Since The King of Rock 'n' Roll was the complete '50s masters, it was easy to assume that its five-disc '60s sequel, From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential 60's Masters, rounded up all the masters from that decade, which is simply not the case. The producers deliberately avoided the soundtracks to Elvis' movies, which perhaps makes sense, given that they are roundly and rightly disparaged as Presley's low point, which then opened the doors to presenting just what they judged as the best non-soundtrack recordings he made during the '60s. They also disregarded the gospel recordings, saving them for the double-disc 1994 collection Amazing Grace: His Greatest Gospel Songs, leaving this as an overview of the best of his pop and rock material of the '60s, all recorded after he got back from the army. Instead of being a detriment, this is a brilliant move, distilling his erratic, wide-ranging '60s recordings to their very best, providing a relatively comprehensive overview of the greatest material Elvis recorded during his most inconsistent decade. Its biggest flaw is that in its zeal to overlook the soundtracks, the box skips over even the hits from the films, so this does not have "Can't Help Falling in Love," "GI Blues," "Follow That Dream," "Viva Las Vegas," "Little Less Conversation," and "Return to Sender," as well as other, lesser hits. They are missed, particularly because there is a surfeit of pop-oriented material from the early '60s. That's one area where this box excels: It proves that Presley did turn toward pop in the early '60s. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he did not abandon rock & roll, and there are many tough performances from the early years of the decade that stand their own with the '50s RCA sides, but by the middle of the box -- which roughly corresponds with the middle of the decade -- it becomes clear that Elvis needed to change his approach, and he did with stunning power. That's where the scope of the box comes into play: By disc three, there's been plenty of good, sometimes great, music, but when Elvis gets his swagger back just before the songs that formed From Elvis in Memphis, the growing energy is kinetic, and the fourth disc, along with half of the fifth, are intoxicating in how Presley rediscovers his power and starts to not only sing songs worthy of his talents, but have productions and performances that match. This is the greatest music on this set -- "Long Black Limousine," "Rubberneckin'," "Wearin' That Loved on Look," "In the Ghetto," "Suspicious Minds," "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road," and "Kentucky Rain" are among the best of this batch -- towering over the rest of the music here and holding its own with the Sun material. This is presented in more thorough form elsewhere, but the long view and scope of this set really make his comeback dramatic on From Nashville to Memphis. That narrative makes the set essential, as does the judicious selection of his early- and mid-'60s highlights. It's done well -- well enough to almost excuse the very, very big hits that are missing, even if it doesn't completely account for their absence. That is a pretty big flaw, but even so, From Nashville to Memphis is necessary for any serious pop library, which speaks volumes for the quality of the music within the box.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Although his recording career only lasted five years, from 1962 through 1967 (seven studio albums in all), with his biggest hits coming in the last two years of that time, and his only number one, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," after his death, Otis Redding is still widely considered the greatest performer of the classic soul era, a designation he undoubtedly deserves. A dynamic performer and a more than competent songwriter ("Dock of the Bay," for instance, is a Redding original), he brought the energy and directness of gospel into the secular world with a fervor and passion that made his songs, and particularly his live versions of them, into gritty sermons on the joy, loss, pain, and yearning that attends being in love. It helped, too, that his backing outfit on most of his tracks was the great Stax Records house band the MG's, who knew how to punch in and stomp it and also when to lay back in a quiet storm behind him, and the band and Redding together were an unstoppable force. There have been plenty of Redding compilations over the years, with this one, The King of Soul, being yet another one, but it is distinctive for its breadth, tracking the arc of Redding's career through 92 tracks arranged chronologically over four discs, and because it also, particularly when covering the early years, includes mono mixes, which often carried more tightly focused punch than the stereo ones. Appearing during the 50th anniversary year of the release of Redding's debut album, Pain in My Heart, this set tells the story of the King of Soul as well as any other compilation out there. Everything essential is here, and with Otis Redding, it's pretty much all essential. He was that kind of artist.© Steve Leggett /TiVo

