LAURIE ANDERSON Amelia (Nonesuch) — Laurie Anderson has been making art about Amelia Earhart for a long time. The first work she made about the legendary flying ace was an orchestral piece first performed at the turn of the millennium. She kept coming back to Earhart as a subject, eventually narrowing the focus to Earhart’s ill-fated final flight. The end result is a work understandably dubbed Amelia, which makes up Anderson’s latest studio album. Like everything in Anderson’s catalog, it’s an inventive, enveloping creation that operates at a dizzying number of levels. It plays like a concept album and theater piece and impish experiment all at once. Anderson provides her usual arch, actorly vocals throughout, which brings a refined, stage-play intensity to a track such as “The Word for Woman Here” (“Stopped in a village/ Bought a dictionary/ Two shillings/ Did you know that the word for “woman” here is Mary?/ Imagine a whole town of Marys”). She also gets help from AHOHNI, who sings on a few tracks, including the eerie and majestically intense “Crossing the Equator” and the brief, lovely “The Wrong Way.” “Radio,” another song aided by AHOHNI, is the penultimate track, and it truly swells with an rich expressiveness that few achieve as compellingly and convincingly as Anderson. Soar with the following cuts: “San Juan,” “The Letter,” and “Road to Mandalay.”

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS Wild God (PIAS) — It’s been forty years since From Her to Eternity, the first studio album billed to Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and it’s been fascinating and a little thrilling to witness the Australian iconoclast age into a figure of indie-rock eminence. On the elegant ballad “Long Dark Night,” on the new album Wild God, Cave even sounds like he’s fully stepping in to take up every square inch of the Leonard Cohen–shaped void that any reasonable music fan would have declared to be unfillable. After a couple albums that were understandably defined by grief, Cave has taken to assuring fans that the new release finds Cave and company in a happy mode again. Of course, happiness in the Cave oeuvre still has a grand, haunted-mansion quality about it. The group is definitely going big this time out. The title cut blossoms into massive proportions, and “Conversion” is so splendidly theatrical it could be slipped into a production of Jesus Christ Superstar and almost pass. Cave himself often seems enraptured by what he’s crafting here, fully caught up in the pleasure of his seductive modern fable-making, maybe best heard of the chiming, choir-infused, album opener “Song of the Lake”: “And he knew that even though he had found Heaven/ Such as described in the ancient scrolls/ Still, he felt the drag of Hell/ Upon his old and mortal soul.” There’s magnificence to be found here. Get wild with the following tracks: “Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt,” “Cinnamon Horses,” and the gospel-like “As the Waters Cover the Sea.”

STEVE WYNN Make It Right (Fire) — Putting a new book onto shelves might be enough for most creators, but Steve evidently thought I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True: A Memoir of Life, Music, and the Dream Syndicate wasn’t quite enough self-expression for this moment in time. He’s primarily a songwriter by trade, so it makes sense that all the reflection required to pen those pages got him thinking about structuring that autobiography in music and lyrics. Make It Right, Wynn’s first solo studio in more than a decade, is a proper companion piece to his book, opening with “Santa Monica,” about the city he was born in, and closing on “Roosevelt Avenue,” named for the street where his current residence sits. In between the two, Wynn expertly plies his trade, delivering a set of a songs grounded in the folk rock that’s been his main milieu for a while (he sounds positively Dylan-esque on the title cut) and yet free to sonically wander. “What Were You Expecting” is the sort of slinky neo-blues that Robbie Robertson offered up on his solo records, “Simpler Than the Rain” gleams with a gentle twang, and the previously noted “Roosevelt Avenue” almost hits Bob Mould territory, if he were a little more inclined towards hoedowns. As memoirs go, this one is terrifically tuneful. In addition to those noted, check the following cuts: “You’re Halfway There,” “Cherry Avenue,” and “Then Again.”