A Bigger Bang is just a straight-up, damn fine Rolling Stones album, with no qualifiers or apologies necessary for the first time in a few decades.

Pinkerton became a cult classic, all raw guitars and self-loathing wit - it's the In Utero of sexual frustration.

Despite the vintage, or maybe because it's all been hidden for so long, everything here feels like new music, busy being born and put to tape with crisp impatience.

Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind. Every mad genius has to make a record like this at least once in his career--at its nastiest, his makes Kid A or In Utero or Trans all look like Bruno Mars.

Tickets to the show may be sold out until approximately forever, but this album is an excellent replacement.

Olsen’s up to something different here, inviting a different sort of attention to fully absorb. It’s worth the investment; the emotion’s as visceral as it is complex, and it ranks among the best sounding records this year, deserving to be cranked on a good sound system — an album to spend time with, to fall into, to shut up and let yourself be kissed by.

This record demands a room full of quiet and your undivided attention. Listen to it any other way and you may be disappointed, even bored, by it. And that will be your hard luck, because Silver and Gold is Neil Young at his hushed, acoustic best: simple, romantic, direct.

Much like the recent A Tribe Called Quest record, Damn. is a brilliant combination of the timeless and the modern, the old school and the next-level. The most gifted rapper of a generation stomps into the Nineties and continues to blaze a trail forward.

A song isn't a song without melody, harmony and voice. Time and again he proves the same thing on Triplicate.

As with everything Guns N' Roses from the period, it's not so much all access as it is all excess. And that's exactly what you want from a reissue like this. It'll bring you to your sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-knees.

The only thing A New Career in a New Town is missing, at least for the diehard fans who would buy a lavish box set like this, is more of everything – more rarities, more photos, more stories. But that's also precisely why this period in Bowie's career remains captivating. There's enough curious music here to last several lifetimes.

As a 50th-anniversary souvenir, the Stones have assembled a three-disc, 50-track compilation that is the best and most comprehensive collection of the band's high points available.

There are jailhouse weepers, lullabies and gallows humor like "Five Minutes to Live" – a jaw-dropping testament to the depth of the man's songbook.

A four-CD, 20-year cornucopia of live performances that show that evolution in real time, drawing on his appearances at the globe-roving Newport Jazz Festival with diverse collaborators.

The music's urgent, live-in-the-studio feel pairs well with Tweedy's lyrics, which seem more direct and compact than they have in a while.

If you happen to be a rock band, and you don't happen to be either of the White Stripes, it so sucks to be you right now.

Devils and Dust is also as immediate and troubling as this morning's paper.

Vampire Weekend have gotten better at just about everything they do.

The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground.

This isn't a mixtape, it's a suite of songs, paced and sequenced for maxaqimum impact.

This three-disc 25th-anniversary package gives the Pixies' surreal 1989 breakthrough the monument it deserves.

"Here we go to the main course!" ad-libs Van Morrison on an extended "Caravan," one of the shaggy outtakes on this five-disc unpacking of the Belfast bard's 1970 jazzy-pop masterpiece. That LP is nearly all main course, and if the numerous alternate takes here often feel incomplete without their sublime, brassy final arrangements, they compensate with intimacy.

Captures Zep in prime swagger.

His album of Waits' penned-and-produced songs may be the masterwork of Hammond's long career, as well as further testament to Waits' unique genius.

21st Century Breakdown is even better, so masterful and confident it makes Idiot seem like a warm-up.

There is a moment in this five-CD ocean of music when you agree with its creator, the Beach Boys composer-producer Brian Wilson, that the greatest pop album ever made is still within reach.

You hear the sound of songwriters flush with discovery, a dazzling glimmer of what lay ahead.

Barring the discovery of more golden eggs, the four CDs of Keep an Eye on the Sky are the last word on Big Star's first, ultimately glorious lifetime.