Regret, longing, and grief fill the other songs, but Lusk's soaring, whole-hearted articulations of hope and reassurance prevent this transfixing half-album from being an unqualified downer.

Honey from a Winter Stone is arguably the most forward-thinking, emotionally vulnerable, and moving album in Akinmusire's catalog. It offers an intimate musical language that transcends genres while being at home in them all.

There have been other Wings collections and they were fine; this double-disc does the best job of capturing all aspects of the band’s career. Anyone wanting to study pop music of the era should make this one of their first stops.

All that's here, dark or bright, is vital.

An amalgam of Streethawk: A Seduction's glam rock posturing, This Night's guitar-heavy psychedelia, and Your Blues' apocalyptic wordplay.

A singular talent, Harding seems to have hit her stride on album number three, and while the darkness of previous efforts is still pervasive, Designer feels like a summer record, though it's probably best suited for dusk.

A small triumph, but a triumph nonetheless.

At once more delicate and more concentrated than any of her previous work, Magdalene is a testament to the strength and skill it takes to make music this fragile and revealing. Like the dancer she is, Barnett pushes through pain in pursuit of beauty and truth, and the leaps she makes are breathtaking.

[The E Street Band are] playing not out of a sense of hunger, but communion. This shared warmth carries Letter to You through the moments where the younger Bruce is perhaps a bit too precious and the older Springsteen is a bit too clear, turning a record that's a meditation on mortality into a celebration of what it means to be alive in the moment.

Musically, Undun flows easier and slower than any other Roots album.

The 2016 triple-disc set The Complete BBC Sessions adds those songs as a third disc to a remastered version of the original 1997 compilation, an addition that doesn't greatly alter the overall picture of Zeppelin's BBC Sessions but offers a whole lot of additional value. Without those sessions, the compilation remains a stellar showcase of Led Zeppelin in ascendancy but with them the portrait deepens.

Bad Bunny does whatever he wants, even if that means quitting when you're far ahead. If he does, we'll still have YHLQMDLG, a transformative fever dream of an album that accents freedom by breaking all the rules without writing new ones.

Trouble No More, more than Saved or even the fine Slow Train Coming, is buoyed by the music. Whether he's singing a slight song, easing into testimony, or leaning into a blues, Dylan seems engaged, even on the verge of rapture, an excitement that carries through the full live shows from 1980 and 1981 on the Deluxe Edition.

Banhart's music is utterly unselfconscious and poetic.

Vespertine isn’t so much a departure from her previous work as a culmination of the musical distance she’s traveled...

While it's likely that From a Basement is cleaner than what Smith... intended, it is much sparer than Figure 8, and it feels at once more adventurous, confident, and warmer than its predecessor.

A fully realized masterpiece.

Jubilee is an album that showcases Zauner's talents to their fullest and makes crushing on Japanese Breakfast hard to resist.

Total absorption reveals that this is simply part of Sault's ever-expanding and increasingly colorful tapestry, no slapdash addendum.

Manning Fireworks is his own fusion of the contemplation of Harvest and the release of Zuma, and it's a small triumph of noisy roots rock.

In Rainbows will hopefully be remembered as Radiohead's most stimulating synthesis of accessible songs and abstract sounds, rather than their first pick-your-price download.

Listeners looking for a concise introduction to the Staples' best work should pick up 1991's single-disc The Best of the Staple Singers, but Come Go with Me demonstrates how consistently rewarding and even moving their lesser work can be, and listened to in full, their Stax catalog is a soul-satisfying revelation.

This may be the band's most self-assured sounding work yet -- their music has never lacked confidence and daring, but now they sound downright swaggering.

Only God Was Above Us isn't just a great album in its own right -- it's one that enriches the understanding of Vampire Weekend's entire history.

Invisible Cinema is as fine a debut as one is likely to hear in 2008.

It doesn't cover the Isleys' brief '60s stints with Wand, United Artists, and Tamla, but it is remarkably generous with dozens of bonus tracks--mono versions, single edits, instrumentals, and so forth--and LP-replica sleeves for each album.

It's ambitious, for sure. That there isn't a single moment that's not compelling is the real victory.

The individual tracks matter less than the collective experience. Isolated songs may hint at Howard expanded emotional and musical pallette, but What Now is a proper album, where each segment expands and interlocks, providing a whole that's greater than its separate parts.