The latest reissue of the album spotlights its sonic depth, thanks to illuminative remastering by guitarist-producer Jimmy Page, and, on the deluxe edition, alternate mixes of each track.

It was a long haul to that nasty perfection — "Loving Cup" was first recorded in 1969; "Sweet Virginia" was a salty-country leftover from Sticky Fingers — and the outtakes unearthed and, in some cases, retouched for this reissue reveal more (not a lot but enough to be grateful for) about the process and detours

All [of the unreleased songs] were recorded around the time of OK Computer; all are unimpeachably first-rate; and yet, all were sensibly left off the original. Nevertheless, they complete the picture of one of rock's greatest bands cresting their first creative peak.

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

What’s clearer now in hindsight, especially thanks to this new box set, is how the quartet took its collective influences and refracted them into something cohesively “Beatles.” ... Revolver heralded the Beatles’ metamorphosis from greatness into immortality.

A serious, ridiculously ambitious punk album. [14 Oct 2004, p.100]

As it turns out, Giles Martin reveals considerable new wonders--particularly in his stereo remix of the original album. The remix, in fact, provides a long overdue epiphany. ... Popular music's most elaborate and intricate creation--and one that helped end the mono era--wasn't made to be heard in stereo.

Greatest protest album ever made? Most stirring soul-music symphony? Yes and yes. And then some.

The alternate takes in this reissue show how hard the Stones worked to sound so natural.

None of the bonus songs are necessarily better than the ones that made the cut on 1999, but they show just how curious he was at the time, trying out new and different ideas, musical themes he would still be exploring in the decades that followed. ... As with the Purple Rain box set a couple years ago, this macro look at 1999 shows not just Prince’s genius but the breadth of his brilliance at the time.

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

It's a fabulously crisp mix of one of modern pop's greatest LPs. Details sparkle.

The trunk of treasure he and the Band made in their short season of hiding keeps on giving.

Sign ‘O’ the Times was an eclectic funk-pop-rock-R&B-gospel-novelty hodgepodge of songs about love, sex, and Jesus that sounds awful on paper — what great record this side of Little Richard could include the phrase “green eggs and ham,” as Prince deadpanned on “Housequake,” and still work? — yet it was a masterpiece. Its very lack of focus was its greatest strength. ... It’s impossible to trace his thought process, which makes it all the more exciting to find the diamonds he left in the vault.

It's no surprise, given how developed Guyville is for a debut, that Phair's playful arrangements and lyrical incision were there from the jump. Her voice expands from singsong to confident as she figures out just what it can do. ... Due to Phair's songwriting and enduring cultural salience (and Wood's production), the album has aged better than the work of her peers. Phair was initially derided for being too pop, but that's what gives Guyville both timelessness and grace.

The real revelations are recordings that part the curtains on the making of Rumours, like Christine McVie's solo-piano-demo rendition of "Songbird."

Giles Martin and Sam Okell have done a new mix in stereo, 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos. The mix does wonders for moments like the three-way guitar duel in “The End,” with Paul, George and John trading off solos live on the studio floor. The Sgt. Pepper and White Album sets were packed with mind-blowing experiments and jams, but Abbey Road is considerably more focused. In these 23 outtakes and demos, you hear a band in the zone, knowing exactly what they want to do, working hard to finesse the details, even the ones only they’ll notice.

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.

Alongside alternate LP mixes are early versions of "Andy's Chest," "The Ocean," and "Rock'n'Roll"; fascinating abandoned outtakes slated for a supposed "lost" fourth LP ("Coney Island Steeplechase," "Ferryboat Bill"); and some of the most exciting live VU recordings ever.

Reminds us that, for all of Simon's genius with tunes and lyrics, it's his rhythmic searching and sophistication that sets him apart.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she’s still more than capable of telling off partners, detractors, and others who have done her wrong, all while picking apart the inner workings of her frantic mind. But what sets Bolt Cutters apart from its predecessors is that, for the first time, the scales tip more toward resilience than agony.

III was a masterful union of ballads and bruising, and a giant step in the songwriting ascent toward, later, "No Quarter" and "Kashmir."

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.

It takes a band as myth-saturated as the Clash to live up to a career-summing box as ambitious as this one. But Joe Strummer and his crew of London gutter-punk romantics fit the bill.

Physical Graffiti, in its cocksure energies and determined reach, was Zeppelin's last, swaggering masterpiece.

It's looser and messier than Sgt. Pepper and, one suspects, always would have been. But its sui generis Americanism counterbalances its paucity of classic pop songs.

Lynn and White weren't straining to make history, just a damn good Loretta Lynn album. But it sure sounds classic anyway.

Finally back in print, every song burns hot as ever.

Kid A Mnesia isn’t just a monument of Radiohead’s bravest, boldest music—it’s a tribute to keeping the creative fires burning even in the coldest of times.

Made and issued between the falls of 1968 and 1970, the original LPs mark Zeppelin's rapid progression out of British R&B and psychedelia into a crushing-riff rock of unprecedented dynamic range, embedded with details from Fifties rockabilly and Celtic and Appalachian folk, blown open with volcanic improvising.

Captures Zep in prime swagger.

The original album still sparkles, thanks to the remastering job, and the documentary is insightful (most of it came out previously as an episode of Classic Albums). But it’s the non-album material that makes the box set definitive.

To Pimp a Butterfly is a densely packed, dizzying rush of unfiltered rage and unapologetic romanticism, true-crime confessionals, come-to-Jesus sidebars, blunted-swing sophistication, scathing self-critique and rap-quotable riot acts.

Ghosteen is a masterpiece of melancholy. You mourn right along with him and hope he finds solace.

The reissue may not be a treasure trove of unheard material, but the gems that echo the sounds of the American South are comforting and familiar. And that’s not a bad thing.

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.

Corgan built a monument to art rock and OCD.

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.

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.

One of the best albums of the year.

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.

II was still tied to straight-blues sources (the Willie Dixon elements in "Whole Lotta Love"). But the alternate takes highlight Robert Plant's ripening vocal poise and, in a rough mix of "Ramble On," the decisive, melodic force of John Paul Jones' bass and John Bonham's drumming.

The original Déjà vu presented CSNY as a united front even as the group was already fraying. This excavation tells the other part of the story: four men working together and, at the same time, starting to drift into their own separate, occasionally colliding worlds.

On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before—yet he just keeps pushing on into the future.

Black Messiah shows how deep easy can go. D'Angelo and his band have built an avant-soul dream palace to get lost in, for 56 minutes of heaven.

In the years since Petty released his 1994 classic album, he slowly revealed, on-stage and in interviews, more about the darkly personal inspirations for the record, this retrospective box does the same for the sprawling, bursting creative process that went into making Wildflowers. It’s the definitive artistic statement that newly illuminates one of the most fruitful, inspired periods of the American legend’s career.

Oasis' debut remains one of the most gloriously loutish odes to cigarettes, alcohol and dumb guitar solos that the British Isles have ever coughed up. This deluxe three-disc reissue captures the madness of the Gallagher brothers' early days.

An awe-inspiring greatest hits set.

The set includes the Memphis Recording Service acetates Presley had cut on his own dime ($3.98 a pair, to be exact); the entire legendary Sun Sessions, aborted takes and all; and every known concert and radio recording from the period. The sound quality is likely as good as it'll ever get, and the performances are musical bedrock.

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 record resonates with raw, emotional intensity in a stunning way.

An album that cut through the grunge-y haze of 1992 with crisp Sixties melodies and... daring emotional clarity.

It’s the sound of longing unbound.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is his most maniacally inspired music yet, coasting on heroic levels of dementia, pimping on top of Mount Olympus.

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.

A fresh listen to No Other, Clark’s lone Asylum album, reminds you both of its beauty and its occasional more frustrating aspects. The songs, which stretch out to as long as eight minutes, aren’t played as much as unfurled. ... Shorn of the choir that appears on many of its songs, the outtakes are vital for the way they allow us to zero in on Clark’s singing. It’s easy to forget how robust a vocalist Clark could be

Whether the performances are stark and embittered (Simone’s) or somber and haunted (the Staples’), the tracks communicate years of struggle and pain — a far cry from the sense of hope that ran through earlier calls to arms, like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

What she offers is a dizzying, kaleidoscopic self-portrait — brash and bawdy at some turns, crushingly vulnerable at other points, and completely ridiculous when it wants to be.

Her curious spirit, as well as her undeniable talent as a vocalist and arranger, make Desire, I Want To Turn Into You a kinetic example of what happens when pop sets out to transcend its own limits.

For casual listeners, the inclusion of already-released material and repeated songs may feel bloated and unnecessary. But hardcore fans have craved this for years, and they’ll be more than happy to indulge in any and all versions of these tracks (ahem, “The Losing End” at the Roxy!). ... Some of the unreleased tracks are unfathomably great.

R.E.M. were already college-radio heroes by the time they made Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. They could've kept making mumbly, jangly tunes for their core audience, but they went bigger and bolder, stepping toward radio-friendliness while retaining their iconoclastic spirit.

While the song selection (including classics like the brass-balled superfunker "Zombie") is killer, recording info would help. The music speaks for itself, but presidential history deserves better.

This edition has 12 outtakes, most of which have been hoarded on bootlegs by Stones fanatics for years. Some of the bonus tracks are nearly as hot as the originals.

The remarkable achievement of Love and Theft is that Dylan makes the past sound as strange, haunted and alluring as the future...

In the 1977-79 half of Name, nearly every song beats the studio version. But the 1980-81 disc is the prize, as the Heads take their lofty concepts to the stage with a ten-piece band. [2 Sep 2004, p.147]

The bonus material is not essential listening, but since U2 rarely pull back the curtain on their creative process, it's fascinating to hear this rough draft of history.

Imagine: The Ultimate Collection is a lavish celebration of John’s masterwork.

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.

The sound quality is astonishing.

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.

From the very first moment they started playing, this was a band that was eons ahead of its time. Pylon Box is exactly the deep dive their incredible legacy deserves.

Lemonade is her most emotionally extreme music, but also her most sonically adventurous.

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 original All Things has aged brilliantly (the fresh remix doesn’t hurt). ... The two CDs of early demos (day one made with Voormann and Starr, day two acoustic versions) could easily stand on their own; these are spare, campfire-ish takes on which Spector would soon add Wall of Sound bricks.

This reissue bonanza shows the Nineties' premier indie band turning reflective and joyfully screwing around at the same time.

The Pretties were impatient modernists, carrying that blues zeal to psychedelia (1967's "Defecting Grey"), rock opera (ahead of the Who, on 1968's S.F. Sorrow) and progressive rock (1970's Parachute) with spectacular if commercially dire results. This grand box takes that tale, across 11 studio albums and a feast of extras, up to the present day.

A definitive album.

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.

Just as exuberant is the part of Disc Two dominated by the jazz-infused playing of pianist Rubén González, whose spiraling solos bring roars from the crowd.

If you want a vision of the future of hip-hop and techno, get this record.

The Bang Years is the anthology his fans have always craved--the first definitive collection of his Sixties nuggets, when he was just another Brooklyn punk hustling his way into the business with a guitar, groovy sideburns and a solitary-man glare.

Following a string of records that have each felt like a swan song, You Want It Darker may be Cohen's most haunting LP.

It's built for fanatics, yet the goods could make a fanatic out of anyone.

When Ocean reins himself in, tucking his words and melodies into tighter verse-chorus structures, the songs have startling force.

All totaled: a trunkload of what at this point are barroom folk standards, played so vividly you'll be bellowing along.

This latest one, which lasts more than double the length of the studio Love Supreme, shows additionally how for Coltrane, his weightiest statement to date wasn’t a fixed masterpiece but a perpetual work in progress, a launchpad to the next phase of his quest.

It is a glorious thing to hear. It will be one of the best things you hear all year.

Finally, the third and most brutal album from these Detroit legends gets both the rawness and the power it deserves.

This welcome five-CD-plus-DVD expansion adds several non-LP singles; a new, nine-cut tribute set featuring contemporary fans from Miguel to Fall Out Boy (John Grant's sighing "Sweet Painted Lady" is the highlight); a vintage documentary about the album's creation; and, best of all, an explosive London concert that demonstrates how hard John and his kickass band could rock between eloquent ballads.

The collection’s treasure trove of five discs contains raw demos, radio sessions, a rare live concert, and alternative mixes that show how Bowie was desperate to figure out his next step. ... The songs that didn’t make it to Hunky Dory studio versions are even more revealing. Each shows Bowie was woodshedding new characters. ... The rest of the demos show how Bowie developed his sound and stuck to his vision when he got into the studio.

Some of Beyoncé’s best vocal work on record, produced flawlessly and at the forefront of each track. Her voice as an instrument is wielded superbly across the entire album but most strikingly at the top of it, as she glides across country and R&B inflections effortlessly.

It’s a strangely addictive mix, comfort-food nostalgia that telegraphs knowingness without sarcasm, parody or airquotes.

For as sparse as it sounds, there’s great depth to Carnage.

As a pop song production display, it's a tour de force. Lorde's writing and fantastically intimate vocals, ranging from her witchy, unprocessed low-register warbles to all sorts of digitized masks, make it matter.

His most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. ... These are age-old ideas, but they don’t feel that way when he’s singing them. It’s par for the course for an artist who specializes in embodying pop archetypes, and making them new again.

Their half-formed debut EP is redeemed by a previously unreleased follow-up session. The LPs Ben Hur and Umber still stun.

The new Red is even bigger, glossier, deeper, casually crueler. It’s the ultimate version of her most gloriously ambitious mega-pop manifesto.

The richest overview yet of maybe the most visionary funk operation in pop history.