Fun.'s debut album Aim and Ignite was an interesting blend of seemingly divergent styles topped by a healthy dose of grandiose ambition and performed with a precise abandon. The trio made an album that was truly progressive and also super catchy and fun. The follow-up, Some Nights, ramps up the ambition and sonic bombast, but also manages to be even more powerful and impressive. While writing and planning the album, singer Nate Ruess, guitarist Jack Antonoff, and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost were heavily influenced by both the sound and scope of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and made every attempt to achieve something similar, even to the point of hiring that album's co-producer Jeff Bhasker to produce and craft beats for them. (Also Emile Haynie, who has worked with Eminem among others) Though the album has more of a hip-hop influence than Aim and Ignite did, there are still large doses of Queen and ELO coursing through the band's blood, both in the machine-crafted vocal harmonies and the ornate bigness of the sound. The album is overloaded with strings and horns, backing vocals, keyboards, and programmed drums surrounding Ruess like a clamoring crowd, but never drowning out his innately sincere vocals and painfully honest lyrics. He has the kind of voice that could cut through any amount of noise, not by using volume but honesty. Even when he's fed through Auto-Tune, you know he's telling you the truth all the time. On songs like the lead single "We Are Young" or the rollicking "All Alone," he provides a very human core that grounds things even as the music builds to ornate crescendos. Indeed, the album is really, really big sounding and could easily have ended up collapsing under its own weight and pretension, but the opposite happens and Some Nights takes flight instead. The songs are both anthemic and human-sized, the heartfelt words and naked emotions are never buried, and the music is uplifting, not overpowering. The trio has crafted a record that measures up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy musically and delivers enough emotional charge to power a small town for a month. It's an impressive achievement and Fun. deserves every bit of acclaim that comes its way because of it.© Tim Sendra /TiVo

Not the first posthumous compilation from David Bowie -- that would be the lavish box Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), which was planned prior to his January 10, 2016 death -- Legacy is nevertheless the first designed with his, well, legacy in mind. That much can be gleaned from the title of the compilation, but that's a bit of a feint since this set essentially repackages the simplest incarnation of a previous Bowie hits compilation, 2014's Nothing Has Changed. Legacy is available as a single and a double-disc, both carrying sequencings that mirror those on Nothing Has Changed (and both featuring a new mix of "Life on Mars?"). On the single disc, the first 12 songs are the same, then the back sequence is different, discarding "Absolute Beginners" and "Hallo Spaceboy" and concluding with "Where Are We Now?" and "Lazarus." Similarly, the double-disc has a nearly identical sequencing on its first disc -- "Ashes to Ashes" and "Fashion" are swapped -- with the differences arriving in the comp's final six songs, so Heathen's "Everyone Says Hi" is here, and this concludes with "Lazarus" and "I Can't Give Everything Away." In both cases, the Legacy sequencing is slightly better than that on Nothing Has Changed, since it winds up ending on the elegiac note that Bowie gave Blackstar. Still, it's splitting hairs: the 2016 and 2014 compilations are similar to each other, and they're also similar to the many Bowie comps that came before, and they're all just as likely to satisfy and pique interest.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

In the year of his 90th birthday (which he would have celebrated on the 23rd of September 2020 had he not died in 2004), Ray Charles is honoured with a new 90-track compilation box set. Just another compilation like all the rest? Yes and no. Ray Charles is undoubtedly one of the most-compiled artists in the history of music. Published by Tangerine, the label that the musician set up at the end of the 50s to keep the rights to his songs, this box set starts out like all the others: with the post-Atlantic hits, Georgia On My Mind, Hit The Road Jack, One Mint Julep, Busted... These are timeless treasures of proto-soul, but there doesn't seem to be much novelty here. The rest is much more interesting, and much rarer: tracks recorded between the second half of the 1960s and the 2000s, many of which were only released on vinyl, never reissued on CD and until now unavailable on digital. This is the first time that Ray Charles' lesser-known years have been given the compilation treatment in this way, and it is a revelation. In the 90s and 2000s, the production of his songs had a synthetic feel, and they did not age too well. These rarer songs are often hidden gems of southern soul, flavoured with country and wrapped in sumptuous symphonic orchestrations. Whether he is singing the Muppets (It's Ain't Easy Being Green) or Gershwin (Summertime, a duet with Cleo Laine), Ray Charles is always deeply moving. Now, the dream is to hear reissues of all these albums in their entirety. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

