Music Reviews

Queens rapper/producer Lil Tecca is back in a bad way with his upcoming fourth LP Plan A (which drops in full on September 20)—and one of its lead tracks, “Bad Time,” clearly sets the table for what’s to come, especially in its Atmos mix on Apple Music.

Because of his close association with Yes’ signature sound, guitarist Steve Howe is assumed to have been a member of the British progressive giants from the outset — but he only came aboard with the five-man band’s third studio release, February 1971’s The Yes Album. Though his fretboard predecessor, Peter Banks (who later co-founded the prog-adjacent ’70s outfit Flash), foreshadowed the aural adventurism to come on July 1969’s Yes and July 1970’s Time and a Word, it was The Yes Album that cemented the wide-ranging, time-signature challenging sonic template for one of the most forward-thinking progressive acts of the past six decades.

Frank Zappa was a master at creating musical Venn diagrams. What do I mean by that? Well, Zappa’s compositional talents stretched well beyond the rock music idiom, so many of his releases would offer a keen intersection of doo-wop, classical orchestration, avant-jazz, progressive jams, country funk, and pure pop sensibilities (for starters). Sometimes he would even incorporate all his artistic powers into all 20-plus minutes of an album side’s lone track.

Burning Dinosaur Bones

Soundgarden was catching fire. The proto-headbanging Seattle-bred foursome began to emerge from the misnomered grunge ooze with their second LP, September 1989’s aptly named Louder Than Love, with tracks like “Loud Love” and “Big Dumb Sex” deftly adding observational tact to the band’s already thunderous bouillabaisse. And then, in October of that forever-hallowed alt-rock emergence year of 1991, Soundgarden swerved into even more progressive-leaning hard-metal lanes with the unrelenting Badmotorfinger.

40th Anniversary Monster Edition & Vinyl Edition Box Sets

Like many rock bands that initially emerged from the free-flowing nether-reaches of the 1960s, Jethro Tull had a decision to make upon entering the 1980s — namely, stick with their signature sound, or embrace the emerging technology of the new decade? Tull mastermind Ian Anderson chose the latter, initially going all-in on the electronic-tinged aural front with August 1980’s A. While A was certainly an eclectic and challenging jumping-off point, its follow-up, April 1982’s The Broadsword and the Beast, was a much better marriage of classic neo-Tull with the more modernized electro-Tull. Two new 40th anniversary box set offerings for Broadsword — a 5CD/3DVD smorgasbord subtitled the Monster Edition, and a relatively extensive companion 4LP collection — tell the album’s expanded sonic-swashbuckling tale quite well in their respective ways.