With her tragic early death (though hardly surprising given Amy Winehouse's lifestyle) a truly unique voice of contemporary soul stopped singing on July 23, 2011. She has a voice that should never be overshadowed either by her chaotic life covering the pages of British tabloids, or by her struggles with alcohol and drugs, or even the hundreds of videos of failed concerts on YouTube... When the Winehouse phenomenon exploded with this second album, the sublime Back To Black being far superior to her first record Frank, soul music was going through a slump with hollow, syrupy R&B singers and sanitized productions flooding the scene. Few people tried to develop the path established by Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, Dinah Washington and Marlena Shaw. But then along came Amy Winehouse, with her incredible timbre, her genuine songs (which she wrote herself, unlike 90% of her peers), her vintage-tinged productions (which were never passé) and brass-filled instrumentation. To top it all off, even her image was distinctive: 50’s beehive, biker tattoos and a cheeky attitude. Back To Black topped the charts for months all over the world, and it's still a real masterpiece of soul music and R&B. When critical opinion meets popular opinion – something relatively rare that’s worth underlining - the enjoyment is only tenfold. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of their first album, Sony Music CG has brought together all the WHAM! singles on one disc, with a host of bonus tracks. It could only begin with Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do); the George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley duo’s brassy, bouncy calling card. The original track is followed by 5 re-jigged versions sure to delight fans. Of particular note is the Special US Remix, with its handclaps raising the slider on an already effective original rhythm, which is followed by Young Guns (Go For It), on the back of which WHAM! became a veritable social phenomenon. Relaxed, elegant and gently anti-conformist, the two young men went on to score a string of hits: Bad Boys, with its unforgettable opening synth gimmick, the summery Club Tropicana, and the unmissable Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, a 1984 single that sounds like it came straight out of the Motown catalogue. The number of hits on this compilation is all the more impressive given that WHAM! had a relatively short lifespan, sacrificed in favour of George Michael's phenomenal solo success. Songs like Last Christmas reflect the evolution of George Michael: it is signed by both of WHAM!’s members, but it is Michael alone who carries it on his shoulders. The christmas jingle is presented here in its original version, accompanied by a “Pudding Mix” which features a synthesised bell. As the album is structured chronologically, it ends with the band's least emblematic singles: The Edge of Heaven, Battlestations, and Where Did Your Heart Go?— a cover of the American band Was (Not Was) sung by Michael, on which Ridgeley is simply absent. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

Tom Waits wrote a song called "Frank's Wild Years" for his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, then used the title (minus its apostrophe) for a musical play he wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and toured with in 1986. The Franks Wild Years album, drawn from the show, is subtitled, "un operachi romantico in two acts," though the songs themselves do not carry the plot. Rather, this is just the third installment in Waits' eccentric series of Island Records albums in which he seems most inspired by German art song and carnival music, presenting songs in spare, stripped-down arrangements consisting of instruments like marimba, baritone horn, and pump organ and singing in a strained voice that has been artificially compressed and distorted. The songs themselves often are conventional romantic vignettes, or would be minus the oddities of instrumentation, arrangement, and performance. For example, "Innocent When You Dream," a song of disappointment in love and friendship, has a winning melody, but it is played in a seesaw arrangement of pump organ, bass, violin, and piano, and Waits sings it like an enraged drunk. (He points out the arbitrary nature of the arrangements by repeating "Straight to the Top," done as a demented rhumba in act one, as a Vegas-style Frank Sinatra swing tune in act two.) The result on record may not be theatrical, exactly, but it certainly is affected. It also has the quality of an inside joke that listeners are not being let in on.