One of the greatest and most influential artists to rise from the Southern Soul movement of the '60s, Georgia-born Otis Redding was a powerful vocalist, capable of swaggering braggadocio and soul-bearing heartache in equal measure. Redding was also a gifted songwriter who penned many of his most memorable songs, and an unstoppable force as a stage performer, often regarded as James Brown's only real rival as the most exciting soul performer of the '60s. Redding's recording career lasted only seven years before he lost his life in a plane wreck in 1967 at the age of 26, but his catalog remains one of the strongest of any artist from soul's golden age. Pure Southern Soul is epic-scale digital collection of Redding's recordings for the Stax/Volt label, featuring 60 songs that encompass his biggest hits and superb deep cuts. This is a treasure trove of classic soul, and a superb, thorough introduction to a landmark talent. Selections include "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," "I've Been Loving You Too Long," "Respect," "Try a Little Tenderness," "Love Man," "These Arms of Mine," "Mr. Pitiful," "Shake," and many, many more.© Mark Deming /TiVo

Two generations. Two styles. Two voices. And an album in common… For about twenty years, crooner Tony Bennett and singer and pianist Diana Krall had produced a few duos here and there, but never an entire album. With this Love Is Here To Stay, they jumped right in and involved another five-star tandem in their enchanted parenthesis of refined vocal jazz: George and Ira Gershwin. They went digging through the vast repertoire of the most famous brothers of 20th American popular music to create this album that seems from another time, produced with the trio of impeccable pianist Bill Charlap, Peter Washington on the double bass and Kenny Washington on drums… Tackling the Great American Songbook is always a redeeming and almost necessary baptism of fire for any worthy jazz singer. And these two didn’t wait for 2018 to do it. Here, each one excels in what they do best, even if, at 92 years of age, Tony Bennett obviously doesn’t have the same organ as he did when he sung I Left My Heart In San Francisco, which made him popular in 1962. Sinatra’s favourite singer knows it, and manages to find a range in line with his vocal condition. The result is particularly touching. A great professional, Diana Krall adapted her singing to the New Yorker, turning their exchanges into endearing, slightly retro flirting. The 38 years between them become the main asset of an old-fashioned yet delightful album. © Clotilde Maréchal/Qobuz

Soundtrack of the eponymous film directed by Richard Lester (dubbed in French Quatre garçons dans le vent or Four boys in the wind), A Hard Day's Night is a first for The Beatles, as for this third album released at the beginning of summer 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote every song on the disc without any covers! And what songs! Can’t Buy Me Love, A Hard Day's Night, I Should Have Known Better - the level is very high and each hit track shows a rapidly developing musical and artistic identity as the group went from being national treasures to international icons. Every corner of this changing pop façade is fascinating. The irresistible melodies are pulled together by sparkling guitars in an innocent, feel-good tribute to all things melodic. A Hard Day's Night is the epitome of the early periods of that famous 'sound' of the The Beatles. Even in ballads such as And I Love Her, the Fab Four already demonstrate a fascinating musical maturity... A true joy for the listener. ©MZ/Qobuz, Translation/BM

The soul music of the 21st century has sometimes had the unfortunate tendency to prioritise analog production techniques in order to bring about a revival, losing sight of making beautiful music. Jalen Ngonda, on the other hand, isn’t faking it. His first album, released on Daptone Records and entitled Come Around and Love Me, presents itself as a magnificent time machine. A contemporary dive into authentic Motown sound, we hear the formulae that brought in the golden age of the genre in the 70s, the bright congas that gave rhythm to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” the guitar riffs that Isaac Hayes refines terrifically, and that high voice singing about love and its torments, crooning about pleas of the heart, the album’s main theme. Come Around and Love Me is a superb record, where the musicians seem to fade into the background in order to completely lend themselves to the lead performer, who takes up the space and shines. © Brice Miclet/Qobuz

