Rock

SuperGlu and Magic Island helped kickstart the first day of SXSW Music Festival 2017 in Austin, Texas.

Garth Brooks and Zane Lowe are featured keynotes for SXSW Music Festival 2017 from March 13-19. 2017 in Austin, Texas.

Her new album matches the blues-rock-soul singer's honeyed voice with a varied batch of songs by top talents ranging from Mississippi John Hurt to The Weepies' Deb Talan to Black Sabbath.

Like crushed train cars telescoping into one another, these seven tracks fuse song and soundtrack-style music, contemporary newspaper accounts and musique concrète, into a gumbo of "you are there" tone poems about real-life train crashes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One-off or not, 'Crystal Fairy' should still go down as a late career highlight for The Melvins maestros (Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover) and a breakout performance for Teri Gender Bender.

'Turbo' has its flaws but it should still be appreciated as the distinct, experimental nugget full of party rockers that it is. The real gem of this three-CD edition, however, is the 20-track live show from May 22, 1986 that makes up the latter two discs.

While Ian Anderson has put out several albums of new material in recent years, he seems happy to rework old successes too. Reviving classic Jethro Tull material for string quartet is a striking new twist. The result is a serious lark: lighthearted but with plenty of creative depth.

These are in no particular order, except for this first one, my vote for song of 2016, at least for guitar. After listening to Joe Bonamassa's blistering, searing solo, you will not forget it anytime soon.

Sadly, through the cruelty of time and mortality, The Band itself ceased to be many years ago but Robbie Robertson himself is still telling stories and spinning guitar chords through his music.

As for the music of 2016, there was the usual amount of "meh" mixed in with a host of impressive releases. Certainly, there were no game-changers that I heard. (Sorry Kanye and Kendrick.)