What does a shrug sound like? On "Don't Know Why,” the opening track of her debut effort, Norah Jones suggests a few possibilities. The first time she sings the title phrase, she gives it a touch of indifference, the classic tossed-off movie-star shrug. Her tone shifts slightly when she hits the chorus, to convey twinges of sadness; here the casual phrasing could be an attempt to shake off a sharp memory. Later, she shrugs in a way that conveys resignation, possibly regret—she's replaying a scene, trying to understand what happened. Those shrugs and shadings, tools deployed by every jazz vocalist of the 1950s, are inescapable throughout Come Away With Me—in part because everything surrounding Jones' voice is so chill. There's room for her to emote, and room for gently cresting piano and organ chords. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Jones knows instinctively how much (or how little!) singer the song needs. The secret of this record, which came out when Jones was 22, is its almost defiant approachability: It is calm, and open, and gentle, music for a lazy afternoon in a porch swing. As transfixing covers of Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart” and Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You” make clear, Jones thinks about contours and shadows when she sings; her storytelling depends as much on the scene and the atmosphere as the narrative. And Jones applies the same understatement to the original songs here, which weave together elements of country, pop, jazz and torch balladry in inventive ways. It's one thing to render an old tune with modern cleverness, a skill Jones had honed as a solo pianist/singer before she was discovered. It's quite another to transform an original tune, like Jesse Harris' "Don't Know Why,” into something that sounds ageless and eternal, like a standard. Jones does that, over and over, using just shrugs and implications, rarely raising her voice much above a whisper. © Tom Moon/Qobuz

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

One of her most pop-oriented albums, but also one of her best and most consistent. Most of the songs feature dramatic, swinging large-band orchestration, with the accent on the brass and strings. Simone didn't write any of the material, turning to popular European songsmiths Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, and Anthony Newley, as well as her husband, Andy Stroud, and her guitarist, Rudy Stevenson, for bluesier fare. There are really fine tunes and interpretations, on which Simone gives an edge to the potentially fey pop songs, taking a sudden (but not uncharacteristic) break for a straight jazz instrumental with "Blues on Purpose." The title track, a jazzy string ballad version of the Screamin' Jay Hawkins classic, gave the Beatles the inspiration for the phrasing on the bridge of "Michelle."© Richie Unterberger /TiVo

