As on their 2006 covers album Yeah!, British hard rock giants Def Leppard make a surprisingly enjoyable meal out of what is usually a predictable exercise. Drastic Symphonies is not an album of new material, nor even entirely new recordings. A collaboration with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, it's a symphonic reimagining of 16 career-spanning songs, including well-known hits and a smattering of deep cuts. Blending their original multi-track recordings with new overdubs to fit the theme, Drastic Symphonies is a pastiche of new and old ideas that, more often than not, reflects the sturdy pop construction on which their career was built. There was always a bit of romantic grandeur to Def Leppard's strain of lush glam metal, especially on early classics like "Too Late for Love" and "Bringin' On the Heartbreak," both of which get full orchestral treatment here. Joe Elliott, still in fine voice, can often be heard singing new leads atop the giant stacks of Mutt Lange-produced harmonies that became their '80s hallmark. Some songs are significantly altered, with only the occasional guitar solo poking out, while others sound very close to their original mixes, albeit with a bit of melodic sweetening from one of the world's great orchestras. The dense and swirling "Paper Sun," from 1999's Euphoria, is a highlight, punching up Def Leppard's original into something more thrilling and cinematic, and their 1987 smash "Animal" is practically built for the kind of pomp it receives here. Of course, any project like this is a mixed bag, and ironically, their biggest hit is Drastic Symphonies' biggest misfire. Naturally, they had to include "Pour Some Sugar on Me," but its stripped-down romantic duet arrangement falls flat without its glammy fizz. Overall, though, the band comes off much better than expected.© Timothy Monger /TiVo

A “roadhouse” is a kind of roadside bar located in the middle of nowhere for drinking and listening to music. Thanks in part to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, roadhouses have acquired a unique reputation and irremediably generate an image that is at once strange, comforting, and melancholic. For the conception of their sixth album, the members of the Australian group The Paper Kites have certainly had a Lynchian ambiance in mind, as the record’s sleeve proves. The photo taken by Dara Munnis represents an actual roadhouse where the group played every night for a month. All of the album’s songs are taken from the concerts performed during this unique residency in the small town of Campbells Creek. Sam Bentley, the leader of the group, explains that Roadhouse is the fruit of a “collective dream”. “We wanted it to be a combination of all the greatest dive bars you’ve ever been to, late-night watering holes, smoky taverns, biker bars”, he adds. The overall color of the album is country and folk, found in the ballads dominated by the banjo, the harmonica, or even the steel guitar (“Rolling On Easy”, “The Sweet Sound of You” and “Hurts So Good”). Others, like “Marietta”, “Mercy” and “I Don’t Want to Go That Way” can instead be put away in the syrupy romanticism aisle, which is emphasized by the singer’s beautifully mournful voice. As for the tracks “Black & Thunder” and “June’s Stolen Car”, they stray a bit from the original folk trajectory and swing toward a more bluesy rock flavor. It’s an atmospheric album that feels like a comforting pause in the middle of a long trip on the desert roads of Australia. ©Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

Taj Mahal has released many kinds of albums in a six-decade career: folk, jump, country, blues of all stripes, sounds from Africa, the Caribbean, R&B, soul, collaborations with musicians from across the globe, and even children's records. Savoy moves in another direction still. Recorded in collaboration with producer, pianist, and longtime friend John Simon, this set offers blues-kissed reads of 14 tunes from the Great American Songbook. The album is titled as an homage to the iconic Harlem ballroom at 596 Lenox Ave. Mahal's parents met there in 1938 seeing Ella Fitzgerald front the Chick Webb Orchestra. Simon and Mahal discussed the project for decades, but August 2022 was when the planets aligned. They cut the set live with a core band and guests. Mahal's band includes guitarist Danny Caron, bassist Ruth Davies, Simon on piano, drummer Leon Joyce, Jr., and a vocal chorus with Carla Holbrook, Leesa Humphrey, and Charlotte McKinnon. Interestingly, Caron and Davies served in Charles Brown's band, and Joyce drummed with Ramsey Lewis for many years. "Stompin' at the Savoy" starts with spoken word; Mahal delivers a reenactment of his parents' meeting. As he commences singing and scatting the lyrics, backing singers underscore with oohs, aahs, and call-and-response. "I'm Just a Lucky So-and-So" is one of three Duke Ellington numbers here. The languid horn section plays a blues progression with added warmth and grace from Kristen Strom's swinging flute. The arrangement of George Gershwin's "Summertime" is delivered allegretto, with blue, finger-popping swing from lush horns. "Mood Indigo" benefits from co-producer Manny Moreira's accumulated years of big band and Broadway experience. His layered brass colorations add dimension. "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me" offers languid, late-night horns (except in the bridge when they deliberately evoke gospel), and Simon's tasteful comping adds drama. The fluid blues guitar break from Caron benefits with elegance and bite. "Sweet Georgia Brown" is meaty and sprightly as Mahal's grainy singing and scatting contrasts beautifully with Evan Price's "Parisian hot jazz" violin. Maria Muldaur -- one of the great interpreters of vintage blues, jazz, R&B, and country -- joins Mahal on the fun, sultry "Baby It's Cold Outside," with excellent violin, trombone, and piano solos. "Caldonia," Louis Jordan's striding jump boogie, offers pumping piano, swinging guitar, and smoking sax and trombone solos behind Mahal's good-time vocal. His harmonica joins Strom's tenor sax to elevate in Benny Golson's dynamic "Killer Joe," before "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" closes the set. Mahal references several classic versions and arrangements in shifting tempos, but he ultimately only sounds like himself. Savoy embodies the abundant joy of its predecessor, Get On Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, but the album offers added nuance, color, dynamics, and musical sophistication. It seemingly accomplishes the impossible by taking these (overly) familiar standards and breathing new life into them while simultaneously honoring their legacies as well as that of the historic Harlem ballroom. © Thom Jurek /TiVo

Dance music's esteemed heritage in the U.K. has borne witness to a long history of legendary duos, whose lineages extend back to its very inception: Autechre, Orbital, Leftfield, LFO, Groove Armada, Disclosure, Bicep. All the above have attained divine status within their cohort, carving out illustrious careers and earning themselves a place nearer the gods. For several years the path has been clear for another such act to ascend this intangible throne; one with equal potential to transcend the artificial borders the scene imposes upon itself, without compromising on the conviction or unique quality of the art which defined them in the first instance.Seven years after brothers Tom and Ed Russell's then-burgeoning Overmono collaboration appeared on the XL imprint, via the Arla series of EPs, 2023 marks the fulfillment of this project's exceptional potential with their long-awaited debut album, Good Lies. It's an LP which firmly consolidates the duo's station at the head of their generation, masterfully synthesizing a breadth of styles without conceding the fundamental aesthetic so central to each of their tunes.An Overmono track sounds like something from a remembered dream: hazy vibrato gently rocking away throughout the synth parts, interwoven with rich, tape-driven textures, but unfailingly punctuated by powerful, precise percussion. At the center of each cut, however, is a vocal sample—one whose words are always slightly concealed from perception, but whose timbre has an assuredly singular quality. Ed himself puts it perfectly: "It's the kind of tone in someone's voice we're really drawn towards … The tone is kind of everything, isn't it?" It certainly is in the context of this album, which sees the duo experiment with tones that are both unique and varied across the board. Highlights are the main stage anthem, "Is U," alongside the Burial-tinged post dub of "Skulled," Afrobeat diversions in "Cold Blooded" and "Calon," and, of course, the LP's eponymous tune—a veritable percy, primed for the advent of summer months. Long live the new kings! © Finn Kverndal/Qobuz

With their eighth studio album, 2023's ebullient So Much (For) Stardust, Fall Out Boy fully re-embrace the emo and punk-pop dynamism of their classic work. It's a soaring style they've been threatening to unleash ever since returning to regular activity following their hiatus after 2008's Folie a Deux. Although their subsequent follow-ups like Save Rock and Roll, American Beauty/American Psycho, and Mania all topped the Billboard 200, the albums often felt like the band were working hard to stay current, throwing their songs into a production blender of contemporary pop, hip-hop, and EDM sounds with varying degrees of success. Without ever sounding too much like a throwback, So Much (For) Stardust has a homecoming feeling, as if Fall Out Boy are getting back to their rock roots. It's a vibe that's underlined by the presence of producer Neal Avron, with whom they recorded the core of their most beloved albums, including 2005's From Under the Cork Tree. From the start, there's a balance of measured craftsmanship (they purportedly took their time in the studio) and big melodic hooks, all effusively delivered by singer Patrick Stump. It's an infectious combination the band perfect on the opening "Love from the Other Side," a song ostensibly about dealing with (and perhaps being the cause of) a bad breakup. That said, it could just as easily work as a metaphor for the group's attempts at transforming their sound coming off the emo highs of the early 2000s. Early in the song, Stump admits, "We were a hammer to the statue of David." There's a bittersweet nostalgia implied by the song, as if the band are looking back on their career and taking stock of where they (and by proxy their fans) find themselves in a post-emo, post-pandemic world. They return to that sentiment on "I Am My Own Muse," where Stump, bellowing against a symphonic string bombast and guitarist Joe Trohman's fiery riffs, sings, "Smash all the guitars 'til we see all the stars/Oh, we've got to throw this year away like a bad luck charm." This kind of bold rock affection drives much of the album, as on the '80s AOR of "Heartbreak Feels So Good," the Queen-meets-Michael Jackson post-punk stomp of "Hold Me Like a Grudge," and the dreamy new wave romanticism of "Fake Out." Adding to the emotional push of the record are several unabashed musical and pop-cultural references, including the Earth, Wind & Fire intimations of "What a Time to Be Alive," the Don Henley "Boys of Summer" flourishes at the center of "The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years)," and even a snippet of Ethan Hawke's soliloquy about the meaning of life from Reality Bites in which his character offers up the adage "It's all just a random lottery of meaningless tragedy in a series of near escapes." Whether that's how Fall Out Boy feel about their career or not, So Much (For) Stardust is a gloriously welcome return to form.© Matt Collar /TiVo

