Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper.... It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Radiohead hated being Radiohead, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Radiohead record yet.

This is one of those albums people are going to obsess over for many years to come.

Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties.... No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.

A quarter-century after its first release, London Calling is still the concentrate essence of The Clash's unparalleled fervor.

This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.--a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.

Quarantine the Past doesn't replace the albums, but it's a highly listenable alternative that is as much a treat for nostalgic older fans as it is a valuable gateway for new listeners.

If allowing Jagger to touch up those vocals was the price to pay to allow Exile receive the tribute it deserves, it's still a bargain.

The influence of Pinkerton led to hundreds of mostly regrettable bands, but what ultimately distinguishes Weezer is how they sonically mirror the unhinged and private mental terror of its narrator.

With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye's man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic.

Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.

It's a colossus of an album, the product of a band that was thinking huge, pushing itself to its limits, and devoted to breaking open its own understanding of what rock music could be.

Essentially perfect... It remains a landmark that hasn't aged a day.

Isn't Anything crystallizes MBV's unique dynamic.

One of the many great things about Liquid Swords is that while it's an unimpeachable work of lyrical mastery, of fierce intellect and sound morals, it's in no way a record for prudes.

As one of classic rock's foundational albums, it holds up better than any other commercial smash of that ilk.

The new version is in fact more textured and nuanced, but not at the expense of the album's bone-dry, brutalizing crunch. Most of its touch-ups are tastefully unobtrusive and illuminating.

If anything, the elucidating peek behind the curtain that Bangs’ documentary provides makes the album feel like an even more singular, remarkable achievement.

The bonus disc is a mildly interesting amalgam of alternate mixes and rough takes--the kind of stuff anyone but the most dedicated obsessives will listen to only once--and there’s little advance here lyrically from the debut, but II is still close to perfect.

The Velvet Underground's stunning simplicity and unflinching honesty presented an even more accessible model of DIY aspiration, free of Warholian conceptualism and Cale’s classically schooled chaos.

Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination.

They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here.

Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time.

Years removed from its source, its impact is multiplied tenfold. In 1996, it was a path towards adult-contemporary pop radio; today, it’s an exquisitely faded Polaroid.

As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. ... The vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity.

Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. ... The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards.

The numerous early takes and rough demos have a diehard appeal (there’s a reason Metallica has a dedicated archivist on their payroll), though the live recordings present a band going through its most monumental transition punctuated by monumental tragedy. Recording a masterpiece was the easy part. Genius does not appear out of thin air and Puppets was a culmination of Metallica’s influences and forward direction, so yes, it will give you a more rounded sense of how a masterwork came to be.

It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating.

The rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wildstyle symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

It’s an overwhelming amount of material. ... The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering.

What remains so great about Tim, and is emphasized over and over again on this new remix, is how Westerberg delivers each song as if it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do.

For the first time, Modest Mouse craft an album, not a collection of songs. That they manage to go beyond any other rock band out there is staggering.... OK Computer must be mentioned, for Modest Mouse just got invited to the same club.

So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision.

The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children's story, one whose execution matches its imagination.

If the additions are what make this record distinctive, what's left out is what makes it brilliant.

It goes without saying that the Pixies' b-sides don't make for an average, run-of-the-mill outtakes compilation, as many of the songs are almost or equally as radiant as the more fortunate tracks that made it to the five classics between 1987 and 1991.

It's of the moment and feels new, but it's also striking in its immediacy and comes across as friendly and welcoming.

What makes Painful so eminently approachable after all these years is that it manages to sound like a fully realized, band-defining statement yet unpretentiously off-the-cuff at the same time. It’s a feeling reinforced by the overflow of material available on this reissue.

With its illusory, ethereal production, wistful melodies, and oft-funereal pace, this is one of those rare albums that can completely absorb you in such a way as to almost dissolve the world around you, and make you feel like you've been transported to another realm of existence within the course of 58 minutes.

The Avalanches have managed to build a totally unique context for all these sounds, while still allowing each to retain its own distinct flavor. As a result, Since I Left You sounds like nothing else.

Loss, regret, and a minor key brilliantly permeate jangling guitars and rhythmic and tonal shifts-- and although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights.

In trading the adolescent kick of Secaucus for ripened resignation, meticulous refinement for crippling maturation, they have realized their magnum opus.

The sprawling Late Registration is the year's most accomplished rap album, and in turn, he's done something that his heroes-- the Pharcyde and Nas, and father figure Jay-Z-- couldn't do: deliver on a promise the second time around.

Though omissions are certain to be an issue for cratedigging obsessives, this collection is as flawless a primer as has ever been made available on a single disc.

Live at Reading effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling, putting you as close to the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez.

It's a rare thing for an album to have such a strong sense of what it wants to be. Bon Iver is about flow, from one scene and arrangement and song and memory and word into the next-- each distinct but connected-- all leading to "Beth/Rest".

For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos--deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix--clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material.

The worthy additions in this "super deluxe edition" are nearly all visual.

Fahey was a restless listener, tinkerer, thinker, and player--a combination that makes this set fascinating both as a history book and a lifetime listening indulgence.

While Channel Orange is stuffed with one-of-a-kind details and characters, its overall scope is grand, as is Ocean's.

The miracle of this album is how it ties straightforward rap thrills--dazzling lyrical virtuosity, slick quotables, pulverizing beats, star turns from guest rappers--directly to its narrative.

Each fluorescent strike of noise, incongruous tempo flip, and warped vocal is bolted into its right place across the record's fast 40 minutes.

III is, indirectly, Led Zeppelin’s own version of Pink Floyd's Meddle--the folky, pretty early record that was never too popular and hence a favorite of indie types skeptical of such a massive mainstream band.... III has easily the best bonus material too.

Nearly twenty years later, GAS still assaults our presumptions about electronic music.

It offers a window onto the playfulness of his improvisations and, in a structure that mimics the range of an actual Prince album, shifts nimbly between up-tempo songs and ballads, sweat and tears, near impossible to stay sitting still while listening.

The material on 77-81 is clearly a big bang, informing not just everything the band did after, but a lot of what other bands did, too.

Sigur Rós effortlessly make music that is massive, glacial, and sparse..... They are the first vital band of the 21st Century.

Dizzee's despairing wail, focused anger, and cutting sonics places him on the front lines in the battle against a stultifying Britain, just as Pete Townshend, Johnny Rotten, and Morrissey have been in the past.

Madvillainy is inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip-hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots.... Good luck finding a better hip-hop album this year, mainstream, undie, or otherwise.

[Finn] not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream.

The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.

You can feel the warmth pouring out of the music.

Despite the cries about careerism, they rarely settled into one spot for long, and even when they were correctly perceived to have done so--about one half of The Great Escape really is a Parklife retread--they were still spreading their collective wings on album tracks and B-sides.

Part Lies makes a good case that their later period has value too, and that the group had raised the bar so high for themselves that merely being very good could be interpreted as a failure.

If Fleetwood Mac shimmered more, rocked less and were organic without being raw, that might suggest the level of evocative language and romance The Lone Bellow exudes.

Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite.

This super deluxe edition—complete with a 49-minute album pressed as a double-LP at 45rpm--encourages exploration of the original album, because even with the bright, discordant new remix, there remains a mysterious core that can not be explained but only experienced.

On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint.

The Antibes version is excellent but this set is more compelling, both because of the personnel and how Coltrane extends the composition.

Nothing short of elemental in its beauty.

Every track on Dongs of Sevotion is chock-full of some of the most poignant, disconcerting lyrics you should ever have to hear.

An exceedingly triumphant psych-pop oddity.... I doubt 2004 will birth a more blissful sonic encounter than Ta Det Lugnt.

Recalls last year's fine Halo Benders release, The Rebels Not In, the album Martsch recorded with Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson and former Spinanes and current Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf. And that's not a bad thing at all.

A matchless combination of scratchy indie rock and post-Oval electronics.

The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.

For its moments of gravity and excellence, Hail to the Thief is an arrow pointing toward the clearly darker, more frenetic territory the band have up to now only poked at curiously.

Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record.

The album's second half is slightly more abstract than the catchy pop that precedes it, but these moments are tempered, causing the record to feel more focused.

The brilliant In Rainbows represents no such thing [downshift]. Nonetheless, it's a very different kind of Radiohead record. Liberated from their self-imposed pressure to innovate, they sound--for the first time in ages--user-friendly.

These four discs ultimately do what any good box set should do: In tracing the band's trajectory from power-pop progenitors to post-pop tinkerers, Keep an Eye on the Sky presents a history of the band that could not be gleaned from the albums themselves, using finished studio tracks along with demos and rarities to give a fuller picture of the musicians, their dynamic, and their songs.

This lyrical simplicity shouldn't obscure the fact that these are sharply constructed songs that take unusual turns. One of Girls' specialities is their willingness to go completely over the top but somehow keep us right there with them.

Few can match their feel for arrangement or sense of structure.

Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.

Along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires has the band taking a leap forward into emotional directness. Koenig and Batmanglij truly seem of one mind here, as the vocals and music interact with each other in an effortless flow.

Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d city did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse.

This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.

It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done--moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists--and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.

Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala.

A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug.

If the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. ... It’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition.

You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades--closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman”--remains.

Homecoming is an important document of those [Coachella] performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity.

Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.

Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton.

Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part.