Fun.'s debut album Aim and Ignite was an interesting blend of seemingly divergent styles topped by a healthy dose of grandiose ambition and performed with a precise abandon. The trio made an album that was truly progressive and also super catchy and fun. The follow-up, Some Nights, ramps up the ambition and sonic bombast, but also manages to be even more powerful and impressive. While writing and planning the album, singer Nate Ruess, guitarist Jack Antonoff, and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Dost were heavily influenced by both the sound and scope of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and made every attempt to achieve something similar, even to the point of hiring that album's co-producer Jeff Bhasker to produce and craft beats for them. (Also Emile Haynie, who has worked with Eminem among others) Though the album has more of a hip-hop influence than Aim and Ignite did, there are still large doses of Queen and ELO coursing through the band's blood, both in the machine-crafted vocal harmonies and the ornate bigness of the sound. The album is overloaded with strings and horns, backing vocals, keyboards, and programmed drums surrounding Ruess like a clamoring crowd, but never drowning out his innately sincere vocals and painfully honest lyrics. He has the kind of voice that could cut through any amount of noise, not by using volume but honesty. Even when he's fed through Auto-Tune, you know he's telling you the truth all the time. On songs like the lead single "We Are Young" or the rollicking "All Alone," he provides a very human core that grounds things even as the music builds to ornate crescendos. Indeed, the album is really, really big sounding and could easily have ended up collapsing under its own weight and pretension, but the opposite happens and Some Nights takes flight instead. The songs are both anthemic and human-sized, the heartfelt words and naked emotions are never buried, and the music is uplifting, not overpowering. The trio has crafted a record that measures up to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy musically and delivers enough emotional charge to power a small town for a month. It's an impressive achievement and Fun. deserves every bit of acclaim that comes its way because of it.© Tim Sendra /TiVo

This collection of hits and unreleased material by Dan Hartman, the late multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter, is only so-so. The hits include the huge dancefloor single "Instant Replay" and a bad remix of the excellent "I Can Dream About You." Also included are Hartman's versions of "Free Ride," written by Hartman as a member of the Edgar Winter Group, and "Living in America," James Brown's huge comeback hit, also written by Hartman. Dan Hartman deserves a better retrospective.© Tim Griggs /TiVo

Madness never disappeared but they faded away, spending years playing summer festivals and other oldies venues befitting an act specializing in nostalgia -- an impression that 2005's covers album, The Dangerman Sessions, did nothing to assuage. All this makes The Liberty of Norton Folgate, the band's first album of original material in ten years, and their first in more than a quarter-century, feel fully realized, even surprising. The element of surprise is not in the music, which is firmly within the 2-Tone tradition they laid down in the early '80s -- and indeed, is produced by their longtime collaborators Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley -- but rather that they've found a way to deepen their nutty sound, to offer nothing less than a mature, middle-aged spin on Presents the Rise & Fall. Like that 1982 new wave classic, The Liberty of Norton Folgate is about London and steeped in classic British pop, using the Kinks as ground zero for a series of wry, keenly observed pop songs about the people and places in London Town. Madness never try to update their sound -- they never dabble in electronica or ragga -- instead they dig deeper, finding new musical wrinkles within tightly written three-minute pop tunes and stretching out on the astonishing title street that concludes the record. While Madness may be trading on the sound that brought them to the top of the charts, it never sounds like a vain, desperate stab at reviving their youth; they play and write as the middle-aged men they are, finding sustenance within the music of their youth, then adapting it to their lives now, finding as much mirth as melancholy in what they see. Also befitting a middle-aged Madness, The Liberty is an album of craft -- so much so that the album has no such stand-out hit single as "Our House," but then again, those were different times -- but the true testament to the value of that craft is that The Liberty of Norton Folgate is as rich and rewarding in its deluxe double-disc incarnation as it is in its simpler, single-disc set, something that speaks volumes to the extent of the band's unexpected revitalization here.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