Empty Sky was followed by Elton John, a more focused and realized record that deservedly became his first hit. John and Bernie Taupin's songwriting had become more immediate and successful; in particular, John's music had become sharper and more diverse, rescuing Taupin's frequently nebulous lyrics. "Take Me to the Pilot" might not make much sense lyrically, but John had the good sense to ground its willfully cryptic words with a catchy blues-based melody. Next to the increased sense of songcraft, the most noticeable change on Elton John is the addition of Paul Buckmaster's grandiose string arrangements. Buckmaster's orchestrations are never subtle, but they never overwhelm the vocalist, nor do they make the songs schmaltzy. Instead, they fit the ambitions of John and Taupin, as the instant standard "Your Song" illustrates. Even with the strings and choirs that dominate the sound of the album, John manages to rock out on a fair share of the record. Though there are a couple of underdeveloped songs, Elton John remains one of his best records.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Flesh + Blood suggested that Roxy Music were at the end of the line, but they regrouped and recorded the lovely Avalon, one of their finest albums. Certainly, the lush, elegant soundscapes of Avalon are far removed from the edgy avant-pop of their early records, yet it represents another landmark in their career. With its stylish, romantic washes of synthesizers and Bryan Ferry's elegant, seductive croon, Avalon simultaneously functioned as sophisticated make-out music for yuppies and as the maturation of synth pop. Ferry was never this romantic or seductive, either with Roxy or as a solo artist, and Avalon shimmers with elegance in both its music and its lyrics. "More Than This," "Take a Chance with Me," "While My Heart Is Still Beating," and the title track are immaculately crafted and subtle songs, where the shifting synthesizers and murmured vocals gradually reveal the melodies. It's a rich, textured album and a graceful way to end the band's career.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Emerson, Lake & Palmer's most successful and well-realized album (after their first), and their most ambitious as a group, as well as their loudest, Brain Salad Surgery was also the most steeped in electronic sounds of any of their records. The main focus, thanks to the three-part "Karn Evil 9," is sci-fi rock, approached with a volume and vengeance that stretched the art rock audience's tolerance to its outer limit, but also managed to appeal to the metal audience in ways that little of Trilogy did. Indeed, "Karn Evil 9" is the piece and the place where Keith Emerson and his keyboards finally matched in both music and flamboyance the larger-than-life guitar sound of Jimi Hendrix. This also marked the point in the group's history in which they brought in their first outside creative hand, in the guise of ex-King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield. He'd been shopping around his first solo album and was invited onto the trio's new Manticore label, and also asked in to this project as Lake's abilities as a lyricist didn't seem quite up to the 20-minute "Karn Evil 9" epic that Emerson had created as an instrumental. Sinfield's resulting lyrics for "Karn Evil 9: First Impression" and "Karn Evil 9: Third Impression," while not up to the standard of his best Crimson work, were better than anything the group had to work with previously -- he was also responsible for Emerson's choice of title, persuading the keyboardist that the music he'd come up with was more evocative of a carnival and fantasy than the pure science fiction concept that Emerson had started with. And Greg Lake pulled out all the stops with his heaviest singing voice in handling them, coming off a bit like Peter Gabriel in the process. And amid Carl Palmer's prodigious drumming, it was all a showcase for Emerson, who employed more keyboards and more sounds here -- including electronic voices -- than had previously been heard on one of their records. The songs (except for the light-hearted throwaway "Benny the Bouncer") are also among their best work -- the group's arrangement of Sir Charles Hubert Parry's setting of William Blake's "Jerusalem" manages to be reverent yet rocking (a combination that got it banned by the BBC for potential "blasphemy"), while Emerson's adaptation of Alberto Ginastera's music in "Tocatta" outstrips even "The Barbarian" and "Knife Edge" from the first album as a distinctive and rewarding reinterpretation of a piece of serious music. Lake's "Still...You Turn Me On," the album's obligatory acoustic number, was his last great ballad with the group, possessing a melody and arrangement sufficiently pretty to forgive the presence of the rhyming triplet "everyday a little sadder/a little madder/someone get me a ladder." And the sound quality was stunning, and the whole album represented a high point that the trio would never again achieve, or even aspire to -- after this, each member started to go his own way in terms of creativity and music.© Bruce Eder /TiVo

When Blixa Bargeld left Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, who would have predicted his departure would result in one of the finest offerings in the band's catalog? Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is a double CD or, rather, two completely different albums packaged in one very handsome box with a stylish lyric booklet and subtly colored pastel sleeves. They were recorded in a total of 16 days by producer Nick Launay (Kate Bush, Midnight Oil, Girls Against Boys, Silverchair, INXS, Virgin Prunes, et al.). Abbatoir Blues, the first disc in the set (packaged in pink, of course), is a rock & roll record. Yeah, the same guy who released the Boatman's Call, No More Shall We Part, and Nocturama albums has turned in a pathos-drenched, volume-cranked rocker, full of crunch, punishment -- and taste. Drummer Jim Sclavunos' aggressive, propulsive kit work is the bedrock of this set. It and Mick Harvey's storm-squall guitar playing shake things loose on "Get Ready for Love," which opens the album. As Cave goes right for God in the refrain -- "get ready for love" -- in the maelstrom, a gospel choir roaring "praise Him" responds. His tense, ambivalent obsession with theology is pervasive; he mocks the Western perception of God in the heavens yet seeks the mystery of His nature. That he does so while careening through a wall of noisy rock damage is simply stunning. It leaves the listener revved up and off-center for what comes next. The chorus -- members of the London Community Gospel Choir -- is prevalent on both records; the Bad Seeds' arrangement utilizes them wisely as counterpoint and mirror for Cave's own baritone. "Cannibal's Hymn" begins as a love song musically; it's chocked with Cave's dark wit and irony and ends far more aggressively while retaining its melody. The single, "Nature Boy," finds itself on Scalvunos' big beat. Cave and his piano use love's irony in contrast with cheap innuendo as underlined by the choir in their best soul croon. "Let Them Bells Ring" is a most dignified and emotionally honest tribute to Johnny Cash and the world he witnessed. The Western wrangle of "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" references Morricone's desert cowboy groove against a swirling cacophony of drums, bashing piano, and the chorus swelling on the refrain, while Cave name drops Johnny Thunders and poet Philip Larkin. The pace is fantastic; its drama and musical dynamics are pitched taut, with lulls in all the right places.The Lyre of Orpheus, by contrast, is a much quieter, more elegant affair. It is more consciously restrained, its attention to craft and theatrical flair more prevalent. But that doesn't make it any less satisfying. It is a bit of a shock after Abbatoir Blues, but it isn't meant for playing immediately afterward; it is a separate listening experience. The title track tells the myth's tale in Cave's ironical fashion, where God eventually throws a hammer at the subject and Eurydyce threatens to shove his lyre up his nether orifice. Warren Ellis' swampy bouzouki and Thomas Wydler's more stylized drumming move the band in the tense, skeletal swirl where chorus and Cave meet the music in a loopy dance. But in "Breathless," the bard of the love song emerges unfettered at the top of his poetic gift. On "Babe You Turn Me On," he wraps a bawdy yet tender love song in a country music waltz to great effect. But on this album, along with the gentleness, is experimentation with textures and wider dimensions. The sparser sound is freer, less structured; it lets time slip through the songs rather than govern them -- check the wall of Ellis' strings married to a loping acoustic guitar on the moving "Carry Me" as an example. Cave's nastiness and wit never remains absent for long, however, and on "O Children," the album's closer, it returns with this skin-crawlingly gorgeous ballad of murder and suicide. This set is an aesthetic watermark for Cave, a true high point in a long career that is ever looking forward.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

An enormous commercial success, 1981's The Dude is a cross-cultural success blending jazz, Latin music, soul ballads, and straight pop into an admittedly slick but never over-produced or soulless stew. The album opens with a surprise: "Ai No Corrida" is a synthesizer-driven yet still-funky Latin dance track written by Chaz Jankel of Ian Dury & the Blockheads, suggesting that unlike a lot of musicians his age, Quincy Jones kept his ears open to new music. The proto-rap title track accomplishes the same thing. The rest of the album is more conventional, with James Ingram and Patti Austin trading vocals on a smooth collection of tracks highlighted by the masterful love ballads "One Hundred Ways" and "Just Once," staples of adult contemporary stations, and the haunting instrumental "Velas." The Dude is an outstanding collection that was massively influential on the '80s R&B scene.© Rovi Staff /TiVo

This is the peak of George Benson's courtship of the mass market -- a superbly crafted and performed pop album with a large supporting cast -- and wouldn't you know that Quincy Jones, the master catalyst, is the producer. Q's regular team, including the prolific songwriter Rod Temperton and the brilliant engineer Bruce Swedien, is in control, and Benson's voice, caught beautifully in the rich, floating sound, had never before been put to such versatile use. On "Moody's Mood," Benson really exercises his vocalese chops and proves that he is technically as fluid as just about any jazz vocalist, and he become a credible rival to Al Jarreau on the joyous title track. Benson's guitar now plays a subsidiary role -- only two of the ten tracks are instrumentals -- but Q has him play terrific fills behind the vocals and in the gaps, and the engineering gives his tone a variety of striking, new, full-sounding timbres. The instrumentals themselves are marvelous: "Off Broadway" is driving and danceable, and Ivan Lins' "Dinorah, Dinorah" grows increasingly seductive with each play. Benson should have worked with Jones from this point on, but this would be their only album together.© Richard S. Ginell /TiVo

In his 2016 autobiography Substance: Inside New Order, Peter Hook writes: “I’ve often said that the magic of New Order was all that push-and-pull between the rock and electronic sides of the music, the yin and yang of Barney [Sumner] and me.” Power, Corruption & Lies, New Order’s second studio album released in May 1983, confirms this comment and features an even more electronic sound. With its famous cover art that depicts a reworking by graphic designer Peter Saville of 19th century French painter Henri Fantin-Latour’s Un panier de roses (A basket of roses), the record alternates between innovative electro-pop (5-6-8) and synthetic cold wave (Your Silent Face), but also more classic post-punk (Age of Consent). What’s more, Sumner’s vocals are his own and the influence of Ian Curtis is a distant memory. With Power, Corruption & Lies, New Order fused the influences of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder to give birth to their own unstoppable compositions, cornerstones for the British electronic pop of that era. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

What does a shrug sound like? On "Don't Know Why,” the opening track of her debut effort, Norah Jones suggests a few possibilities. The first time she sings the title phrase, she gives it a touch of indifference, the classic tossed-off movie-star shrug. Her tone shifts slightly when she hits the chorus, to convey twinges of sadness; here the casual phrasing could be an attempt to shake off a sharp memory. Later, she shrugs in a way that conveys resignation, possibly regret—she's replaying a scene, trying to understand what happened. Those shrugs and shadings, tools deployed by every jazz vocalist of the 1950s, are inescapable throughout Come Away With Me—in part because everything surrounding Jones' voice is so chill. There's room for her to emote, and room for gently cresting piano and organ chords. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Jones knows instinctively how much (or how little!) singer the song needs. The secret of this record, which came out when Jones was 22, is its almost defiant approachability: It is calm, and open, and gentle, music for a lazy afternoon in a porch swing. As transfixing covers of Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart” and Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You” make clear, Jones thinks about contours and shadows when she sings; her storytelling depends as much on the scene and the atmosphere as the narrative. And Jones applies the same understatement to the original songs here, which weave together elements of country, pop, jazz and torch balladry in inventive ways. It's one thing to render an old tune with modern cleverness, a skill Jones had honed as a solo pianist/singer before she was discovered. It's quite another to transform an original tune, like Jesse Harris' "Don't Know Why,” into something that sounds ageless and eternal, like a standard. Jones does that, over and over, using just shrugs and implications, rarely raising her voice much above a whisper. © Tom Moon/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

Looking back on his career with and without Air, Nicolas Godin's beginnings as an architecture student become more and more apparent -- and not just because the first song he created, "Modulor Mix," was a tribute to Le Corbusier. A skilled use of structure and space is just as important to composing music as designing a building, and the weightless drift of his music is as much of a feat as a skyscraper that seems to defy gravity. Much like an architect, over the years Godin has built on his music's foundations while continuing to innovate. If Contrepoint's dazzling fusion of classical, jazz, Tropicalia, exotica, and left-field pop and the flawless '60s spy music homage of his Au Service de la France (A Very Secret Service) score felt like reactions to the iconic sound he crafted with Air, then Concrete and Glass is a welcome return to it. As its name suggests, Godin's second solo album is ultra-sleek and airy, in both senses of the word. With its vocodered vocals, spacey electronics, and a melody that flirts with several moods -- romance, loneliness, nostalgia -- without settling on any of them, "What Makes Me Think About You" harks all the way back to Moon Safari's "Remember." "The Border," an homage to Mies van der Rohe, recalls the spacious, late-night moods of Pocket Symphony. Godin even includes some of the whimsy that prevented his previous project from seeming too pretentious with "Turn Right Turn Left," a sci-fi pop duet with a route-finding app that makes navigating Los Angeles sound blissful. However, Concrete and Glass isn't a rehash of Air's music. It's often more streamlined, as on "Time on My Hands," a sculptural track featuring impassioned vocals by Kirin J Callinan. Godin's other collaborators also help distinguish the album from his prior work. Kadhja Bonet's elegant turn on "We Forgot Love" makes it easy to envision her singing it alone in a gorgeous but empty penthouse. Another highlight is "Catch Yourself Falling," a poppy collaboration with Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor that sounds so natural, it's surprising that he and Godin haven't worked together before. Though the closest Godin comes to the excitement of Contrepoint is the jazzy, suite-like finale "Cité Radieuse," Concrete and Glass is still a fine example of his distinctively smooth style. © Heather Phares /TiVo