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Helado Negro's music radiates softness and sensuality. The American singer and composer, who sings in both English and Spanish, depending on the mood and emotion, is on a journey toward sonoric fulfillment. His ninth album, Phasor, is deeply inspired by contemplating nature and the fascination that comes from that. This is largely due to one element, a constant presence at its core: the Sal-Mar synthesizer, created in 1969 by composer Salvatore Martirano and a team of engineers from the University of Illinois. From this instrument, he extracts a remarkable warmth, and above all ideas, often transforming them into loops, which he repeats, and, to an extent, modulates, evolving them by adding, taking away, changing or cutting, always with a desire to create music that begs to be cozied up to with its velvety smoothness. Warm, exaggerated bass, ghostlike electronic clinking, fully-embodied melodies…It's a fantastic album, skilfully simple, and capable of describing traffic jams like forests and observing human nature as much as nature itself. © Brice Miclet/Qobuz

Recorded during and immediately following R.E.M.'s disaster-prone Monster tour, New Adventures in Hi-Fi feels like it was recorded on the road. Not only are all of Michael Stipe's lyrics on the album about moving or travel, the sound is ragged and varied, pieced together from tapes recorded at shows, soundtracks, and studios, giving it a loose, careening charm. New Adventures has the same spirit of much of R.E.M.'s IRS records, but don't take the title of New Adventures in Hi-Fi lightly -- R.E.M. tries different textures and new studio tricks. "How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us" opens the album with a rolling, vaguely hip-hop drum beat and slowly adds on jazzily dissonant piano. "E-Bow the Letter" starts out as an updated version of "Country Feedback," then it turns in on itself with layers of moaning guitar effects and Patti Smith's haunting backing vocals. Clocking in at seven minutes, "Leave" is the longest track R.E.M. has yet recorded and it's one of their strangest and best -- an affecting minor-key dirge with a howling, siren-like feedback loop that runs throughout the entire song. Elsewhere, R.E.M. tread standard territory: "Electrolite" is a lovely piano-based ballad, "Departure" rocks like a Document outtake, the chiming opening riff of "Bittersweet Me" sounds like it was written in 1985, "New Test Leper" is gently winding folk-rock, and "The Wake-Up Bomb" and "Undertow" rock like the Monster outtakes they are. New Adventures in Hi-Fi may run a little too long -- it clocks in at 62 minutes, by far the longest album R.E.M. has ever released -- yet in its multifaceted sprawl, they wound up with one of their best records of the '90s.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Released in the fall of 1999, when Korn were in danger of being overshadowed by such protégés as Limp Bizkit, Issues reaffirms the group's status as alt-metal leaders, illustrating that the true difference between Korn and their imitators is their mastery of sound. Korn are about nothing if not sound. Sure, Jonathan Davis doesn't merely toss off lyrics, but in the end, it doesn't matter since his voice and the various words that float to the surface simply enhance the mood. Similarly, the band doesn't really have any distinguished riffs or hooks -- everything each member contributes adds to the overall sound -- so, casual listeners can be forgiven if they think the songs sound the same, since not only do the tracks bleed into one other, the individual songs have no discernible high points. Each cut rises from the same dark sonic murk, occasionally surging forward with volume, power, and aggression. It's mood music -- songs don't matter, but the foreboding feeling and gloomy sounds do. To a certain extent, this has always been true of Korn albums, but it's particularly striking on Issues because they pull off a nifty trick of stripping their sound back to its bare essentials and expanding and rebuilding from that. They've decided to leave rap-metal to the likes of Limp Bizkit, since there is very little rapping or appropriation of hip-hop culture anywhere on Issues. By doing this, they have re-emphasized their skill as a band, and how they can find endless, often intriguing, variations on their core sound. Issues may not be the cathartic blast of anger their debut was, nor is it as adventurous as Follow the Leader, but it better showcases the sheer raw power of the band than either.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Big Thief songwriter and frontwoman Adrianne Lenker's aesthetic falls somewhere between rough edged Appalachian Mountain music filtered through an urban Brooklyn sensibility, and something further out, more individualized, and in the end, not completely expressible. While stanzas like "When I say celestial/ I mean extraterrestrial/ I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart/ When I say heart I mean finish/The last one there is a potato knish/ Baking too long in the sun of spud infinity" might make you smile, her lyrics often seem like they're only scratching the surface of what she's thinking and feeling. Her voice, which can shade into a Hazel Dickens kind of portentousness, often strains to reach a place that only she can visualize. But the overall effect is a rigorous, engaged, and inviting musical experience. Recorded in four locations—Topanga Canyon, Upstate New York, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona—there's nevertheless a cohesion thanks to Lenker's singing. "Red Moon," with guest Matt Davidson of Twain on fiddle and harmony vocals, is the band at their most Americana-esque. The album's sweetest melody is found on "No Reason" with Buck Meek on twelve-string guitar and guest Richard Hardy on flute. The only misstep is "Love Love Love," where Lenker's voice wobbles and nearly breaks in spots. At times the foursome (rounded out by bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia) do get noisier, as in "Little Things," where Meek's electric guitar chimes and reverb gives Lenker's voice extra force; guitar effects and electronics add a textured bass thump to "Flower of Blood." You may wonder if this double album would have been tighter and less indulgent condensed into a single, but Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You justifies its length, staying steady until the goodtime honky-tonk closer, "Blue Lightning." © Robert Baird/Qobuz

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

Perhaps it was inevitable that Bob Dylan would change direction at the end of the '70s, since he had dabbled in everything from full-on repudiation of his legacy to a quiet embrace of it, to dipping his toe into pure showmanship. Nobody really could have expected that he would turn to Christianity on Slow Train Coming, embracing a born-again philosophy with enthusiasm. He has no problem in believing in a vengeful god -- you gotta serve somebody, after all -- and this is pure brimstone and fire throughout the record, even on such lovely testimonials as "I Believe in You." The unexpected side effect of his conversion is that it gave Dylan a focus he hadn't had since Blood on the Tracks, and his concentration carries over to the music, which is lean and direct in a way that he hadn't been since, well, Blood on the Tracks. Focus isn't necessarily the same thing as consistency, and this does suffer from being a bit too dogmatic, not just in its religion, but in its musical approach. Still, it's hard to deny Dylan's revitalized sound here, and the result is a modest success that at least works on its own terms.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

With the hypnotic and bright Grammy-nominated track "Levels," Swedish EDM DJ/producer Tim Bergling aka Avicii unleashed a global dance hit the size of "Beachball," "Blue Monday," "Starships," and maybe even "The Hokey Pokey." If the masses leave the dancefloor, "Levels" brings them back with sunshine and light, but Avicii's debut album is a sharp left turn, kicking off with the acoustic guitar strum of "Wake Me Up," a pleasant, well-written heritage pop track where "I Need a Dollar" vocalist Aloe Blacc gets thrown in a synthetic Mumford & Sons surrounding for something very non-"Levels." It's a strange jumble that works, but even more surprising is the seductive "Addicted to You," where Oklahoma singer/songwriter Audra Mae gets sultry on a song co-written by country and pop legend Mac Davis, and don't wonder long about how the results ended up sounding so Nina Simone, because the curve balls keep coming. Adam Lambert reins in his glam tactics on the Nile Rodgers-assisted "Lay Me Down" for a disco and Daft Punk swerve, while the kinetic down-on-the-farm "Shame on Me" offers a knee-slapping, EDM-meets-country rave-up that threatens to go hambone with a solo on the spoons. Country music and bluegrass keep winding their way into the album, and while it rarely smacks of a gimmick, these rustic numbers often evolve into EDM around their drum machine-introducing choruses, as if True was a remix album commission Avicii picked up while vacationing in Appalachia. In the end, it's an admirable and interesting effort where the highs offset the lows, but those with molly in hand and dancing shoes on feet should just cool their jets and get ready to sit a spell.© David Jeffries /TiVo

Recoils from fame usually aren't as subdued as Norah Jones' third album, Not Too Late, but such understatement is customary for this gentlest of singer/songwriters. Not Too Late may not be as barbed or alienating as either In Utero or Kid A -- it's not an ornery intensification of her sound nor a chilly exploration of its furthest limits -- but make no mistake, it is indeed a conscious abdication of her position as a comfortable coffeehouse crooner and a move toward art for art's sake. And, frankly, who can blame Jones for wanting to shake off the Starbucks stigmata? Although a large part of her appeal has always been that she sounds familiar, like a forgotten favorite from the early '70s, Jones is too young and too much of a New York bohemian to settle into a role as a nostalgia peddler, so it made sense that she started to stretch a little after her 2004 sophomore set, Feels Like Home, proved that her surprise blockbuster 2002 debut, Come Away with Me, was no fluke. First, there was the cabaret country of her Little Willies side band, then there was her appearance on gonzo art rocker Mike Patton's Peeping Tom project, and finally there's this hushed record, her first containing nothing but original compositions. It's also her first album recorded without legendary producer Arif Mardin, who helmed her first two albums, giving them a warm, burnished feel that was nearly as pivotal to Jones' success has her sweet, languid voice. Mardin died in the summer of 2006, and in his absence, Jones recorded Not Too Late at the home studio she shares with her collaborator, bassist and boyfriend Lee Alexander. Although it shares many of the same sonic characteristics as Jones' first two albums, Not Too Late boasts many subtle differences that add up to a distinctly different aesthetic. Jones and Alexander have stripped Norah's music to its core. Gone are any covers of pop standards, gone are the studio pros, gone is the enveloping lushness that made Come Away with Me so easy to embrace, something that Not Too Late is most decidedly not. While this might not have the rough edges of a four-track demo, Not Too Late is most certainly music that was made at home with little or no consideration of an audience much larger than Jones and Alexander. It's spare, sometimes skeletal, often sleepy and lackadaisical, wandering from tunes plucked out on acoustic guitars and pianos to those with richer full-band arrangements. Norah Jones has never exactly been lively -- part of her charm was her sultry slowness, ideal for both Sunday afternoons and late nights -- but the atmosphere here is stultifying even if it's not exactly unpleasant. After all, unpleasantness seems to run contrary to Jones' nature, and even if she dabbles in Tom Waits-ian carnivalesque stomps ("Sinkin' Soon") or tentatively stabs at politics ("My Dear Country"), it never feels out of place; often, the shift is so subtle that it's hard to notice. That subtlety is the biggest Achilles' heel on Not Too Late, as it manifests itself in songs that aren't particularly distinctive or performances that are particularly varied. There are exceptions to the rule and they all arrive with full-band arrangements, whether it's the lazy jazz shuffle of "Until the End," the country-tinged "Be My Somebody," or the wonderful laid-back soul of "Thinking About You." These are songs that not only sound full but they sound complete, songs that have a purposeful flow and are memorable for both their melody and sentiment. They would have been standouts on Feels Like Home, but here they are even more distinctive because the rest of the record plays like a sketchbook, capturing Jones and Alexander figuring out how to move forward after such great success. Instead of being the end result of those experiments, the completed painting after the sketch, Not Too Late captures their process, which is interesting if not quite compelling. But its very release is a clear statement of artistic purpose for Jones: its ragged, unfinished nature illustrates that she's more interested in pursuing her art than recycling Come Away with Me, and if this third album isn't as satisfying as that debut, it nevertheless is a welcome transitional effort that proves her artistic heart is in the right place.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The qualities of a vocal genius don't always become clear when she's singing classic material. Often as not, her abilities to both personalize and transcend a lifeless song with a stellar performance reveal the character behind the singer. Both Billie Holiday and Otis Redding excelled no matter what they were recording, whether it was a timeless standard or a studio throwaway. This collection of Amy Winehouse material, released to coincide with the first Christmas season after her death in July 2011, does not contain a strong set of material. Besides the covers, which are well chosen, originals "Between the Cheats" and "Best Friends, Right?" and "Half Time" should not have survived the cut if Winehouse had been around to wield her veto power. But if the songwriting isn’t strong enough to make listeners confuse this with a Back to Black follow-up, the productions and performances are up to her high caliber. Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson handled virtually all of the production work, while these performances by Winehouse are just as strong as she showed on Frank and Back to Black. Thanks to the work of Remi and Ronson, the album is also strikingly uniform; only the songwriting and prevalence of covers or "original versions" reveal that this is a posthumous collection. Ronson's production on "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" is towering, although he injects a little more drama into his chart than the song can support, while a skittering version of "The Girl from Ipanema" (nearly drum’n’bass at points) nearly reinvents a tired classic. The recordings stretch from the beginning of her professional career to close to the end, but Winehouse is virtually always in strong voice; only on her Tony Bennett duet, “Body and Soul,” does she veer into self-parody.© John Bush /TiVo

The Chicago Transit Authority recorded this double-barreled follow-up to their eponymously titled 1969 debut effort. The contents of Chicago II (1970) underscore the solid foundation of complex jazz changes with heavy electric rock & roll that the band so brazenly forged on the first set. The septet also continued its ability to blend the seemingly divergent musical styles into some of the best and most effective pop music of the era. One thing that had changed was the band's name, which was shortened to simply Chicago to avoid any potential litigious situations from the city of Chicago's transportation department -- which claimed the name as proprietary property. Musically, James Pankow (trombone) was about to further cross-pollinate the band's sound with the multifaceted six-song "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon." The classically inspired suite also garnered the band two of its most beloved hits -- the upbeat pop opener "Make Me Smile" as well as the achingly poignant "Color My World" -- both of which remained at the center of the group's live sets. Chicago had certainly not abandoned its active pursuit of blending high-octane electric rockers such as "25 or 6 to 4" to the progressive jazz inflections heard in the breezy syncopation of "The Road." Adding further depth of field is the darker "Poem for the People" as well as the politically charged five-song set titled "It Better End Soon." These selections feature the band driving home its formidable musicality and uncanny ability to coalesce styles telepathically and at a moment's notice. The contributions of Terry Kath (guitar/vocals) stand out as he unleashes some of his most pungent and sinuous leads, which contrast with the tight brass and woodwind trio of Lee Loughnane (trumpet/vocals), Walter Parazaider (woodwinds/vocals), and the aforementioned Pankow. Peter Cetera (bass/vocals) also marks his songwriting debut -- on the final cut of both the suite and the album -- with "Where Do We Go from Here." It bookends both with at the very least the anticipation and projection of a positive and optimistic future.© Lindsay Planer /TiVo

Foals are the kind of band that seemingly overhaul their sound with every album they release. Their debut album Antidotes (2008) was a true masterpiece, brimming with fresh, explosive rock. It was followed by the raging success of Holy Fire (2013) and What Went Down (2015), setting this band from Oxford on an upwards trajectory that saw them headlining the biggest indie rock festivals. Their songs are written to shine on stage, and upbeat tracks like Cassius, Inhaler and Spanish Sahara really get the crowds going. The British band became a quartet following the departure of bassist Walter Gervers in 2018, and they began adopting a more synthetic sound. They released Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part I and II a few months apart in 2019. With keyboardist Edwin Congreave leaving Foals in 2021, the band is now a trio. This departure hasn’t stopped them creating music though, and now they’re back with the incredible Life Is Yours: a disco-funk avalanche intended to bury the dark days of the pandemic. The English band experiment with drum machines in the track 2001 and give a cheeky wink to 80s pop in Wake Me Up and Under The Radar (they also seem to take inspiration from the band Metronomy in Looking High). They even get the disco ball out on the incredible closing track Wild Green. “This has the potential to be an iconic year, and I’d love this record to be the soundtrack to that – to be there for that house party, that barbecue, that drive to the ocean, when the face masks are a distant memory and it’s just you hugging your mates in the middle of a field," explains frontman Yannis Philippakis. This is a daring release that might surprise fans of the percussive and intellectual math rock Foal’s have been known for, but the light dose of pop on this album is sure to brighten your day. © Charlotte Saintoin/Qobuz