While the title track's big-hearted buildup channels the crew's establishing alt-pop buoyancy, new ideas stagger the 11 tracks. Monolithic "MetaGoth" and smoky ballad "Walking With a Killer" work through internal frustrations, eloquently tracking out a new era for the Breeders.

Sound System presents the complete Clash, lovingly remastered on six discs, comprising the five studio LPs the classic lineup released between 1977 and 1982, plus a 3-CD set featuring non-LP singles and B-sides. A DVD unspools archival footage, plus every video. The sonic upgrade sounds best on the earliest material.

At its core, this constitutes a hearty glimpse of young Bob Dylan changing the music business, and the world, one note at a time.

Brighter compositions match the lyrical demands of more specified storytelling, most vividly on piano-led "Mr. Lee."

The Monkeys' most anti-rock album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino proves their most adventurous, pop accessibility be damned.

The 31-year-old bares herself and parlays stereotypical insecurities into liberating strengths, hurling bombs of empowerment.

It's a rare occasion of art transcending influence, with Toledo sounding like he's coming apart while doing it.

The percussive snap and enhanced reverb on "Yer Blues" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" make the songs all the more blistering, but overall, any flourishes are carefully considered. Better still, the true revelations occur after the familiar first 94 minutes are up.

Combative and hostile even 30 years later, ... And Justice For All delivers exactly what its title promises.

All told, Saltwater's the most refreshing indie pop LP since Sufjan Stevens' Illinois.

Wincing the Night Away makes both [previous] albums sound like fragmented potential.

An enchanting, rhapsodic album of uncommon depth.

Textured, ornate, and somehow seeping into the deepest parts of you. Notch it as the best Explosions in the Sky album since their previous high-water mark, 2003's The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place.

The era may have confounded fans, but Trouble No More harvests some of Dylan's most remarkable performances.

Perfect in vision, voice, harmony – not to mention timing – Treasure of Love delivers quintessential Flatlanders.

Master of Puppets realized the band's greatest strengths, coalescing hardcore punk with progressive metal.

Every classic, from "Blitzkrieg Bop" to "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World," bleeds fresh energy. The three CDs of stereo and mono mixes, demos, single versions, and two blistering live sets from 1976 L.A. are killer, but the new vinyl makes purchasing this box mandatory.

The repetitiveness of Pool tires itself out by track 12, but there's an art to flawless cohesion.

Stepping upward into the macro, the album's landmark achievement lies in Kendrick Lamar's elevation of hip-hop into subtle invisibility, his blackness not exclusively tied to the rapper image.

There's effortless, unhurried groove as he slides from the disarming grit of Nineties hip-hop in "Without You" to Sixties soul on "The Bird" and honey-dripped R&B with "Am I Wrong."

The last album's title ['Perfect From Now On'] was a promise; this one makes good on it.

Run the Jewels 2 gut-punches the competition into second place.

Nomad is more than a beautiful offering for the world music crowd. It's the defining work of a guitar hero.

This self-titled album, released on UK indie Rough Trade in 1988, began her journey to becoming a household name. In a newly remastered 2-disc edition, Lucinda Williams blossoms all over again.

A legendary liquor-soaked session with Tom Waits, two discs containing a ragged-but-right contemporary concert, and a booklet that takes an in-depth look at the making of DTAS crackle and pop, but in revisiting its creators' original intent, a formerly sneered at LP becomes essential.

Perfect.

The tones and the story told -- wordlessly throughout -- are exquisite.

It's as if this box set wants to prove Slint was human, not just a faceless menace that cut a record lost to time and circumstance, worthy of celebration and also fitting neatly in a box.

Hooks sparse and structure loose, Iridescence redefines future pop.

Tremors ultimately flourishes as a dazzling set of pop tracks.

Olsen transcends ephemeral charm at every turn.

It's a heroic effort all around.

Devotchka's captured the sound of a new world order.

Descended from the kings of the region, Sidi Toure, not unlike regional innovator Ali Farka Toure, boasts liquid picking and plucking in this series of duets cut at his sister's home.

Now in his 50s, Bob Mould returns not as the forefather of modern indie rock, but as a vital contemporary.

Lifted soundtracks the scaling of mountains, both geographic and internal.

