Road to Ruin (40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)

Ramones

Road to Ruin is where the Ramones’ frustration over not having sold millions inspired them to include acoustic heart-tuggers and Ed Stasium to come on like a producer. This 40th-anniversary box—among the de rigueur rough mixes, alternate takes, outtakes, remastered stereo original, and battering-ram live show (New Year’s Eve, 1979)—is where Stasium, now 69, unveils his stripped-down mix. It sounds amazing. All three discs do. What else would you expect from a set that includes six iterations of “I Wanna Be Sedated”?

Out of the Blues

Boz Scaggs

The slow burners get over with subtle touches—the vocoderized backing vocals of “Rock and Stick,” the hide-and-seek guitars of “Radiator 110.” Both of those songs, like the sharpest up-tempo number (“Those Lies”) and the sharpest “Target Exclusive” track (“Good Information”), were written by the same “Applejack” Walroth whose compositions nudged Scaggs’ last album from its comfort zone. This time, the task falls to a 44-year-old Neil Young slow burner that Scaggs sounds as if he’s been waiting his whole life to sing.

Linda Thompson Presents My Mother Doesn't Know I'm on the Stage

Various artists

In 2005, three years after releasing the album that signaled her victory over dysphonia, the folk singer Linda Thompson organized a various-artists performance of mostly comedic, mostly Victorian-era-music-hall songs at London’s Lyric Theatre. This belated document collects 11 of that evening’s highlights and augments them with an iPhone recording of a James Walbourne original, a home recording by the music-hall revivalist John Foreman, and a Jools Holland–documentary outtake from Roy Hudd. Wit, hilarity, pathos, exact rhymes—they don’t write ’em like these anymore.

13 Rivers

Richard Thompson

When he’s really focused, which for most of this album’s 53 minutes he is, Thompson makes his rock-folk present seem like the providential fruition of his folk-rock past. Drum-driven rhythms punctuate spiraling solos played on an electric guitar that sounds as dark as his voice, and unapologetically appropriated Biblical echoes give his pared-down lyrics a high-stakes universality. They’re not always immediately parsable, but even then the musicianship (check out Taras Prodaniuk’s fancy bass work on “You Can’t Reach Me”) carries the day.

ENCORE

Louis Hardin Jr. (1916-1999)—aka Moondog—was a genuine American eccentric. Blinded in an accident at 16, he rejected the tenets of his Episcopalian upbringing and morphed into New York City’s “Viking of 6th Avenue,” so nicknamed because of his Gandalf-like appearance and self-made Norse-themed outfits. From his perch in front of the Warwick Hotel, he interacted with passersby, composed music and Beat-doggerel verse using a Braille apparatus, and became a Manhattan legend.

On Moondog (Deutsche Grammophon), the classical pianist Katia Labèque teams with the avant-garde rockers Triple Sun to explore and (although they wouldn’t put it this way) rehabilitate nine Moondog compositions. Partly because of his limitations, Hardin preferred repetitive forms, and sometimes there wasn’t much there there, but Labèque and combo embellish his canons until they give off mystical glints. Meanwhile, admirers of their hard-rocking “Bumbo” should investigate the London Brass & London Saxophonics’ Moondog Big Band version. It swings. —A.O.