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.