Few bands ever took the term "death metal" as literally as Liverpool, England's Carcass. The band's penchant for crafting song titles that eschewed Satanic tropes in favor of gruesome medical terminology became as much a calling card as their neck-snapping blend of melodic thrash and punishing grindcore, and when they decided to call it quits in 1996 after the release of the relatively disjointed (by Carcass standards) Swansong, it left a fouler taste than usual in the mouths of their listeners. Seventeen years later, Surgical Steel, the group's sixth long-player, remedies all that with a decisive thrust of the scalpel, offering up an 11-track tour de force that's as visceral, inventive, and grotesque as Symphonies of Sickness, yet infused with the dense, machine-shop precision and chrome veneer of 21st century metalcore. What impresses most upon hearing the latest from guitarist Bill Steer and bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker, who are joined by new drummer Dan Wilding, as well as longtime producer Colin Richardson, is how confident it sounds. This is not some rote, paint-by-numbers nostalgia trip, nor is it a calculated audio autopsy of what made landmark grindcore albums like Reek of Putrefaction and Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious so influential. The dense, instrumental opener uses a demo from 1985 as a foundation for Steer to lay down some "Hellion"-era Judas Priest-inspired leads, and subsequent tracks like "The Master Butcher's Apron," "Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System," and "Unfit for Human Consumption" immerse themselves effortlessly and irrevocably within the Carcass canon, yet manage to convey a level of nuclear propulsion that suggests a band just entering its heyday as opposed to unexpectedly emerging from the abyss. That Carcass chose to come out of their cave at all is impressive, but that they did it with both style and substance intact is great news for fans of extreme metal the world over. © James Christopher Monger /TiVo

Few bands ever took the term "death metal" as literally as Liverpool, England's Carcass. The band's penchant for crafting song titles that eschewed Satanic tropes in favor of gruesome medical terminology became as much a calling card as their neck-snapping blend of melodic thrash and punishing grindcore, and when they decided to call it quits in 1996 after the release of the relatively disjointed (by Carcass standards) Swansong, it left a fouler taste than usual in the mouths of their listeners. Seventeen years later, Surgical Steel, the group's sixth long-player, remedies all that with a decisive thrust of the scalpel, offering up an 11-track tour de force that's as visceral, inventive, and grotesque as Symphonies of Sickness, yet infused with the dense, machine-shop precision and chrome veneer of 21st century metalcore. What impresses most upon hearing the latest from guitarist Bill Steer and bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker, who are joined by new drummer Dan Wilding, as well as longtime producer Colin Richardson, is how confident it sounds. This is not some rote, paint-by-numbers nostalgia trip, nor is it a calculated audio autopsy of what made landmark grindcore albums like Reek of Putrefaction and Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious so influential. The dense, instrumental opener uses a demo from 1985 as a foundation for Steer to lay down some "Hellion"-era Judas Priest-inspired leads, and subsequent tracks like "The Master Butcher's Apron," "Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System," and "Unfit for Human Consumption" immerse themselves effortlessly and irrevocably within the Carcass canon, yet manage to convey a level of nuclear propulsion that suggests a band just entering its heyday as opposed to unexpectedly emerging from the abyss. That Carcass chose to come out of their cave at all is impressive, but that they did it with both style and substance intact is great news for fans of extreme metal the world over. © James Christopher Monger /TiVo

Joni Mitchell's ongoing Archives series has been an overwhelming success and the third volume somehow manages to outdo its predecessors. Where Volume 1 gave a raw, warts-and-all look at a developing talent wrestling with her creative identity and Volume 2 showed that talent operating at an astonishingly high level, Volume 3 documents Mitchell's transition from a truly gifted artist pushing the boundaries of the rock-culture zeitgeist into a mad genius staking her own sonic territories. This set, probably more than any other that has been or will be part of this series, is dynamic and revelatory, like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and finding an actual wizard doing real wizardry. While Vol. 3 falls short of giving blow-by-blow documentation of the incredible studio-as-an-instrument work Mitchell did to transform For the Roses, Court and Spark, and—most triumphantly—The Hissing of Summer Lawns from jazz-inflected pop-folk records into towering artistic statements (most of the songs here are presented in either spare embryonic versions or funky, recalibrated live takes, with little middle ground). This volume repeatedly demonstrates Mitchell's unerring gift for songwriting that is singular and superlative, as well as her willingness to build sonic scaffolding for those songs that is as complementary as it is challenging. The results are often just as impactful in their simplest renditions (a live acoustic version of "This Flight Tonight" loses the electric filigree and multi-tracked harmony vocals but still can stop traffic), and there are real revelations in the early and alternate versions of these well-known album tracks. In fact, most of these early versions would have made excellent album tracks. "See You Sometime" especially benefits from a loose, swinging airiness that's replaced with a denser arrangement on For the Roses, a streamlined, acoustic demo of "Raised on Robbery" is missing the full-band energy of the final version, but employs some wild background vocals that give the number an entirely different vibe, and a demo of "Help Me"—just Mitchell and a guitar—is breathtaking in its elegance. Despite the strengths of these more straight-ahead versions, Mitchell was clearly going to be dissatisfied with releasing them in forms that were merely "really good," when—with more work in the studio and the multi-track editing suite—they would be transformed into work that was "truly great."  © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

Of all the great transitional albums in rock history, Joni Mitchell's For the Roses is one of the greatest. Coming after the spare, diaristic Blue—on which Mitchell both perfected and abandoned her evolution from the coffeehouse folk scene —and pointing the direction to the more jazz-flecked and kaleidoscopic sounds of Court and Spark, Roses found her going from strength to strength lyrically, while opening a pandora's box of musical possibilities in these songs' structures and instrumentation. The album starts familiarly enough, with the piano-and-vocals simplicity of "Banquet," which initially presents as an impressionistic number but quickly reveals itself to be a biting class critique far more cynical and angry than anything Mitchell had previously recorded. If that wasn't enough of a clue that Roses was going to be a very different Joni Mitchell album, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" makes it clear that this was an artist intent on radically reshaping her sound. The song couples bleak lyrics about addiction and codependency with a lush arrangement that leans as heavily on well-deployed horn lines as it does on a full-bodied acoustic guitar attack accentuated by subtle studio effects. It's a complex sonic construction that is remarkably airy and light-filled, providing an unsettling contrast to its dark lyrics. Despite its rather dour opening, Roses has considerable tonal variety; after all it's also home to "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" one of Mitchell's most beloved accidents, written as an offhanded half-joke reply to her label's insistence that she get a song on the radio. Naturally, it wound up being a hit, but also sneakily subverts the "songs about radios get played on the radio" trope by being lined with "Wall of Joni" multi-tracked vocals, no discernable chorus, and a questionable take on whether radios are actually cool or not. There are also several other numbers that align closely with the singer-songwriter vibes of Blue, most notably the beautiful piano-and-vocals approach of "Lesson in Survival," but for the most part, Roses is an album that finds Mitchell pushing forward. "Let the Wind Carry Me" is profoundly intense lyrically ("Sometimes I get that feeling that I wanna settle and raise a child with somebody/ But it passes"), and wildly dynamic musically, with odd timings, quirky phrasings, and ethereal saxophone lines intertwined with gut-punch vocal harmonies. "Car on a Hill" would revisit some of the musical themes here just a few months later, but this number is far more challenging than its Court and Spark descendant. Likewise, "Blonde in the Bleachers"—a pure homage to the sanctifying (and suffocating) power of rock stardom—is perched upon such a jazzy foundation that it wouldn't have been out of place on The Hissing of Summer Lawns three years later. This "in-between-ness" has often found For the Roses left out of conversations extolling the virtues of the records it came before and after, but that very aspect is what makes it such a remarkably unique and utterly essential album in Mitchell's catalog. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

Of all the great transitional albums in rock history, Joni Mitchell's For the Roses is one of the greatest. Coming after the spare, diaristic Blue—on which Mitchell both perfected and abandoned her evolution from the coffeehouse folk scene —and pointing the direction to the more jazz-flecked and kaleidoscopic sounds of Court and Spark, Roses found her going from strength to strength lyrically, while opening a pandora's box of musical possibilities in these songs' structures and instrumentation. The album starts familiarly enough, with the piano-and-vocals simplicity of "Banquet," which initially presents as an impressionistic number but quickly reveals itself to be a biting class critique far more cynical and angry than anything Mitchell had previously recorded. If that wasn't enough of a clue that Roses was going to be a very different Joni Mitchell album, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" makes it clear that this was an artist intent on radically reshaping her sound. The song couples bleak lyrics about addiction and codependency with a lush arrangement that leans as heavily on well-deployed horn lines as it does on a full-bodied acoustic guitar attack accentuated by subtle studio effects. It's a complex sonic construction that is remarkably airy and light-filled, providing an unsettling contrast to its dark lyrics. Despite its rather dour opening, Roses has considerable tonal variety; after all it's also home to "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" one of Mitchell's most beloved accidents, written as an offhanded half-joke reply to her label's insistence that she get a song on the radio. Naturally, it wound up being a hit, but also sneakily subverts the "songs about radios get played on the radio" trope by being lined with "Wall of Joni" multi-tracked vocals, no discernable chorus, and a questionable take on whether radios are actually cool or not. There are also several other numbers that align closely with the singer-songwriter vibes of Blue, most notably the beautiful piano-and-vocals approach of "Lesson in Survival," but for the most part, Roses is an album that finds Mitchell pushing forward. "Let the Wind Carry Me" is profoundly intense lyrically ("Sometimes I get that feeling that I wanna settle and raise a child with somebody/ But it passes"), and wildly dynamic musically, with odd timings, quirky phrasings, and ethereal saxophone lines intertwined with gut-punch vocal harmonies. "Car on a Hill" would revisit some of the musical themes here just a few months later, but this number is far more challenging than its Court and Spark descendant. Likewise, "Blonde in the Bleachers"—a pure homage to the sanctifying (and suffocating) power of rock stardom—is perched upon such a jazzy foundation that it wouldn't have been out of place on The Hissing of Summer Lawns three years later. This "in-between-ness" has often found For the Roses left out of conversations extolling the virtues of the records it came before and after, but that very aspect is what makes it such a remarkably unique and utterly essential album in Mitchell's catalog. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz