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.