As evidenced by June 2009—a collection of early recordings now finding a proper release—Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. While his brainwaves would go on to launch a sea of chillwave thought pieces, early songs showed an artist more interested in Ariel Pink-style experimentation than the retro-tinged dance pop he’d come to embrace.

For all of the music Jack White has put out into the world, Blunderbuss is his first solo album, though it sounds much like his work with The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, or The Dead Weather. Written, recorded, and produced entirely by White, Blunderbuss has all the stomp and sway of his best records, but also the unevenness that plagues him to varying degrees.

Kill for Love opens with the unlikeliest of covers—a watery, electronic take on Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” An allegory for what Young saw as his own growing irrelevance, the song spawned his most quoted lyric—“It’s better to burn out than to fade away”—which is perhaps the saddest of rock ‘n’ roll credos (its appearance in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note rendering it all the more tragic).

Eddie Hazel’s 1977 record Game, Dames, and Guitar Thangs was the only full album the former Funkadelic guitarist released under his own name in his lifetime, and now reissued, it mostly lives up to the high regards in which it’s been held.

During the 1970s, Philadelphia International Records released some of the best pop music of the last century, and Golden Gate Groove documents the night in 1973 when a handful of Philadelphia International Records’ best and brightest, including The O’Jays and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, performed for a mainly white, and somewhat skeptical, convention of CBS record execs.

In this semi-baffling release, the silk-tongued Sufjan Stevens has collaborated with Chicago hip-hop artist Serengeti and electronic composer Son Lux for four tracks of oddball weirdness. Beak & Claw is largely a showcase for Serengeti’s ambling, free-association raps, here set to glitchy electro pop, with mostly silly lyrics.

Britpop heroes Pulp returned to the U.S. last week for their first American shows in 14 years, starting with a show at Radio City Music Hall last Tuesday night.

Chances to see seminal shoegazers Swervedriver live have been relatively uncommon in the 14 years since their last album, even post-reunion at Coachella 2008.

Roger McGough and Mike McGear were both members of the music, poetry and comedy troupe The Scaffold, which had a short string of hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “McGear” was actually Mike McCartney, little brother of the Beatle Paul, making this album a semi-obscure piece of Beatles ephemera, with guests including Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Graham Nash, and John Mayall.