Complete Third

Big Star

Alex Chilton’s 1974 crackup classic gets the whole-shebang treatment. Delicate demos, worthwhile rough mixes, and Lesa Aldridge singing “After Hours” as sweetly as Chilton singing “Nature Boy” and “Don’t Worry Baby” highlight Discs 1 and 2, leaving the finished, Jim Dickinson–produced versions and a new mix of “Thank You Friends” for Disc 3. The booklet features essays from numerous musicians eloquently attesting to the haunting and, at times, harrowing beauty of the music, which used to sound ahead of its time. Now it sounds timeless.

Revolution Radio

Green Day

Having gotten its Broadway show, its 2012 trilogy, and Billie Joe Armstrong’s Everly project with Norah Jones out of its system, Green Day finally gets back to making the second-generation punk that got it prematurely inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And, if anything, the catchiness, power-riff, and variety quotient is higher than it used to be. The wisdom quotient, however, isn’t. Coming from someone in his mid-40s, Armstrong’s realization that “We live in ­troubled times” seems like too little too late.

Winter Wheat

John K. Samson

Each of the protagonists in these 15 dramatic monologues articulates an off-kilter view of the world rooted in distrust of fetishized aspects of contemporary life. Gadgets and ­technology (“Postdoc Blues,” “Carrie Ends the Call,” “Select All Delete”), patriotism (“Fellow Traveller”), and even sanity (“Quiz Night at Looky Lou’s,” “Alpha Adept”) get cut down to size. But as detailed as the monologues are, it’s Samson’s definitively indie folk-pop melodies and his singing, which honors Neil Young’s by improving on it, that will have listeners repeatedly pushing repeat.

Letter from a Bedford Jail

The World in Lights

The World in Lights is the husband-wife duo Joel Herbert and Dani Rocca, and this concept album hits the bull’s-eye. Based on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the songs simultaneously tell the old, old story and stand discretely on their own. Herbert and Rocca, in other words, serve the source material without sounding slavish, trading lead vocals, harmonizing, and mixing and matching pop-rock/rock-pop genres with accomplished ease. Their Bandcamp page’s claim that this album “has something for everyone” overstates matters, but only a little.

Encore

The three-disc package Waxing the Gospel: Mass Evangelism and the Phonograph, 1890-1900 (Archeophone) will fascinate evangelical Christians, particularly those born during the baby boom. It’s they, after all, who spent every Sunday for decades singing the hymns that constitute the bulk of this set’s 102 selections, most and possibly all of which were recorded during the 19th century. Boomers will also marvel that these compositions defied fashion for as long as they did, remaining a staple of evangelical gatherings until supplanted by contemporary worship songs.

But aside from its considerable historical value (and the considerable historical value of the accompanying 408-page book), this package presents listeners with a dilemma: How often will they want to listen to recordings that, digitally restored though they are, still don’t sound very good? For anyone thrilled by the prospect of finally getting to hear Ira D. Sankey sing or Dwight L. Moody and Fanny Crosby recite, the answer will probably be, “Often enough.” —A.O.