Though the reissue campaign that presented PJ Harvey's albums with their demos was extensive, it still didn't gather everything in her archives. She fills in those gaps with B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, a comprehensive set of harder-to-find and previously unreleased material that covers three decades of music. Kicking off with a handful of previously unreleased demos, the collection celebrates what makes each track special within Harvey's chronology. Short but fully realized versions of "Dry" and "Man-Size" reaffirm that by the time she hits the record button, she knows exactly what she's doing; the guitar and voice sketches of "Missed" and "Highway 61 Revisited" are as formidable as the finished takes; and the demo of the B-side "Me Jane" (yes, that's how thorough this set is) offers one of the Rid of Me era's catchiest songs in an even rawer state. B-Sides, Demos & Rarities reinforces just how vital Harvey's non-album tracks are to her creative trajectory. The uncanny carnival oompah of "Daddy," a "Man-Size" B-side, feels like one of the earliest forays into the eeriness that gave an extra thrill to To Bring You My Love, White Chalk, and much of Harvey's later work. She continues Is This Desire?'s experimentation on "The Bay," which contrasts songwriting befitting a classic folk ballad with pulsing keyboards and jazzy rhythms, and continues to try to make sense of the world's chaos on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era material spanning the whispery Saturn return of "30" to "This Wicked Tongue," an updated expression of biblical sin, desire, and torment that delivers one of the set's most quintessentially PJ Harvey moments. Fittingly for such an anachronistic-sounding album, White Chalk's B-sides reach back to Harvey's earliest days: "Wait" and "Heaven" date back to 1989 and deliver sprightly, strummy folk-pop that's almost unrecognizable as her work. The set's previously unreleased music contains just as many revelations. One of its most notable previously missing puzzle pieces is the demo of Uh Huh Her's title track. A shockingly pure expression of rage, jealousy, and sorrow, it may have been too raw and revealing even for a PJ Harvey album, but it's a shame that it and the like-minded "Evol" didn't make the cut. Conversely, "Why'd You Go to Cleveland," a 1996 collaboration between Harvey and John Parish, and the 2012 demo "Homo Sappy Blues" are downright playful, proving the complete picture of her music includes something akin to fun. Highlights from the collection's 2010s material include "An Acre of Land," a lush ballad rooted in the British folk traditions that are just as essential to her music as punk or the blues, and the 2019 cover of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," which pays homage to a kindred spirit while transforming the song into something more desolate and plaintive. A must-listen for anyone following Harvey's archival series, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities serves as a fascinating parallel primer to her music and the multitudes within it.© Heather Phares /TiVo

More than a quarter-century after Tom Petty's Wildflowers was first released, it can finally be heard the way the singer-songwriter intended. When he turned in 25 songs, hoping for a double album, Warner Bros. asked him to pare it down to one. But just three years past his death, his family and Heartbreakers bandmates Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell (technically a solo release, Wildflowers features most of the band) have restored the record to its original glory and added in a trove of home demos, alternate takes and live tracks—some 70 songs in all. Produced by Rick Rubin while Petty's decades-old marriage was crumbling and he was reportedly battling heroin addiction, the 1994 release remains one of the all-time great break-up records; heard all together, the extended LP (the All The Rest part is produced Petty's longtime engineer Ryan Ulyate) Petty is a deeper devastating beauty. "New" tracks like the Byrds-y "Leave Virginia Alone," tender "Something Could Happen" and psychedelic Beatles-meets-Wall of Sound "Somewhere Under Heaven" are a comfortable coda to classics such as "You Don't Know How It Feels" and "It's Good to Be King." Extra track "Hope You Never" is a gorgeous, direct complement to old favorite "Only a Broken Heart." As perfect as the original album has always played, it's hard to imagine not including the swaying After the Gold Rush-esque "Hung Up & Overdue" (with backing vocals by Beach Boy Carl Wilson) or sunny, jangling "California" (which also shows up in a demo version, with a telling extra verse: "Don’t forgive my past/ I forgive my enemy/ Don’t know if it lasts/ Gotta just wait and see"). Dig into the home recordings, and it's an even bigger mystery why the harmonica-inflected "There Goes Angela" and plaintive "There's a Break in the Rain (Have Love Will Travel)" weren't contenders over, say, the Celtic-flavored "Don't Fade on Me." Chalk part of that first-listen awe up to the intimacy of these solo demos, which also cast a new, revelatory light on the gently folksy title track and "You Don't Know How It Feels." Live non-album favorites "Girl on LSD" and "Drivin' Down to Georgia" are captured here, along with a blistering "Honey Bee" and lovely takes on "You Wreck Me" and "Crawling Back to You." Tench has recalled Petty calling Wildflowers "the best record we ever made." Now it's even better. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Her self-titled debut LP (later retitled Ain't No Mountain High Enough after the single became a hit) was arguably her finest solo work at Motown and perhaps her best ever; it was certainly among her most stunning. Everyone who doubted whether Diana Ross could sustain a career outside the Supremes found out immediately that she would be a star. The single "Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)" remains a staple in her shows, and is still her finest message track.© Ron Wynn /TiVo

It's often unfair to compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles but in the case of the group's mono mixes, it's instructive. Until the 2009 release of the box set The Beatles in Mono, all of the Fab Four's mono mixes were out of print. That's not the case with the Rolling Stones. Most of their '60s albums -- released on Decca in the U.K., London in the U.S. -- found mono mixes sneaking onto either the finished sequencing or various singles compilations, so the 2016 box The Rolling Stones in Mono only contains 56 heretofore unavailable mono mixes among its 186 tracks. To complicate things further, the box -- which runs 15 discs in its CD version, 16 LPs in its vinyl incarnation -- sometimes contains both the British and American releases of a particular title (Out of Our Heads and Aftermath), while others are available in only one iteration (Between the Buttons is only present in the U.K. version). All this is for the sake of expedience: this is the easiest way to get all the mono mixes onto the box with a minimal amount of repetition. To that end, there's a bonus disc called Stray Cats -- with artwork that plays off the censored plain white cover art for the initial pressing of Beggars Banquet -- collecting the singles that never showed up on an official album, or at least any of the albums that made the box. Along with the odd decision to have the CD sleeves be slightly larger than a mini-LP replica (they're as big as a jewel box, so they're larger than a shrunk vinyl sleeve, a size that's rarely seen in other releases), this is the only quibble on what is otherwise an excellent set. The sound -- remastered again after the 2002 overhaul for hybrid SACDs -- is bold and colorful, with the earliest albums carrying a wallop and the latter records feeling like they're fighting to be heard in two separate channels and all the better for it. If nothing here provides a revelation -- none of the mixes are radically different, the way that some Beatles mono sides are -- this nevertheless is the best the Rolling Stones have sounded on disc (or on vinyl) and there's considerable care in this package, from the replications of the sleeves to the extensive notes from David Fricke. Plus, hearing the Stones in mono winds up being a hot wire back toward the '60s: this feels raw and vibrant, as alive as the band was in the '60s.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The tracks on this two-CD, 31-song anthology, spanning Cohen's career from his 1967 debut album through 2002's Ten New Songs, were chosen by Cohen himself. It could thus be regarded as an accurate mirror of how Cohen sees his own career path and catalog highlights. And there are many of the songs you would expect from any decent Cohen retrospective: "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "So Long Marianne," "Bird on a Wire," "Famous Blue Raincoat," and "I'm You're Man," for instance. Still, the balance and selection isn't ideal. There's just one song ("Famous Blue Raincoat") from Songs of Love and Hate, and no songs at all from Death of a Ladies Man. Cohen's 1988-2002 period is arguably overrepresented, with about half of the package's tunes dating from that era. And because his later period is so prominently featured, most listeners won't be able to get around the fact that his voice declined in expressive range in the later years, and his material was less striking than his best early songs. Still, for those who've enjoyed Cohen all along, it's a good dose of much of his better work, and certainly doesn't skimp on the running time, with each of the discs lasting 78 minutes.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo