"Blinding Lights" artistically and commercially was so optimal for Abel Tesfaye that it quickly became his signature song, and was only two years old when Billboard announced that it had rocketed past Chubby Checker's "The Twist" to claim the title of all-time number one hit. For the follow-up to "Blinding Lights" parent album After Hours, Tesfaye delves deeper into the early- to mid-'80s pop aesthetic. He resurfaces with a conceptual sequel designed as a broadcast heard by a motorist stuck in a purgatorial tunnel. The primary collaborators are "Blinding Lights" co-producers Max Martin and Oscar Holter, plus fellow After Hours cohort Daniel Lopatin, whose airwaves-themed 2020 LP Magic Oneohtrix Point Never was executive produced by Tesfaye. Instead of scrambled voices like those heard on the OPN album, Dawn FM features recurrent announcements from Jim Carrey as a serene and faintly creepy character, or maybe himself, intonating end-of-life entertainment and counsel. The other unlikely appearances -- Quincy Jones with a spoken autobiographical interlude, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston somewhere in the cocksure "how it's going" outlier "Here We Go...Again" -- are ostentatious. In the main, this is a space for Tesfaye to fully indulge his frantic romantic side as his co-conspirators whip up fluorescent throwback Euro-pop with muscle and nuance. Tesfaye's almost fathomless vocal facility elevates even the most rudimentary expressions of co-dependency, despair, regret, and obsession, and he helps it all go down easier with station ID jingles and an amusingly hyped-up ad for "a compelling work of science fiction" called (the) "After Life." The set peaks early with a sequence of dejected post-disco jams that writhe, percolate, and chug. Most of these songs surpass the bulk of Daft Punk's similarly backward-gazing Random Access Memories, projecting the same lust for life with underlying existential doom as Italo disco nuggets such as Ryan Paris' "Dolce Vita." Toward the end of that first-half stretch, Tesfaye reaffirms his R&B roots and affinity for Michael Jackson with a cut built from Alicia Myers' 1981 gospel boogie classic "I Want to Thank You." After that, it slows down and stretches out a bit to varying effect, dipping into Japanese city pop for the bittersweet and remorseful "Out of Time" and edging ever so achingly toward Latin freestyle with "Don't Break My Heart." Just before Carrey's epilogue, Tesfaye and company pick up the pace with "Less Than Zero." Rather than use the title as a prompt to sink back into detailing debauchery, Tesfaye makes the song this album's "Scared to Live," a sentimental ballad that's hard to resist. © Andy Kellman /TiVo

After the surprise release of his 2014 album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, Thom Yorke has released his third solo studio album (not counting the soundtrack of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 film Suspiria) the more conventional way. Under XL Recordings, Anima brings us another dose of “electronic Radiohead”. Thom Yorke first showed us that he could successfully dabble in electro music as early as 2006 with his first album The Eraser, and even ten years earlier with OK Computer and the band’s various remixes. His vocals work tremendously well with technoid beats and he’s not afraid to alter them either, sometimes reducing them to a sample which can be cut, repeated and layered, like on the album’s opener Traffic.This album has plenty of spirit and a lot of heart. Produced by the trusty Nigel Godrich, it includes Last I Heard (…He Was Circling the Drain), a true masterpiece with its ethereal organ combined with drones, duplicated vocals and only a bass as the beat. The drones return once more in Dawn Chorus, a track that you should definitely add to your winter playlist, featuring Yorke’s unmistakable vocals with practically zero filters. Also worth a listen is I Am a Very Rude Person, a funny little funk track with a broken beat and various layer changes throughout. For this third solo album, Thom Yorke is clearly more confident in himself and his individuality. His music can be placed somewhere between Four Tet, James Holden, Burial or Caribou – all musicians/groups with whom he has worked, and his minimalist production style is a breath of fresh air in an industry that often piles on too many layers. Most importantly of all, this is clearly the work of a songwriter who pushes his own limits. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

What does World music sound like when filtered through Jacob Collier’s harmonic kaleidoscope? His prismatic vision – piling arrangements on top of each like a glass pyramid – has already earned him a Grammy in 2017, for You and I, from his debut album. Then, Djesse came along, like a tornado of styles, a jazz-world fusion where the London-based multi-instrumentalist extended his conceptual and technical dominion to even vaster musical landscapes. So vast, that apparently it’s only the first in a series of 4. If any proof was still needed that Collier is a musical genius in the highest sense, Djesse Vol. 2 is in the pudding. The scope is still extremely wide, thanks to Jacob’s ability to fit any sort of instrument into a song: bag pipes, slap bass and acoustic guitars are all a part of the opening track Sky Above. But that same scope is also widened through different features: Pino Palladino and Lianne La Havas on the romantic soul-trance of Feel, Steve Vai and his unmistakable shredding on top of the polyrythmic funk of Do You Feel Love, and even Chris Thile and his mandolin, threading the needle on the tender I Heard You Singing. The latter song is actually a fair representation of the artistic direction on the second volume of Djesse: there are more references to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, thanks to bagpipes, mandolin and harps galore. Collier also seems to have taken a step back from his jazz influences: his practice of negative harmony through a capella parts certainly highlighted his vocal abilities, but apart from tracks such as Moon River his signature technique is sparser. That certainly contributes to making the music more relatable and more intimate. If Djesse Vol. 2 doesn’t necessarily break any ground from a theoretical perspective, the production value is on point and it also signals Collier’s emotional growth. As a musician, he certainly has nothing to prove, but his evocative power as an artist is still showing considerable improvement compared to previous records. © Alexis Renaudat/Qobuz

Throughout 1969 and into 1970, CCR toured incessantly and recorded nearly as much. Appropriately, Cosmo's Factory's first single was the working band's anthem "Travelin' Band," a funny, piledriving rocker with a blaring horn section -- the first indication their sonic palette was broadening. Two more singles appeared prior to the album's release, backed by John Fogerty originals that rivaled the A-side or paled just slightly. When it came time to assemble a full album, Fogerty had only one original left, the claustrophobic, paranoid rocker "Ramble Tamble." Unlike some extended instrumentals, this was dramatic and had a direction -- a distinction made clear by the meandering jam that brings CCR's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" to 11 minutes. Even if it wanders, their take on the Marvin Gaye classic isn't unpleasant, and their faithful, exuberant takes on the Sun classics "Ooby Dooby" and "My Baby Left Me" are joyous tributes. Still, the heart of the album lays in those six fantastic songs released on singles. "Up Around the Bend" is a searing rocker, one of their best, balanced by the menacing murkiness of "Run Through the Jungle." "Who'll Stop the Rain"'s poignant melody and melancholy undertow has a counterpart in Fogerty's dope song, "Lookin' out My Back Door," a charming, bright shuffle, filled with dancing animals and domestic bliss - he had never been as sweet and silly as he is here. On "Long as I Can See the Light," the record's final song, he again finds solace in home, anchored by a soulful, laid-back groove. It hits a comforting, elegiac note, the perfect way to draw Cosmo's Factory -- an album made during stress and chaos, filled with raging rockers, covers, and intense jams -- to a close.© 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

Pay attention to the "raw" designation in RAW: That Little Ol' Band from Texas, the 2022 album that purports to be the soundtrack to the 2019 documentary That Little Ol' Band from Texas. Within the movie is a segment capturing ZZ Top playing a show at Gruene Hall, famously hailed as "the oldest continually run dance hall in Texas." That set is presented here on RAW: That Little Ol' Band from Texas, an album that winds up being a more valuable document than expected thanks to the fact that it captures the classic lineup of ZZ Top playing a bunch of down-and-dirty blues just a few years before the passing of bassist of Dusty Hill in 2021. While the group doesn't sound as spry as they did in the 1970s or '80s -- the rhythms are a little heavier, the growl in Billy Gibbons' voice is quite gravelly -- it's enjoyable to hear how they're playing as a band of old pros. They've performed these songs countless times -- it's not all the hits, but as they run through "Just Got Paid," "Heard it on the X," "La Grange," "Tush, "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide," and "Legs," it feels like they are -- but there's still energy and a palpable joy in how they launch into a groove or extend themselves in a jam and it's still a wonder to hear Gibbons solo.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

