Few albums can say that they have defined a generation, but (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is undoubtedly among that elite crowd. Recorded over the course of just 15 days in 1995, the album catapulted Oasis from crossover indie act to worldwide pop phenomenon, flooding the charts with retro-rock riffs and unforgettable hooks. To say that its impact was titanic would be an understatement. It became the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad. It has sold over 22 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. And it was the knockout blow in the battle of Britpop, being twice as successful as their rival Blur’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape.Following up from the incredibly popular Definitely Maybe was no mean feat, but Oasis pulled it off without a hitch. The idealistic hope-against-the-odds message from their beginnings was replaced with realism and reflection. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Noel Gallagher commented that while their first album “was all about dreaming of being a pop star in a band, the second album is about actually being a pop star in a band”. They had reached where they wanted to be, and were wondering what lay beyond fame and fortune. The Mancunians had clearly enjoyed enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to yield four sides of vinyl, though they never limited themselves purely to counter-culture clichés. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting took on a notably more introspective tone, nestled in amongst jauntier tracks like She’s Electric and Roll With It. His philosophising shone through perhaps most obviously on Cast No Shadow, a song which was dedicated to The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft and details the struggle that songwriters (and more universally, all of us) face when they desperately try to say the right thing and it keeps coming out wrong. Elsewhere, we find the attitude and aloofness that Oasis do so well. The cocaine anthem Morning Glory rides along a continuous wave of stadium-filling guitars as Liam Gallagher sings “All your dreams are made / When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. And then of course, there are Oasis’ biggest hits: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which urges the listener to live regret-free; Champagne Supernova, which despite its famously nonsensical lyrics (Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball we’re looking at you) resonates with people the world over; and the often-imitated-never-replicated Wonderwall, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any Brit who doesn’t know all the words. Being more than just wedding dancefloor fillers and karaoke classics, the three tracks brilliantly capture the band’s skill for drawing complexity from simplicity. Ultimately, this album marked the beginning of the long-drawn-out end for Oasis and the albums that followed never quite lived up to the glorious rock and carefree euphoria found here. But then that’s another story… © Abi Church/Qobuz

Only two months after the masterful White Album, this tenth Beatles album was released in January 1969 and seems a bit... tired. The soundtrack to the animated film by Canadian George Dunning (which was released in theaters seven months earlier), Yellow Submarine offers thirteen tracks, of which only six (at the time, only side A) are by the Fab Four. The rest is largely the bringing together of various instrumentals by legendary producer George Martin. Overdubs and sound effects of all kinds, psychedelia is required from one end to the other for this great album. It is certainly one that remains essential to understanding the history of the group, without really ever reaching the level of Revolver, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club or Abbey Road. ©MZ/Qobuz, Translation/BM

Led by the infectious, pseudo-new wave single "Just a Girl," No Doubt's major-label debut, Tragic Kingdom, straddles the line between '90s punk, third-wave ska, and pop sensibility. The record was produced by Matthew Wilder, the auteur behind "Break My Stride" -- a clever mainstream co-opting of new wave quirkiness, and, as such, an ideal pairing. Wilder kept his production lean and accessible, accentuating No Doubt's appealing mix of new wave melodicism, post-grunge rock, and West Coast sunshine. Even though the band isn't always able to fuse its edgy energy with pop melodies, the combination worked far better than anyone could have hoped. When everything does click, the record is pure fun, even if some of the album makes you wish they could sustain that energy throughout the record. Tragic Kingdom might not have made much of an impact upon its initial release in late 1995, but throughout 1996 "Just a Girl" and "Spiderwebs" positively ruled the airwaves, both alternative and mainstream, and in 1997 No Doubt cemented their cross-generational appeal with the ballad hit "Don't Speak."© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Few albums can say that they have defined a generation, but (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is undoubtedly among that elite crowd. Recorded over the course of just 15 days in 1995, the album catapulted Oasis from crossover indie act to worldwide pop phenomenon, flooding the charts with retro-rock riffs and unforgettable hooks. To say that its impact was titanic would be an understatement. It became the fastest-selling album in the UK since Michael Jackson’s Bad. It has sold over 22 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time. And it was the knockout blow in the battle of Britpop, being twice as successful as their rival Blur’s contemporaneous album The Great Escape.Following up from the incredibly popular Definitely Maybe was no mean feat, but Oasis pulled it off without a hitch. The idealistic hope-against-the-odds message from their beginnings was replaced with realism and reflection. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Noel Gallagher commented that while their first album “was all about dreaming of being a pop star in a band, the second album is about actually being a pop star in a band”. They had reached where they wanted to be, and were wondering what lay beyond fame and fortune. The Mancunians had clearly enjoyed enough sex, drugs and rock’n’roll to yield four sides of vinyl, though they never limited themselves purely to counter-culture clichés. Noel Gallagher’s songwriting took on a notably more introspective tone, nestled in amongst jauntier tracks like She’s Electric and Roll With It. His philosophising shone through perhaps most obviously on Cast No Shadow, a song which was dedicated to The Verve’s frontman Richard Ashcroft and details the struggle that songwriters (and more universally, all of us) face when they desperately try to say the right thing and it keeps coming out wrong. Elsewhere, we find the attitude and aloofness that Oasis do so well. The cocaine anthem Morning Glory rides along a continuous wave of stadium-filling guitars as Liam Gallagher sings “All your dreams are made / When you’re chained to the mirror and the razor blade”. And then of course, there are Oasis’ biggest hits: Don’t Look Back In Anger, which urges the listener to live regret-free; Champagne Supernova, which despite its famously nonsensical lyrics (Slowly walking down the hall / Faster than a cannonball we’re looking at you) resonates with people the world over; and the often-imitated-never-replicated Wonderwall, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any Brit who doesn’t know all the words. Being more than just wedding dancefloor fillers and karaoke classics, the three tracks brilliantly capture the band’s skill for drawing complexity from simplicity. Ultimately, this album marked the beginning of the long-drawn-out end for Oasis and the albums that followed never quite lived up to the glorious rock and carefree euphoria found here. But then that’s another story… © Abi Church/Qobuz

Blessed with an intuitive genius that illuminated his entire career, Ray Charles sensed that country music and the blues had a common soul that he could touch with his expressive voice and natural gifts for phrasing. Having left Atlantic Records for the ABC label where he was guaranteed artistic freedom, Charles decided to step through the looking glass; in the middle of the civil rights movement he turned country music into lush, R&B-influenced 60s pop, blurring racial and artistic barriers in the process. As proof of his success, the single, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (written by white country star Don Gibson) spent five weeks at #1 on the pop charts and sixteen weeks at #1 on the R&B charts before winning the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Rhythm and Blues Recording.  As fresh today as when they were recorded, no context is required to appreciate these sublime tracks, which have now been combined into a single package.  Charles knew a hit song when he heard it and he convincingly transformed a well-known track like Hank Williams’ “Your Cheating Heart” into a sweet, sexy ballad that seems as right as the original.  For instrumental backup, Charles used two modes: strings and vocal choir by arranger Marty Paich for ballads like “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and punchier swing band arrangements by famed composer/arranger Gerald Wilson for tracks like “Hey Good Lookin’.” While a snappy, brass-led version of Williams’ “Move it Over” is a revelation, the utterly transformative version of one of country music’s most storied touchstones, “You Are My Sunshine,” featuring Charles in full Atlantic-era R&B mode—complete with Raelettes—is spectacular.  One of the finest moments in an acclaimed career, the expansive vision and charismatic vocals heard here are still breathtaking. © Robert Baird / Qobuz

The story of Back to Black is one in which celebrity and the potential of commercial success threaten to ruin Amy Winehouse, since the same insouciance and playfulness that made her sound so special when she debuted could easily have been whitewashed right out of existence for this breakout record. (That fact may help to explain why fans were so scared by press allegations that Winehouse had deliberately lost weight in order to present a slimmer appearance.) Although Back to Black does see her deserting jazz and wholly embracing contemporary R&B, all the best parts of her musical character emerge intact, and actually, are all the better for the transformation from jazz vocalist to soul siren. With producer Salaam Remi returning from Frank, plus the welcome addition of Mark Ronson (fresh off successes producing for Christina Aguilera and Robbie Williams), Back to Black has a similar sound to Frank but much more flair and spark to it. Winehouse was inspired by girl group soul of the '60s, and fortunately Ronson and Remi are two of the most facile and organic R&B producers active. (They certainly know how to evoke the era too; Remi's "Tears Dry on Their Own" is a sparkling homage to the Motown chestnut "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and Ronson summons a host of Brill Building touchstones on his tracks.) As before, Winehouse writes all of the songs from her experiences, most of which involve the occasionally riotous and often bittersweet vagaries of love. Also in similar fashion to Frank, her eye for details and her way of relating them are delightful. She states her case against "Rehab" on the knockout first single with some great lines: "They tried to make me go to rehab I won't go go go, I'd rather be at home with Ray" (Charles, that is). As often as not, though, the songs on Back to Black are universal, songs that anyone, even Joss Stone, could take to the top of the charts, such as "Love Is a Losing Game" or the title song ("We only said good bye with words, I died a hundred times/You go back to her, and I go back to black").© John Bush /TiVo

With A New Day Now, Joe Bonamassa revisits his debut album A New Day Yesterday. The American bluesman has even rerecorded his vocal parts. According to him, the reason behind this project relates to the lack of experience and rigour that can be heard on the original record. The first release by the young man, then aged 22, came ten years after his noteable performance as the support act for B.B. King and marked the beginning of his artistic blossoming. For Bonamassa, this retrospective album is also an homage to producer Tom Dowd, his former mentor whose demanding approach, both technically and musically, helped him to progress from a child prodigy to the best bluesman of his generation. © IF/Qobuz

That album recording of the sold-out tour The Wall Live 2010-2013. This series of concerts by Roger Waters is the first comprehensive interpretation of the concept album by Pink Floyd since 1990. Mixing explosive scenic rock performances with strong message of peace and compassion, The Wall Live attracted more than 4.5 million spectators in more than 200 concerts across four continents! Produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck, Paul McCartney), the disc offers a rather exhilarating listening experience of the masterpiece originally published back in 1979, which was the first narrative concept album of Floyd. Three decades later, this scenic reinterpretation demonstrates the sheer timelessness of these particular songs. Above all, the versions offered here shed new light that all Pink Floyd fans worthy of the name will treasure. © CM/Qobuz

Admittedly, the soundtrack to Yellow Submarine wasn't one of the highlights in the Beatles' catalog, so providing an official alternate version of it is no big deal. The soundtrack always felt cobbled together, because it was. It only contained four new songs -- two of which were written by Harrison, which indicates how seriously Lennon and McCartney took the project, if their enjoyable throwaways ("Hey Bulldog" and "All Together Now," respectively) didn't provide enough of a clue -- plus two previously released songs ("All You Need Is Love," "Yellow Submarine") and a side of George Martin instrumentals from the film's score. The Beatles never assembled a slighter album while they were active, so it wasn't a sacrilege when their organization decided to assemble a "songtrack" -- a soundtrack that featured only the songs in the film, not any of the instrumentals -- to coincide with the re-release of the film in 1999. In a way, the "songtrack" (which is what the Beatles' associates insisted on calling the new effort) is an improvement on the soundtrack since it eliminates dead weight and strengthens the original six songs with nine songs featured in the movie ("Eleanor Rigby," "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," etc.). It's a little jarring not to hear the songs from the soundtrack in a different order on the songtrack, but ultimately the record is entertaining, if a bit familiar. That's not the case with the sound, though. The Beatles have decided to make this the first remixed CD in their catalog. The differences are slight but often notable and never really an improvement; as a matter of fact, it could likely be enough to irk, possibly anger, longtime Beatlemaniacs. It helps distinguish the Yellow Submarine "songtrack" as much as the new sequencing.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The world of pop music was hardly ready for The Velvet Underground's first album when it appeared in the spring of 1967, but while The Velvet Underground and Nico sounded like an open challenge to conventional notions of what rock music could sound like (or what it could discuss), 1968's White Light/White Heat was a no-holds-barred frontal assault on cultural and aesthetic propriety. Recorded without the input of either Nico or Andy Warhol, White Light/White Heat was the purest and rawest document of the key Velvets lineup of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker, capturing the group at their toughest and most abrasive. The album opens with an open and enthusiastic endorsement of amphetamines (startling even from this group of noted drug enthusiasts), and side one continues with an amusing shaggy-dog story set to a slab of lurching mutant R&B ("The Gift"), a perverse variation on an old folktale ("Lady Godiva's Operation"), and the album's sole "pretty" song, the mildly disquieting "Here She Comes Now." While side one was a good bit darker in tone than the Velvets' first album, side two was where they truly threw down the gauntlet with the manic, free-jazz implosion of "I Heard Her Call My Name" (featuring Reed's guitar work at its most gloriously fractured), and the epic noise jam "Sister Ray," 17 minutes of sex, drugs, violence, and other non-wholesome fun with the loudest rock group in the history of Western Civilization as the house band. White Light/White Heat is easily the least accessible of The Velvet Underground's studio albums, but anyone wanting to hear their guitar-mauling tribal frenzy straight with no chaser will love it, and those benighted souls who think of the Velvets as some sort of folk-rock band are advised to crank their stereo up to ten and give side two a spin. © Mark Deming /TiVo

Six years is a long time, about one-and-a-half generations in pop music and a fairly large chunk out of anyone's life, two sentiments that come into play on the Beastie Boys' sixth album, 2004's To the 5 Boroughs. When the Beasties last delivered an album, it was in the summer of 1998 as the Clinton impeachment scandal was heating up, and just as that sordid saga closed the curtain on the swinging '90s, Hello Nasty served as both a culmination of the New York trio's remarkable comeback and as a capper to the alt-rock boom of the '90s, the last album of the decade to capture what the '90s actually felt like. Not only is the political and cultural landscape of 2004 much different than that of 1998, the Beasties are a different band in a different position. They're no longer on the vanguard of pop culture, setting the trends and styles, nor do they embody their time; like it or not, the po-faced, humorless brooding of Coldplay and Wilco is an appropriate soundtrack to the drab, dark days of the early 2000s. No, the Beastie Boys are no longer groundbreakers; they're elder statesmen, operating outside of the fashions of the time. This has as much to do with maturity as it does with changing times. Now that Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D are all nearly 40, they're not as interested in being the world's hippest group, as evidenced by their abandonment of their Grand Royal empire at the turn of the decade, and that suspicion is borne out by To the 5 Boroughs. Like many musicians at middle age, the Beasties are a little set in their ways, ignoring modern music nearly entirely and turning to the music of their youth for sustenance. For the Beasties, this means heavy doses of old school rap spiked with a bit of punk, which admittedly isn't all that different from the blueprints for Check Your Head, Ill Communication, and Hello Nasty, but the attack here is clean and focused, far removed from the sprawling, kaleidoscopic mosaics of their '90s records. In contrast, To the 5 Boroughs is sleek and streamlined, with all the loose ends neatly clipped and tied; even the punk influences are transformed into hip-hop, as when the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer" provides the fuel for "An Open Letter to NYC." Given the emphasis on hip-hop, it may be tempting to label Boroughs as an old-school homage, but that isn't accurate, since nothing here sounds like a lost side from the Sugarhill Records stable. Still, old-school rhyme schemes and grooves do power the album, yet they're filtered through the Beasties' signature blend of absurdity, in-jokes, and pop culture, all served up in a dense, layered production so thick that it seems to boast more samples than it does. Apart from an explicit anti-Dubya political bent on some lyrics, there's nothing surprising or new here, and the cohesive, concise nature of To the 5 Boroughs only emphasizes the familiarity of the music. Familiarity can be comforting, though, particularly in troubled times, and there's a certain pleasure simply hearing the trio again after six long years of silence, particularly since the Beasties are in good form here, crafting appealing productions and spitting out more rhymes than they have since Paul's Boutique. If there are no classics here, there's no duds, either, and given that the Beasties' pop culture aesthetic once seemed to be the territory of young men, it's rather impressive that they're maturing gracefully, turning into expert craftsmen that can deliver a satisfying listen like this. That's a subtle achievement, something that will likely not please those listeners looking for the shock of the new from a Beastie Boys record, but judged on its own musical merits, To the 5 Boroughs is a satisfying listen, and convincing evidence that the trio will be able to weather middle age well.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Neil Young has never been especially interested in the way the music industry expects artists to operate, preferring to trust his gut rather than fretting about career expectations. It's not hard to imagine Young saying to hell with it and joining a bar band rather than dealing with the annoyances of rock stardom, and he did just that for a while in 1977. That year, he impulsively joined a fledgling band called the Ducks, featuring Bob Mosley of Moby Grape on bass, noted songwriter Jeff Blackburn on guitar, and Johnny Craviotto, who worked with Ry Cooder and Arlo Guthrie, on drums. While Young was the most famous person on board, he was not the leader; all four Ducks took turns singing lead, Mosley and Blackburn wrote most of the songs, and they were content to play bars and clubs in their native Santa Cruz, California, doing two sets a night and charging a three-dollar cover at the door. With someone as famous as Young in the lineup, this could only stay a secret for so long, especially since the Ducks were playing two or three nights a week, and the grand experiment was over in three months, with only a few bootleg tapes to confirm it ever happened. Thankfully, Young obsessively documents his activities, and he had a mobile recording truck tape some Ducks gigs in August 1977. Forty-five years later, he pulled the reels out of his vault and compiled a Ducks album, 2023's High Flyin'. The Ducks were a bar band in the same way NRBQ were a bar band -- their mix of country rock, blues, and tough, straight-ahead rock & roll was rooted in the classics without getting mired in clichés. While they had good, unpretentious fun on-stage, they also had impressive chops and a catalog of fine material, and the energy of seeing a group this good in a funky, intimate setting was not lost on their audiences. Young seems to be having a ball not having to be the star of the show, and his guitar work is excellent, ripping out solos in his unmistakable style but also buzzing along beside Blackburn. He also takes the opportunity to rework some of his classic tunes, with a gutsy tear through "Mr. Soul" a highlight of this set. Mosley and Blackburn's originals are good enough to stand up to comparison to Young's, and Mosley seemingly taught some of the tricks of Moby Grape's glorious harmonies to his fellow Ducks, feeling rougher but no less satisfying. Mosley and Craviotto are a superb rhythm section, too, knowing when to groove and when to push the music into fifth gear. It's a shame the Ducks didn't have the chance to mature and cut a studio album, because they clearly had talent and potential to spare, but there's no shame in being a truly great bar band, and High Flyin' shows the Ducks were something special for just three bucks.© Mark Deming /TiVo