VU arrived in Los Angeles with new bass player Doug Yule to track its third and final LP for MGM Records, here excavated as a 6-CD set. Bassist/keyboardist/viola virtuoso Cale's absence proved sonically profound.

Indian throws a temper tantrum on From All Purity that goes beyond petulance and into an appropriately pure state of sanity-stomping anguish, purging the demons with sulfuric acid and a nail-studded baseball bat.

Like Lucinda Williams, every blessed bon mot Hubbard drawls sounds lowdown--and eternal.

No one song stands apart, but Burn Something Beautiful hangs together as one of Escovedo's most entrancing works.

Bruce Springsteen's fifth release proved a cardinal development in his storytelling, and The Ties That Bind: The River Collection dissects it across four CDs, a 2-DVD concert from the same year in Arizona, and an hourlong documentary on a third DVD, plus over 200 coffee-table-ready photos.

There's sex, drugs, crab cakes, and people you've never met and never will, including James Gandolfini and the children of Newtown, Conn., but their presence devastates nonetheless.

The 6-disc set witnesses the studio process as it unfolded 50 years ago, particularly the CD unfolding the complete session for "Like a Rolling Stone."... Experience history in real time.

A pair of trad-style instrumentals, "Snake Chapman's Tune" and "Pacific Slope," underlines Fulks' sublime stylistic mastery.

With support from Geffen Records waning, Young retaliated with a crack country outfit in the International Harvesters and dug his boots into the outlaw sound with conviction.

The Walkmen have solidified their place among our memories.

Confident, crunchy, and catchy as hell.

Gifted a falsetto reminiscent of famed Kentucky balladeer John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), his voice soars along rural Americana and across desolate plains ("Where I'm Calling From"). Through the tense, starry twilight of "Outlands," tranquil, meandering rivers and sprawling juniper trees ("Juniper Arms") outline a rocky terrain wherein "Some Beast Will Find You by Name." To that topography, add Adam Torres.

The songs spring from a warm hearth, upping the ante from their well-received sophomore LP, 2003's Heart.

Cultists are now treated to the best-recorded live VU documentation ever.

At times on Small Town Heroes, Segarra echoes them [Karen Dalton, Lucinda Williams, or Gillian Welch] precisely, taking what they do best and making it her own. That's a rung many have reached for but most have never grasped.

The Life Pursuit is certainly nothing new in the pop lexicon, but Murdoch's keen observational eye gives these songs vivid life.

Empathetic and hopeful, By the Way rivals breakout The Story as Carlile's best.

Spare, swirling keyboards and gently urgent guitar pluckings anchor this minimalist masterpiece, allowing Romy Madley Croft's plaintive, laudanumlike vocals to tentatively soar above the albumwide ache that is her and Oliver Sim's (e)vocation.

The Costello formula takes over: minimalist but experimental instrumentation, eternally durable vocals, and literate punk-wave bittersweetening.

Boldest album to date, Freedom highlights "Miki Dora" and "Skipping School" grapple with masculinity and its illusions. "Satudarah" offers stoned-eye hallucinogens.

Following in the paths of American jazz counterparts Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington, UK jazz savants Yussef Kamaal weave a fabric of the genre steering free of up-nosed traditionalist conventions in pursuit of exploratory grooves and improvisation on Black Focus.

Made In California's hefty price tag won't endear it to serious fans, but it's the first release to encompass the Beach Boys' entire inspiring, frustrating, contradiction-laden tale.

Epic, over-the-top, enormous in scale.

By going back to adolescence, Fite's made his most mature album.

Living between two cultures can be alienating, but Camila Cabello packages her experience as a Cuban-American seamlessly into pure pop perfection.

One of his most accomplished recordings.

Put this against 1994's acclaimed Foolish or 2001's Here's to Shutting Up, and it stands on its own, a reminder that Superchunk is still doing it better than most new bands today.

The Odessa Tapes has it all, most tellingly a warmth and intimacy foreign to More a Legend's typically starched Nashville conformity.

Combined with illuminating outtakes and demos from less-troubled follow-up New Morning, they make Another Self Portrait a far more rewarding listen than its predecessor.

Will Sheff creates albums as statements, and Away ultimately rings with a wonder in letting go.

Aural adventurers, the mothership has landed.

The Loneliest Man I Ever Met refuses to be overshadowed by Kinky Friedman's outsized personality.

Every song but one falls fully developed in the five- to seven-minute ballpark, brimming with enough dissonant wizardry, smart vocal imagery, and tonal shades of rock to fly the freak flag like no aging rockers ever have.

Every song could be three, but that they're not and that each individual movement advances the album's romantic arc proves all too swoonworthy.

Nothing Feels Natural picks up where Priests last left us, poking holes in the American dream, aggressive and accusatory, where both the band and listener aren't safe from Priests' rage.

Taut, toned guitars meet tendon-snapping rhythms and acrobatic frontman Mike Wiebe's almost talking punk blues--mocking, self-deprecating, unyielding in their needling efficacy.

English rapper Simbi Ajikawo, doing business in bars as the extraordinary Little Simz, tackles success, vulnerability, and sheer escapism on her lush and soul-jazz-infused Stillness in Wonderland.

Build Me Up From Bones calls on the same whimsical picking that earned her an early Grammy nomination for Best Country Instrumental Performance, while diversifying to great effect.

The Scottish trio aren't trying to subvert anything on debut long-player The Bones of What You Believe, churning out hard-driving and utterly undeniable electro-pop, and the hooks arrive absolutely relentless.

From the opening preface, "The Sundering," it's apparent that Gods transcends the Sabbath worship of its contemporaries, a clearer sense of control and pacing underscoring the biblical tales of wrath and retribution.

A number of contemporary indie bands attempts to strip-mine mountain ballads in the service of indie pop, but none has melded the impulses as effortlessly and captivatingly as Fleet Foxes manage on "Blue Ridge Mountains" and "Oliver James." Sublime.

World Music sounds like a truly panglobal operation, a remarkably organic siphon of dozens of musical traditions.

Summation of their best recorded moments, X echoes the pulverizing claustrophobia of Source Tags & Codes (2002) and sheer aggression of bone-crushing 1999 debut Madonna, erecting walls of drill-bit noise and floating ennui codas.

"Worries" finishes the album out in familiar power-punk mode, on a riff with drive to spare. Impressive as hell, and this band's only just begun.

All the studio LPs are augmented with bonus material, while three discs compiled exclusively for this box are where the treasure resides.

Sure, they're not very hip, but Portugal the Man are anything but slouches, and Evil Friends is proof that some bands get big for being good, nothing else.

Converts of the group's mainstream exploits needn't fear: "Show Yourself" grooves on an indelible vocal hook, and grunge stomper "Steambreather" recalls another O'Brien collaborator, Stone Temple Pilots.

Years of Refusal, his most consistently meaty solo work since 1994's "Vauxhall and I," amps up guitarist Boz Boorer's crunch and crackle to near-felonius degrees.

Like 2010's The Foundling, this seventh studio LP draws marrow from Gauthier's bones, cauterizing the wounds of a relationship into one of the most devastating breakup albums of all time.

Freed from slick production, Clark plays to his many strengths.

Like Blondie circa 1981, Allen breathes needed fresh air into the game.

Although certainly not the capstone to Wennerstrom's extraordinary personal and artistic journey, A Beautiful Life reaches a new pinnacle for the songwriter, and signals a remarkable turning point on a new path forward.

Expansive cross-pollination at its finest, Lazaretto's dizzying Pandora's box of funk, blues, and hillbilly soul shakes and bakes enough to require a shrink-wrapped bottle of Dramamine.

This is dirty, dusty, disintegrated bay-music at its best.

A 25th anniversary minibox stuffs poster and postcards in with a mother lode second disc of 19 "Athens Demos," from punky ("Bad Day") to finished ("All the Right Friends").

The first hip-hop classic of the new millennium.

Through thick and thin, Kanye West proves the ultimate curator and host, the master of his domain.

Consider the Meat Puppets' Sewn Together its "Young Frankenstein."

Ready to Die finds the quintet on Fat Possum, making them indie artists for the first time, and they give their new label the best produced, loudest, and slickest--without sacrificing any primal grit and drive--Stooges disc yet.

Ultimately it's Gainsbourg's voice--a heady melange of tussled bedclothes whisperings and near-dead sexy murmurs--that lifts both her life and art from beneath the shade of her mythic paterfamilias.

It's music-making for the pure joy of it, and that delight overflows in a manner that's truly rare.

Solid and gaseous, dark and light in all the right places, this is the Comets' brightest so far.