For Neil Young, the early to mid-'70s was a time marked by his first taste of an initial revulsion to superstardom. In the wake of the success of Harvest, Young went on an often unhappy journey of self-discovery and reappraisal brought on by the end of his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress and the overdose deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. All of this was refracted through the moody lens of a trio of studio records known as the "Ditch Trilogy": On the Beach, Tonight's the Night and Zuma. This epochal period in Young's story has now been sweepingly documented by Neil Young Archives Vol. II (1972-1976), a 10-part box set, arranged chronologically, whose first run sold out on Young's website in November 2020. Best of all, its 139 tracks, 49 of which were unreleased and 12 previously unheard new songs, are all presented here in the brilliant high-resolution sound that's a hallmark of the Neil Young Archives. While ten albums may sound like too much Young even for collectors and longtime fans, Archives Vol. II includes three previously released albums: Homegrown from 1974-75 (released in 2020), and the live albums, Tuscaloosa (2019)—a much cheerier document from the same '73 Harvest tour that produced the troubled live album, Time Fades Away—and Roxy: Tonight's The Night Live (2018) recorded the same year on the Sunset Strip with the Crazy Horse rhythm section joined by guitarist/pianist Nils Lofgren and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith in a band Young called the Santa Monica Flyers. The new songs, many of which were previously known to collectors, include a piano and dobro-led meditation on spirituality set to a steady push-pull 7/8 rhythm entitled "Goodbye Christians on the Shore." "Sweet Joni" is a rough-hewn tribute to Young's fellow Canadian who makes a guest appearance later in this set in her song, "Raised on Robbery." Deeper in there's another quartet of new songs headlined by "Frozen Man," where the singer wonders "who could live inside this frozen man" while a tale unspools that parallels Young's emotional struggles and wanderings during this very fraught decade. As for revelations among the live recordings on Archives Vol. II, there's Odeon Budokan, a mashup of unreleased live material from a pair of 1976 shows from Budokan Hall in Tokyo and London's Hammersmith Odeon. By then, Young had recovered his confidence and emotional equilibrium and is rocking out with Crazy Horse on a familiar set that finishes with an epic version of "Cortez the Killer." Most of the collection's greatest pleasures lie in unreleased versions of previously released tunes. One of the albums here, The Old Homestead opens and closes with unreleased versions of "Love/Art Blues," a tune first officially heard on the live CSNY 1974 album and whose lyrics perfectly encapsulate the dilemma Young found himself in during the period covered by Archives Vol. II 1972-1976: "I've got the love art blues/ Don't know which one to choose/ There's really something to lose/ With these love art blues." © Robert Baird/Qobuz

R&B singer/songwriter Jhene Aiko released her sophomore album, Trip, in 2017. Clocking in at over 90 minutes and 22 tracks, the album documents Aiko's journey through loss, grief, and acceptance after the death of her brother in 2012. Released as part of Aiko's MAP Mission project -- which is comprised of a movie, an album, and a book of poetry -- Trip features a number of guest artists, including Big Sean, Swae Lee, Kurupt, and Brandy. © Liam Martin /TiVo

For his 70th album, the unshakeable Willie Nelson (now 87 years of age) shows us his softer side. He may be the King of the outlaws, sitting comfortably atop his marijuana mountain, but the Texan has never hidden the super-sensitive and borderline romantic side of his personality. First Rose of Spring was produced by his old partner Buddy Cannon with whom he co-wrote two of its original songs. It also includes compositions by Chris Stapleton, Toby Keith and Pete Graves, as well as one by another 5-star outlaw, Billy Joe Shaver, with whom he covers We Are the Cow-Boys. This exquisite album primarily made up of love songs is drawn to a close with Yesterday When I Was Young (a cover of Charles Aznavour’s famous Hier Encore), which gives a sense of finality to the album as a whole, but not in a weak, languishing way. The production is understated, never flashy and accentuates the violins – when they’re there – with skill. There are also some beautiful acoustic guitar moments (played on a Martin N-20 Trigger) and vocals that are more fluid than usual. First Rose of Spring truly stands out from the many (perhaps too many) recent releases of Willie Nelson, who seems to be writing a never-ending will but doing so with as much class as ever. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

It's been a long period of quiet for Dolores O'Riordan, the lead singer of the Cranberries. Her band quietly disbanded after the 2001 release of Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and although she didn't disappear, O'Riordan surely wasn't overly active, popping up on music by Angelo Badalamenti and Zucchero but primarily devoting herself to family affairs before she set out to record her solo debut with producer Youth in 2006. Released the following year, Are You Listening sidesteps the turgid proggy inclinations of latter-day Cranberries albums while also avoiding the awkward attempts at hard rock that plagued some of the band's mid-period albums. So, it returns O'Riordan to her strengths: melodic, atmospheric, mildly brooding pop. But Are You Listening isn't exactly a dead ringer for Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We? Youth gives this album drama, grandeur, and muscle, so it sounds positively cinematic where early Cranberries was quiet and insular. Of course, this sense of scale is only appropriate for the modern-day Dolores O'Riordan, who has long been a star but where that sense of confidence could turn indulgent on latter-day Cranberries albums, she's now relatively humble and direct, singing songs about family, faith, and nostalgia that sound relatable to fans who have grown up with her and are also facing similar issues. And that's why Are You Listening is a success as a solo debut: it doesn't resurrect O'Riordan's earliest work as much as reconnect with it, and she hasn't sounded this purposeful, or made a record this satisfying, since the days of "Linger."© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo