GOSPEL

Whitney Houston, "I Go to the Rock: The Gospel Music of Whitney Houston" (Legacy Recordings)

"Do you like gospel music?" Houston asked an audience at the Yokohama Arena in Japan in January 1990, before launching into an ecstatic six-minute medley of the devotional standards "He" and "I Believe." This live recording is one of the six previously unreleased tracks featured on "I Go to the Rock," a career-spanning compilation that centers Houston's lifelong connection to gospel music. (A concurrently released DVD provides additional commentary.) The set features several familiar tracks from the 1996 soundtrack of "The Preacher's Wife" — still the bestselling gospel album of all time — and two never-before-released performances from Houston's 1995 "VH1 Honors" concert, including a rousing duet of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" with CeCe Winans. But the album's most precious gem is "Testimony," an upbeat, foot-stomping song Houston recorded in 1981, when she was just 17. Her voice, fascinatingly, was still unformed compared to the immaculate instrument she'd soon learn how to command, but, as ever, it was alive with passion and spirit.

LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times

POP/ROCK

DeYarmond Edison, "Epoch" (Jagjaguwar)

Bon Iver didn't come out of nowhere. Before he started that project, Justin Vernon was in DeYarmond Edison, a pensive, folky but exploratory band that made two albums before splitting up; other members formed Megafaun. DeYarmond Edison — Vernon's middle names — delved into folk, rock, minimalism and bluegrass, learning traditional songs but also experimenting with phase patterns. It made two studio albums and left behind other songs, including "Epoch." This extensively annotated boxed set includes songs from Mount Vernon, DeYarmond Edison's jammy predecessor, along with DeYarmond Edison's full second studio album, unreleased demos, intimate concerts, collaborations outside the band and Vernon's 2006 solo recordings. It's a chronicle that opens up the sources of a style getting forged.

JON PARELES, New York Times

The Who, "Who's Next/Life House" (Geffen)

Pete Townshend had vast ambitions for The Who's studio follow-up to the rock opera "Tommy," but cooler heads prevailed and it was cut back to a concept-free single album: "Who's Next," a pinnacle of the band's career. In 1970, long before the internet, Townshend envisioned "Life House" as a high-tech parable about ecological disaster, tyranny, virtual entertainment and the healing communal power of live rock music, which he wanted to generate with crowdsourced information from concert workshops. He also leaped into early synthesizer technology. Townshend never quite let go of "Life House"; he has released parts of it on solo collections, and this year he also collaborated on turning its story into a graphic novel. This exhaustive boxed set unites "Who's Next" with the whole painstaking process before it — demos, instrumentals, discarded songs with elements that would resurface elsewhere and variations and ferocious live workshop concerts at small theaters along with spatialized Blu-ray remixes. It's a deep dive into Townshend's intense, convoluted creative efforts. The extended instrumental versions of the electronics-driven "Baba O'Riley" are spectacular; so is the live, muscular and metaphysical "Time Is Passing."

JON PARELES, New York Times