Staff Picks for February 2025

This electronic-pop gem from Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth is an instant charmer. Their only official album, it has only gotten better over the decades with a blend of sparkling melodies, feel-good vibes, and irresistible beats for fans of acts like Bjork, Dido, and Goldfrapp. "Let Go" was the big hit of the time, but everything else is worth your time and attention: this is a perfect, no-skips classic.
- Neil Z. Yeung

A nod to author Ray Bradbury's 1964 short story collection of the same name, Sea Power's sixth long-player, the measured and oddly comforting Machineries of Joy, finds the bookish, self-mythologizing, and willfully nostalgic yet remarkably buoyant indie rockers doing what they do best: being Sea Power.
- James Monger

This is Janis Ian's second album from her re-emergence in the early to mid-'70s as one of the genre's most inspired and original singer/songwriters. While this title, released 50 years ago this month, houses Ian's biggest international hit, the confessional "At Seventeen," the entire effort combines her honest and confessional lyrics with an equally engaging blend of pop/rock and definite jazz and blues.
- Lindsay Planer

From Lil B to Mac Miller, Clams Casino’s otherworldly beats are instantly recognizable. Although Instrumental Relics essentially functions as a highlight reel of Clams’ early work, the release inherently elevates these productions from background tracks to evocative, standalone landscapes of texture and sound, characterized by eerie, wailing vocals, hazy synths, and sludgy, industrial percussion— a hypnotic, haunting compilation.
- Lane Liu

Led Zeppelin returned from a nearly two-year hiatus in 1975 with the double-album Physical Graffiti (released 50 years ago today), their most sprawling and ambitious work. Where Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy integrated influences on each song, the majority of the tracks on Physical Graffiti are individual stylistic workouts.
- Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Beat Happening's second album arrived three years after their exceptionally lo-fi debut, with clearer production offering a more defined picture of just how minimal their vision of pop was. This album flies by at a snappy 23 minutes, but it's here where the band's gentle genius and Cramps-taught swagger both become apparent. Jamboree's bold vulnerability opened countless doors for indie rock on the whole, and it's one of the band's most enjoyable front-to-back listens.
- Fred Thomas

After years as one of indie rock's standard-bearing groups, Yo La Tengo surpassed itself with And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, released 25 years ago today. Easily one of 2000's most accomplished albums, it isn't as immediate as some of the group's earlier work, but it's just as enduring, proving that Yo La Tengo is the perfect band to grow old with.
- Heather Phares

On the Level, released 50 years ago today, is Quo at its single-minded best. It doesn't matter whether its driving the boogie through your skull with the relentless precision of "Little Lady" and "Over and Done," lurching loosely around the ghosts of blues and ballads ("Most of the Time"), or even glancing back to their days as one of British psych's finest pop bands ("What to Do"). Still, all roads lead back to "Down Down," a dynamic riff, a perplexing lyric, and a mood that's so compulsive that you'll still be shaking your head in time long after all your hair's fallen out.
- Dave Thompson

Brashly abrasive and unabashedly rocking right out of the gate, The Hold Steady's second album presents like the smartest guy in the room with a PhD, a drinking problem, and all of the Replacements' Twin Tone albums but they're haphazardly tucked into Judas Priest sleeves. Crushing guitars answer to epic piano lines and a flat but pleading delivery as frontman Craig Finn shouts down the microphone about Bones Brigade videos, Trix cereal, the Bible, McKenzie Phillips, an anarcho-punk collective from Minneapolis and Mary Tyler Moore.
- Zac Johnson

The sixth studio effort from the mercurial Nashville psych-rockers, Nothing as the Ideal sees All Them Witches reunite with Dying Surfer Meets His Maker producer Mikey Allred for a bold and bracing collection of songs that plays to all of their strengths.
- James Monger

This is a generous amount of modern synth funk from a former session musician who does it all in his Los Angeles garage. Dâm-Funk fits within the domain of future/past left-field R&B, alongside Sa-Ra and J*Davey; however, his inspirations are relatively focused, narrowed down to the fallout caused by synthesizer wizards Bernie Worrell and Junie Morrison. What also sets Dâm apart from his contemporaries is a total reliance on, and mastery of, old gear; that's how some of these tracks swing like the best of Mtume while bouncing, kicking, and squirming like Zapp and early Prince.
- Andy Kellman

Although the chaotic sessions that spawned this album (released 50 years ago today) have passed into rock & roll legend and the recording's very genesis (as an out-of-court settlement between John Lennon and an aggrieved publisher) has often caused it to be slighted by many of the singer's biographers, Rock 'n' Roll, in fact, stands as a peak in his post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try.
- Dave Thompson

Roger McGuinn, the former leader and 12-string jangle-meister of the Byrds, and Mick Ronson, who contributed the wicked guitar crunch to David Bowie's Spiders from Mars period, conjure strange magic on the mighty Cardiff Rose.
- Mark Deming

On Fly By Night, released 50 years ago today, Rush's first bona-fide classic, "Anthem," is included, while the over eight-minute "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" helped pave the way for the group's future epics ("2112," "Cygnus X-1," etc.), and introduced the fans to Peart's imaginative lyric writing, often tinged with science-fiction themes.
- Greg Prato

Scientifically proven to be the most romantic album ever recorded, these six ballads performed by the Classic Quartet provide a lush and unobtrusive bed for crooner Johnny Hartman to luxuriate over. Coltrane was just two years away from the explorations that would result in A Love Supreme, but at this stage he was content to honor these traditional compositions with a relaxed but passionate feel. Stay in, pour something cool into a glass, and fall in love.
- Zac Johnson

Easily regarded as one of the finest outings by this quintet, this is as a solid groundbreaking meld of melodic hard bop and soul jazz. It at not only stood out from the group's other live recordings form the era but influenced the tradition at large in the mid 1960s.
- Thom Jurek

As owner and engineer at J&M Studios, housed in a reworked grocery store on Rampart Street in NOLA, Cosimo Matassa saw the birth of R&B, rock & roll, and soul, pass through his doors between 1945 and 1956. He was responsible for the early hits of Fats Domino, Little Richard, and dozens of others during his tenure there. This amazing four-disc, 120-track box tells that historic, grooving story, and filled with energy and vitality.
- Steve Leggett

Of the bands that struck it rich in the Garage Rock Explosion of the early 2000s, the Hives were the ones who proved built to last, and 2023's The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons confirmed they never lost their essential virtues and sense of rowdy joy. Full of high energy rock action powered by songs with a sharp pop sensibility and acidically witty lyrics, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is good dangerous fun.
- Mark Deming

The duo of vocalist Emilie Rex and filmmaker/musician Rick Alverson (Drunk, Spokane) introduced a hushed, haunted sound built from minimalist arrangements of rock and orchestral instruments on their self-titled debut in 2017. Returning to that sound, the follow-up was informed by the loss or illness of multiple close family members. It features riveting performances in which every quiet sound (instruments like kalimba, piano, marimba, low drums, and spectral synths) has the effect of a mountain or a storm front on the horizon; sounds like breaths, creaks, and shifting movements are also part of its lingering atmosphere.
- Marcy Donelson

While Kendrick's follow-up album DAMN. was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in music, the groundwork was laid on his masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly. An incredible pastiche of funk, R&B, sound collage, found objects, gospel, psychedelic guitars, jazz lines, beat poetry and hip-hop, the album is abrasive, abusive, upsetting and groundbreaking. Kendrick addresses race, sexuality, cultural inequality, violence, and Hood Politics from a position of knowing reluctance...almost as though he is hesitantly embodying the role of Chuck D's "CNN of the ghetto" reporter. Much like Beyoncé daring to celebrate the Black history of country music, as he performs at the Superbowl halftime show tonight, your social media timeline will likely be filled with people expressing outrage and dismissal. Don't listen to those people. Kendrick Lamar is one of the most important artists of our lifetime with a perspective that those keyboard warriors simply refuse to accept.
- Zac Johnson

Jazz -funk fans must have been taken aback when multi-instrumentalist and composer Bennie Maupin's Jewel in the Lotus was released by Manfred Eicher's ECM imprint in 1974. For starters, it sounded nothing like Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters recording, which had been released the year before to massive sales and of which Maupin had been such an integral part. By contrast, Jewel in the Lotus sounded like an avant-garde jazz record, but it stood outside that hard-line camp, too, because of its open and purposeful melodies that favored composition and structured improvising over free blowing.
- Thom Jurek

Emmylou Harris' major-label solo debut quickly establishes the pattern that the vast majority of her subsequent work would follow: Pieces of the Sky, released 50 years ago today, is bravely eclectic, impeccably performed, and achingly beautiful.
- Jason Ankeny

While his most popular songs ("Battle of New Orleans" and "Tennessee Stud") have endured thanks to other artists' renditions, Jimmie Driftwood's own uniformly excellent recordings are lesser known. The enigmatic and highly entertaining Arkansas folk singer was said to have written over 6000 songs during his lifetime and some of his best are collected here.
- Timothy Monger

Opening with a big blast of glam -- "Shotgun Wedding" wears its debt to Marc Bolan proudly -- the band's fifth album proceeds to balance the loud with the dreamy, alternating the two extremes not with desperation but affection. More than a decade into their career, they remain unapologetic acolytes of classic pop and rock, shunning anything that happened after punk but happily embracing all the byways of the British Invasion and its fallout, and emphasizing songcraft without seeming fussy. That latter quality is what elevates this outing.
- Stephen Thomas Erlewine

The second (and last) album from the original PJ Harvey trio, 1993's Rid Of Me took the stark power of their debut, Dry, and magnified it by a power of ten through the ferocious attack of Polly Jane Harvey and her rhythm section and Steve Albini's bone-dry, high contrast production, making the sound sting like a slap in the face. Harvey shifted gears after this, and it's her toughest, finest rock album.
- Mark Deming

Before he became famous as the piano man, Billy Joel played an obscenely distorted organ in a short-lived heavy psych/acid-rock duo who released one album in 1970 which made no commercial impact whatsoever and went straight into the cut-out bin. Fans of Billy Joel (and Joel himself) might insist that it's an embarrassment and the worst album ever made, but for lovers of weird, obscure records and ridiculously overblown prog-rock, it's surprisingly awesome. If Lou Reed had made the similarly misunderstood Lulu at the beginning of his career rather than the end, it would've been something like this.
- Paul Simpson

On this 1969 highlight, the innovative pianist paired his classic trio with sweeping strings and dashes of Latin percussion to create a highly engaging and underrated jazz classic.
- Timothy Monger

Blink and you missed it: cult favorite '90s duo Shampoo released a compilation of their entire oeuvre in 2024 -- it was one of our favorite reissues of the year -- and, whether you've heard of them before or are hearing them for the first time, it demands a listen, especially for fans as way back as the Spice Girls up until the current brat queen Charli XCX.
- Neil Z. Yeung