Nearly a quarter decade after they shook up radio with their Southern-fried Faces revival, Shake Your Moneymaker, the Black Crowes—that is, let's be honest, brothers Chris and Rich Robinson—are back with a ninth album that embraces their crushed velvet and cracked leather roots. Happiness Bastards could've come out in 1990 or, more aptly, 1970 or '71, filed next to the Stones and the Faces and James Gang. "Dirty Cold Sun" nods to the latter: blistering funk with deep-fried Southern rock guitar and piston rhythm, leaving nothing on the table. The guitar riffs, of course, come from the great Rich Robinson, king of open tuning, who had fallen into a rut during the late aughts (the less said about those albums, the better) but sounds rejuvenated on tracks like the urgent "Rats and Clowns." His brother, meanwhile, seems like no decades have passed, that signature rasp honed to a fine point. "Bedside Manners" tears it up with greasy guitar and boogie piano frills, then slows its roll, as Chris does his usual motormouth riffing—spray-painting every corner with "huh" and "oh!" The brothers did well by choosing Jay Joyce to produce; he's excellent at pushing artists with a dark outlaw edge (Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Cage the Elephant) toward a multi-hued palette. "Cross Your Fingers" starts out as a ballad, then kicks into a confident, liquid-bass strut accented by Merry Clayton-style backing vocals. "Well, I stand accused on the shore of a stormy sea … And I survived the bullet you shot right through my heart/ And in this crime, I have surely taken part," Chris sings in what could be an omission of the vainglory and rivalry that drove a wedge between the brothers for years. There are other nods to their shared history. Stomping "Follow the Moon" could be an outtake from their Amorica album, and the vocal melody of "Wanting and Waiting"'s verses sound a lot like "Jealous Again" from 1990. But there are also a couple of left turns. "Flesh Wound" is a shit-kicker, its pop-punk beat and revved-up rockabilly guitar offering levity amidst the Stonesy shadows; you wouldn't want a whole album of it, and it's probably going to piss off some fans, but it's a fun novelty. And "Kindred Friend" is a beautiful break from the regular programming; there is no juke-joint bite to this Lennon-esque ballad. There is one wasted moment on Happiness Bastards. Country star Lainey Wilson signs up for harmony on swampy, gospel-tinged "Wilted Rose," but her powerhouse is too low in the mix to matter. Wilson is a master at duets (see: Jelly Roll, Hardy, Cole Swindell); too bad the Crowes couldn't make room for her.  © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Aside from the experimental side project Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats was the first album Frank Zappa recorded as a solo artist sans the Mothers, though he continued to employ previous musical collaborators, most notably multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood. Other than another side project -- the doo wop tribute Cruising With Ruben and the Jets -- Hot Rats was also the first time Zappa focused his efforts in one general area, namely jazz-rock. The result is a classic of the genre. Hot Rats' genius lies in the way it fuses the compositional sophistication of jazz with rock's down-and-dirty attitude -- there's a real looseness and grit to the three lengthy jams, and a surprising, wry elegance to the three shorter, tightly arranged numbers (particularly the sumptuous "Peaches en Regalia"). Perhaps the biggest revelation isn't the straightforward presentation, or the intricately shifting instrumental voices in Zappa's arrangements -- it's his own virtuosity on the electric guitar, recorded during extended improvisational workouts for the first time here. His wonderfully scuzzy, distorted tone is an especially good fit on "Willie the Pimp," with its greasy blues riffs and guest vocalist Captain Beefheart's Howlin' Wolf theatrics. Elsewhere, his skill as a melodist was in full flower, whether dominating an entire piece or providing a memorable theme as a jumping-off point. In addition to Underwood, the backing band featured contributions from Jean-Luc Ponty, Lowell George, and Don "Sugarcane" Harris, among others; still, Zappa is unquestionably the star of the show. Hot Rats still sizzles; few albums originating on the rock side of jazz-rock fusion flowed so freely between both sides of the equation, or achieved such unwavering excitement and energy.© Steve Huey /TiVo

Rock music needs its rebel hounds and few today can equal the brainy abandon regularly displayed by Protomartyr's furious vocalist Joe Casey. Making energetic post punk dependent on the loud-soft dynamic that was once Nirvana's domain, these Detroiters are centered around the colorful Casey whose tortured, reverb-enhanced haranguing sucks up all the oxygen and catches every eye. While he does occasionally try to sing, as on "Tip The Creator," a song he says is about, "feeling completely lost with new technologies and my confusion over how people could worship the scumbags who run these dehumanizing companies," Casey's inner demon is his superpower. It enables him to convincingly spit out tangled lines like "A demigod in Toughskins busts in fills the jelly glasses to the brim/ 'Hey you old fuck, take a chair, see if you're gonna win the tontine'" ("Fun in Hi Skool"). Few frontmen outside of Iggy Pop would even try to muster the twistedness and convincing snarl of "Elimination Dances" ("I was sucking on a rubber ear/ For your and my amusement/ Terms of service, they ain't so clear/ Pale youth is my replacement"). While Casey is the seething cauldron out front, a truly great band toil away behind him. The musicianship is superb and the band is at its best when the songs fuse with Casey's dramatic energies, rather than being just inert settings for his angsty bellowing. Recorded in Texas, Protomartyr's sixth record features Greg Ahee's guitar showers and rolling beats, all set to a customary cinematic sweep. This time the influence of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western soundtracks comes through, a flavor best heard in "We Know The Rats," whose title sums up the band's zeitgeist. "3800 Tigers" somehow successfully splices the number of the endangered species estimated to be left in the wild today with speculation on what the Detroit baseball team will resemble centuries from now. Lest anyone think this is indie rock immune to the granddaddy of all human frailties, the subject of love is eventually debated, most fervently in "Polacrilex Kid" where Casey agonizes over the question of "Can you hate yourself and still deserve love?" Formal Growth in The Desert is a feast of evolving space and textures by the perpetually unsatisfied. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

Few albums have been so appropriately named as Aerosmith's 1976 classic Rocks. Despite hard drug use escalating among bandmembers, Aerosmith produced a superb follow-up to their masterwork Toys in the Attic, nearly topping it in the process. Many Aero fans will point to Toys as the band's quintessential album (it contained two radio/concert standards after all, "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion"), but out of all their albums, Rocks did the best job of capturing Aerosmith at their most raw and rocking. Like its predecessor, a pair of songs have become their most renowned -- the menacing, hard rock, cowboy-stomper "Back in the Saddle," as well as the downright viscous funk groove of "Last Child." Again, even the lesser-known tracks prove essential to the makeup of the album, such as the stimulated "Rats in the Cellar" (a response of sorts to "Toys in the Attic"), the Stonesy "Combination," and the forgotten riff-rocker "Get the Lead Out." Also included is the apocalyptic "Nobody's Fault," the up-and-coming rock star tale of "Lick and a Promise," and the album-closing ballad "Home Tonight." With Rocks, Aerosmith appeared to be indestructible.© Greg Prato /TiVo

John Williams' score to the 1989 adventure Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade wraps the blockbuster series on a suitably rousing note. While adhering to the action-meets-suspense-meets-comedy formula outlined via the previous films, Williams never succumbs to repetition or mere recycling, instead investing his themes with a rapturous joy that's undeniably infectious. From the mischievous "Indy's Very First Adventure" to the menacing "Brother of the Cruciform Sword," Williams' melodies operate in broad, vivid strokes, forgoing nuance in favor of larger than life thrills and chills. There's no denying Williams does this sort of thing better than anyone else, however, and for all its seeming simplicity, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade makes for genuinely exciting listening.© Jason Ankeny /TiVo

The number of metal bands formed after the turn of the century that have managed to become real headliners can be counted on one's fingers. Powerwolf is one of them. Call of the Wild is their tenth album: the group was formed in 2004 and has been releasing records like clockwork ever since. The band has stuck, limpet-like, to its chosen style (power metal) from the outset. But over the years it has added various spices to its unchanged basic recipe in order to avoid the "photocopier" effect that plagues this rather formalised genre. The increasingly grandiloquent Powerwolf serves up a collection of hymns with some larger than life choruses. Increasingly focused on arrangements worthy of a big-screen film soundtrack, the quintet's music gives pride of place to Falk Maria Schlegel's flamboyant keyboard performances, which are better for creating a cinematic atmosphere than those of many competitors, who often struggle to recreate the majesty of a symphony orchestra with two Casios and a Roland. With Call of the Wild, Powerwolf could even appeal to fans of musicals: their music is always melodic and accessible to a wide audience, and Attila Dorn's vocals remind one of the powerful and spirited performances for which Demis Roussos became famous. The reference to Roussos might raise eyebrows at first glance, but it is actually much more accurate than you might think. Unsurprisingly, the band have announced that they are planning a very major stage production for their coming tour. It makes sense: it's hard to imagine such a forceful musical explosion being performed without a visual counterpart to match. Bursting with out-of-the-box hits (Beast of Gévaudan, Dancing with the Dead, or the lighter Undress to Confess), Call of the Wild is a very smart move by the Saarbrücken band: it's accessible for a lot of people but as power metal, it is still eminently credible and expertly written so as not to alienate purists. Great work. © Charlélie Arnaud/Qobuz

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

Considering that Sonic Youth lost Jim O'Rourke and found the custom-tweaked, irreplaceable guitars that were stolen in 1999 before heading into the studio to make Rather Ripped, it seemed that the album could be a big departure from what they'd been doing on Murray Street and Sonic Nurse -- possibly a return to the kind of music they could only make with those instruments, or perhaps an entirely different approach that reflected their revamped, old-is-new-again lineup. Rather Ripped ends up being of a piece with their previous two albums, and often plays like a stripped-down, slightly less-inspired Sonic Nurse. Once again, Kim Gordon contributes some of the best tracks here; "Reena" and "Jams Run Free" are equal parts dreamy and driving, while "The Neutral" is a sweet, low-key love song. Thurston Moore contributes a gently but powerfully political track à la Sonic Nurse's "Peace Attack" with "Do You Believe in Rapture?," a reflection on peace and apocalypse that's mostly serene, even if the guitar harmonics throughout the song add shivers of doubt and tension. "Rats" is a standard-issue Lee Ranaldo song, freewheeling and poetic (and with lines like "Let me place you in my past/With other precious toys," it has the sharpest lyrics on Rather Ripped), even if it's not quite as amazing as the previous album's "New Hampshire." Rather Ripped's rock songs are solid, but not amazing -- the interplay of Moore's and Ranaldo's guitars and Steve Shelley's drumming are the best things about "Sleepin' Around" and "What a Waste." Actually, the more atmospheric songs end up being some of the most compelling. "Lights Out" reeks of whispery, late-night cool, and the closing track, "Or," is one of the sparest and most oddly unsettling songs Sonic Youth has done in a while (not to mention a reminder that quiet doesn't always mean peaceful in this band's world). Rather Ripped is also surprisingly lean, with the songs on its first half feeling so tightly structured that they seem like radio edits. Only "Turquoise Boy" and "Pink Steam" really open up and deliver Sonic Youth's famously sprawling, jam-based sound. If Rather Ripped is a tiny bit disappointing, it's only because the band's playing outpaces their songwriting ever so slightly. It's a solidly good album, and if taken as part of a trio of albums with Sonic Nurse and Murray Street, it shows that Sonic Youth is still in a comfortable yet creative groove, not a rut. © Heather Phares /TiVo

Will to Power is the tenth studio album from Swedish power metal outfit Arch Enemy. Produced by bandmembers Michael Amott and Daniel Erlandsson, the five-piece deliver a selection of brutal, riff-heavy metal tracks with vocalist Alissa White-Gluz's uncompromising guttural growl.© Rich Wilson /TiVo