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

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

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

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

[Tempest is] a thing to behold.

The most despairing, confrontational and musically turbulent album Bruce Springsteen has ever made.

Her tenth album returns to the dazzling synth-pop of albums like '1989' and 'Reputation,' with lyrics caught between a love story and a revenge plot.

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.

This three-disc remastered Ya-Ya's includes the original in all its gritty glory. Disc Two is a five-song EP from the same shows, with acoustic performances--"Prodigal Son" and "You Gotta Move"--from Richards (playing a resonator guitar) and Jagger. The third disc is an unexpected treat: blistering sets by openers B.B. King plus Ike and Tina Turner (doing an outrageously steamy take on Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long").

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.

Rarely does an act so flatteringly curate its own brilliance.

Whether she's holding notes with the strength of a suspension bridge or enjoying a rare lighthearted "whoo-hoo!" on "Sweetest Devotion," her incredible phrasing – the way she can infuse any line with nuance and power – is more proof that she's among the greatest interpreters of romantic lyrics.

The only dicey part is an uneven disc of six remixes: some provide new insights, others fall flat. ... With three other discs and a book of the Edge's moving black & white portraits of the band in the California desert, the box is a thorough portrait of a band on the verge, ready to burst into the arms of America and the rest of the world.

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

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.

Wrote a Song for Everyone does not replace anything Fogerty did the first time around. It affirms the living history in his greatest hits--that of a great nation still being born.

It's a museum piece, a record that merits a display in the Smithsonian.

Late Registration is an undeniable triumph, packed front to back, so expansive it makes the debut sound like a rough draft.

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.

Even for him, though, The Rising, with its bold thematic concentration and penetrating emotional focus, is a singular triumph.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The sound quality is astonishing.

There are 50 tracks of the work in progress--outtakes and sketches; roads not taken and songs left behind--across the summer and fall of 1968. But the Esher tapes are a profound record in themselves. There are rough lyrics and missing parts; Lennon’s “Glass Onion” is just one, repeated verse. But this is an unprecedented view of the Beatles at the ground zero of songwriting as well as the trials and conflict that charged that bounty.

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

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

Adele has never sounded more ferocious than she does on 30—more alive to her own feelings, more virtuosic at shaping them into songs in the key of her own damn life. It’s her toughest, most powerful album yet.

Magic is, in one way, the most openly nostalgic record Springsteen has ever made.

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

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.

Her excellent new Guts is another instant classic, with her most ambitious, intimate, and messy songs yet. Olivia’s pop-punk bangers are full of killer lines (“I wanna meet your mom, just to tell her her son sucks”) but she pushes deeper in powerful ballads like “Logical.” All over Guts, she’s so witty, so pissed off, so angsty at the same time, the way only a rock star can be. And this is the album of a truly brilliant rock star.

His third straight masterwork. [7 Sep 2006, p.99]

U2's first studio album in five years--is a triumph of dynamic, focused renaissance.

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

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

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.

By the fourth line — "Being this young is art" — it's obvious, the track ["Slut!"] is a stunner. .... The chorus [of "Say Don’t Go"] ("Why'd you have to lead me on? Why'd you have to twist the knife?") hits so tragically hard that it was destined to be screamed by stadiums full of fans at future Eras shows. "Suburban Legends" is a euphoric, dizzying rush to the head, with Antonoff's production making it sound like the soundtrack to the world's most addictive arcade game.

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

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

A perfect treasure of soft, spangled woe sung with a heavy open heart.... It's the best album Beck has ever made.

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.

To the 5 Boroughs is an exciting, astonishing balancing act: fast, funny and sobering.

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

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.

In terms of consistency, craftsmanship and musical experimentation, Goddess in the Doorway surpasses all his solo work and any Rolling Stones album since Some Girls.

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.

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

All over The Record, they keep recombining their individual styles into a different kind of chemistry for each song. That’s why they transcend any kind of “supergroup” cliché. After all, supergroups are a dime a dozen compared to actual great bands. And boygenius leave no doubt about where they stand.

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

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.

On The Union, produced by T Bone Burnett, John and Russell share the resurrection. Each goes back to what he first did best. Then they do it together.

Grande’s latest is a gorgeously exposed journey to the end of her world — or at least what she believes to be the end. It’s a divorce album that goes through all the stages of grief, and the singer navigates a new beginning with some of the most honest and inventive songs of her career so far.

Working on a Dream is the richest of the three great rock albums Springsteen has made this decade with the E Street Band--and moment for moment, song for song, there are more musical surprises than on any Bruce album you could name.

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.

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.

Stunning. .... Tortured Poets has the intimate sound of Folklore and Evermore, but with a coating of Midnights synth-pop gloss.

He is still singing about singing, all over No Line on the Horizon, U2's first album in nearly five years and their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's "Achtung Baby."

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

Home Video is her greatest work yet — a cohesive and poignant collection of tales from her teenage years in Richmond, Virginia. These stories are woven like a quilt, with several dark patches reminiscent of her hero Bruce Springsteen’s The River.

Why anybody would choose to spend their life without a copy of This Is Not a Test! is a mystery.

Vampire Weekend were late arrivals, lacking the Strokes’ switch-blade attitude and the art-punk edge of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s. But Vampire Weekend now look like the smartest guys in the room, marshalling a sumptuous, emotionally complex music perfect in this pop moment.

The cumulative effect of this mass of old, borrowed, blue and renewed – covers, recent outtakes and redefining takes on two classics--is retrospect with a cutting edge, running like one of the singer's epic look-ma-no-set-list gigs: full of surprises, all with a reason for being there.

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

The album's producer, Gil Norton (whose crescendos for the Pixies were an alternative-rock cornerstone), has subtly filled out the sound of the Patti Smith Group without losing its handmade, jamming essence. Guitar tones resonate through the mix, and new lines snake through what used to be hollow space.

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.

Blunderbuss gets stranger and more fascinating the closer you listen.

It comes down to the songs, and these are the most intense he's ever written, one instant classic after another.

Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana (or I Do Whatever I Want) convenes a family reunion of his favorite rappers and reggaetoneros to produce a genre-promiscuous work of reggaeton a la marquesina: a more street-savvy form of reggaeton once deemed so risqué that it was criminalized and relegated to garage parties across Puerto Rico throughout the Nineties.

Austin's favorite trio dishes out eleven helpings of diverse alt-pop on what may wind up being the finest record of its ilk all year. Charged by song sculptor/frontman Britt Daniel, this start-to-finish triumph never underachieves even if it has an effortless aura at times.

Like a great DJ set, songs morph into one another thematically and structurally, most notably in the album’s central triptych. ... The music works its magic, and like a perfect night a clubbing, the uplift is ultimately irresistible.

The result is a set that feels like an instant folk-rock classic.

The album cuts on Honk include monolithic classics like “Start Me Up” and “Brown Sugar,” but it’s the more recent material that makes this compilation interesting. ... But no matter how skilled the band became in the studio, it’s on the road where they earned their “world’s greatest” mantle, and the bonus live cuts here prove their vitality.

The result is a raw quality with a sound akin to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes — an album that undoubtedly influenced these sessions (George Harrison, having recently hung out with the Band in Woodstock, describes his early take of “All Things Must Pass” as ‘Band-y’.) The mix also includes “Don’t Let Me Down,” tragically left off the original album but now in its rightful place, nuzzled between a loose, rowdy medley and the gem “Dig a Pony.”

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.

As always, it's Yorke's voice that holds the emotional center, and it's never been more affecting. Credit both his delivery and the production clarity, a statement in and of itself.

Quadrophenia, as delivered the first time, is still one of his, and the Who's, greatest albums--and the better opera.

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.

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.

There isn't a weak song on Money; most of them are unforgettable.

Rage Against the Machine's 1992 debut is a grenade that keeps exploding.... Remastered to museum-clean standards, the reissued album comes with DVDs of holy-shit live shows and music videos, plus demos that prove just how down and detailed the group had every song (even if Morello still couldn't resist changing solos).

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.

Taken together, it's a comprehensive document of a great band with endless secrets to reveal, even now.

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

Swift touches on so much more – nuanced acts of forgiveness, complex personal histories, the ability to visualize and know how a person can look in different shades of light. No doubt Swift is still the master of writing a spiteful kiss-off, but the songs of Evermore are a welcomed step in a more mature direction.

CSNY 1974 may be the closest we'll come to hearing a mid-Seventies reunion album from this band.

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.

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.

Weird, playful, unclassifiable, sexy, brilliantly addictive.

Is this an evolution from Lemonade? Not quite. But with Renaissance, Beyoncé is more relatable than ever, giving listeners all the anthems and sultry slow burners we love and have come to expect from her, proving that inclusivity is the new black.

There are bum notes (musicians were high, burnt or both) and bumpy mixes (recording conditions were just shy of wartime). But the result, combined with the full-length performances in the Woodstock Experience packages, is the most comprehensive and satisfying account so far of the main reason why Yasgur's acres became an instant city of freaks, including me: the music.

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

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.

It’s the sound of a freewheeling star at the top of her game, reimagining rock history in her own platinum image.

More Blood, More Tracks does not contradict the choices Dylan made on the way to Blood on the Tracks. It fills in his road to wisdom.

The way the screams and music dance across these 17 songs--recorded during three nights in 1964 and 1965 and spliced into a seamless rush of manic love--is what makes Live at the Hollywood Bowl such a thrill.