Surprisingly, very few artists can float a digital-age collection of number one singles without resorting to trickery involving foreign countries or obscure charts. The Beatles had little trouble (The Beatles 1) and Elvis Presley managed both a disc of number ones (Elvis: 30 #1 Hits) and one of number twos (2nd to None), but Michael Jackson bent the rules so far that calling his disc Number Ones is tantamount to consumer fraud. Additionally, a collection of number one singles may not be the best representation of an artist's career; the Elvis volume included nothing from his Sun years, and the Beatles' set skipped "Strawberry Fields Forever." The #1's, Motown's collection of chart-toppers by Diana Ross & the Supremes, fares much better. It benefits from two Supremes characteristics: as a pop group through and through, their biggest hits were often their best songs, and, with the help of the solo Diana Ross, they spent a long time on the charts (nearly 20 years separates the Supremes' debut at the top from Ross' last number one single). While Motown's separate volumes on Diana Ross and the Supremes (in the Ultimate Collection series) remain the best source for a single-disc picture of either act, The #1's works remarkably well. It includes 19 number one pop singles (13 from the group, six from the solo Ross), plus various number ones on the R&B and dance charts, and there aren't any glaring omissions. Granted, fans of early Motown can't live without the girl-group chestnuts "Buttered Popcorn" and "Your Heart Belongs to Me," while those who enjoy latter-day Ross won't find "One More Chance" or "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" -- but of course, this collection wasn't created with them in mind. For the group who recorded more hit singles during the '60s than any other act except the Beatles, and for one of the reigning solo artists of the '70s, The #1's is a worthy tribute.© John Bush /TiVo

M83's lush, expansive sound already made their albums feel twice as big as they were, so an actual double album from Anthony Gonzalez and company was inevitable. However, on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, he doesn’t use that extra space to top the widescreen nostalgia of Saturdays = Youth; instead, he fills it with songs that cover more sounds and moods than any of M83's previous work, resulting in impressionistic moments that add up to a grand statement. The album begins with two songs that reaffirm Gonzalez's flair for the unapologetically epic. He recruits Zola Jesus for "Intro," and her unusual mix of frostbitten edge and vulnerable warmth is a perfect conduit for the huge emotions Gonzalez favors. With its sleek neon tones, "Midnight City" shows just how far he's traveled from Saturdays = Youth's ornate sound. He goes even farther afield with the tender piano instrumental "Where the Boats Go"; "Raconte-Moi Un Histoire," where a child imagines a world where everyone turns into jungle frogs over bouncy synths and guitars; and "Soon, My Friend," which ends the album's first half with symphonic grandeur and Beach Boys harmonies. On its second half, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming sounds more traditionally M83, from the triumphant yet heartbroken "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea" to the thrilling rush of "New Map" and "Steve McQueen." Despite the album's sprawl, Gonzalez holds everything together with wide-eyed enthusiasm. He handles most of the vocals here, singing with a yelp that evokes Howard Jones on "Reunion" and "OK Pal" -- and while this album is as indebted to the '80s as his previous album was, it somehow feels less steeped in nostalgia. Gonzalez displays his uncanny knack for making unfashionable sounds fresh again with "Claudia Lewis'" un-ironic slap bass and "Splendor'"s children’s choir; it takes guts to use these sounds, and brains to use them well, and fortunately, he has both. Unlike Saturdays = Youth's wall-to-wall epics, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ebbs and flows, with interludes like the dreamy "Echoes of Mine" and "Klaus I Love You" tipping the album’s balance toward atmosphere instead of pop songs. More than any of M83's other albums, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming feels like a destination to explore, and its retro-futuristic ambition helped set the tone for synth pop in the 2010s.© Heather Phares /TiVo

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A guitarist worshipped by Jimi Hendrix, an insanely good falsetto singer that even Prince looked up to, an author heavily involved in the American civil rights movement and a top-tier songwriter: Curtis Mayfield was a man of many talents. His groovy symphonies helped form solid links between funk, jazz, blues, soul and traditional gospel. After making his name with The Impressions in the 60s, he embarked on a solo career in 1970. This box set named Keep On Keeping On contains the singer’s first four studio albums, each remastered in Hi-Res 24-Bit quality: Curtis (1970), Roots (1971), Back to the World (1973) and Sweet Exorcist (1974). Here, the rhythm'n'blues enjoy a second life, supported by a wah-wah guitar, careful percussion and an always airy string section. Every topic concerned is a mini-tragedy, socially engaged, anchored in traditional gospel music. The masterful arranging of these albums (especially his masterpiece Curtis, and Roots) can be considered rivals to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. It is worth mentioning that this 1970-1974 box set does not include the soundtrack to Superfly, Gordon Parks Jr.’s 1972 film which contains the singles Pusherman and Freddie’s Dead. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Eschewing the orchestrated sound that dominated much of his 1970s output, the Across 110th Street soundtrack being the definitive example, with The Poet Womack stays in that slick vein, but this time does so with a soft jazz feel. Workouts like "Where Do We Go from Here" contain long intros and codas with Womack's gruff vocal style trading off with the silky voices of a female choir; on "So Many Sides of You," one of the more rollicking songs on the record, the piano, drums, and Nathan East's bass are as crisp as a new dollar bill. A bonus, aside from the songs, is the great cover art, which shows Womack decked out in a lavender sports coat and a pair of sunglasses, which only someone of his soulful grace could pull off. © Steve Kurutz /TiVo

40 years and nearly as many official albums in, it's amazing that Guided by Voices isn't constantly repeating themselves. While they're not breaking brand new ground with every release, the music is diverse enough to make band's tendency to churn out multiple albums a year seems driven by inspiration more than mere compulsion. Even Nowhere to Go But Up, the band's third studio effort of 2023 and 39th long-player overall, stands apart from the two records that preceeded it by months, as much as it carves out a new space for itself in the lengthy GbV saga that's been mutating since the early '80s. Where La La Land broke up its art-prog experimentalism with Beatles-y pop melodies and Welshpool Frillies leaned into onstage excitement by recording live to tape (both of these albums were also released in 2023), Nowhere to Go But Up finds the band embracing over-the-top production power. The album starts with Phil Spector levels of pop enthusiasm with the anthem-like "The Race Is On, The King Is Dead." It's all loud, melodic guitars and bashing drums, but the melodies are backed up by chiming bell tones and string sounds deep in the mix, making for one of the more orchestrated GbV tunes and a perfect backdrop for especially memorable vocal lines from Robert Pollard. The entire first half of the album is driving, excellently-produced power pop. Songs like "Stabbing at Fractions" and "Puncher's Parade" are beefed-up versions of the kind of tunefully melancholy, mid-tempo songs Pollard used to record exclusively on cheap cassette four tracks, benefiting here from studio sheen and clarity without completely losing their mystery. Of course, the band wanders into weirdness before too long, indulging in a lengthy Who-like intro on the otherwise absurd abstract rock of "Love Set" and flexing their prog rock powers on "Jack of Legs," complete with epic and declamatory horns and a song structure that rarely repeats a section. By the end, Nowhere to Go But Up grows more compositionally adventurous, but saves some catchiness for even its most complexly-mapped songs. The element that sets the album apart from other recent GbV output isn't the songwriting as much as the sound they achieve; a nearly slaphappy implementation of the studio as a way to make Pollard's oddball musings and occasional heart-rending turns of phrase bigger than ever.© Fred Thomas /TiVo

The first solo album by the former leader of the Impressions, Curtis represented a musical apotheosis for Curtis Mayfield -- indeed, it was practically the "Sgt. Pepper's" album of '70s soul, helping with its content and its success to open the whole genre to much bigger, richer musical canvases than artists had previously worked with. All of Mayfield's years of experience of life, music, and people were pulled together into a rich, powerful, topical musical statement that reflected not only the most up-to-date soul sounds of its period, finely produced by Mayfield himself, and the immediacy of the times and their political and social concerns, but also embraced the most elegant R&B sounds of the past. As a producer, Mayfield embraced the most progressive soul sounds of the era, stretching them out compellingly on numbers like "Move on Up," but he also drew on orchestral sounds (especially harps), to achieve some striking musical timbres (check out "Wild and Free"), and wove all of these influences, plus the topical nature of the songs, into a neat, amazingly lean whole. There was only one hit single off of this record, "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Down Below We're All Going to Go," which made number three, but the album as a whole was a single entity and really had to be heard that way.© Bruce Eder /TiVo

The Essential Taj Mahal pulls together the bluesman's Columbia, Warner, Gramavision Private Music, and Hannibal labels' recordings, making it the first truly cross-licensed compilation of his work. Given the depth and breadth of this set (it covers four decades), the listener gets not only a cross-sectional view of the artist, but also his innovative and idiosyncratic journey through the blues: Mahal has not only kept the tradition alive, he's expanded it and deepened it, tracing its roots and developments through the course of American, Caribbean, and African cultures. While there is no unreleased material here, there doesn't need to be. The sheer adventure in these recordings reveals the wealth of the contribution Mahal has made not only to the blues, but to popular culture both present and past. This is a comp to own, to be moved by, and to ultimately enjoy. Columbia issued a three-CD set earlier, but there were things there that needed to be trimmed. This leaner and meaner version is superior.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

From the beginning, Frank Zappa cultivated a role as voice of the freaks -- imaginative outsiders who didn't fit comfortably into any group. We're Only in It for the Money is the ultimate expression of that sensibility, a satirical masterpiece that simultaneously skewered the hippies and the straights as prisoners of the same narrow-minded, superficial phoniness. Zappa's barbs were vicious and perceptive, and not just humorously so: his seemingly paranoid vision of authoritarian violence against the counterculture was borne out two years later by the Kent State killings. Like Freak Out, We're Only in It for the Money essentially devotes its first half to satire, and its second half to presenting alternatives. Despite some specific references, the first-half suite is still wickedly funny, since its targets remain immediately recognizable. The second half shows where his sympathies lie, with character sketches of Zappa's real-life freak acquaintances, a carefree utopia in "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance," and the strident, unironic protest "Mother People." Regardless of how dark the subject matter, there's a pervasively surreal, whimsical flavor to the music, sort of like Sgt. Pepper as a creepy nightmare. Some of the instruments and most of the vocals have been manipulated to produce odd textures and cartoonish voices; most songs are abbreviated, segue into others through edited snippets of music and dialogue, or are broken into fragments by more snippets, consistently interrupting the album's continuity. Compositionally, though, the music reveals itself as exceptionally strong, and Zappa's politics and satirical instinct have rarely been so focused and relevant, making We're Only in It for the Money quite probably his greatest achievement.© Steve Huey /TiVo

After the demise of the much-beloved Uncle Tupelo in 1994, Jeff Tweedy regrouped with three of his four bandmates as Wilco and promptly cut A.M., a debut that sounded like he had been stashing a bunch of his best songs. It was followed by the expansive and successful Being There which dropped the alt-countryisms for a more mainstream rock tone, indicating aims for a larger canvas. Those ambitions further morphed into experimental impulses on Wilco’s third album, summerteeth, signaling a band transcending genre and turning consequential. Now remastered and re-released with a selection of demos, outtakes, alternative tracks and an entire 1999 live show, summerteeth's internal churn—a pain and passion struggle between happy pop music and troubled, downbeat lyrics—begins immediately with the tuneful but bleak "Can't Stand It," where "Our prayers will never be answered again." Uncomfortable autobiography mixes with gorgeous baroque pop in "She's a Jar," where Tweedy ends with, "A pretty war/ With feelings hid/ She begs me not to hit her." Even the violins and rising chords of "A Shot in the Arm," don't hold any joy, as he wishes for "Something in my veins bloodier than blood." It would all be just scary narcissism if it wasn't for exuberant melodies like "Pieholden Suite" where a banjo flickers through before a blast of Beatles-y brass, or the jumpy Anglo-pop of "ELT." The light-dark dichotomy persists even in the album's hookiest moment, the Magical Mystery Tour-esque outtake, "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway (Again)" where "love’s a weed" and "a kiss is all we need," but in the end, "I'm a bomb regardless." summerteeth's musical success owes much to multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett's production and arrangement skills, and his added textures of Moog synthesizer, Farfisa organ, lap steel, drums and tambourine. In the post-Max Johnston and Ken Coomer, pre-Nils Cline and Pat Sansone version of Wilco, Bennett supplied the voltage that brought Tweedy's melodic though murky material to life. Never the excruciating struggle that the next album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became, these are Bennett's finest moments on record, and along with Mitch Easter, he contributed to summerteeth's more defined mix and heightened sonics. While the demos are not revelatory being mostly guitar and voice—although Tweedy's dry, low tone on "Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway (Again)" is ominous—some of the alternates are choice, like the shrieking rant "Viking Dan." A funky, slow Fender Rhodes-led version of "Summer Teeth" is lounge jazz. The stripped down alternate take of "ELT" is the equal of the released take. And the "We're Just Friends / Yee Haw" soundcheck is a full tilt goof. The well-recorded live show is a telling snapshot of a band known for its roaring virtuosic performances, as they play most of their first three albums, delivering an especially strong "Passenger Side", "I Got You (At The End of the Century)" and "California Stars." A charismatic peek into an innovative, inspiring rock band evolving from eager contender to conflicted champion. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

