It was designed to be a blockbuster and it was. Prior to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John had hits -- his second album, Elton John, went Top 10 in the U.S. and U.K., and he had smash singles in "Crocodile Rock" and "Daniel" -- but this 1973 album was a statement of purpose spilling over two LPs, which was all the better to showcase every element of John's spangled personality. Opening with the 11-minute melodramatic exercise "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" -- as prog as Elton ever got -- Goodbye Yellow Brick Road immediately embraces excess but also tunefulness, as John immediately switches over to "Candle in the Wind" and "Bennie & the Jets," two songs that form the core of his canon and go a long way toward explaining the over-stuffed appeal of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. This was truly the debut of Elton John the entertainer, the pro who knows how to satisfy every segment of his audience, and this eagerness to please means the record is giddy but also overwhelming, a rush of too much muchness. Still, taken a side at a time, or even a song a time, it is a thing of wonder, serving up such perfectly sculpted pop songs as "Grey Seal," full-bore rockers as "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and "Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock & Roll)," cinematic ballads like "I've Seen That Movie Too," throwbacks to the dusty conceptual sweep of Tumbleweed Connection in the form of "The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34)," and preposterous glam novelties, like "Jamaica Jerk-Off." This touched on everything John did before, and suggested ways he'd move in the near-future, and that sprawl is always messy but usually delightful, a testament to Elton's '70s power as a star and a musician.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Ziggy Stardust wrote the blueprint for David Bowie's hard-rocking glam, and Aladdin Sane essentially follows the pattern, for both better and worse. A lighter affair than Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane is actually a stranger album than its predecessor, buoyed by bizarre lounge-jazz flourishes from pianist Mick Garson and a handful of winding, vaguely experimental songs. Bowie abandons his futuristic obsessions to concentrate on the detached cool of New York and London hipsters, as on the compressed rockers "Watch That Man," "Cracked Actor," and "The Jean Genie." Bowie follows the hard stuff with the jazzy, dissonant sprawls of "Lady Grinning Soul," "Aladdin Sane," and "Time," all of which manage to be both campy and avant-garde simultaneously, while the sweepingly cinematic "Drive-In Saturday" is a soaring fusion of sci-fi doo wop and melodramatic teenage glam. He lets his paranoia slip through in the clenched rhythms of "Panic in Detroit," as well as on his oddly clueless cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together." For all the pleasures on Aladdin Sane, there's no distinctive sound or theme to make the album cohesive; it's Bowie riding the wake of Ziggy Stardust, which means there's a wealth of classic material here, but not enough focus to make the album itself a classic.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Will Butler's new band, and album, was born out of necessity. While the multi-instrumentalist Butler had released a few solo records during his tenure in Arcade Fire (the band co-founded by his brother Win), in 2022 he found himself adrift. "I had quit my band Arcade Fire very recently, after 20 years—maybe the most complex decision of my life. I had spent the preceding two years at home with my three children. I was waking up every morning and reading Emily Dickinson, until I had read every Emily Dickinson poem. I was listening to Morrissey, to Shostakovich, to the Spotify top 50. I had unformed questions with inchoate answers." When the itch to make a new record came, Butler found his answers at home, in his Brooklyn basement studio with his wife, Jenny Shore, and friends—Jenny's sister Julie Shore, Sara Dobbs and drummer Miles Francis, formerly of Antibalas. You can hear the theatrical Morrissey influence, as well as some New Order cool (the icy synth riffs that slice through "Stop Talking") and Echo and the Bunnymen's darker side. And yes, Dickinson's idyllic effect is evident on "Long Grass," a collision of smooth bass, energetic synth and hyperkinetic BPMs with high-drama vocals casting a goth shadow on the dance floor: "Let me stay …Here in the long grass/ Here by the train tracks/ Here where the air is clear/ Here where the blood sings." "Willows" wouldn't be out of place on a John Hughes '80s soundtrack, but also packs in a bit of Arcade Fire's mischief and urgency. "Me & My Friends" tackles a classic goth-industrial rhythm and layers on a spooky vocal choir—"I want to tell you that, I, I'm all right/ It's just me and my friends/ Gonna see you in the morning/ At the end of the night/ If it eeeeeeever ends"; maybe the "friends" are literal, maybe they are sleep-depriving 3 a.m. worries. Francis has described "Saturday Night" as having a "robot-alien-dancing-at-a-haunted-dive-bar" feeling, boosted by strings. "Car Crash" is pretty darn goth in sentiment ("When they come out to lay the sheets/ Will the police recognize me/ When they come out and clean the street/ Will there be anything left for anything to see?"); it starts out with just Butler and piano before eventually building to a metallic shimmer and heavenly host chorus. New Romantic-derived "Arrow of Time" is a fun surprise, opening with big, funky liquid bass before it explodes out of nowhere to momentary punkish fury. And "I Am Standing in a Room" comes on as unhinged Danny Elfman quirk: a crazed barroom piano roll from a haunted house where Tim Burton cartoon skeletons juke and jive. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

No one else thinks quite like Jack Antonoff, which is how he has become the in-demand producer for a certain type of tender and strong female artist: Taylor Swift, Lorde, Clairo, St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey, the Chicks, Olivia Rodrigo... He's able to use music to pull heartstrings in the most devastating and joyous ways, sometimes both at once. Some of his choices are so out there, yet so familiar, that you are never idly listening. That's certainly the case with the third album from his post-fun. band, Bleachers. You can pinpoint any number of things that the songs sound like—but Antonoff and his bandmates mix up the (intentional or not) influences in such a way that it all feels brand new and not like anything else happening right now. For the first two Bleachers albums, the band was in the tank for a precise '80s vibe—the John Hughes soundtrack; this time around, the view is more expansive. "HDYWM" (How Dare You Want More) is a vibrant joyride of jittery Vampire Weekend guitar, pop-punk "hey! hey!" and big-hearted Springsteen spirit. It fades off into a clever call-and-response between guitar and sax, with Antonoff joining in, before sweeping into a giant, Clarence Clemons-style sax (plus Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano) scene that commands dancing. "Big Life" flirts with rockabilly—both 1950s and '80s style—and Meatloaf theatrics, complete with a hiccuping chorus. "45" gives off vapors of the Kinks and the Shins, with Antonoff comparing a past relationship to "old 45s spinnin' out of time." And while Antonoff, a proud son of New Jersey, landed the state's patron saint himself, even this Springsteen cameo is unexpected. Instead of using The Boss on a more obvious track, like "HDYWM" or "DGD" (Don't Go Dark—co-written with Lana Del Rey), he shows up on the slower, stirring "Chinatown." Antonoff's own vocals drop out mid-line and Springsteen appears out of nowhere, raspy as ever, like some ghost of the future. Novelist Zadie Smith also guests, lending lyrics to the strings-driven "91": "It's '91, a war is on/ I watch in black, white, and green/ My mother dances around like there ain't no rip in the seam." "SMTH" (Stop Making This Hurt) radiates with nervous energy and bright '80s-style horns, making it the most like an "old" Bleachers song. There are lovely ballads ("Secret Life" and "SB"), and "All This Faith" is cinematic-romantic with its sweeping strings, pretty acoustic guitar and echo-y chorus. With so many oddball twists and turns, you have to wonder: Is Antonoff one of the most clever musicians working today, is it all happy accidents, or is he living in some magical lightning-strike moment? © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Double live albums were commonplace during the '70s, even for bands that weren't particularly good in concert. As a travelin' band, Lynyrd Skynyrd made their fame and fortune by being good in concert, so it made sense that they released a double-live, entitled One More from the Road, in 1976, months after the release of their fourth album, Gimme Back My Bullets. That might have been rather quick for a live album -- only three years separated this record from the group's debut -- but it was enthusiastically embraced, entering the Top Ten (it would become one of their best-selling albums, as well). It's easy to see why it was welcomed, since this album demonstrates what a phenomenal catalog of songs Skynyrd accumulated. Street Survivors, which appeared the following year, added "That Smell" and "You Got That Right" to the canon, but this pretty much has everything else, sometimes extended into jams as long as those of the Allmans, but always much rawer, nearly dangerous. That catalog, as much as the strong performances, makes One More from the Road worth hearing. Heard here, on one record, the consistency of Skynyrd's work falls into relief, and they not only clearly tower above their peers based on what's here; the cover of "T for Texas" illustrates that they're carrying on the Southern tradition, not starting a new one. Like most live albums, this is not necessarily essential, but if you're a fan, it's damn hard to take this album off after it starts. © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo