An abiding love of classic soul, twangy rock, and R&B has always been at the core of Rick Astley's pop sound. It's an organic blend that he's been increasingly digging into since 2016's 50 and one which underpins all of 2023's Are We There Yet? His third album to be produced out of his home studio in London, the album feels like a love letter to the earthy, blues-influenced work of artists like Bill Withers and Otis Redding. Central to the album is "Dippin' My Feet," an infectious, country- and gospel-tinged rocker that nicely evokes the similarly rootsy, throwback style of Oklahoma singer JD McPherson. In fact, it's easy to imagine Astley hearing the rise of roots-inspired artists like McPherson and even singers like Hozier (another possible touchstone for the sounds at play on Are We There Yet?) and finding common pop ground. Here, he takes a back-to-basics approach, framing his resonant baritone in ringing piano and organ flourishes, crisp acoustic guitars, handclaps, and warm backing vocal harmonies. While the album certainly has a lovingly crafted, analog quality, there's a raw immediacy to many of these tracks, as if they were recorded live-in-studio or captured at a passionate church service. It's an earthy vibe reflected in Astley's vocals, as on the gospel-influenced "Never Gonna Stop," where he takes on the throaty intensity of a blues singer. Other evocative sounds pop up elsewhere, as on "High Enough," a minor-key number with echoey vibraphone accents that brings to mind the yearning atmosphere of a Chris Isaak song. Similarly, "Forever and More" has the crisp, guitar-driven soulfulness of an '80s Style Council track. Certainly, all of the rootsy soulfulness Astley embraces on Are We There Yet? is far removed from the studio sophistication of his early hits. That said, it feels genuine and hard-won by age and experience. With Are We There Yet?, Astley hasn't just arrived, he's come into his own.© Matt Collar /TiVo

It's nearly impossible to listen to 4 Hero's Two Pages without thinking about the incredible success enjoyed by the jungle movement (and Roni Size's New Forms LP in particular) during the four-year gap which separated Dego and Mark Mac's second album from their third. With LTJ Bukem, the duo were one of the first jungle acts to desert hardcore for the astral drift of jazz-fusion atmospheres, and Two Pages is about as fusion-soaked as it gets. The first of the two discs includes the more downtempo R&B, almost orchestral side of 4 Hero, quite indebted to jazz luminaries like Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston Smith and Roy Ayers. Many of the instruments are live contributions, while vocalists as wide-ranging as poet Ursula Rucker and Digable Planets rapper Butterfly make appearances. The second disc is the dancefloor (read: tighter) half of the album, skirting through dense soundscapes of paranoid breakbeats. As could be expected, more than two hours of music is way too much for listeners to work their way through, and a heavy editing job would have made this a stellar album instead of the flawed and somewhat bloated album it turned out to be. For drum'n'bass fans, the real highlights come with second-disc tracks like "We Who Are Not as Others" and "In the Shadows" -- as it is, they're so terrific as to nearly justify purchase by themselves. (The American version of Two Pages edited the album down to fit on a single disc, and also added several tracks not available on the British two-CD version.)© John Bush /TiVo

If, in 1999, The Soft Bulletin found the Flaming Lips decisively moving away from their previous identity as acid-damaged rockers and segueing into a more genteel sort of psychedelia, 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was where the band fully set their controls for the heart of the sun. The Lips completely shed the dissonance and goofiness of their early major label releases and turned the sweeping soundscapes of Soft Bulletin into the foundation of Yoshimi, a new sound that was cosmically and philosophically indulgent.  While these indulgences would go to extremes on many of the band's future releases, here they’re a dazzling balance of bold sonic experimentation and deeply melodic (but sublimely weird) song structures that resulted in what is probably the strongest and most cohesive album in their catalog. Though technically not a concept album (only the first third relates the "Yoshimi" storyline), it is nonetheless tightly bound to its sonic signatures (burbling synths, overdriven percussion, highly processed guitars) and the even-toned, reverb-drenched approach to vocals that Wayne Coyne had recently settled on. (The way that Coyne sings on the Lips' aughts-era albums manages to be the most unsettling combination of "it's all gonna be fine" soothing and "the universe is ending, let's get weird" chicanery.) Coyne, guitarist/drummer/studio rat Steven Drozd, and bassist Michael Ivins—along with producer Dave Fridmann—spent nearly two years putting the album together, and in that time, it seems they set out to explore the outer capabilities of every piece of equipment encountered. Yet the result never sounds like a collagist pastiche or an over-gilded lily; instead, it has a warm, lived-in feel, but one where home is a slightly rusty spaceship stuck on the outer edges of the galaxy. For its 20th anniversary, Yoshimi is getting an encyclopedic expansion, with an additional five discs worth of material appended to the original album. The majority of the bonus studio tracks were already previously released on various singles, EPs, and one-offs (most of which were compiled on the DVD-Audio release of Yoshimi). But there is also much more in terms of previously unreleased studio tracks, many of which are surprisingly revelatory demos.While some of the demos are the unpolished run-throughs one may expect, others are seemingly half-baked fragments that are not only delightful on their own, but also give a peek inside the band's creative process: The rough, three-minute sketch of "Do You Realize??" shows the listener where Drozd added the soaring chorus that not only became the song's signature, but also gave it its epic emotional heft. There's also a 15-song concert from an early 2003 date in London that was previously broadcast on the BBC that is an excellent document of the band's effusive live presence. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

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