It is indeed satisfying to see the music of Eric Coates on classical best-seller charts, where this one landed in the late spring of 2023. For so many decades, Coates was neglected, but championing by the conductor John Wilson, here with the BBC Philharmonic in fine form, has begun to change the situation. One thing that distinguishes Coates from most of his fellow composers of light music is that he undertook compositions in larger forms, and this album includes several splendid examples. Much of it is given over to Cinderella in 11 concise but hugely evocative sections illustrating episodes in the famous tale. Consider "The Clock Strikes Twelve," with not bells but timpani strokes. Coates' abilities as a musical portraitist are in evidence not once but twice, with the broad types of The Three Men ("The Man from the Country," "The Man About Town," and "The Man from the Sea," a riot of chantey-like music), and then at the end with The Three Elizabeths ("Queen Elizabeth I," "Elizabeth of Glamis," and, in 1944, "Princess Elizabeth"). There are also short pieces including, to raise the curtain, The Television March. There is not a dull moment on the album, and the next step for this delightful music would be its inclusion in a broad range of symphonic programs. © James Manheim /TiVo

In 2009, just over a year before his untimely death, the late, great Irish bluesman played an intimate set at London's Islington Academy which has since gone down in legend among his fans. Recorded for posterity, it appeared in January 2020. Featuring Moore at the top of his game, it includes some of his best-loved tunes including "Since I Met You Baby," "I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know," "Walking by Myself," and the classic "Parisienne Walkways."© John D. Buchanan /TiVo

This set, although it doesn't say it anywhere on the cover, is entirely made up of live tracks. That's not a good thing. Marvin Gaye disliked touring, and truthfully, his sweetly nuanced singing style worked best in a studio setting, where every lift and turn of his phrasing could be clearly heard. The concert stage, by contrast, required large, grand gestures from his singing, and while no one would suggest Gaye was ever anything but a solid performer, the hushed intimacy that made some of his greatest songs so magnificent was often difficult to attain on-stage. Bootlegs and cobbled-together packages of live Gaye shows have been on the market for years, often with the venue mislabeled (if it is listed at all) and overly intrusive crowd noise. This set is drawn from Gaye's final tour in 1983, and while it's interesting to hear a ten-minute version of "Sexual Healing," one of Marvin Gaye's greatest songs, and a clear statement of his major theme -- the use of love, lust, and sex to reach out to God -- nothing here is even close to essential.© Steve Leggett /TiVo

After two delectable EPs, Benjamin Clementine has finally brought out his first album, At Least for Now. An impressive record. It is the strong, demanding work of a true voice, literally and figuratively. He is as charismatic a figure as those on whose shoulders he stands. It is hard not to think of Nina Simone, for example, when one hears the grain in Clementine's voice and his connection with the piano. But she is also there in his relationships to the musical styles which he mixes and matches with charm and ease. Jazz, soul, folk, blues and pop: At Least for Now makes no distinctions, eschewing labels because it is confident of its own vision... Even the instrumentation here alternates between the nakedness of a solo piano and the power of a violin section. A great aficionado of Maria Callas, but also of Léo Ferré and Jacques Brel, Clementine is also a fine raconteur. And so we will let ourselves be carried away by his storytelling. A star is well and truly born. © MD/Qobuz

