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.

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.

The timeless quality always inherent in M. Ward’s music abounds here on the songwriter’s seventh solo album, and rather than a wasteland, this feels more like slices of a dreamscape. Reflective, calculated, and ultimately seductive, A Wasteland Companion drives one’s senses through a quiet maelstrom of compressed energy.

Danish outfit Choir of Young Believers’ second LP mines breezy folk, synth pop, progressive narratives, and electronic experimentation for inspiration, somehow wrapping it all tightly up in a streamlined package that threatens to spill out from its modest trappings.

“Hey Jane” opens Sweet Heart Sweet Light, Spiritualized’s seventh full-length album and the first since 2008’s Songs in A&E. Nodding slyly to The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” the song finds frontman Jason Pierce wondering, like a mantra, “Hey Jane, when you gonna die?”—one of numerous allusions to mortality throughout Sweet Heart Sweet Light.