Jason Isbell certainly knows about the elation that comes from success and validation. He has yet to stumble in a solo career that began in 2007, a kind of roll most musicians only dream of. But on Weathervanes, his first album of originals since 2020's just-as-the-pandemic-struck Reunions, Isbell returns to examining what he calls "boundaries" and the sticky riddle of how to "keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you're growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself." An expressive vocalist who's at his best singing his own songs (the mark of all great songwriters), Isbell is one of the craftiest, most honest songwriters working today. His genius lies in his ability to mix troubled tales of sharp-eyed realism with a fascination for humanity's cruelty, regret, and redemption. As a master lyricist, he can open this record with a raw tune like "Death Wish," because of couplets like, "Did you ever love a woman with a death wish/ Something in her eyes like flipping off a light switch" and "Who's gonna save you, who's left to pray to/ What's the difference in a breakdown and a breakthrough?" While he has a poet's eye for details like "thick cut bacon on Texas toast" and "Got square-toed boots so he ain't for real/ Wouldn't last five minutes on a pedal steel" ("Strawberry Woman"), his storytelling succeeds because of the grace with which he encapsulates emotional quagmires as he does in the nervous brushes-on-cymbals hymn "If You Insist": "We're running out of options/ I'll wait outside the door/ If you insist on being lonely/ I might wait a minute more." Occasionally, there's even a touch of humor as in the opening lines of "Cast Iron Skillet": "Don't wash the cast iron skillet/ Don't drink and drive, you'll spill it." Given his rising celebrityhood it's not surprising the film business would come calling; Isbell has a part in Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Watching the director gave the songwriter a new vision for collaboration, and here his co-producing partnership with Matt Pence (Centro-matic, Justin Townes Earle, Elle King) resulted in a sound that is full and rich without surrendering to excessive loudness. His sensitive, well-oiled band the 400 Unit, with stalwarts Derry deBorja (keyboards) and Sadler Vaden (guitar), ably add atmosphere and support Isbell throughout but especially on electrified rockers like the pounding "When We Were Close" and "This Ain't It," the latter echoing '70s Southern rock by way of the Marshall Tucker Band. Listen closely, Isbell's artistry continues.  © Robert Baird/Qobuz

Pablo Honey in no way was adequate preparation for its epic, sprawling follow-up, The Bends. Building from the sweeping, three-guitar attack that punctuated the best moments of Pablo Honey, Radiohead create a grand and forceful sound that nevertheless resonates with anguish and despair -- it's cerebral anthemic rock. Occasionally, the album displays its influences, whether it's U2, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., or the Pixies, but Radiohead turn clichés inside out, making each song sound bracingly fresh. Thom Yorke's tortured lyrics give the album a melancholy undercurrent, as does the surging, textured music. But what makes The Bends so remarkable is that it marries such ambitious, and often challenging, instrumental soundscapes to songs that are at their cores hauntingly melodic and accessible. It makes the record compelling upon first listen, but it reveals new details with each listen, and soon it becomes apparent that with The Bends, Radiohead have reinvented anthemic rock.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Born out of jam sessions where the band went into the studio with no preconceived notions other than preselected tunings and rhythms, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard prove yet again on Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava that they haven't run out of ideas even after releasing more records per year than most bands do in a lifetime. Despite its origins as a freeform workout, the final product actually has structure and purpose thanks to the editing job the band's Stu MacKenzie did and the overdubs that the rest of the gang added later. It's definitely not as directed as some of their concept albums; the main point seems to be getting loose and loud while delving into the vagaries of nature and their standby concern: global catastrophe. The songs are long, but don't meander much -- the guitars have more bite than a pit-full of snakes and MacKenzie made sure to add dynamic shifts and the occasional chorus as he went. It's nothing new for a band that has displayed no fear when it comes to stretching out past the ten-minute mark; they've never been tied to any rules and that's what makes them so freeing and inspiring to listen to. If they want to dip into some reggae-adjacent grooving ("Mycelium") that's totally cool. If they want to veer into cop-show jazz with wah-wah pedals, staccato bass runs, and silky flutes, more power to them. Murky Afropop blues jams -- "Magma" -- that unspool over nine tightly scripted minutes? Yes, that works. Heavy prog-jazz doom rockers -- "Gliese 710" -- that combine Brubeck-on-downers piano chords with blown-out, amp-inflaming guitars, and far-out sax blowing? Perfect! Also on point are rippling funk rockers ("Iron Lung") and ("Hell's Itch") that have the feel of Santana, -- if they were beach rats from Australia. The latter song really lets loose with some fret-melting guitar dueling that escapes being indulgent thanks to the sheer intensity of the playing. When the song ends after 14 sweaty minutes, the first instinct isn't to faint from exhaustion, it's to rewind the song to the beginning and jump back into the magical world they created. That's the feeling the whole album engenders. Unlike some of their efforts, which can wear out their welcome in spots, there isn't a moment of boredom or repetition here. Amazingly, it's another fresh start for the band that's on par with career high points like Butterfly 3000, Nonagon Infinity, or Flying Microtonal Banana. King Gizzard are restless and brilliant and listeners must follow everything they do like a hawk because they might unleash something classic, just like they did with Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava.© Tim Sendra /TiVo

Though it was conceived as a mere cash-in for the long-awaited return of the original Black Sabbath, 1998's Reunion is as close to an official live album as the band has had in their historic 30-year career. 1980's Live at Last was released without their permission, and 1982's Live Evil featured then-singer Ronnie James Dio. With this in mind, the band must be commended on the excellent quality of the recordings, which include their most enduring classics ("War Pigs," "Paranoid," "Iron Man"), as well as a few surprises ("Dirty Women," "Behind the Wall of Sleep"), and were culled from a series of concerts in their native Birmingham in December 1997. The real key to this album, however, is the band's ability to avoid the most common pitfall of live recordings: speeding up the songs. This patience is crucial, since such Sabbath staples as "Sweet Leaf," "Black Sabbath," and "Snowblind" owe much of their unique personality and somber atmospherics to the band's trademark "snail's pace." "Children of the Grave" proves itself once again as one of the band's most dependable live favorites, and the massive riffs of "Into the Void" are simply timeless. The two brand new studio tracks are another treat for longtime fans, and while "Selling My Soul" is rather mundane, "Psycho Man" is absolutely incredible thanks to its slow intro and raging final riff.© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo

Mandy, Indiana's debut album has been a long time coming, some three years after the Mancunian group captured attention with its first singles. Since then, the band's post-punk sound has grown more ominous as the world's political landscape has become divisively darker. "The themes of revolution and a need to stop the rise of fascism are very present in the lyrics," singer Valentine Caulfield has said. Sleazy and slinky, "Pinking Shears" features Caulfield, who sings in her native French, delivering what sounds like a playground chant but is actually extremely bleak: "This shitty world has worn me out ... I no longer want to wake up/ When we let humans die/ In the Mediterranean Sea/ In unheated buildings/ In our countries of big freaks/ When we choose our refugees/ Only blondes are allowed in." "Injury Detail," meanwhile, throbs and kicks out a manic dance floor beat, applying the monotony of video-game action as a way of getting through the day: "Player 1, prepare yourselves ... Up down/ Down, left/ Left right/ Right, up," ad infinitum, Caulfield orders, before declaring: "Finish off your opponent." The band chose to record the album in parts and pieces at unusual locations, from a Bristol shopping mall to a cave in the West Country to Gothic crypts, while splicing in lo-fi field recordings of, for example, a herd of Swiss cows. According to guitarist and producer Scott Fair, "It's about us capturing things happening in a specific place at that moment." "The Driving Rain (18)" opens with the sound of exactly that, a sort of cleansing relief before the song is taken over by needling synth and intermittent sparks of tumbling drums, with Caulfield's vocals layered and layered in AutoTune, like an AI angel chorus with a mind of its own. Caulfield has said that her therapist told her to utilize her anger about the world, which emerges as a brilliant disturbance in "Drag (Crashed)," cataloging shitty things said to and about women, like "I prefer natural girls, but you look tired" and "She's gonna pop some fly buttons/ You're going to need a gun to fend off the boys"—a comment made about the singer when she was just a toddler. She sounds caught behind a metallic wall as she hollers and hisses her words over a siren-guitar skronk and horror-movie screams. "Iron Maiden" is a trudging funeral march punctuated with shocking guitar brightness that builds to a blinding frequency and, low in the background, a wail of anguish. And "Peach Fuzz" comes on like a war whoop, its Centipede-esque video game squiggles chasing the beat; if it were soundtracking a movie, this would be a breaking-point scene, the main character drugged and sweaty, strobe lights illuminating the cartoon grotesquerie of a late-night dance floor. "It's not a revolt, it's a revolution," Caulfield proclaims. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

A heavy metal cornerstone that heralded the arrival of Bruce Dickinson, solidifying the band's classic sound as well as their legacy.© TiVo

When Mastodon first reared its bucktoothed head in 2001 with the Lifesblood EP, the scriveners of metal took note: here was something promising. With 2002's Remission, the promise was kept; it was a debut that puzzled and excited listeners with an amalgam of styles: hardcore punk's intensity and angular chops; death metal's squealing, complex guitars; a heaviness usually the province of sludge and doom metal; and drumming that risked its integrity and ventured into the territory of wank by courting progressive rock and jazz. (Has anyone other than Magma's Christian Vander dared to marry percussion this complex to metal this extreme?) Other bands have flirted with this territory, most notably Dillinger Escape Plan, but their attack always had one foot firmly planted in punk's messy metalcore backyard. Mastodon, however, are leveraging with all hooves staked in the murky underworld swamp of extreme metal. We are now out of Remission and into 2004's highly anticipated follow-up, Leviathan, which again puzzles and will surely alienate one old fan for every two new admirers it gathers in its net. The naysayers will note that too many concessions were made on Leviathan in order to gain a wider audience, that the production is too polished and the vocals too melodic, and they are right. On Remission there was a claustrophobic paranoia, a suffocating heaviness like an elephant's heel pressing on someone's chest; its vocals were the raw hardcore screams of an anarchist drill sergeant. Leviathan digs out of the boot camp stampede and seeks out even heavier environs, going where few bands have gone before, straight down into the ocean. However, the studio polish of producer Matt Bayles that will be agonized by underground purists turns out to be just surface glare. Lurking beneath is an expansiveness more massive than anything found on the shores. The sound on Leviathan seems bottomless and infinite in the best possible way: it's not a dip in the pool; it's a headlong cliff dive into deep waters. There are remarkable no-they-didn't, yes-they-did changes littering Leviathan like chum in shark territory. "Megalodon" moves from angular post-hardcore to chugging boogie thrash with deceptive ease, turning from one to the other with a Southern rawk guitar lick sure to have Duane Allman raise a bony hand in deathly devil-horned approval. It's not just that the sound is now "oceanic," either; metal has always had a tendency to rehash the same dark themes and few bands have the wherewithal to attempt to broaden that vision. Leviathan may not be an out and out concept album, but it's awfully close and thank god they didn't choose anything as cheesy as a blind kid playing pinball. Instead, Mastodon's chosen guide is Moby Dick, and a good portion of the lyrical themes on songs like "Blood and Thunder," "I Am Ahab," "Aqua Dementia," and "Seabeast" are based on Herman Melville's dystopian waters. It's a good fit with the music, too. Filtered through Melville's spyglass, the watery tales and creatures of Leviathan are even more paranoid and intense than the more terrestrial Remission. Those who choose to follow Mastodon into the sea will surely agree.© Wade Kergan /TiVo

Returning with a largely revamped lineup, Swedish power metallers Sabaton narrow their thematic focus on their seventh studio album, Heroes. Rather than tackling the large-scale battles they have in the past, the band focuses their lyrics on individual feats of wartime heroics. While the scope of the songs might be smaller, the music is still as grand as ever, thanks in part to guitarists Chris Rörland and Thobbe Englund, and drummer Hannes van Dahl, all of whom make their first appearance on a Sabaton album. Helping to provide an appropriately epic atmosphere, the new additions make a fine first showing for themselves, allowing Sabaton to deliver an album of properly heroic, heavy metal battle hymns. © Gregory Heaney /TiVo

The Sacrament of Sin is the seventh studio album from German power-metal outfit Powerwolf and follows their 2015 release Blessed & Possessed. Recorded at the beginning of 2018 at the Fascination Street Studios in Örebrö, Sweden with producer Jens Bogren (Amon Amarth, Opeth), the album sees the group deliver a collection of bold, anthemic power metal in their trademark style.© Rich Wilson /TiVo