And the cover versions keep on coming.

On the latest albums by Alice Cooper and the former KISS lead guitarist Ace Frehley, you’ll encounter fresh takes on hits and deep cuts by (in alphabetical order) the Animals, the Beatles, Cream, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, Humble Pie, the Kinks, KISS, Led Zeppelin, MC5, Mountain, Outrageous Cherry, Lou Reed, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and the Rolling Stones—blasts from the past guaranteed to inflict PTSD on listeners conditioned exclusively by 21st-century pop.

Stage Fright (50th Anniversary) by the Band: It’s heretical to say so, but these guys are overrated—not unfunky in their backwoods way or even historically unimportant (they had Dylan’s back and seeded Americana), just less monumental than their larger-than-life reputation. They were really good at what they did, but what they did didn’t evolve: The Winterland act captured in The Last Waltz is essentially the same as the Royal Albert Hall act from five years earlier captured on this deluxe reissue’s second disc.

The subject of this column is the new albums by Pete Yorn and Harry Dean Stanton with the Cheap Dates. But first, some context.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, every musician who has ever been referred to as a “rock star” will be dead, his music left to fend for itself amid the indifferent algorithms of the Cloud.

How much of it will survive, or what forms that survival will take, is anyone’s guess. But as the final generations raised on rock follow their musical heroes into the Great Beyond, a lot of that music will probably suffer neglect.

Under a Mediterranean Sky by Steve Hackett: Sixty orchestral seconds into the opening track, Hackett’s nylon-stringed guitar makes the first of its many appearances, setting the tone for what follows: a strikingly elegant evocation of the wide-open spaces the album’s title promises—an evocation that has much more in common with the traditional classical-guitar repertoire than it does with Hackett’s progressive-rock youth. Not that he has shed all traces of pop.

If you’re the kind of cineaste who watches Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes for the scene in which Michael Redgrave browbeats peasants into helping him document Bandrikan folk music, you’ll love Dust-to-Digital’s new digital anthology, Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music.

Mysterious Spaceship Moon by Richard F. Adams: Adams calls this assemblage of twinkling pianos and shimmering synthesizers a “soundtrack to an imaginary 1960s British sci-fi film about imaginary moon people in their imaginary spaceship moon” and a “love letter to post-war, British, cinematic soundtrack music.” But it’s also what Philip Glass might’ve come up with if sometime between Glassworks and Mishima he’d sequestered himself in a studio with Isao Tomita and Edgar Froese and said, “Forget art, fellas.

Perhaps the instrument that benefited the most from 2020’s plethora of classical-music releases was the harp—the very instrument (or a close relative thereof) identified in Revelation 5 as standard equipment of the four beasts and the four-and-twenty elders who fall down in worship before the Lamb.

So if it’s a foretaste of glory divine you crave, the cream of the 2020 harp crop is for you.