In 1962, Ella Fitzgerald was at the height of her powers, about midway through recording her now-iconic series of "songbook" albums and, two years earlier, having released a barnstormer of a live album, Ella in Berlin, that solidified her position as one of the most talented and popular musicians working in the jazz idiom. Her only competition at the time was, essentially, Frank Sinatra and herself. During the course of 1962, she would release three albums: two complementary collaborations with Nelson Riddle that further pushed her into crossover territory without tarnishing her credibility or minimizing her skills, and the oft-overlooked Rhythm is My Business, a hard-swinging set that comes off breezy and soulful, but is a remarkable document of the strength of Fitzgerald and her band during this era. And it's that strength that's captured on The Lost Berlin Tapes, recorded in concert at Berlin’s Sportpalast that year. Verve Records founder Norman Granz frequently recorded live sets of many of his acts (Fitzgerald especially), and that's what accounts for both the existence and the remarkable fidelity of these "lost" tapes. (Though they were never truly lost; Granz had just stashed them away). From a performance perspective, it's unbelievable that this concert recording sat unheard for more than a half-century. Brimming with energy and benefiting from the confidence that can only come from being at the top of one's game, Ella and her band careen through 17 songs with a full-throated fervor that's greeted with an equally enthusiastic response from the crowd. The set both swings incredibly hard and evinces a cool, sophisticated polish, a combination that, again, pretty much only she and Sinatra were delivering at this scale during the era. It's the sort of casual excellence that's made to look deceptively easy. (And yes, she aces the version of "Mack the Knife" here.) Releases like this—especially in the aftermath of the devastating Universal fire that destroyed so many iconic album masters and so much unreleased material—prove that, even when we think a barrel has been fully scraped or a vault fully excavated, there will always be warm, welcome surprises to be found in the archives of these legendary artists. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

In an art form such as the blues, there is a tug-of-war between adhering to the roots of the traditional sound and respecting the influences from the ancestors, and the need to create your own art that reflects your life experiences and the zeitgeist. Kevin Moore, also known as Keb' Mo', has straddled that tightrope amazingly well over his long career, and continues to do so on Good to Be—a diverse blues/Americana album with a lot of unique touches. The bulk of the album was written and recorded in Nashville, evident in the laid-back and sure tone of the production, from Vince Gill's hand on the mixing board, to guests such as Darius Rucker on "Good Strong Woman." "The Medicine Man," featuring Old Crow Medicine Show, will have you thinking back to The Band's Music from Big Pink. There's a great, mostly straight-ahead cover of Bill Withers' classic "Lean On Me". The mellow, acoustic opener "Good To Be (Home Again)" frames Keb's soulful voice in a poignant lyric about walking the streets of your youth and being revitalized by the familiar sights and sounds (prompted by Keb's purchase and renovation of his childhood home in Compton). Other nice brushstrokes include the jazzy, smoky horns and after-dark vibe of "All Dressed Up" and the heartfelt, moving lyrics about striving for social justice and young people speaking out for their rights of "Louder." Keb' Mo' is a consummate musician constantly striving to excel and be true to his vision, all the while building on the foundations of the blues and Americana music that fueled his passion in the first place. © Rick Banales/Qobuz

As far as major-label debuts by underground bands go, Green is fairly uncompromising. While it displays a more powerful guitar sound on "Get Up," "Turn You Inside Out," and "Orange Crush," it also takes more detours than Document, whether it's the bizarrely affecting contemporary folk of "The Wrong Child" and "You Are the Everything," the bubblegum of "Stand" and "Pop Song 89," or the introspection of the lovely "Hairshirt" and "World Leader Pretend." But instead of presenting a portrait of a band with a rich, eclectic vision, Green is incoherent. While its best moments are flat-out great, the band has bitten off more than it can chew; many of the songs sound like failed experiments, and its arena-ready production now sounds slightly dated. Nevertheless, half of the record is brilliant, and it certainly indicates that R.E.M. are continuing to diversify their sound.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo