The alternate takes are all lesser versions interspersed with studio chatter and other audio vérité--the sound of a band enjoying its work, unaware its time was nearly up.

If this combination of big-name backers, undeniable skills, radio-ready tracks and a marketable thug persona make Get Rich or Die Tryin' a sure-shot smash hit, it also makes it a great record.

All of it rocks; none of it sounds like any other band on earth; it delivers an emotional punch that proves all other rock stars owe us an apology.

On Graduation, West tries hard to address the problems on his first two albums, and succeeds: The new disc is tighter than "Late Registration" (fifty-one minutes long), with no skits (thank heavens) and less ornate production.

In its own way, its as artful, ambitious, determined, joyous and inspiring, as Lemonade or To Pimp a Buttery. It's a sexy MF-ing masterpiece.

Thanks to all the cheeky winks and nods that the Who dressed the record with, it transcended mishmash status. Now this exhaustive, super deluxe edition box set is showing the genius at work behind The Who Sell Out.

In 2015, it sounds like Eden. But it doesn't sound dated--mainly because so many bands are still feasting on Pavement's ideas.

A buried-treasure mother lode. ... He's in peak lonesome-guy mode on the never-released failed-relationship chronicle "Give Me Strength." Another previously unheard song, "Hawaii," is a spooky mysterious-stranger ballad.

Kala strikes deep. There's a resolute sarcasm, a weariness and defiant determination, a sense of pleasure carved out of work--articulated by the lyrics, embodied by the music.

If experience has taught U2 anything, it is that a great new song can still feel like the first day of the rest of your life. Songs of Experience is that innocence renewed.

The result is by turns audiobook, podcast, and live album, and at its most potent when it becomes a hybrid of the three.

What Now is another side of Brittany Howard that makes each of her previous departures feel like a baby step by comparison.

Tell Tale Signs makes plain that Dylan knows the caprices of the world he lives in, now more than ever.

It's the best thing they've ever done, more than exceeding their usual quotient of fire guitars, killer choruses, and crafty rock-history updates. [Feb 2022, p.72]

Produced by Ken Nelson, who was also responsible for Badly Drawn Boy's Bewilderbeast, Quiet Is the New Loud is equally praiseworthy, as the band conjures up the spirit of Nick Drake with eerie precision.

As with the reissue of the group's fourth album, Page has impeccably restored the glimmer of Houses of the Holy and uncovered an LP's worth of fascinating outtakes that show the band's headspace at the time.

If you love the Band, it’s mostly nothing you haven’t heard a couple thousand times before, but little else is needed. A half-century later, the brotherhood of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Manuel and Garth Hudson still makes you want to join the party.

This sumptuous birthday celebration of America's greatest folk singer is really a present to us: two CDs of his greatest songs and recordings, mostly from the mid-1940s, and a disc of illuminating rarities, including what is thought to be Guthrie's first studio session in 1939.

They perfected the genre moves: bracing attack, two-guitar blurs of dissonance and beauty, a sympathetic barker wringing emotion from lyrics about the insular rock scene and girls who stalked it.

The LP remains corrosively beautiful.

Pablo doesn't go for any grand musical and emotional statements on the level of "Bound 2" or "Runaway" or "Hey Mama." West just drops broken pieces of his psyche all over the album and challenges you to fit them together.

Reflektor is closer to turning-point classics such as U2's Achtung Baby and Radiohead's Kid A--a thrilling act of risk and renewal by a band with established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the average, of merely being liked.

Immersion is a good way to characterize the grip and whirl of construction recounted on the two CDs of demos in this seven-disc box, which includes a previously released recording of the 1980-81 stage show.

For the die-hards, the ones who have charted the Classic Quartet's every move, from the early glories of the Coltrane LP to the fiery outpourings heard on albums like Sun Ship from 1965, it's another small but crucial puzzle piece in the group's still-stunning evolution during its roughly three-year lifespan. For everyone else, it's an unvarnished, day-in-the-life portrait of an icon--and the three musical giants that helped him achieve that status--at work.

This is an album that proves something beautiful and enduring can come from even the most dire circumstances.

The Live Anthology redresses that wrong with a panoramic picture of the Heartbreakers' indestructible groove.

For Chapter and Verse he's chosen a revelatory mix of classics and obscurities.

The deluxe edition is an overwhelming portrait of one of the most pivotal moments in the lives of Metallica but also the metal genre as a whole, because the band would take the Justice template and streamline it to become megastars within just a few years.