You have to buy the White Album again. ... [Giles Martins' remix is] a secondary attraction. You come to hear multiple alternate versions of material that could be and was played live by a rock band ... or sounded just as complete in hootenanny form in the all-acoustic demos. ... Tracing the small lyrical changes is a delight.

The new mix is just part of the reason to pick up the four-CD “Let It Bleed” edition, if probably the most crucial one. .... And the disc of alternate versions and outtakes, most previously unreleased, makes for a great listen by itself, as well as satisfying some historical curiosity about things like how some early Alex Chilton-produced demos compare with the finished album.

For the fanatic, there is nothing quite like this sound-bath and its accompanying eye candy. If the full monty is out of reach price-wise for the Clark aficionado, the two-CD hardbound edition, which includes nine of the alternates, is a magnificent alternative, containing generous excerpts (including Rogan’s complete essay, song lyrics and band bios) from the box’s book. Even if you choose the least expensive option of the basic LP or single CD, you are in for a revelation if you have never heard “No Other.” As its title suggests, it remains a one-of-a-kind listening experience.

In short, it’s a die-hard fan’s fantasy come to life — and like the deluxe edition of “1999” released last year, goes a long way toward satiating appetites only made stronger by decades of bootlegs. (And, remarkably, the compilers left out a lot.)

The set employs a “Get Back”-style approach to several of the songs, where listeners can hear the evolution of “Yellow Submarine” from a depressing lament to the familiar jaunty children’s anthem, that “And Your Bird Can Sing” once had a flagrant Byrds reference, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” was originally much slower — and even trippier. ... What’s really special here are the aforementioned book and especially the outtakes, many of which have eluded bootleggers over the half-century-plus since illicit Beatles releases began hitting the market.

Listening to this gargantuan boxed set, it’s hard not to get the sense that if Lambert had been healthy, he might have been able to focus Townshend’s brilliant, beautiful, exciting songs into a concept as coherent as “Tommy.” “Who’s Next/ Life House” shows how tantalizingly close they came.

Needless to say, this gorgeous cacophony sounds more amazing than ever in this revamped sonic edition. ... There are 47 demos and outtakes, most of them previously unreleased — none is a Holy Grail, but several are fascinating. Most interesting are the demos. ... Some may argue, not without reason, that McCartney’s “Band on the Run” or Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” or “Imagine” is actually the best Beatles solo album, but this lovingly rendered 50th anniversary edition makes the case for “All Things Must Pass” in vivid detail.

An album that not only marks Rosalia’s true arrival, it moves her toward the front line of today’s musical innovators.

The complete “Inconcerated” alone is worth the price of admission. Five of the 29 tracks appeared on a promo CD of that name at the time, and it was worth staying alive for an additional 30 years just to find out that the rest of the show was as grandly played and recorded. ... Chances are that the “Wallace mix” will be the version you put on in the future — although, truth be told, there are some elements of the Lord-Alge mix that work and might even be preferable, maligned as it is.

The remixed album itself holds hundreds of small and large musical pleasures. ... So for anyone on the fence, maybe the best advice is to buy this edition for the deliriously detailed historical book, if nothing else — then decide whether to warm up to the new spatial separation on John, Paul and George’s turn-taking guitar solos on “The End,” among other modest tweaks.

There’s one element that will probably sway any die-hard fan still on the fence: The Band’s 11-song, previously unreleased Woodstock set in full. ... You can feel The Band testing itself, stretching its legs, figuring out what it is and what it’s going to become. And 50 years later, you’re there with them.

The Weeknd’s music has always been about contrasts, and here the beauty and the madness are more smoothly integrated than ever. “After Hours” is one of the most successful musicians of the past decade testing the balance between innovation and commerciality as much as anyone today.

“Fetch the Bolt Cutters” sounds as fresh as something that crossed Apple’s fertile mind 10 minutes ago. It may be way early to say it’s the most satisfying album of the year, but if there are any more to come along this good, 2020 is not going to feel like such a waste of time after all.

As one might expect from the title, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” is elaborate, dramatic and demanding, and is not the kind of art that one comes to lightly — although, in yet another of the album’s counterintuitions, it works just as well as background listening as it does in intense focus. Expect this challenging and ever-changing artist’s most definitive statement to date to top many album-of-the-year lists.

Possibly, song for song, her best yet. ... She sounds like she knows exactly who she is, what she wants to say and how she wants to say it — and with “Chromatica,” she’s laid a rock-solid foundation for the next phase of her remarkable career.

One of the year’s best.

The fact that Sault seduces listeners, drawing them in with beautiful sounds, and then hits them with uncompromisingly direct lyrics and messages that startle them into thinking about things they might not normally think about, especially when grooving to music, is perhaps the greatest triumph. Sault’s music is definitively 2020, by, for and about these times.

Their melodic sensibilities have translated remarkably well to more traditional songwriting. ... Most importantly, despite the complexity of the production, like its predecessors this album flows with a remarkable sense of fluidity and fun — it doesn’t sound labored-over, even though it obviously was. ... Twenty-plus years and three albums into their career, “We Will Always Love You” opens up a whole new chapter for the Avalanches.

“Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Edition” is again like those aforementioned Beatles boxed sets in that we can see how close some of those songs came to not being classics, quite, without the final bit of vocal arrangement or an extra melodic element that sent them over the top.

Obviously, this isn’t a standard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert — see above for plenty of those — but for people who love the sound of a band stretching, showing off, challenging each other and having fun, it’s hard to think of many better albums. ... The album captures what is arguably the best lineup of the band since its original one, with stellar backing vocals from bassist Howie Epstein and auxiliary Heartbreaker Scott Thurston.

There’s no question whose album this is, and like so many female superstars, Grande is tragically underrated as a musician. She’s not only a virtuoso singer but a skilled vocal arranger and producer whose multitracked backing voices are like songs on their own, embellishing and responding to her lead like a troupe of attuned dancers.

As strong and revealing as the bare-bones collection is, it’s hard to imagine a Coltrane freak who won’t want to plunk for the deluxe version. It affords one of the deepest looks available at the way Trane addressed creative choices in the studio. No less than three more versions of “Impressions” are heard on the second disc, and they are the best advertisement for the two-disc package. ... Is its belated arrival a godsend? Absolutely.

If you believe there can be such a thing as an instant country classic, “The Highwomen” is that. ... The all-star foursome has put together an album full of high comedy and high pathos, zingy group-sings and gut-wreching solo turns, wryness and rue, and harmony co-existing with this strange and nearly forgotten thing called twang.

Above all, “RTJ4” is a triumph of all sorts of unexpected syntheses, seamlessly uniting disparate moods, styles and eras. ... If Killer Mike and El-P haven’t yet fully ascended to that most rarefied plane of telepathically attuned hip-hop partnerships — Q-Tip and Phife, Prodigy and Havoc, Erick and Parrish — they’ve come extraordinarily close.

A fully rounded collection of songs that sounds like it was years in the interactive making, not the product of a quarter-year’s worth of file-sharing from splendid isolation.

With fascinating oral-history annotation for all 70 tracks in the “super-deluxe” edition, the augmented “Wildflowers” is the best and most justified boxed set of this kind since the Beatles’ White Album compendium. It’s one of the ones you’d load under your arm in a fire. Petty was on fire during this period, as the presence of 32 distinct compositions in the big box attests.

Far more fleshed-out than the EPs (none of the songs from which are repeated here), it seems all but inevitable that Parks will be one of the breakthrough artists of 2021. So what makes her and this album so special? In a word, intimacy. ... None of the above would work without the album’s brilliantly restrained production and arrangements, nearly all by her longtime collaborator Luca Buccellati: The music flawlessly frames her voice and lyrics and never intrudes.

With 2021 not yet at the halfway point, it’s hard to imagine many other albums coming along that could match the combination of emotional potency, melodic fluency, social significance and heartrending beauty in Russell’s retelling of a lifetime’s worth of debasement and self-reclamation.