Roger Waters has never really accepted the fact that Pink Floyd is able to exist without him, both on stage and on record—not that he’d ever admit that. Rick Wright’s death in 2008 seemed to quash any possibility of a reunion, and seeing David Gilmour continue to play Floyd songs must still bother him. After a couple of live tours, The Wall and Us + Them, the singer-bassist found himself stuck in the middle of a pandemic that was pushing everyone to record albums ‘at home’.Consequently, Waters got stuck into a long-distance collaboration with numerous musicians, re-recording Floyd tracks and rearranging them in his own way. His song selection isn’t inconsequential either; he draws from the albums he was heavily involved in writing, namely The Wall and The Final Cut (as well as a track from his solo discography, ‘The Bravery of Being Out of Range’): his way of reminding us who the boss was during his time in Pink Floyd and showing us that songs that are written well in the first place never get old.This is an exciting release, though it doesn’t overtly possess the magic of Waters’ days with Pink Floyd. Comfortably Numb 2022 is a particularly curious track, far more composed and less heroic than the original. It comes in at two minutes longer than the original, too; the numerous choruses at the end attempt to make the listener forget about Gilmour’s sublime guitar solo—a gamble that will inevitably split opinions amongst hardcore fans. This is more than just a new album. The Lockdown Sessions is more of a stylistic exercise that has kept the creator’s creative juices flowing ahead of his farewell tour, This Is Not a Drill. Every hero has the right to take it easy eventually. © Chief Brody/Qobuz

Caroline Polachek's latest album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, has been one of the most highly anticipated albums of the year, arriving on Valentine's Day to the delight of fans around the world. After the success of her debut album, Pang, Polachek's path to this latest project has been a long and winding one, with the artist dropping singles along the way, like breadcrumbs leading us to this pop paradise.As a singer-songwriter and producer, Polachek's unique take on pop music is often described as experimental, but it's her tasteful approach that truly sets her apart. With Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, Polachek invites us onto her island, surrounded by love and masterfully crafted sonic ideas that offer a much-needed palette cleanser in the saccharine-sweet buffet of pop music we are all constantly fed.The album is a mishmash of influences from all genres and eras, creating a sound that feels both timeless and forward-thinking. Each track is a building block, from the opening notes of "Welcome to My Island" to the closing chords of "Billions." On "Pretty In Possible," Polacheck channels the '80s hit "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, giving it a 2023 makeover, while "Bunny is a Rider" delivers a breakbeat, radio-ready hit that's sure to get you moving. Meanwhile, the Spanish guitars on "Sunset" transport us to a world of sun-kissed beaches and endless summers.While some critics might argue that Polachek's abstract lyrics and varied influences create a lack of throughline to the album, the counterpoint could be that this lack of consistency was intentional. By viewing the album as the soundtrack to her world, we can fully immerse ourselves in the sonic experience and discover the beauty in the chaos.  The journey takes the listener from the modern club banger "I Believe" to the ethereal "Butterfly Net," which offers a moment of respite from the chaos. The church bells and swaying harmonies of "Blood and Butter" feel like looking out over the ocean, while the Trinity Children's Choir singing "I never felt so close to you" on the closing track "Billions" brings us full circle on this island of love.Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is passionate, curious and seductive (it could be an alternative soundtrack for the television show White Lotus). While it's hard to predict what she'll do next, one thing is for sure: this is Caroline Polacheck's world, and we're all just living in it. © Jessica Porter-Langson/Qobuz

Arriving swiftly on the heels of Moving on Skiffle, Accentuate the Positive is certainly a kissing cousin to its 2023 companion: it's another spirited revival of a style that a young Van Morrison held dear. Despite being titled after the Johnny Mercer & Harold Arlen standard, Accentuate the Positive isn't an ode to the Great American Songbook. It's nominally a celebration of the early days of rock & roll, an era that did see various styles, attitudes, and demographics mingle, so Morrison's decision to punctuate classics by Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Chuck Willis with pop tunes, country hits, and jump blues isn't far afield: all this music was part of the early explosion of rock & roll. Besides, Van Morrison has never been a rockabilly cat, he's a blues shouter and he plays precisely to those strengths here, leading his band through lively and loving readings of rock & roll oldies, never apologizing for the unabashed nostalgia of the entire enterprise.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

After Fish's departure, Marillion teetered on the brink of collapse: The frontman's distinct voice and poetic prose made him the defining member of the band. One can only imagine how record executives held their collective breath as Steve Hogarth was brought in to take the reins. His first outing with band, 1989's Season's End, removed all doubts about the band's future. Hogarth's unique, expressive voice fit Marillion perfectly; on the full-throttle rock assault of "The Uninvited Guest" or the emotional "After You," Hogarth's singularity is unmistakable. The heartfelt "Easter," with its imaginative electric-acoustic arrangement, is another showcase for Hogarth's talents. Marillion's ability to write music whose ideals live and breathe in the listener continues on Seasons End, particularly on the inspiring "Holloway Girl," which dissects the injustice of incarcerating mentally ill female inmates (at England's Holloway Prison) instead of placing them in appropriate psychiatric facilities. The beautiful "Easter" is the band's plea for peace in Ireland, while "The King of Sunset Town" has its lyrical roots in the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Hogarth's flexible range and beautiful phrasing shine on the entire album. In 1999 Marillion released a remastered version of Seasons End, including a bonus disc of outtakes and alternate versions as well as the previously unreleased "The Bell in the Sea" and "The Release." Both are strong tracks and are welcome additions to the Marillion catalog. While 1995's Afraid of Sunlight is the peak of Marillion's growing, impressive body of work, Season's End shouldn't be missed either.© Jeri Montesano /TiVo

Elton John before his mid-'70s cloudburst of success is a fascinating aural adventure. After the tentative first step of Empty Sky, the muscular songwriting strength of Elton John, the countrified experimentalism of Tumbleweed Connection and the live energy bursting through  17-11-70, Madman Across The Water, now reissued with Bob Ludwig's highly detailed yet full-bodied remastering, is the first album in what would become an amazing four-year run of varied, resourceful, and artfully brilliant collaborations between John and Bernie Taupin.  The pair's trajectory from this point shot skyward into considerable wealth and ever-expanding notoriety. But as John/Taupin efforts go, the highly produced and manicured Madman is also a tale of two records. On the surface there are the obvious, irrepressible hits "Levon" and "Tiny Dancer" that are polished to a high gloss, and like the rest of the album, feature Paul Buckmaster's string arrangements (sometimes to a detriment). But beyond those two tracks, this may be John's moodiest album thanks to darker songs like the title cut with its complex and masterful arrangement, ARP synthesizer, and some of Taupin's most obscure phrases, and the gloomy lament "Goodbye," which closes the album.  And in most other hands, a song like "Indian Sunset," with its overserious and occasionally embarrassing lyrics, could come off as a hackneyed and naively racist tribute to Native Americans, but is partially rescued by John's impassioned singing. Madman is less essential than Honky Château or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road because of low points like the lesser melody of "Holiday Inn," the overproduced massed voices of "All The Nasties," or the impenetrable lyrics of "Rotten Peaches," which seem to tell the story of picking "devil fruit" in a "U.S. State Prison." It is interesting to hear the gusto that John's road band brings to this material. Producer Gus Dudgeon preferred to work with studio musicians and this is the last John record not to feature band members Nigel Olsen (drums) and Dee Murray (bass), though guitarist Davey Johnstone (who still plays with John today) appears on several tracks including playing mandolin and sitar on "Holiday Inn." Ambitious and oddly dark, Madman is the preface for all the glorious pop music to come.  © Robert Baird/Qobuz

In 2015, Melody Gardot stepped out of her comfort zone with Currency of Man, an album which suited her entirely but displayed a more soul’n’blues side. That is not to say that her brilliant past efforts were not in keeping with her musical personality, but it was with this record that she confirmed her love for Philadelphia, the town in which she grew up and where groove holds a different meaning.  Five years later, Sunset in the Blue holds all the hallmarks of a return to the singer’s old days which made Melody Gardot’s name. The album is a stripped-back approach to jazz and bossa-nova as imposed by the unexpected circumstances of the year 2020. When the album was beginning development, the pandemic brought a halt to everything an forced the American to rethink the project. She hence proposed that her associates, spread out all over the world, work from a distance. Melody Gardot was based in Paris, her arranger and conductor Vince Mendoza in Los Angeles and the majority of her musicians in England! Despite these constraints, the miracle record was on course for creation which would span a period of roughly five months. And so, Mendoza found himself conducting on-screen from California with musicians playing in London’s Abbey Road Studios (things weren’t made any easier considering the various time-differences). In addition to Mendoza, Melody Grant recruited a set of silky smooth sound connoisseurs who were also instrumental in the success of 2009’s My One and Only Thrill: the producer Larry Klein and sound engineer Al Schmitt.Upon listening to the end result, however, we soon forget the last-minute DIY means with which this album was made. Because throughout Sunset in the Blue, Melody Gardot maintains a fascinatingly solid and intimate direction. Here we see a return to Gardot whispering hypnotically into the ear as she sings amid intermittent piano phrases and guitars. Her voice gracefully lounges upon a bed of refined and perfectly balanced violin strings. This formula reaches an irresistible climax with the album’s title track as she turns to her much-loved Brazil with tracks like Ninguém, Ninguém and Um Beljo, before she returns to the exquisite-sounding Moon River and I Fall in Love too Easily. A beautiful album which finishes with a somewhat intrusive track, Little Something, a pop duet with Sting that doesn’t really fit in with Sunset in the Blue’s general mood. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Fierce Kate Bush fans who are expecting revelation in Aerial, her first new work since The Red Shoes in 1993, will no doubt scour lyrics, instrumental trills, and interludes until they find them. For everyone else, those who purchased much of Bush's earlier catalog because of its depth, quality, and vision, Aerial will sound exactly like what it is, a new Kate Bush record: full of her obsessions, lushly romantic paeans to things mundane and cosmic, and her ability to add dimension and transfer emotion though song. The set is spread over two discs. The first, A Sea of Honey, is a collection of songs, arranged for everything from full-on rock band to solo piano. The second, A Sky of Honey, is a conceptual suite. It was produced by Bush with engineering and mixing by longtime collaborator Del Palmer.A Sea of Honey is a deeply interior look at domesticity, with the exception of its opening track, "King of the Mountain," the first single and video. Bush does an acceptable impersonation of Elvis Presley in which she examines his past life on earth and present incarnation as spectral enigma. Juxtaposing the Elvis myth, Wagnerian mystery, and the image of Rosebud, the sled from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Bush's synthesizer, sequencer, and voice weigh in ethereally from the margins before a full-on rock band playing edgy and funky reggae enters on the second verse. Wind whispers and then howls across the cut's backdrop as she searches for the rainbow body of the disappeared one through his clothes and the tabloid tales of his apocryphal sightings, looking for a certain resurrection of his physical body. The rest of the disc focuses on more interior and domestic matters, but it's no less startling. A tune called "Pi" looks at a mathematician's poetic and romantic love of numbers. "Bertie" is a hymn to her son orchestrated by piano, Renaissance guitar, percussion, and viols. But disc one's strangest and most lovely moment is in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," scored for piano and voice. It revives Bush's obsessive eroticism through an ordinary woman's ecstatic experience of cleaning after a rainstorm, and placing the clothing of her beloved and her own into the washing machine and observing in rapt sexual attention. She sings "My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers/Oh the waves are going out/My skirt floating up around your waist...Washing machine/Washing machine." Then there's "How to Be Invisible," and the mysticism of domestic life as the interior reaches out into the universe and touches its magic: "Hem of anorak/Stem of a wall flower/Hair of doormat?