Clocking in at 26 minutes, Weather feels more like an EP than an LP, but there's a reason for the brevity. While Huey Lewis & the News were completing their first album of original material in nearly 20 years, Lewis was diagnosed with Meniere's disease, an affliction that effects hearing. Meniere's meant Huey could no longer hear notes clearly, which meant that he had to retire from performing, which in turn meant that the music the News completed for their new album would in effect be their final album. Since Huey Lewis & the News wrote and recorded Weather without planning it as a goodbye, the album has a light, breezy tone, and that amiability is actually a fitting farewell for a group who always were a hard-working rock & soul combo. Weather finds the News favoring the soul side of that equation, which should come as no surprise considering how their last album a decade prior was a tribute to Stax Records. If the album's production is a shade too precise and polished, the quality of the originals and the presence of a cover of Eugene Church's "Pretty Girls Everywhere" more than compensate. With one notable exception, the tracks are firmly songs for a sunny afternoon, with the opening "While We're Young" carrying not a note of bittersweetness. The exception is the closing "One of the Boys," a sweetly nostalgic, twangy stroll through the past that feels like a nod to the group's country-rock beginnings as Clover. Arriving at the end of this cheerful set of rock & soul, it seems like the one time the News are taking stock of their mortality, but the rest of the record captures them at their best, delivering good-time music with a smile.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The first track, "Grab the Devil by the Horns and Fuck Him up the Ass," is a time warp. For a minute and a half the group relives the new wave of British metal and cranks out an Iron Maiden style tune. After a brief trip down memory lane the album quickly morphs into pop punk. The songs are well crafted and the hooks are catchy on "Make No Difference" and "Summer." But in some respects that is problematic, there was a time in the pre-Green Day/Blink 182 years where punk defined itself by not being radio friendly. A good album, but essentially proof that turn of the millennium punk is just as much a corporate rock entity as adult contemporary. © Curtis Zimmermann /TiVo

Shania Twain entered a self-imposed exile following the supporting tour for 2002's Up!, suffering from a then-undisclosed contraction of Lyme disease. Troubles compounded, as they often do. Twain split from her husband, Robert John "Mutt" Lange, in 2008, a traumatic event on its own that was complicated by the fact that he was her collaborator on the blockbusters The Woman in Me (1995), Come on Over (1997), and Up! This meant she had to start over personally and professionally, which explains the long delay between Up! and Now, which was released in September of 2017. Many trends have come and gone during that 15-year gap and Twain -- assisted by not one producer but a roundtable, as is standard for 21st century blockbusters -- decides to split the difference between chasing fashion and staying true to her glitzy country-pop. It's a tricky move made harder by the fact that so much of her '90s appeal rested on her unfettered exuberance, and that sunniness is understandably tarnished due to the bruises she sustained during her difficult hiatus. Twain addresses this pain on Now -- sometimes directly, sometimes elliptically -- but she makes it plain that she's come out from the darkness, celebrating that she's "Home Now" with the "Light of My Life" and "Life's About to Get Good." Worthy sentiments all, but the problem is these songs -- and Now in general -- don't feel nearly as bright and cheerful as Twain's records with Lange, nor do they deliver the same kind of sweet, sentimental rush on the ballads. Now is melodically undernourished, with hooks never quite materializing in either the choruses or the excessively polished arrangements designed to support Twain, not sell the tracks. That production, a mishmash of Vegas showstoppers and feints toward the electronic-glazed AAA charts, feels as hesitant and inarticulate as the songs. Sometimes, Twain's signature charm surfaces -- "Because of You" (present only in the album's 16-track Deluxe Edition) has a lovely, gentle sway, "You Can't Buy Love" is a fizzy bit of bubblegum in the vein of Amy Winehouse's "Valerie" -- but Now feels fussy, as if every element was triple-guessed because the pressure to have a triumphant comeback was too great.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Don't Let the Devil Take Another Day sees Stereophonics frontman, Kelly Jones, reimagining a collection of classic Stereophonics and solo tracks, stripping them back to basics. Included are reworkings of "Local Boy In a Photograph," "Dakota," and "Maybe Tomorrow," alongside his take on Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night."© Rich Wilson /TiVo