For a guy who made his name driving party people to ecstasy, Moby has always had a thing for the blues. His unlikely 1999 megahit, Play, used them literally, grafting ancient samples into inviting electronic grooves. His latest uses them spiritually, giving his melancholy streak room to brood and blossom. Instrumentals like "Shot in the Back of the Head" (Google the haunting video, directed by David Lynch) billow moodily, lush arrangements glowing with Eno-style analog-synth warmth. Never the...

The Dead's "Tennessee Jed" is an inspired kickoff to Levon Helm's first proper rock & roll record in a dog's age. His 2007 comeback from throat cancer, Dirt Farmer, was mainly an acoustic affair. Electric Dirt — recorded with Larry Campbell and the rest of the band from Helm's Midnight Ramble gigs at his Woodstock, New York, home — wants to party: Helm struts his slippery shell-game groove on "Jed" and works it deftly throughout. But he digs deepest here with his voice, which veers...

Wilco's seventh studio album is a triumph of determined simplicity by a band that has been running from the obvious for most of this decade. The title is the giveaway. So is the opening gag, "Wilco (The Song)," with its rattling-bones guitar and singer-boss Jeff Tweedy's assurance, sung like pillow talk, that his combo is good for all that ails you: "Do you dabble in depression?/Is someone twisting a knife in your back?...Wilco will love you, baby." At times, Wilco (The Album) sounds like the...

Rob Thomas will never, ever be cool. Thomas has been the large-lunged, chest-thumping voice of straight-down-the-middle pop rock since 1996, when he emerged at the helm of Matchbox Twenty. He writes big, blowzy songs about love and angst, occasionally sounds like he's trying to eat his microphone, and is the bearer of what may be the least appealing shag haircut in popular-music history. But there's no doubting that he's a powerful singer, and with his biggest hit — the ferociously cheesy...

After his last album, the 2007 glam-rock epic Magic Position, Patrick Wolf had a horrific revelation: He wasn't being pretentious enough. So the art-damaged, beyond-androgynous U.K. poet goes all out here. You want great songs about minotaurs? "Theseus" features a spoken-word interlude from actress Tilda Swinton. He plays around with Celtic folk with violinist Eliza Carthy. "Vulture" is an electro-pop explosion with Wolf chanting, "You're d-d-d-dead meat," over buzzing beats from Nineties...

In the early 1960s, Babatunde Olatunji was the face of African music in America. Though the real Afropop of the time was longer on melodies of wisdom than drums of passion, the Nigerian political-science student quickly found that to teach Americans anything at all about Africa, he'd best keep it simple. So his six albums for Columbia, the first and last of which resurface here with unnecessarily jazzy bonus tracks, stick to theatrical percussion compositions overlaid with catchy choral singing....