Given the title of its sixth release, it's fair to wonder if Mastodon is hinting at 2011's The Hunter or its back catalog. Many of the tracks on Once More 'Round the Sun dig into the band's seemingly inexhaustible bag of monstrous riffs and wonderfully fractured motifs. That said, as a collective, they unapologetically explore the more polished and accessible songwriting and performing craft found on The Hunter. This set marks a fork in the road where Mastodon evolves once more, to cross over from metal's angular, sludgy power to adrenaline-fueled, hook-laden, hard rock. The album was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, best known for his work with Foo Fighters and Rush. The sound Mastodon pursues here draws inspiration from the '70s, without remotely being an exercise in nostalgia. There is one notable exception; it's deliberate and obvious: "The High Road" boasts unapologizing Thin Lizzy worship, albeit ambitiously updated. (Who better?) Its verse/riff structure weds Lynott's rhythmic sensibility to Mastodon's dynamic aggression. The anthemic chorus melody and harmonies, and twinned lead guitar roar, were trademarked by Lizzy's Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham long ago. "Chimes at Midnight" is intense, fueled by a mammoth chugging riff. It lets the "drop D" freak flag fly, with a near-shouted vocal, harmonic chorus, and spacy six-string interludes. "The Motherload," with its swaggering guitar heroics, is a wound-out yet nearly hummable prog melody, with a relentless bass and snare attack. "Aunt Lisa," with its knotty guitar intro, contains processed vocals, a series of rising and falling key changes, and the Coathangers guesting -- cheerleader style -- in a chanted vocal chorus à la Faith No More's "Be Aggressive!" There are also some substantive guitar pyrotechnics in the extended solos in "Halloween" and "Ember City," which, due to their imagination and focus, add dimension to them as songs. "Diamond in the Witch House" is a sprawling, nearly eight-minute closing jam. Neurosis' Scott Kelly and his menacing growl guest as it lumbers, trudges, and lurches ever forward (longtime fans will likely dig this). Once More 'Round the Sun furthers what Mastodon began on The Hunter: expanding their music past metal's rigid borders -- toward an integrative sound that doesn't leave metal out.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Given the title of its sixth release, it's fair to wonder if Mastodon is hinting at 2011's The Hunter or its back catalog. Many of the tracks on Once More 'Round the Sun dig into the band's seemingly inexhaustible bag of monstrous riffs and wonderfully fractured motifs. That said, as a collective, they unapologetically explore the more polished and accessible songwriting and performing craft found on The Hunter. This set marks a fork in the road where Mastodon evolves once more, to cross over from metal's angular, sludgy power to adrenaline-fueled, hook-laden, hard rock. The album was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, best known for his work with Foo Fighters and Rush. The sound Mastodon pursues here draws inspiration from the '70s, without remotely being an exercise in nostalgia. There is one notable exception; it's deliberate and obvious: "The High Road" boasts unapologizing Thin Lizzy worship, albeit ambitiously updated. (Who better?) Its verse/riff structure weds Lynott's rhythmic sensibility to Mastodon's dynamic aggression. The anthemic chorus melody and harmonies, and twinned lead guitar roar, were trademarked by Lizzy's Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham long ago. "Chimes at Midnight" is intense, fueled by a mammoth chugging riff. It lets the "drop D" freak flag fly, with a near-shouted vocal, harmonic chorus, and spacy six-string interludes. "The Motherload," with its swaggering guitar heroics, is a wound-out yet nearly hummable prog melody, with a relentless bass and snare attack. "Aunt Lisa," with its knotty guitar intro, contains processed vocals, a series of rising and falling key changes, and the Coathangers guesting -- cheerleader style -- in a chanted vocal chorus à la Faith No More's "Be Aggressive!" There are also some substantive guitar pyrotechnics in the extended solos in "Halloween" and "Ember City," which, due to their imagination and focus, add dimension to them as songs. "Diamond in the Witch House" is a sprawling, nearly eight-minute closing jam. Neurosis' Scott Kelly and his menacing growl guest as it lumbers, trudges, and lurches ever forward (longtime fans will likely dig this). Once More 'Round the Sun furthers what Mastodon began on The Hunter: expanding their music past metal's rigid borders -- toward an integrative sound that doesn't leave metal out.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

With their 1983 debut, the Violent Femmes got the ball rolling for what would become alternative rock, using acoustic instruments to deliver an unexpectedly raw blend of punk angst and catchy-if-neurotic songwriting. The band's subsequent '80s albums were a mixed bag, yielding occasional highlights but not quite gelling into anything as consistently powerful as the first album. Released in 1991, fifth album Why Do Birds Sing? was something of a return to form, if only in terms of having song after song of the kind of weirdly fractured folk pop that represented the band at their most accessible. Upbeat and straightforward album-opener "American Music" is somewhere between campfire song and pop masterpiece, with subtle production details like sleighbells and sparingly used organ runs growing along with the song's steady build. More blatant stabs at pop come with a snarling cover of Culture Club's hit "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," the inverted girl group appropriation of "Look Like That," and the driving college rock of "Used to Be." The band's penchant for sardonic and juvenile humor remains intact on the faux-blues stomp of "Girl Trouble" (vocalist Gordon Gano returning to the refrain "Have mercy on me, I've got girl trouble up the ass!") and the shadowy clunk of "Make More Money," a bitter revenge story of the tormented high school nerd becoming a rich rock star. When Why Do Birds Sing? was first released, the Violent Femmes were already a decade into their career, enjoying cult success but still living mostly in the shadow of their debut. The album would be one of their most commercially successful up until that point, despite some critics finding it disjointed and a little too all-over-the-place stylistically. Removed from the time it originally arrived in, Why Do Birds Sing? feels more solid, with its lesser moments strung together by some of the best songs the band ever penned, and production that makes space for both the Femmes' anxious demeanor and their not-so-secret love of big, dumb pop songs. © Fred Thomas /TiVo

Given the title of its sixth release, it's fair to wonder if Mastodon is hinting at 2011's The Hunter or its back catalog. Many of the tracks on Once More 'Round the Sun dig into the band's seemingly inexhaustible bag of monstrous riffs and wonderfully fractured motifs. That said, as a collective, they unapologetically explore the more polished and accessible songwriting and performing craft found on The Hunter. This set marks a fork in the road where Mastodon evolves once more, to cross over from metal's angular, sludgy power to adrenaline-fueled, hook-laden, hard rock. The album was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, best known for his work with Foo Fighters and Rush. The sound Mastodon pursues here draws inspiration from the '70s, without remotely being an exercise in nostalgia. There is one notable exception; it's deliberate and obvious: "The High Road" boasts unapologizing Thin Lizzy worship, albeit ambitiously updated. (Who better?) Its verse/riff structure weds Lynott's rhythmic sensibility to Mastodon's dynamic aggression. The anthemic chorus melody and harmonies, and twinned lead guitar roar, were trademarked by Lizzy's Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham long ago. "Chimes at Midnight" is intense, fueled by a mammoth chugging riff. It lets the "drop D" freak flag fly, with a near-shouted vocal, harmonic chorus, and spacy six-string interludes. "The Motherload," with its swaggering guitar heroics, is a wound-out yet nearly hummable prog melody, with a relentless bass and snare attack. "Aunt Lisa," with its knotty guitar intro, contains processed vocals, a series of rising and falling key changes, and the Coathangers guesting -- cheerleader style -- in a chanted vocal chorus à la Faith No More's "Be Aggressive!" There are also some substantive guitar pyrotechnics in the extended solos in "Halloween" and "Ember City," which, due to their imagination and focus, add dimension to them as songs. "Diamond in the Witch House" is a sprawling, nearly eight-minute closing jam. Neurosis' Scott Kelly and his menacing growl guest as it lumbers, trudges, and lurches ever forward (longtime fans will likely dig this). Once More 'Round the Sun furthers what Mastodon began on The Hunter: expanding their music past metal's rigid borders -- toward an integrative sound that doesn't leave metal out.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

The greatest classics from The Carpenters have resurfaced in a sublime blend of vocal harmonies and symphonic arrangements. For this project in 2018, Richard Carpenter himself went along to Abbey Road Studios. Their last album in 1981, Made in America, was a half-posthumous album (Richard’s sister Karen having died in 1983 at only 32 years of age) and invoked a certain feeling of nostalgia, showing that this legendary pop group shifting more towards easy-listening could still be deep. However, it is still very rooted in the American culture of the seventies, particularly through the classics Close To You, Rainy Days and Mondays and We’ve Only Just Begun.With this album, the legacy of The Carpenters lives on in an unconventional way. The producers have kept the voices of the original recordings and some instrumental parts, surrounding them with the brand-new sounds of the violins from the London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Thanks to their classy arrangements, these strings tastefully accentuate the romanticism of this timeless pop. © Clotilde Maréchal/Qobuz

Twenty-six years after Oasis' 1996 two-night stint on the grounds of Hertfordshire's Knebworth House, their frontman, Liam Gallagher, achieved the same feat as a solo artist. This live album captures the best takes from his June 2022 Jubilee weekend dates at the same venue in front of 170,000 people. The set leans heavily on Oasis material but also features renditions of songs from his three U.K. number one solo studio albums.© James Wilkinson /TiVo

After The Velvet Underground cut three albums for the jazz-oriented Verve label that earned them lots of notoriety but negligible sales, the group signed with industry powerhouse Atlantic Records in 1970; label head Ahmet Ertegun supposedly asked Lou Reed to avoid sex and drugs in his songs, and instead focus on making an album "loaded with hits." Loaded was the result, and with appropriate irony it turned out to be the first VU album that made any noticeable impact on commercial radio -- and also their swan song, with Reed leaving the group shortly before its release. With John Cale long gone from the band, Doug Yule highly prominent (he sings lead on four of the ten tracks), and Maureen Tucker absent on maternity leave, this is hardly a purist's Velvet Underground album. But while Lou Reed always wrote great rock & roll songs with killer hooks, on Loaded his tunes were at last given a polished but intelligent production that made them sound like the hits they should have been, and there's no arguing that "Sweet Jane" and "Rock and Roll" are as joyously anthemic as anything he's ever recorded. And if this release generally maintains a tight focus on the sunny side of the VU's personality (or would that be Reed's personality?), "New Age" and "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" prove he had hardly abandoned his contemplative side, and "Train Around the Bend" is a subtle but revealing metaphor for his weariness with the music business. Sterling Morrison once said of Loaded, "It showed that we could have, all along, made truly commercial sounding records," but just as importantly, it proved they could do so without entirely abandoning their musical personality in the process. It's a pity that notion hadn't occurred to anyone a few years earlier.© Mark Deming /TiVo

This Life is the ninth studio album from original British boy band Take That and follows 2017's Wonderland. The record sees Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, and Howard Donald deliver a selection of grown-up pop cuts produced by Dave Cobb, Jennifer Decilveo, Ryan Carline, and Barlow himself. The singles "Windows," "Brand New Sun," and "This Life" are included.© Rich Wilson /TiVo

Though the reissue campaign that presented PJ Harvey's albums with their demos was extensive, it still didn't gather everything in her archives. She fills in those gaps with B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, a comprehensive set of harder-to-find and previously unreleased material that covers three decades of music. Kicking off with a handful of previously unreleased demos, the collection celebrates what makes each track special within Harvey's chronology. Short but fully realized versions of "Dry" and "Man-Size" reaffirm that by the time she hits the record button, she knows exactly what she's doing; the guitar and voice sketches of "Missed" and "Highway 61 Revisited" are as formidable as the finished takes; and the demo of the B-side "Me Jane" (yes, that's how thorough this set is) offers one of the Rid of Me era's catchiest songs in an even rawer state. B-Sides, Demos & Rarities reinforces just how vital Harvey's non-album tracks are to her creative trajectory. The uncanny carnival oompah of "Daddy," a "Man-Size" B-side, feels like one of the earliest forays into the eeriness that gave an extra thrill to To Bring You My Love, White Chalk, and much of Harvey's later work. She continues Is This Desire?'s experimentation on "The Bay," which contrasts songwriting befitting a classic folk ballad with pulsing keyboards and jazzy rhythms, and continues to try to make sense of the world's chaos on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era material spanning the whispery Saturn return of "30" to "This Wicked Tongue," an updated expression of biblical sin, desire, and torment that delivers one of the set's most quintessentially PJ Harvey moments. Fittingly for such an anachronistic-sounding album, White Chalk's B-sides reach back to Harvey's earliest days: "Wait" and "Heaven" date back to 1989 and deliver sprightly, strummy folk-pop that's almost unrecognizable as her work. The set's previously unreleased music contains just as many revelations. One of its most notable previously missing puzzle pieces is the demo of Uh Huh Her's title track. A shockingly pure expression of rage, jealousy, and sorrow, it may have been too raw and revealing even for a PJ Harvey album, but it's a shame that it and the like-minded "Evol" didn't make the cut. Conversely, "Why'd You Go to Cleveland," a 1996 collaboration between Harvey and John Parish, and the 2012 demo "Homo Sappy Blues" are downright playful, proving the complete picture of her music includes something akin to fun. Highlights from the collection's 2010s material include "An Acre of Land," a lush ballad rooted in the British folk traditions that are just as essential to her music as punk or the blues, and the 2019 cover of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," which pays homage to a kindred spirit while transforming the song into something more desolate and plaintive. A must-listen for anyone following Harvey's archival series, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities serves as a fascinating parallel primer to her music and the multitudes within it.© Heather Phares /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