiling teenage angst. Neither singer can hit the high notes he did in the '70s but neither tries, and their deeper voices add a sense of melancholy that contrasts well with the vigorous muscle of the band. An encore of greatest hits (plus "Tea & Theatre," from 2006's Endless Wire) is a nice touch but the focus is where it should be: on Quadrophenia, which upon its 40th anniversary sounds like Pete Townshend's masterpiece, whether it's heard in its original LP version or on this very good live set.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

With a voice that sounds like a more mainstream version of the late jazz cult superstar Eva Cassidy and smoky raven-haired looks to rival a movie lot's worth of young ingénues, it's a bit of a surprise that Katie Melua has remained so unknown in the United States, despite the chart success the Eastern European-born songstress has achieved in her adopted home of the United Kingdom. It seems like she should be at least as popular as, say, Regina Spektor or Nellie McKay. Pictures may not help that much, however, because in comparison to its fairly straightforward jazz-tinged singer/songwriter predecessors, Melua's third album takes a bit of a left turn into the self-consciously quirky. It's a wonder that it took so long, because Melua's producer and part-time songwriter is Mike Batt, a minor legend of the U.K. music scene who has fashioned a decades-long career out of deliberate eccentricity. Much of Pictures sounds like Batt is reverting to his '70s children's music productions for the Wombles, especially "Mary Pickford (Used to Eat Roses)," a horrifyingly cutesy song about the early days of Hollywood royalty; "Scary Films," a thinly disguised cop of early Kate Bush tracks like "Hammer Horror" and "Wow," and the fake reggae "Ghost Town," which sounds like Batt experimenting with getting as close to ripping off the Specials' classic of the same name without veering into actual plagiarism. The closer Melua comes to restrained adult pop, like the unexpectedly touching Batt-penned torch ballad "What It Says on the Tin," and the gently swaying, Everything But the Girl-like bossa nova bounce of "Perfect Circle," the better the album is. The songs written by Melua by herself and/or with lyricist Molly McQueen are uniformly stronger than Batt's contributions, particularly the intimate, smoky "Spellbound," suggesting that leaving her mentor would do Katie Melua a world of good.© Stewart Mason /TiVo

Damon Albarn went to great pains to explain that the first Gorillaz album was a collaboration between him, cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, and producer Dan the Automator, but any sort of pretense to having the virtual pop group seem like a genuine collaborative band was thrown out the window for the group's long-awaited 2005 sequel, Demon Days. Hewlett still provides new animation for Gorillaz -- although the proposed feature-length film has long disappeared -- but Dan the Automator is gone, leaving Albarn as the unquestioned leader of the group. This isn't quite similar to Blur, a genuine band that faltered after Graham Coxon decided he had enough, leaving Damon behind to construct the muddled Think Tank largely on his own. No, Gorillaz were always designed as a collective, featuring many contributors and producers, all shepherded by Albarn, the songwriter, mastermind, and ringleader. Hiding behind Hewlett's excellent cartoons gave Albarn the freedom to indulge himself, but it also gave him focus since it tied him to a specific concept. Throughout his career, Albarn always was at his best when writing in character -- to the extent that anytime he wrote confessionals in Blur, they sounded stagy -- and Gorillaz not only gave him an ideal platform, it liberated him, giving him the opportunity to try things he couldn't within the increasingly dour confines of Blur. It wasn't just that the cartoon concept made for light music -- on the first Gorillaz album, Damon sounded as if he were having fun for the first time since Parklife. But 2005 is a much different year than 2001, and if Gorillaz exuded the heady, optimistic, future-forward vibes of the turn of the millennium, Demon Days is as theatrically foreboding as its title, one of the few pop records made since 9/11 that captures the eerie unease of living in the 21st century. Not really a cartoony feel, in other words, but Gorillaz indulged in doom and gloom from their very first single, "Clint Eastwood," so this is not unfamiliar territory, nor is it all that dissimilar from the turgid moodiness of Blur's 2003 Think Tank. But where Albarn seemed simultaneously constrained and adrift on that last Blur album -- attempting to create indie rock, yet unsure how since messiness contradicts his tightly wound artistic impulses -- he's assured and masterful on Demon Days, regaining his flair for grand gestures that served him so well at the height of Britpop, yet tempering his tendency to overreach by keeping the music lean and evocative through his enlistment of electronica maverick Danger Mouse as producer. Demon Days is unified and purposeful in a way Albarn's music hasn't been since The Great Escape, possessing a cinematic scope and a narrative flow, as the curtain unveils to the ominous, morose "Last Living Souls" and then twists and winds through valleys, detours, and wrong paths -- some light, some teeming with dread -- before ending up at the haltingly hopeful title track. Along the way, cameos float in and out of the slipstream and Albarn relies on several familiar tricks: the Specials are a touchstone, brooding minor key melodies haunt the album, there are some singalong refrains, while a celebrity recites a lyric (this time, it's Dennis Hopper). Instead of sounding like musical crutches, this sounds like an artist who knows his strengths and uses them as an anchor so he can go off and explore new worlds. Chief among the strengths that Albarn relies upon is his ability to find collaborators who can articulate his ideas clearly and vividly. Danger Mouse, whose Grey Album mash-up of the Beatles and Jay-Z was an underground sensation in 2004, gives this music an elasticity and creeping darkness than infects even such purportedly lighthearted moments as "Feel Good Inc." It's a sense of menace that's reminiscent of prime Happy Mondays, so it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the highlights of Demon Days is Shaun Ryder's cameo on the tight, deceptively catchy "Dare." Over a tightly wound four minutes, "Dare" exploits Ryder's iconic Mancunian thug persona within territory that belongs to the Gorillaz -- its percolating beat not too far removed from "19/2000" -- and that's what makes it a perfect distillation of Demon Days: by letting other musicians take center stage and by sharing credit with Danger Mouse, Damon Albarn has created an allegedly anonymous platform whose genius ultimately and quite clearly belongs to him alone. All the themes and ideas on this album have antecedents in his previous work, but surrounded by new collaborators, he's able to present them in a fresh, exciting way. And he has created a monster album here -- not just in its size, but in its Frankenstein construction. It not only eclipses the first Gorillaz album, which in itself was a terrific record, but stands alongside the best Blur albums, providing a tonal touchstone for this decade the way Parklife did for the '90s. While it won't launch a phenomenon the way that 1994 classic did -- Albarn is too much a veteran artist for that and the music is too dark and weird -- Demon Days is still one hell of a comeback for Damon Albarn, who seemed perilously close to forever disappearing into his own ego.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Canadian rap-rock singer/songwriter Grandson presents his debut studio album, Death of an Optimist. This record follows the three EPs in his Modern Tragedy Trilogy and offers a more comprehensive take on the artist, acting as both an origin story and a stocktake of current affairs in 2020.© Liam Martin /TiVo

