It’s difficult, as this plays, to believe that The Beautiful Old focuses on sheet-music favorites from before the advent of electricity. These 19 gusts of folk-tinged turn-of-the-century Americana still hold boundless insights.

Back when I compiled my “Best” Guitarists list, my hope was to reframe the discussion, making people see that there are different ways of evaluating talent. The good news is that most folks seemed to get the idea.

We have scorching new jazz from Wayne Shorter for you, along with equally trenchant — and, yeah, loud — stuff from Richard Thompson and Lisa Loeb.

Four of this month’s reader-selected Top 10 items on Something Else! Reviews deal with Beatle-y things: Specifically, the times they whiffed as a group and as solo artists

Richard Thompson amps up the dying-light rage that has always made for his best albums, while smartly avoiding the studio trickery that sometimes muted his gift during the Mitchell Froom years.

“Good Things Happen to Bad People,” the guitar-stoked advance song from Richard Thompson’s forthcoming long-player Electric, finds him bellowing with a bracing vigor. There’s a knife’s edge to both his singing and his playing.

Stuck on a desert island, you’re going to want to rock every once in a while, right? That’s where this string-bending, axe-swinging, fretboard-melting, amp-blowing list comes in.

For all of the musical ferocity associated with Bob Mould — both as a solo artist and as a key creative force in Husker Du and Sugar — there’s one key influence some might never have guessed: Folk legend Richard Thompson.

Richard Thompson seems to put out a live album every year and being a sucker for his clever songwriting and maximal guitar playing, I usually lap it up all the same. The former founding member of that seminal British folk-rock group Fairport Convention, Thompson has not only been a part of the history of that genre, he is the history. [...]