J.J. Cale was the embodiment of cool blues. With his atypical blend of rock, folk, country, blues and jazz, he was one of the most influential figures in rock'n' roll. Worshipped by Clapton, the Cocaine writer who spent most of his time in a mobile home remains the essence of a laid-back and relaxed musical style. For his fans, Stay Around is a gift from heaven. This posthumous record from April 2019 brings together fifteen unreleased songs mixed and produced by Cale himself and compiled by his widow, Christine Lakeland, and his old collaborator and manager Mike Kappus. "I wanted to find stuff that was completely unheard to max-out the ‘Cale factor'," says Lakeland, "using as much that came from John’s ears and fingers and his choices as I could, so I stuck to John’s mixes. You can make things so sterile that you take the human feel out. But John left a lot of that human feel in. He left so much room for interpretation.” Obviously, all these gems - from the stripped back Oh My My My to the more elaborate Chasing You - do not change anything at all about what we knew and loved about this king of cool. The quality of Stay Around, which never sounds slap-dash, proves that the man took every second of his art seriously. And as always with him, we come out of this posthumous album with the feeling of having fully lived a human and warm encounter. A sincere and engaging experience, connected to the soul and the gut. Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Turning away from the sweet pop of Out of Time, R.E.M. created a haunting, melancholy masterpiece with Automatic for the People. At its core, the album is a collection of folk songs about aging, death, and loss, but the music has a grand, epic sweep provided by layers of lush strings, interweaving acoustic instruments, and shimmering keyboards. Automatic for the People captures the group at a crossroads, as they moved from cult heroes to elder statesmen, and the album is a graceful transition into their new status. It is a reflective album, with frank discussions on mortality, but it is not a despairing record -- "Nightswimming," "Everybody Hurts," and "Sweetness Follows" have a comforting melancholy, while "Find the River" provides a positive sense of closure. R.E.M. have never been as emotionally direct as they are on Automatic for the People, nor have they ever created music quite as rich and timeless, and while the record is not an easy listen, it is the most rewarding record in their oeuvre.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

There’s a ‘before and after’ Out Of Time in the life of R.E.M. This ‘before’ for Michael Stipe’s band is mainly found on university campuses where the group gained a cult following in the ‘80s… How then did R.E.M. manage to sell 12 million copies of Out Of Time to the world? The answer is that this record was both sublime and austere. An uncompromising album, like the chamber rock such as Nirvana and the Pixies that you’d blast out without caring about pissing off the neighbours in that year of 1992… Always virtuosic, Peter Buck goes from the mandolin to the acoustic guitar with great ease, John Paul Johns from Led Zeppelin sublimely arranges refined chords and Michael Stipe shines with his melancholic and tortured prose with the candor of a man with self-assured belief. Cinemascope ballads prevail, peaking with Everybody Hurts. It must be said, Automatic For The People is not the most easy-flowing album by R.E.M. but it is one of the most beautiful. Released in 2017, this 25th anniversary edition also offers, alongside the remastered album, a live recording from the 40 Watt Club in Athens on the 19th November 1992 with some cover versions like Funtime by Iggy Pop and Love Is All Around by The Troggs. © MD/Qobuz

War on her mind? Whatever Beth Hart’s mind-set was in Autumn 2019, the Californian tigress has long shown her feisty side without ever getting caught up in the clichés. With the album War in My Mind, she adds the finishing garnish to her classic rock’n'blues’n’soul cocktail by looking inwards and confronting her inner demons. “More than any record I’ve ever made, on 2019’s War In My Mind I’m more open to being myself on these songs”, she explains. “I’ve come a long way with healing, and I’m comfortable with my darknesses, weirdnesses and things that I’m ashamed on – as well as all the things that make me feel good.” On songs such as Bad Woman Blues, Let It Grow and Woman Down, Hart pours her heart out – without being overly gushy - and uses her voice as an irresistible magnet that pulls every word, every sentence, every chorus. The cherry on the cake is that we find Rob Cavallo behind the console, crafting a slick yet never rushed production. © Clotilde Maréchal/Qobuz

Five fallow years. We had to wait until 2016 for MGMT to hit the studio, under the sun of the US West Coast. Little Dark Age marks the glorious return of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, heroes of the soundtrack to the 2000s. After an eponymous album which was less impressive than Oracular Spectacular (2007) and Congratulations (2010), this fourth work takes off on a synth-pop tangent. They needed to evolve. All alone, the Brooklyn team started to feel their isolation. On production, we find Dave Fridmann, ex-Mercury Rev, and Chairlift guitarist, Patrick Wimberly, who manages a double triumph. Channelling their genius and opening it out to collaborations: Connan Mockasin, who can be found in the album's title clip, and the main synth freak, Ariel Pink. In a more sombre vein which binds form to content, MGMT draws out nuances in the form of homages to the Cure, Gothic and even pop flavours. If the acid sheen of their youthful works had the character of a bad trip (You die, And words won’t do anything, It’s permanently night), the psychedelic effervescence dries up to give way to a baroque pop sound, the quilted synths of Hand it Over showing that the priority here is levity. The heritage of Robert Smith has replaced the hippy bandanas, without quite filling Andrew's head with post-punk fatalism. On the contrary. Struck by occasional inspirations (TSLAMP, She Works Out Too Much), MGMT are playing on the halcyon days of the Eighties, when new wave unfurled across Europe (the ambiguous Me & Michael). This recipe brings forth Little Dark Age and When You Die, marked by the dark synths and vivid melodies that Ariel writes along with the lyrics. An album like a rough-hewn gem. Frustrating, delightful, but with the allure of a thing incomplete. © CS/Qobuz

Set in the 1970s and loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-selling novel Daisy Jones & the Six is the fictional account of the rise and fall of a prominent blues-rock band as revealed through interviews. An Amazon Studios miniseries adaptation was already underway by the time the book was published in 2019, with producers enlisting Blake Mills to construct the band's sound. To write the songs (25 in all appear in the series), Mills enlisted help from none other than Jackson Browne as well as figures like Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, Madison Cunningham, and Roger Manning, among many others. The emerging 11-song soundtrack album doubles as the group's imagined debut, Aurora. It was performed by the show's band-camp-trained cast, led by Riley Keough as Daisy and Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne. (Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Will Harrison, and Sebastian Chacon round out the group's TV lineup, which diverges slightly from the book in number and by instrument.) Together with Mills' production, the star-studded writing team manage to settle into a dual-vocal-heavy MOR sound that's credible as the output of a single band at the same time that it touches on Laurel Canyon, Nashville, and, if fleetingly, Fleetwood Mac itself, as on the chorus of soft rock standout "Let Me Down Easy," a descendent of "Dreams." Another highlight is the rousing "Regret Me," which almost evokes the Heartbreakers with its efficient hooks, gritty guitar tones, organ, live energy, and slight affectation by Claflin. They let loose again with the bluesy garage rock of the Keough-led "More Fun to Miss," while quasi-acoustic ballads like "Two Against Three" and the trite "No Words" ("There ain't no words for the song I'm trying to write/Oh, I just don't know the words, babe, for what I'm trying to write/Everything I've tried so far, babe, doesn't feel right") can seem more like sentimental, narrative-serving fare -- not that that's necessarily a bad thing, considering their purposes. In the end, while Aurora plays out more like a cast album than unearthed period vinyl, it does hover on the spectrum, and the actor/musicians come to play while songs suggest the intended period Los Angeles music scene, if they rarely stand strong enough on their own to create their own legend.© Marcy Donelson /TiVo