A veritable prog metal "supergroup," O.S.I. -- the "Office of Strategic Influence" -- was formed by Fates Warning guitarist Jim Matheos, Chroma Key and former Dream Theater keyboardist Kevin Moore, and Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy, with help from Gordian Knot bassist Sean Malone. Like similar collaborations, such as Transatlantic or Liquid Tension Experiment (many of which feature the same rotating cast of six or eight talented players), O.S.I.'s debut album is more than the sum of its disparate parts. Office of Strategic Influence masterfully blends '70s-styled progressive rock, heavily influenced by King Crimson and Pink Floyd, with an '80s-era heavy metal aesthetic, and the avant-garde sound of underground indie rockers such as Max Vague. The album-opening instrumental, "The New Math (What He Said)," is a fast-paced rocker, Matheos' guitar clamoring for attention above the din of Portnoy's crashing rhythms and Moore's manic keyboard work. Like Rick Wakeman-era Yes on steroids, the song showcases the threesome's musical abilities and jump-starts Office of Strategic Influence with a jolt. The following material offers little to disappoint, the band keeping up the frantic pace on songs such as "When You're Ready" and "Dirt from a Holy Place," the performances crackling with electricity and passion. Lengthy instrumental passages are powerful and purposeful: an integral part of each composition rather than an excuse to merely "jam." The individual talents of O.S.I. mesh seamlessly, blending instrumental virtuosity with oblique lyrics, creating an album that is as physical an experience as it is an intellectual exercise. In any other subgenre of rock, Matheos would be a guitar hero on the order of Steve Vai or Eddie Van Halen, the Fates Warning frontman capable of both classically styled acoustic craftsmanship and chaotic metallic riffing, often in the context of the same song. Office of Strategic Influence allows the underrated axeman a chance to spread his wings and fly high, while Malone and Portnoy hold down the bottom line with rock-solid rhythms. Kevin Moore is the other focal point here, the keyboard wizard providing an instrumental counterpoint to Matheos' raging guitar. Moore's imaginative style and natural skill coax a myriad of sounds from his instrument to challenge Matheos in the mix. Offering both power and pomp, O.S.I. would appeal to fans of classic prog rock and modern heavy metal alike. The regular-release single disc version of Office of Strategic Influence includes a video of "Horseshoes and B-52's." The two-CD limited-edition package offers three new songs, including a blistering cover of Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" and a five-song video documentary: munchies for your computer.© Rev. Keith A. Gordon /TiVo

3 stars out of 5 -- "Pokey, singing, guitar-strumming and delivering hot kazoo, revives memories of old New Orleans, stirred in with country blues and a touch of Western Swing..." © TiVo