It's ironic that the most recognized album of A.R. Rahman is not his best work. For many Rahman fans, Slumdog Millionaire is not exactly the sound that they attribute to him. His Bollywood successes are designed as playback songs rather than as background scores. Thus, with the additional element of vocal melodies, his past accomplishments weigh heavily in public perception of his incredible music. While it very well deserved the enthusiastic applause at the Academy Award and Golden Globe ceremonies, Slumdog Millionaire will ignite lesser fervor in someone who has followed Rahman's music closely over the past two decades. It still has the all-pervading signature sound of Rahman with its brilliant percussion, ominous electronica, and somber crooning, yet it displays a more hurried pace in contrast to his more subtle offerings, in which music serves as a colorful canvas behind beautiful vocal portraits. What's more interesting with this album is the flash of experimentation that wouldn't have been possible in a Bollywood album -- minimalist electronica with "Riots," acid jazz with "Millionaire," and big beat with "Liquid Dance." Rahman packs this album with his usual well-credited crew, including Blaaze for the hip-hop-styled "Gangsta Blues," Sukhwinder Singh for album highlight "Jai Ho," and Suzanne for the lighthearted "Latika's Theme" and "Dreams on Fire." The most talked-about addition in the list of singers here is M.I.A. She delivers exciting vocals on the opening theme "O... Saya." The album also includes an original song from M.I.A.'s Kala album, the hit "Paper Planes" (also here in a special remix), as well as the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy composition "Aaj Ki Raat" from the film Don. The success of Slumdog Millionaire's music can be traced back to the success of the film, and while the world was late in noticing Rahman until Slumdog Millionaire remedied that situation, listeners should explore his other offerings -- both past and, one assumes, future -- that could be considered more highly deserving of accolades. © Bhasker Gupta /TiVo

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A.R. Rahman is best known outside of India for his compositions on the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, but he's written for many film scores. The Best of A.R. Rahman has 14 tracks drawn from ten of them, though nothing from Slumdog Millionaire, which itself would seem to disqualify this as the best possible best-of. The minimal packaging doesn't tell us much about the composer or the recordings, though judging from the copyrights, the material spans 1997 to 2006. What it lacks in annotation, however, it does make up for in quantity, with 73 minutes of music. The music's as much of a mélange of different elements as devotees of Indian soundtracks have come to expect, to varying degrees fusing traditional-inclined Indian instrumentation and melodies with up-to-the-minute technobeats and energetic, at times sexy vocals. Even measured against the usual eclecticism of such productions, Rahman is diverse, able to devise fairly frivolous dance numbers, straight-ahead romantic Indian pop, airy ballads, and pastoral pieces with a less urban flavor. Not much is easily pigeonholed, however; just when you think Shreya Ghoshal and Uday Mazumdar's "Barso Re" is going to be a pretty traditional tune without a whiff of modernity, the chanting choruses and hard electronic beats take it in a different direction. Not much of this is as eccentric to non-Indian ears as the kind of Bollywood that draws a cult following for its exotic feel, and some pieces, like Lata Mangeshkar's "So Gaye Hain," have a sedate quality with more of the classical-influenced cinematic orchestration many associate with soundtracks the world over. But neither is it too mainstream, though Preeya Kalidas and Raza Jaffrey's "Shakalaka Baby," much of which is sung in English, comes close to being dancefloor filler that could be played almost anywhere in the world without sounding out of the ordinary.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo

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Kacey Musgraves' sixth album, Deeper Well feels like a rewind—not just to her own earlier work, but to a folk-scene era from well before she was born. There are shades of the Mamas and the Papas and the early 1960s Cafe Wha? scene (the album was recorded blocks away, at Greenwich Village’s Electric Lady Studios). It’s not not country, but it’s also far from cowboy-hatted Nashville. Musgraves has described her last record—her "divorce album"—2021's Star-Crossed, as "more dramatic and acerbic, there were a lot more electronic instruments." This time, she's tuning into the world around her, but also trying to figure out the secrets of the cosmos. "My saturn has returned," she sings on the title track—a bit of classic singer-songwriter acoustic pluck that gently tumbles like water over creek rocks—before metaphorically shuddering at someone's "dark energy." Folk-naif "Heart of the Woods" marvels at nature "communicating through the roots of the trees." "I saw a sign or an omen," she declares on "Cardinal," a Hollies-esque number with 12-string guitar and a round-robin bridge. Musgraves has said it's about a real-life pattern of seeing birds and wondering if they were a sign from friend John Prine after the legend passed away in 2020. The bulk of the songs are written with her co-producers Ian Fitchuk, who worked on her last few records, and Daniel Tashian, who also helped out on 2018’s excellent Golden Hour. (It’s no stretch to imagine Star-Crossed never having happened and Deeper Well being the natural progression from Golden Hour.) "The Architect" is the only song here penned with her longtime writing partner Shane McAnally; and yes, it feels a bit more countrified than the others. Musgraves' Texas twang is strong as she questions "are there blueprints or plans?" to life. She adopts a particularly velvet timbre on moody cautionary tale "Lonely Millionaire," which interpolates the song "Kody Blu 31" by Atlanta rapper JID. "Too Good To Be True" borrows from Anna Nalick's "Breathe (2AM)," while "Heaven Is" reimagines a Scottish folk traditional. And Musgraves hasn't abandoned the rebel spirit that got her "Follow Your Arrow" banned from country radio in 2013. "Dinner With Friends" is a dreamy, free-floating gratitude list—"The feeling you feel when you're looking at something you made/ The layers and ruffles in my favorite pink champagne cake"—that calls out "My home state of Texas/ The sky there, the horses and dogs/ But none of their laws." There's not much dynamic range on Deeper Well; Musgraves is in a pleasantly pretty, low-key mood throughout. But there is one stand-out "what was that?!" moment at the bridge of "Anime Eyes," when the love song explodes in a whirlwind psychedelic bridge, as Musgraves breathlessly lets loose with a torrent of sensory emotion: "Ridiculous hazy, crazy, rainbow, explosions of ecstasy ... Happy tears overflowing, lightning bolts so overwhelming!" It's wild and free and DGAF. The album ends, tellingly, on a line from the song of the same name: "Nothing to be scared of." © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

His album Traveller was one of the best country discs of 2015. Over the years, Chris Stapleton has written for the the whole of Nashville (but not only Nashville!), signing hit after hit for Kenny Chesney, George Strait, Adele, Luke Bryan, Tim McGraw and Brad Paisley, and co-writing with Vince Gill, Peter Frampton and Sheryl Crow. The native of Kentucky no longer has much to prove in terms of his songwriting ability… However, getting behind the mic was a different matter: his first solo album which he has record at the age of 37 had to be up to scratch. And it was. Sure, between 2008 and 2010 Stapleton had been at the helm of the SteelDrivers, a decent bluegrass group, but this time it was time for him to write his own record - under his name and no one else's… Traveller proved that Chris Stapleton possessed a truly gifted voice. From the ballads to the considerably more up-tempo tracks, he suited his songs from head to toe, sometimes even adding a touch of southern soul… Two years down the line, the songwriter is back with a superb follow-up: a contemporary country work that preserves tradition while remaining firmly in the present. After a flawless first volume in May 2017 (From A Room: Volume 1), the second volume has been released this December (From A Room: Volume 2)! Recorded in the lair of the famous RCA Studio A in Nashville where Elvis, Waylon Jennings and other legends hung out last century, this record brings out a more rootsy side from its author. Stapleton still sings divinely well, bawling like a wounded wolf when necessary, playing the southern soul lover if needs be, and rolling out small touches of sticky blues. In short, the bearded-man from Lexington slaloms perfectly between the very personal and the more commercial, and at the end of his winding road he has arrived at a record that is every bit as good as volume 1. © MD/Qobuz

Sinfonia of London rose to fame in the 1950s as the leading recording orchestra of the day, appearing in the musical credits of more than 300 films, including the 1958 soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It was reformed by John Wilson in 2018, initially as a recording orchestra, and is made up of some of Europe’s finest orchestral musicians. Their recording of Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp won the orchestral award of the magazine BBC Music and drew critical acclaim worldwide. The Overture from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, which opens this latest programme, is an excellent demonstration of Korngold’s rich, chromatic soundworld, one that set the blueprint for the Hollywood sound for countless composers who followed. Although the songs were written by Harold Arlen, it was Herbert Stothart’s score for The Wizard of Oz that won the Oscar, and it is his suite from the movie that features here. There are also Suites from Max Steiner’s Now, Voyager and Franz Waxman’s Rebecca (here receiving its première recording). Shorter pieces by David Raksin, Frederick Loewe, Johnny Mandel, and Alfred Newman complete this rewarding programme. © Chandos

Bringing huge, Southern rock riffs to the world of slick post-grunge, Black Stone Cherry bring the heavy stuff on their third album, Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea. If Black Stone Cherry have proven that they’re good at anything over the course of their last two albums, it’s that they know when to go big, and they do just that on the album opener, “White Trash Millionaire.” Opening with a stomping riff, the song kicks off the album on the right foot with a stomping down-home country-rock riff. Country swagger dominates the guitar work on “Let Me See You Shake,” a song that seems readymade for the strip club with its sleazy, churning riffage. It’s not all country-influenced hard rock, though, as a good chunk of the album finds the band showing off their more sensitive side with songs like “Won’t Let Go” and “Stay,” which still have some solid rock at their foundation, but lose the confident strut that Black Stone Cherry build for themselves. In a genre that's grown more and more homogeneous as its radio dominance has spread, a band like Black Stone Cherry is kind of refreshing, bringing something a little dirty and grimy to a sound that’s usually so polished, and while it’s definitely more Kid Rock than Lynyrd Skynyrd, it’s got a whole lot more country than some of their contemporaries are bringing to the table.© Gregory Heaney /TiVo

It might not truly seem too good to be true, but a collaborative album from Rick Ross and Meek Mill was just about unimaginable before the old associates squashed any remaining perception of a rift with the pugnacious if cool-headed "Shaq & Kobe." Although nothing else on Too Good to Be True touches that lead single, the LP follows through with a fan-pleasing array of tracks that alternate from unswervingly militant to elegantly soulful. Ross and Meek remain well-matched as partners -- the former's gravelly baritone complementing (and just as often complemented by) the latter's bug-eyed bulletins.© TiVo Staff /TiVo