How does an instant multimillion-selling album become an underrated minor masterpiece? George Harrison's follow-up to the triple-disc All Things Must Pass (which had been comprised of an immense backlog of great songs that he'd built up across the last years of his time with the Beatles), Living in the Material World was necessarily a letdown for fans and critics, appearing as it did two-and-a-half-years after its predecessor without that earlier album's outsized songbag from which to draw. And it does seem like Harrison narrowed his sights and his vision for this record, which has neither the bold musical expansiveness nor the overwhelming confidence of its predecessor. And while there are still some beautiful and delightfully lyrical, charming moments throughout, few of the melodies are as instantly memorable and compelling as those of most of the songs on the earlier record, and some of the most serious songs here, such as "The Light That Has Lighted the World," seem weighed down with their own sense of purpose, in ways that All Things Must Pass mostly (but not entirely) avoided. What Living in the Material World does show off far better than the earlier record, however, is Harrison's guitar work -- unlike the prior album, with its outsized contingent of musicians including Eric Clapton and Dave Mason on guitars, he's the only axeman on Material World, and it does represent his solo playing and songwriting at something of a peak. Most notable are his blues stylings and slide playing, glimpsed on some of the later Beatles sessions but often overlooked by fans. "Don't Let Me Wait Too Long" is driven by a delectable acoustic rhythm guitar and has a great beat. The title track isn't great, but it does benefit from a tight, hard, band sound, and "The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord)," despite its title, is the high point of the record, a fast, rollicking, funky, bluesy jewel with a priceless guitar break (maybe the best of Harrison's solo career) that should have been at the heart of any of Harrison's concert set. Vocally, Harrison was always an acquired taste, and he isn't as self-consciously pretty or restrained here, but it is an honest performance, and his singing soars magnificently in his heartfelt performance on "The Day the World Gets Round," a song that resembles "Beware of Darkness" and also, curiously enough, "Across the Universe." Perhaps a less serious title would have represented the album better, but nobody was looking for self-effacement from any ex-Beatle except Ringo (who's also here, natch) in those days. Even in the summer of 1973, after years of war and strife and disillusionment, some of us were still sort of looking -- to borrow a phrase from a Lennon-McCartney song -- or hoping to get from them something like "the word" that would make us free. And George, God love him, had the temerity to actually oblige, to the extent of painting a few signs here and there suggesting where he'd found it and where we might, all with some great playing and some laughs. And it wasn't all serious -- there are pointed moments of humor throughout, especially on the title song; and "Sue Me, Sue You Blues" was a follow-up to Beatles-era tracks such as "Only a Northern Song," dealing with the internal workings and business side of his lingering involvement with the group, in this case the multiple, overlapping, sometimes rotating lawsuits that attended the breakup of their organization. And one track, "Try Some, Buy Some," which he'd given away to Ronnie Spector at the time, actually dated back to the All Things Must Pass sessions.© Bruce Eder /TiVo

Stand! is the pinnacle of Sly & the Family Stone's early work, a record that represents a culmination of the group's musical vision and accomplishment. Life hinted at this record's boundless enthusiasm and blurred stylistic boundaries, yet everything simply gels here, resulting in no separation between the astounding funk, effervescent irresistible melodies, psychedelicized guitars, and deep rhythms. Add to this a sharpened sense of pop songcraft, elastic band interplay, and a flowering of Sly's social consciousness, and the result is utterly stunning. Yes, the jams ("Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey," "Sex Machine") wind up meandering ever so slightly, but they're surrounded by utter brilliance, from the rousing call to arms of "Stand!" to the unification anthem "Everyday People" to the unstoppable "I Want to Take You Higher." All of it sounds like the Family Stone, thanks not just to the communal lead vocals but to the brilliant interplay, but each track is distinct, emphasizing a different side of their musical personality. As a result, Stand! winds up infectious and informative, invigorating and thought-provoking -- stimulating in every sense of the word. Few records of its time touched it, and Sly topped it only by offering its opposite the next time out.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

