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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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