/Is that autumn leaf falling?/Or is that you walking home?/Is that a storm in the swimming pool?"A Sky of Honey is 42 minutes in length. It's lushly romantic as it meditates on the passing of 24 hours. Its prelude is a short deeply atmospheric piece with the sounds of birds singing, and her son (who is "the Sun" according to the credits) intones, "Mummy...Daddy/The day is full of birds/Sounds like they're saying words." And "Prologue" begins with her piano, a chanted viol, and Bush crooning to romantic love, the joy of marriage and nature communing, and the deep romance of everyday life. There's drama, stillness, joy, and quiet as its goes on, but it's all held within, as in "An Architect's Dream," where the protagonist encounters a working street painter going about his work in changing light: "The flick of a wrist/Twisting down to the hips/So the lovers begin with a kiss...." Loops, Eberhard Weber's fretless bass, drifting keyboards, and a relaxed delivery create an erotic tension, in beauty and in casual voyeurism. "Sunset" has Bush approaching jazz, but it doesn't swing so much as it engages the form. Her voice digging into her piano alternates between lower-register enunciation and a near falsetto in the choruses. There is a sense of utter fascination with the world as it moves toward darkness, and the singer is enthralled as the sun climbs into bed, before it streams into "Sunset," a gorgeous flamenco guitar and percussion-driven call-and-response choral piece -- it's literally enthralling. It is followed by a piece of evening called "Somewhere Between," in which lovers take in the beginning of night. As "Nocturne" commences, shadows, stars, the beach, and the ocean accompany two lovers who dive down deep into one another and the surf. Rhythms assert themselves as the divers go deeper and the band kicks up: funky electric guitars pulse along with the layers of keyboards, journeying until just before sunup. But it is on the title track that Bush gives listeners her greatest surprise. Dawn is breaking and she greets the day with a vengeance. Manic, crunchy guitars play power chords as sequencers and synths make the dynamics shift and swirl. In her higher register, Bush shouts, croons, and trills against and above the band's force. Nothing much happens on Aerial except the passing of a day, as noted by the one who engages it in the process of being witnessed, yet it reveals much about the interior and natural worlds and expresses spiritual gratitude for everyday life. Musically, this is what listeners have come to expect from Bush at her best -- a finely constructed set of songs that engage without regard for anything else happening in the world of pop music. There's no pushing of the envelope because there doesn't need to be. Aerial is rooted in Kate Bush's oeuvre, with grace, flair, elegance, and an obsessive, stubborn attention to detail. What gets created for the listener is an ordinary world, full of magic; it lies inside one's dwelling in overlooked and inhabited spaces, and outside, from the backyard and out through the gate into wonder.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Forty years after its release on the 30th of November 1982, people still name Thriller as one of Michael Jackson’s greatest albums. To mark the occasion, Sony is rolling out the red carpet for the anniversary edition of this masterpiece, including 25 bonus tracks! For this record, which was released in the same year as the Compact Disc, the 24-year-old star once again teamed up with Quincy Jones. The era was also marked by the rise of MTV—which was only a year old at the time—and Michael dreamed of reaching funk lovers as well as rock and pop fans. However, Thriller became what we know it to be because it was essentially a compilation of strong, perfect songs. As Quincy would later say: 'If an album reaches number one, it’s because the songs are perfect to begin with!'Emphasising the role of sound engineer Bruce Swedien and songwriter Rod Temperton, who’d already been involved in Off the Wall, the producer told Rolling Stone magazine in 2009: 'Michael didn’t create Thriller. It takes a team to make an album. He wrote four songs, and sang his ass off, but he didn’t conceive it. That’s not how an album works.' ‘The Girl Is Mine’, the duet with Paul McCartney, was released as a single on the 18th of October 1982, a good month after the album. By joining forces with the ex-Beatles member again, Michael Jackson showed the way. He broke down racial boundaries even further, building bridges between America and Europe and blurring the lines between musical genres. His label, Epic–like everyone involved–knew that this album was going to be unlike anything else the world had ever seen.To link the album to Off The Wall, Thriller is logically opened by ‘Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'’. With its sample of Manu Dibango’s ‘Soul Makossa’ (the Cameroonian saxophonist would only claim royalties in 2008), it was the perfect way to satisfy Michael’s lifelong fans. However, the lyrics were already less smooth than they had been in the past, revealing that the star had hardened up and freed himself from his child-artist image. Of course, the heart of this colossal album is in its three major songs: ‘Thriller’, ’Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’. With creaking doors, werewolf screams, a long instrumental intro (Michael’s voice only appears at the one-minute mark) and a monologue by 50s, 60s and 70s horror star Vincent Price, ‘Thriller’ (and its video) remains a pop culture megalith. With a pyrotechnic guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen (who, according to legend, burned out the studio speakers during the recording), ‘Beat It’ is a relentless, ultra-rhythmic rock song, just what Quincy Jones was hoping for since he’d fantasised about placing a song similar to The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’ (1979) at the heart of the album. However, the stand-out track from Thriller, of course, is the record-shattering hit ‘Billie Jean’. This is an excellent reissue of a true masterpiece.© Marc Zisman/Qobuz

With five tracks from this album already released as singles, the long-awaited Deceivers by Arch Enemy has finally seen the light of day, five years after the Swedish band’s last ‘full length’ album. Of course, the element of surprise has been somewhat lost as they had already offered the world a taste of what was to come. Nevertheless, it is always better to judge a record as a whole. This logic works in Arch Enemy’s favour: the album succeeds in being quite varied while retaining a coherent thread over its duration. Over the years, Michael Amott (the band’s guitarist and main writer) has learned to transform each of his riffs into an instantly memorable ritornello. However, whilst this easily accessible music might have given the band an outrageously stereotypical sound (some might even dare to say “commercial”), it is counterbalanced by the assertive and aggressive vocals of Alissa White-Gluz. For only her third appearance with the band, she definitely gives the previous vocalists (Angela Gossow and Johan Liiva) a run for their money, forging a space for herself within the quintet. The band have an unmatched capacity for using their time efficiently, with the exception of the dispensable and short instrumental, ‘Mourning Star’. Deceivers has all the right ingredients to become a landmark of the band’s career, joining the ranks alongside Burning Bridges (1999) and Wages Of Sin (2001), both of which boast so many strong tracks. ‘Deceiver, Deceiver’ and ‘The Watcher’ are simply irresistible; fast and injected with a good dose of thrash metal. The same goes for the heavy ‘Poisoned Arrow' and ‘Spreading Black Wings’—watching these live is surely a recipe for breaking your neck. Some albums make an impact from the very first listen, and Deceivers is definitely one of them, cementing Arch Enemy as the European leader of melodic death metal. A real success. © Charlélie Arnaud/Qobuz

In 2015, Melody Gardot stepped out of her comfort zone with Currency of Man, an album which suited her entirely but displayed a more soul’n’blues side. That is not to say that her brilliant past efforts were not in keeping with her musical personality, but it was with this record that she confirmed her love for Philadelphia, the town in which she grew up and where groove holds a different meaning.  Five years later, Sunset in the Blue holds all the hallmarks of a return to the singer’s old days which made Melody Gardot’s name. The album is a stripped-back approach to jazz and bossa-nova as imposed by the unexpected circumstances of the year 2020. When the album was beginning development, the pandemic brought a halt to everything an forced the American to rethink the project. She hence proposed that her associates, spread out all over the world, work from a distance. Melody Gardot was based in Paris, her arranger and conductor Vince Mendoza in Los Angeles and the majority of her musicians in England! Despite these constraints, the miracle record was on course for creation which would span a period of roughly five months. And so, Mendoza found himself conducting on-screen from California with musicians playing in London’s Abbey Road Studios (things weren’t made any easier considering the various time-differences). In addition to Mendoza, Melody Grant recruited a set of silky smooth sound connoisseurs who were also instrumental in the success of 2009’s My One and Only Thrill: the producer Larry Klein and sound engineer Al Schmitt.Upon listening to the end result, however, we soon forget the last-minute DIY means with which this album was made. Because throughout Sunset in the Blue, Melody Gardot maintains a fascinatingly solid and intimate direction. Here we see a return to Gardot whispering hypnotically into the ear as she sings amid intermittent piano phrases and guitars. Her voice gracefully lounges upon a bed of refined and perfectly balanced violin strings. This formula reaches an irresistible climax with the album’s title track as she turns to her much-loved Brazil with tracks like Ninguém, Ninguém and Um Beljo, before she returns to the exquisite-sounding Moon River and I Fall in Love too Easily. A beautiful album which finishes with a somewhat intrusive track, Little Something, a pop duet with Sting that doesn’t really fit in with Sunset in the Blue’s general mood. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Swedish DJ Avicii is a strange case. In 2011, he broke through with "Levels," a bleepy and bright bit of EDM that could have been his signature hit, but then his 2013 album, True, was a country-pop and folk-inspired affair that thrilled his fans with its inventiveness, but left others as cold as a meandering Mumford & Sons remix effort. Two years later, his LP Stories is another genre-busting affair that fits in better with mainstream radio than it does the club, but everything iffy about True has been perfected here, as the producer revisits the song-oriented album and lets the outside genres freely come and go. Country-pop is back in EDM remix form when "Broken Arrows" offers a spirited Zac Brown song with Avicii pumping it higher during the whirlwind bridge, but "Pure Grinding" is a highlight that would have never fit on True, and it lives up to its claim to be "funktronica" with double-dutch lyrics and '70s electro in support. "Touch Me" is a bell-bottomed delight that owes a debt to the disco movement, specifically Chic, and if the strange "City Lights" is the album's most arguable track, fans of Meco and Giorgio Moroder could argue it's spot-on with its robot vocals and tiny melody. "Talk to Myself," with Sterling Fox, steps into the '80s with a modern version of Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride," and the rest of the prime moments come from the mainstream pop side of the spectrum, with the Martin Garrix and Simon Aldred (Cherry Ghost) feature "Waiting for Love" leading the pack. "Can't Catch Me," with Matisyahu and Wyclef Jean, is reggae, but the kind that Michael Franti and Radio Margaritaville can agree on, while "For a Better Day" is the same kind of electro and soul that Moby took to the top of the charts. Complaints that this isn't a dance album and doesn't sound like "Levels" may still be filed, but they're better applied to True. The pleasing, alive, and diverse Stories is a fine reason to think of Avicii as a producer of attractive music, with EDM, pop, and all other genres on a sliding scale.© David Jeffries /TiVo

Great artistic transformations are by nature traumatic, but rarely has a single musical statement been the source of more controversy and change than Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, now remastered and reissued for its 20th anniversary. Anyone who's seen the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart witnessed the project's two creative engines, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett, driving themselves mad in the process. Arguably, Wilco's best work were products of the Tweedy-Bennett partnership. Bennett, who came off as unduly obsessive and off kilter in the film, was fired from the band after the album's completion (and sadly died in 2009 from an accidental overdose at age 45); original drummer Ken Coomer was also let go during the recording process. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot also stands as yet another instance where Jim O'Rourke, who eventually mixed the album, continued to build his considerable reputation as a musical influencer. The turmoil continued after the album was finished when Warner Music Group-owned Reprise Records, which had undergone staff changes after a merger with AOL, didn't hear the album's commercial potential, and refused to release it. This led to a lengthy battle during which the band streamed the album for free on its website, gained control of the master tapes, and after a bidding war signed with another WMG label, Nonesuch Records, where the band remains to this day.  (As a final complication, the album's cover features a photo of Chicago's Marina City— two corn cobbed-shaped high-rise buildings—and had an original release date of September 11, 2001.) Artistically, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot marks the moment where Wilco left its Uncle Tupelo alt-country past behind and stepped deep into bold sonic exploration. Although Tweedy has always made it clear that he considers it a "pop album," he's also said, "I was learning about contrasts. A lot of the songs on Yankee aren't particularly abstract. But they benefit from being in a disorienting landscape of language … I needed to find some experimental music with a bigger heart. That's what I was looking for my whole life."In a telling sign that it's something special, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still sounds fresh, an artistic evergreen. While the lyrics veered off into nonsensical land, the music, in songs like the "I'm the Man Who Loves You," "War on War" and ever sublime, "Jesus, Etc." are tuneful in timeless ways, untethered to any genre or current of popular music. It's ageless art rock that stands to this day as the band's most lasting work. The original mix has been refreshed by famed engineer Bob Ludwig without any major changes. The tracks that appear under the heading of Unified Theory of Everything are taken from the mountain of tape (much of it ADATs) that the band recorded for the album. At their most revealing, Wilco show the expansive vision of experimentation they brought to the project and the struggle to translate that in the studio. While "Jesus, Etc." is nearly the same as the released take, this version of "Kamera" is slower and has a big buzzy guitar at its center.  The "Stravinsky mix" of "Ashes of American Flags" opens with flutes.  None is more telling however than "Remember to Remember," which later became "Hummingbird" on 2004's A Ghost is Born. It's much heavier than the original version, the mix based around an insistent drumbeat, wavering keyboards, and an electric guitar part. The live show from 2002 at The Pageant in St. Louis, which benefits from generally good sound, shows the band bouncing back, playing stripped down versions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tunes and getting a handle on playing the material without the multi-talented Bennett. There was a time back before the band became the extraordinary collection of virtuoso musicians it is today, when Tweedy was still hungry, desperate even, for success. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the sound of a band reaching and finding something unforgettable. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

Realigned with Philippe Zdar, the half of Cassius who mixed United, Phoenix make adjustments on the polarizing characteristics of their second and third albums -- the pokey and occasionally listless Alphabetical, the jagged and tune-deficient It's Never Been Like That -- with some of the most direct and enjoyable songs they've made to date. The two opening songs, the bopping "Lisztomania" and the buzzing "1901," are so immediate and prone to habitual play that the remainder of the album is bound to be neglected. There is plenty to like beyond that point, including "Lasso," which niftily alternates between a tangled rhythm and tight-spiral riffing, and the labyrinthine "Pt. 1" of "Love Like a Sunset," which serves the same purpose as the extended instrumental passages on Roxy Music's Avalon, at least until its rousing conclusion and shift into "Pt. 2." Beyond containing the band's best, most efficient songwriting, the album also stands apart from the first three studio albums by projecting a cool punch that is unforced. Vocalist Thomas Mars, more bright-eyed and youthful than ever, also sounds more a part of these songs, rather than coming across as a protruding element that clashes against the instruments. Maybe they've just hit their stride.© Andy Kellman /TiVo

Falling somewhere between the pop sensibilities of Ten Summoner's Tales and the searching ambition of The Soul Cages, Mercury Falling is one of Sting's tighter records, even if it fails to compel as much as his previous solo albums. Though he doesn't flaunt his jazz aspirations as he did in the mid-'80s, Mercury Falling feels more serious than The Dream of the Blue Turtles, primarily because of its reserved, high-class production and execution. Building from surprisingly simple, memorable melodies, Sting creates multi-layered, vaguely soul-influenced arrangements that carry all of the hallmarks of someone who has studied music, not lived it. Of course, there are many pleasures in the record -- for all of his pretensions, Sting remains an engaging melodicist, as well as a clever lyricist. There just happens to be a distinct lack of energy, stemming from the suffocating layers of synthesizers. Mercury Falling is a record of modest pleasures; it's just not an infectious, compulsive listen. © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo