New and noteworthy

I’m Glad About It: The Legacy of Gospel Music in Louisville 1958-1981 

Various artists

These 83 songs paint a vivid portrait of Kentucky’s largest city as a stylistically varied if somewhat hermetic hotbed of black-gospel talent. Or as the musician, producer, and record-store-owner Ben Jones puts it in the accompanying oral-history book, “Who cares about secular music when we got 10 Aretha Franklins in every church and I can hear them for free every Sunday morning?” At $40, this box isn’t free, but at less than 50 cents a song, it’s a bargain. Two highlights among many: the Religious Five Quartet’s “Running for a Long Time,” which will crack you up, and the Newburg Radio Chorus’ “Calvary,” which will give you the chills.

New Arrangements and Duets

Van Morrison

The new arrangements are big-band settings of nine ­previously recorded Van Morrison songs, a couple of which (“So Quiet in Here,” “Avalon of the Heart”) sounded better the first time. (“The Master’s Eyes” sounds pretty much the same.) The duets, recorded shortly before Morrison’s anti-COVID-lockdown stance made him uncool, are seven re-recordings that find Willie Nelson, Kurt Elling, Curtis Stigers, and Joss Stone sharing the vocals. Stone mostly seems in the way on “Someone Like You,” but Elling and Stigers help the lively ones swing. Half-full or half-empty, depending on your mood.

Got a Story To Tell

Thee Sacred Souls

One secondary pleasure of evaluating this delicately soulful sophomore effort is having to listen to the Delfonics and Marvin Gaye to see whether it’s William Hart or Gaye who has influenced Josh Lane’s superlative falsetto more. Another is having to listen closely enough to get a handle on how much of the Souls’ retro vibe isn’t quite as retro as it sounds. The answer? More than first meets the ear. And though the songwriting could be sharper, it’s improving.

Star Time

White Animals

On their first album in 21 years, these unpretentious mainstays of the ’80s Nashville indie scene raise their humor quotient while maintaining ties to the garage rock of the ’60s. So in addition to an abundance of ­party-worthy riffs and beats, we get a goofy Doug Sahm soundalike (“Unlucky in Love”) and lyrics shoring up titles such as “In a Post Apocalyptic World (Would You Be My Girl)” and “I Tried Like Heck.” Best inside joke: electrifying the Soggy Bottom Boys’ arrangement of “Man of Constant Sorrow” and calling it “Man of Constant Dread.”

Queen RB/Redferns/Getty Images

Encore

The latest Queen album to get the “Collector’s Edition” treatment is the group’s eponymous 1973 debut, now titled Queen I. As it was the album whose sound the band always liked least, the undertaking makes sense. With the first of the six discs (plus a vinyl LP and a book), listeners finally get a remix embodying the clarity, depth, and explosiveness that Queen intended. The other discs corral alternate takes, radio sessions, live cuts, and, with a few overheard profanities, demos.

Confronting afresh, the songs reveal that the wide-­ranging dynamics and layered vocals and guitars for which Queen would become famous were present from the beginning. The fantasy-­based or—in the case of “Jesus,” “Mad the Swine,” and “Liar”—religion-laced lyrics, on the other hand, would gradually recede. What no one could’ve seen coming is that the gender confusion informing Brian May’s “Son and Daughter” would play like the soundtrack to Western-society dysfunction 54 years later. —A.O.