On a brisk set with some familiar callbacks to their big beat heyday, the Chemical Brothers offer a decent late-era installment with their ninth album, No Geography. Not as exploratory or insular as their other 2010s output, No Geography is a steady, no-frills mix that focuses more on clever samples than guest vocals and festival-sized body-rocking. Standing out atop the pack, the singles are the best moments on the album. Persistent throbber "Got to Keep On" rides a glittery disco-funk sample (Peter Brown's 1977 gem "Dance With Me") while "We've Got to Try" goes the soul route by swiping the uplifting vocals from the Hallelujah Chorus' "I've Got to Find a Way" and grinding them into a buzzy, robust anthem that recalls the duo's late-'90s best. In a similar vein, "Free Yourself" is all digital dread, taking snippets of Diane di Prima's utopian poetry and twisting them into a robotic instruction manual for liberation through the dancefloor. However, "MAH" ends up being the riotous highlight of No Geography (utilizing a hilariously crotchety El Coco sample from 1977), the closest the Chems come to that "classic" old-school sound. In addition to the singles, Norwegian singer Aurora plays an important role in the album's sound, bringing much-needed emotion to a trio of songs with her ethereal vocals and songwriting. Japanese rapper Nene also guests, dropping a scene-stealing and all-too-brief verse on "Eve of Destruction." While not a low in the Chemical Brothers' catalog by any means, No Geography is also not their strongest or most memorable work to date. It's best not to call it a comeback, just another ample addition to their decades-long discography.© Neil Z. Yeung /TiVo

In the mid-1970s, while most of the music world was focused on stadium concerts, the excesses of hard and glam rock and inevitable indulgences like half-hour drum solos, one unknown Memphis quartet was quietly predicting the future. Fronted by Alex Chilton who'd been the teenaged singer on the Box Tops 1967 hit, "The Letter," and including songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens, Big Star (named for a local supermarket chain), was steeped in the Beatles and contemporaries of Badfinger and The Raspberries. During its short life, the band recorded three ahead-of-their-time albums in the early 70s that are now worshipped as THE unassailable grails of power pop. Even more far-reaching, the band's three albums are also the place where R.E.M., The dBs, The Posies, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, and many others first got the idea for the jangly, tuneful, proudly Anglophilic guitar pop that eventually became a large part of Alternative Rock. Opening with Chris Bell's unexpectedly Robert Plant-esque vocal on the opening track, "Feel," this collection of Bell/Chilton originals progresses through sparkling tracks like the hilariously-titled, Byrdsian romp, "The Ballad of El Goodo," rockers like "Don't Lie To Me," the anthemic "When My Baby's Beside Me," and the joyous, bouncy single "In The Street," sung by Bell and later re-recorded by Cheap Trick as the theme song of television's That 70's Show. All are lean, clean, joyous blasts of melody built on tight ensemble playing rather than vocalist melodrama or solo instrumental glory. What gives #1 Record a never to be repeated edge in the slim Big Star catalog, is the presence of two strong vocalists in Chilton and Bell, who trade leads and harmonize together. The gossamer, beseeching "Give Me Another Chance" rises on their ravishing, John and Paul-like entwining. The defining twist in the Big Star fable is that because the distribution was fumbled, #1 Record barely made it into the stores, a lost cult record from the day it was released. Given an appropriately shimmering, tingle-inducing production thanks to the recording and mixing expertise of both Bell, but in particular Ardent Studio owner John Fry (most apparent in the crystalline acoustic guitar tones in "Watch The Sunrise"), these 12 miraculous confections are given added detail and punch in the sparkling new all-analog remastering. Guitar pop music has rarely if ever been this consequential. The still-radiant, all-consuming pop genius here remains sublime. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

The 1975 are back with their third studio album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. After a stint in rehab for frontman Matty Healy back in November/December, 2017, which helped him shake some drug problems, the four piece from Wilmslow are back to doing what they do best; making unique music with complex lyrics. So, what are The 1975 trying to tell us this time round?It doesn’t look like they’re overly bothered about being seen as a “cool” Indie Rock band anymore. They seem to have stepped out from behind this front to give us an album that focuses on sincerity and the role that the internet plays in our relationships. This message of sincerity is most clear on tracks such as Give Yourself A Try and Sincerity Is Scary which focus on overcoming identity problems (caused by people hiding behind social media) and giving an honest account of one’s self. One of the highlights of this album has to be Love It If We Made It, a track which takes a look at the political and social craziness of the time that we live in. “Modernity has failed us!” proclaims Healy. Speaking about the meaning of this song Healy stated “Love It If We Made it is the gem of hope amongst all of the rubble” ... “We have to really love each other, and if you don’t, just try.” The song that most clearly spells out the threat that the internet poses to our real, human relationships is The Man Who Married A Robot. Siri tells us the tale of a lonely man that became best friends with the internet and only existed online. Eventually the man dies, leaving no meaningful trace behind, but the internet lives on. There is something quite chilling about the story. Produced almost entirely by Healy and drummer George Daniel, the album also includes acoustic ballads such as Be My Mistake and Surrounded By Heads And Bodies as well as tracks with heavier production such as I Like America & America Likes Me. The boys close the album with I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) which focuses on the struggles of everyday life and has a hint of the Oasis to it with a strong dash of melancholy. Insecurity, the increasing madness of the world, computer screen relationships, The 1975 bring it all together whilst appreciating that it isn’t always easy to be sincere. © Euan Decourt/Qobuz

Though it remains the only Rolling Stones outtakes collection album ever to be officially released, Metamorphosis is one of those albums that has been slighted by almost everyone who has touched it, a problem that lies in its genesis. While both the Stones and former manager Allen Klein agreed that some form of archive release was necessary, if only to stem the then-ongoing flow of bootlegs, they could not agree how to present it. Of the two, the band's own version of the album, compiled by Bill Wyman, probably came closest to the fan's ideal, cherrypicking the vaults for some of the more legendary outtakes and oddities for a bird's-eye view of the entire band's creative brilliance. Klein, on the other hand, chose to approach the issue from the songwriting point-of-view, focusing on the wealth of demos for songs that Jagger/Richards gave away (usually to artists being produced by Andrew Oldham) and which, therefore, frequently featured more session men than Rolling Stones. Both approaches had their virtues, but when Klein's version of the album became the one that got the green light, of course fans and collectors bemoaned the non-availability of the other. The fact is, if Wyman's selection had been released, then everyone would have been crying out for Klein's. Sometimes, you just can't win. So, rather than wring your hands over what you don't receive, you should celebrate what you do. A heavily orchestrated version of "Out of Time," with Jagger accompanying the backing track that would later give Chris Farlowe a U.K. number one hit, opens the show; a loose-limbed "Memo From Turner," recorded with Al Kooper, closes it. No complaints there, then. The real meat, however, lies in between times. During 1964-1965, Mick Jagger and Andrew Oldham headed a session team that also included the likes of arrangers Art Greenslade and Mike Leander, guitarist Jimmy Page, pianist Nicky Hopkins, bassist John Paul Jones, and many more, convened to cut demos for the plethora of songs then being churned out by Jagger and Keith Richards. Some would subsequently be redone by the Stones themselves; others, however, would be used as backing tracks for other artist's versions of the songs. Metamorphosis pulls a number of tracks from this latter grouping, and while "Each and Every Day of the Year" (covered by Bobby Jameson), "I'd Much Rather Be With the Boys" (the Toggery Five), "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind" (Vashti), "Sleepy City" (the Mighty Avengers), and "We're Wasting Time" (Jimmy Tarbuck) may not be Stones performances per se, they are certainly Stones songs and, for the most part, as strong as any of the band originals included on the group's first four or five LPs. Elsewhere, the 1964 Chess studio outtake "Don't Lie to Me" is as fine a Chuck Berry cover as the Stones ever mustered, while "Family," the rocking "Jiving Sister Fanny," Bill Wyman's "Downtown Suzie," and a delightfully lackadaisical version of Stevie Wonder's "I Don't Know Why" are outtakes from two of the Stones' finest-ever albums, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. All of which adds up to an impressive pedigree, whatever the circumstances behind the album, and whatever else could have been included on it. Indeed, if there are any criticisms to be made, it is that the album sleeve itself is singularly uninformative, and the contents are seriously jumbled. But those are its only sins. Everything else you've heard about it is simply wishful (or otherwise) thinking. © Dave Thompson /TiVo

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