With a few lineup changes at the start, and a couple hiatuses since, the Feelies have been together for over 45 years now. The band upended traditional rock 'n' roll cliches and structure to arrive at their own beautiful jingle-jangle mourning, propelled by a submerged and insistent force—oh, let's just call it Jersey motorik. Their music is characterized by strict attention to volume, repetition, and the implementation of subtle changes in tempo and dynamics. Fans of the band have longed for a full-length live album for years; with their Springsteen-length sets and seemingly endless bursts of energy, the Feelies are among the greatest live bands in the world, after all. But the group was too perfectionist to ever allow such a thing to happen with their own songs. Here's a great solution, then: Some Kinda Love, a sprawling set of 18 Velvet Underground songs, recorded at Jersey City's White Eagle Hall in 2018.We all know the adage that, while it didn't sell too well upon release, every kid who bought the Velvet Underground's first album later went and started a band. And from their start in the late 1970s in a Haledon, New Jersey garage, the Feelies showed themselves to be a particularly smart, suburban variant of the Reedophile. They were of the punk era, and absolutely informed by it, especially in their first recordings. But they did so without making too much of a fuss at the hairdresser. With their buttoned-up intensity, emphasis on those quiet-loud shifts, ironic lyrics, and the sort of harmonic guitar solos one could sing along to note-for-note, the Feelies were a clear template for what became known in the 1980s as indie-rock, and were a huge influence on a swath of acts who came later, from REM to Sonic Youth, and Yo La Tengo to Galaxie 500.This recording is such a treat. The album starts with "Sunday Morning," the first song on VU's first album, then closes out with "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'," the last song on their final studio album, Loaded. Such attention to detail shows you that you are about to get taken to school, so sit down, shut up, and listen loud. Different band members take charge on lead vocals depending on the song, which is swell and is a nod to their extended family of bands the Trypes, Yung Wu, and Speed the Plough. Glenn Mercer's vocals at times channel the exact timbre of mid-to-late period Reed (especially on "New Age") that it feels like a seance. The Feelies know these songs so well, and they simply appropriate the structures and chord changes with love enough to perform them straight ahead here ("Sweet Jane," "What Goes On"), and stretched-into-just-shy-of-oblivion there ("All Tomorrow's Parties," "Oh Sweet Nuthin'"). They absolutely steamroll through and inject new life into songs you've heard a million times, like "I'm Waiting For My Man," "Run Run Run," and especially an amped-up "White Light/White Heat." Some Kinda Love might prove to be the best tribute record of the 2020s. The only thing missing from it is a half hour version of "Sister Ray." © Mike McGonigal/Qobuz

Ten years after Amy Winehouse's tragic and untimely death, the BBC is unearthing an impressive body of live recordings made by a singer who was unique among contemporary soul artists. This is actually a much-augmented version of At the BBC, which originally came out in 2012 with 24 tracks. This 2021 version of At the BBC packs 38 tracks (from 2004-2009) and over two hours of music: proof of this artist's power, as well as a document of her sometimes-ambiguous relationship with the scene. Here you can find Winehouse's performances on shows hosted by Jo Whiley, Jools Holland, and the late Pete Mitchell, who were always great champions of hers. On top of that, we have concerts recorded by UK radio (two with the Modfather, Paul Weller, making a guest appearance), as well as recordings of more intimate shows. In front of an audience, Amy would sometimes force her singing, as if tempted to go in for vocal pyrotechnics. But everything here is controlled and classy, as when she revisits standards like Lullaby of Birdland and I Should Care, or on a raw, powerful version of Rehab with Mitchell in 2006..During the 2000s, women soul singers were few and far between, and fewer still were those who really tried to develop and build on the eternal soul music laid down by Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Dinah Washington and Marlena Shaw. As At the BBC reminds us, Amy Winehouse had a lithe, strong voice, real songs (which she wrote herself, unlike most of her peers), production values that felt vintage (but never old-fashioned), and a superb brass section. These unique traits all shine on the final part of this 2021 re-release of At the BBC with a 2007 concert at London's Porchester Hall, ending with a spicy cover of Monkey Man by Toots and the Maytals, which the Specials – adored by Winehouse – also revisited on their debut album. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz