Not even overfamiliarity can really dull the rest of what’s here. The box set carries a distinct whiff of die-hards only--the mono mix is nice but inessential, the best of the demos have already been released, as has the first of the live shows, while the second was recorded later the same night and sounds virtually identical--but the music at its centre is about as inarguable as you can get.

Revolver’s new details tease out deeper meanings in the songs. Now more prominent, the low-lit backing harmonies on Here, There and Everywhere remake the tune as an old-fashioned rock’n’roll love song; the piano bending out of key on I Want to Tell You mirrors the narrator’s insecurity; and McCartney’s booming walking bass on Taxman illuminates the biting, cynical tone of Harrison’s lyrics. ... Revolver still sounds so vibrant.

London Calling itself stands tall as the band's masterpiece, the showcase for all their musical tastes and inclinations.

It’s all beautifully done, as you might expect. ... Giles Martin’s remix is a vast improvement on the old stereo version--more muscular, with an unexpected emphasis placed on Ringo Starr’s drums--although the original mono mix, also here, is the one with the Beatles’ fingerprints on it.

At its best, Doolittle was almost impossibly thrilling, packed with evidence of why alt-rock shifted in the Pixies’ wake.

In spring 1967, Dylan and the Band were out of step, but ahead of the curve. Now, 47 years on, even the listener overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of what’s on offer here--who doesn’t want to hear the false starts and fragments and gags--might conclude that the highlights are as timeless as rock music in the 60s got.

The jazz and classical groups play separately and sometimes merge, and though conventional themes or sustained pulses are mostly sidelined by the languages of free jazz and contemporary classical music, this epic life's work is a landmark in jazz's rich canon.

It’s revelatory to hear this most intense of bands playing with such ease and fluency, and utterly compelling.

Now, 21 years on, beautifully remastered, Blue Lines still sounds unique.

The result is that this seems not so much an album as a sudden glorious eruption; after eight long years, an urgent desire to be heard.

It’s an album that actually deserves a monolith of a box, and one whose title was supremely well chosen. Physical Graffiti is the sound of a group writing their identity, in huge block capitals of sound, across popular culture.

Despite the hype, it is hard not to be impressed with the new Smile.... The music flows beautifully - no mean feat when it encompasses barbershop singing, acid rock, early pop, Hawaiian chanting and mock-religious plainsong.

The result is genuine alt-country at a time when the term has come to signify little more than middling acoustic rock.

An Americana classic.

Anyone startled by what happened to Pink Floyd in the wake of Waters’ rancorous 80s departure, aghast at the sheer level of screw-you obduracy displayed by all parties, might consider the story The Early Years tells. As it turns out, they were always like that.

Time will tell whether in decades to come, To Pimp a Butterfly is still being spoken of in the same breath as the kind of epochal albums it’s currently being compared to, but for the moment, he’s certainly achieved his aim in impressive style.

The result is perhaps the most straightforwardly beautiful set of songs that Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have ever recorded. ... Listening to Ghosteen, it’s very hard indeed not to be taken aback.

What makes it so compelling is the haunting vocal writing. Full of gently lapping lines, close imitation and moments of honeyed homophony, all underpinned by tactful percussion, it is startlingly different from the driving, hard edges of much of Lang's work with the Bang On a Can collective.

From start to finish, it’s a perfect mix of sombreness, playfulness, anger and melancholy, with one moment of great mass communication – Everybody Hurts, a song whose power is undimmed by constant exposure. A stunning live disc repositions Drive as a stomping rock song, and showcases the playful side of the group with covers of Love Is All Around (pre-Four Weddings) and Funtime.

Striking an exquisite balance between brute force, insistent melody and bold experimentation, this is the finest mainstream metal album of 2014 by a huge margin.

He remains one of the most evocative, instantly recognisable voices in contemporary British music.

What's beyond doubt is the quality of the music he made.

They're dangerously close to national-treasure status.

He wanted change but loved America, as shown by this remarkable box set of material recorded for the US government.

David Kennedy’s drumming is riveting, both finicky and louche as he sways through Dilla-time funkiness and math-rock detail. Guitarist Finlay Clark is in some ways a minimalist, repeating pretty riffs or expertly chosen chords, but there’s nothing minimal about his generous playing. .... Most astonishing of all is Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, singing with more power and confidence than ever before. Her luminously soulful voice is a distinctive instrument, with vibrato that makes whole songs shudder with life.

It’s remarkable for its power, freshness and range.

Whether Damn will have the same epochal impact as To Pimp a Butterfly remains to be seen, but either way it sounds like the work of a supremely confident artist at the top of his game.

For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power.

Conflict of Interest feels closer in spirit to Dave’s expansive Psychodrama than British rap’s other big-hitting recent albums: smart and sombre, long yet free of padding.

This set’s beautiful opener Defiant, Tender Warrior builds a bewitching trance from soft piano wavelets, growling bass accents and snare-pattern whispers before Lloyd’s breathy tenor long-tones and enraptured top-end warbles even begin.

The same voice sings the final lines of an album that is no less brilliant, but perhaps less straightforward, than initial reactions suggested: not so much an exploration of grief as an example of how grief overwhelms or seeps into everything--a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.

As Start Together proves, that was never a question anyone would need to ask Sleater-Kinney [“Where’s the ‘fuck you’?”].

[The Promise's] elegiac tone would have fitted Darkness perfectly, but most of the other 20 previously unreleased tracks demonstrate that Springsteen never actually stopped writing the hook-laden, audience-rousing crackers with which he made his name.

This is an African classic.

This album offers beats that retread past glories, and an emotional palette narrowed to a range roughly as wide as West's navel.

Brimming with character and endlessly relistenable, Icky Mettle is something of a touchstone for one of US indie's purplest patches.

Nothing less than a thorough exploration and devastation of folk’s most conventional tropes is Lankum’s impressive game.

It manages to be as lyrically unflinching as the music is compelling – not the easiest balance to achieve, as acres of terrible protest songs historically attest. You’d call it the album of the year if its predecessor wasn’t just as good.

There's a theory that REM were never the same after their lyrics became audible, but Lifes Rich Pageant is packed with songs on which the new clarity of Stipe's vocals bears dividends.

The tracks themselves--tidied up from demos with the help of producers Chris Kimsey and Don Was--are no disgrace.

Bold, beautiful album.

And whereas the dark era that began with a military coup in 1964 is now relegated to Brazil's history, the music it inspired sounds fresher and more provocative than ever.

This is a remarkable and historic set of recordings with an equally remarkable history.

Marius Neset, the 25-year-old Norwegian saxophonist who surfaced in the UK last year with Django Bates (his teacher and mentor at Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory), not only combines Brecker's power and Jan Garbarek's tonal delicacy, but has a vision that makes all 11 originals on this sensational album feel indispensable, and indispensably connected to each other.

It could have been trimmed a shade, but it's another leap forward for a fast-developing European jazz original.

A patchwork of catholic musical influences stitched tightly together by one man's peculiar, expansive vision of pop: Soul Mining is a brilliant and very idiosyncratic album.

Still, if 21 represents all there is or is ever going to be, it's hard not to be hugely impressed. As sarcophagi go, it's a spectacularly well-appointed one.

It's a chapter in the story of 20th-century music as a whole, not just the minutiae of jazz.

An album that’s inventive, angry, witty, original and pretty irresistible. Supernova is a riot of its own.

It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from; confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation. ... It’s remarkable.

The difference is that those albums [Anti and The Life Of Pablo] were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control.

There are four hours of previously unreleased music here, and the production and liner notes are typically classy.

Young Americans and Station to Station are albums that make you wonder how Bowie did it, given the state he was in, by all accounts, when he made them. ... The Gouster feels like eavesdropping on a moment when he wasn’t so sure. It makes for fascinating listening.

Magnificent.

[The three albums] together make up one very powerful entity.

Even if you are one of the eight million who bought their first album, Buena Vista's long-awaited follow-up is well worth checking out.

The most original and exciting artist to emerge from dance music in a decade.

You could never describe You Want It Darker as merely more of the same. As striking as the sense that its themes are of a piece with the rest of Cohen’s oeuvre is the sense of an artist willing to move forward.

This critic is prepared to believe that the fact he found the menus slightly counterintuitive points to deficiencies on his own part, but suffice to say that at least one Neil Young fan--temporarily unable to navigate away from one of the on-stage "raps" provided as "audio bonuses" and gripped by the fear that he was going to spend the rest of his life listening to Neil Young saying "ummm...ahhhhhh ... wrote this sahwng...ummmm...my house"--found himself howling for the luddite comforts of a CD box set with a nicely illustrated booklet.

For now, the best tribute you can pay Channel Orange is that, while it plays, you forget about the chatter and just luxuriate in a wildly original talent.

The Satanist is as untamed and direct as its title suggests: a flawless paean to free will and the human spirit.

Elvin Jones’s elemental muscularity is thunderously upfront in the mix, and Tyner often sounds like the man heading for the exit that he soon turned out to be – but this is a unique document of a landmark 20th-century band at a pivotal moment.

The duo have refined their sound until it is shatteringly effective. Nevertheless, Elephant sounds suspiciously like the White Stripes' apotheosis.

WAAITT is a diverse record in many respects: touched by Afrobeats, gospel, electronica, drill and R&B, its most recurring sonic feature is a series of mournful piano figures. The album encompasses many different voices and Dave seems to be making a point of letting his collaborators put their own stamp on his songs.

If it doesn’t feel quite as remarkable as Ghosteen, that tells you more about the previous album than the quality of Carnage: Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now.

For all its odd misfires, it makes a great deal of the stuff that sits alongside it in the charts look pretty feeble by comparison. If that sounds like faint praise, it isn’t meant to be: if it was easy to make hugely successful mainstream pop music as smart as this, then everybody would be at it. And they patently aren’t.

Both albums are sublime. Taken together they're hip-hop's Sign o' the Times or The White Album: a career-defining masterpiece of breathtaking ambition.

Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is perhaps the closest comparison in terms of musical and emotional tenor, but Byrne’s album is ultimately as singular as the woman singing it, and as unforgettable as a departed friend.

If the results don’t quite hold together, Cowboy Carter still proves Beyoncé is impressively capable of doing whatever she wants.

Whatever he’s doing, the results are uniformly fantastic: rich, fascinating and moving, packed with gorgeous melodies and arrangements that feel alive, constantly writhing into unexpected new shapes.

Red (Taylor’s Version) adds satisfying hues of deep, gothic black.

This is a gloriously brave and vibrant piece of work and the most significant metal album of 2011 by some distance.

From its ambitious narrative arc to its fine linguistic detail, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City is a honed and deliberate major label debut.

A Grand Don't Come for Free raises the stakes to such an extent that it sounds literally unprecedented: there isn't really any other album like this.

There is a warts-and-all feel to sound quality and some of the improvising, but this is newly emerging and influential music still in the furnace, and Davis's timing can make even a seasoned fan whoop.

Devotees will not be disappointed.

Touted as Act I of a confirmed trilogy, Renaissance falls short of being Beyoncé’s best full-length, but it still fulfils her liberationist aims. ... Her sense of freedom throughout is palpable, and an infectious spur to action.

An extraordinary album.

At once soft and hard, fiery and vulnerable, Grey Area finds Little Simz thriving in her multi-facetedness.

Her fourth album feels like an unjustly forgotten classic.

To say it's ambitious feels like damning with faint praise; its sheer musical scope--from the James Brown funk of Tightrope to the English pastoral folk of Oh, Maker--is spellbinding.

Their travails have produced an epic, ambitious collection that is beautifully beatific, purifying and uplifting.

The River itself feels a bit unwieldy compared to the sleek single album Springsteen originally handed in to Columbia, which features here, and while less weighty--philosophically and in size--it is actually a better listen, not least because it’s not constantly dragged down by unwieldy rockers. A further disc rounds up outtakes, which makes it apparent that Springsteen could have managed several different iterations of The River, all of which would have been as good as or better than the eventual album..

This new album contains 10 sublime reflections on religious sites and buildings.

It has the distinct tang of an album that could be huge. There’s something undeniable about it, the beguiling sound of a band doing what they do exceptionally well, so that even the most devoted naysayer might be forced to understand its success.

The other striking thing is how sharp her lyrics are, behind their unassuming conversational veneer: only Pretty Isn’t Pretty’s assault on beauty standards feels a little boilerplate. Elsewhere, she’s witty.

At times the album can seem tired and mid-paced, and some of the collaborators (Andre 3000, Anderson Paak) are more effective than others (Talib Kweli, Jack White). But for those who value Tribe’s contribution to music, this is a record to be grateful for.

SOS is very long – 23 tracks, well over an hour. It suggests someone continually adding to and augmenting a project, or perhaps throwing everything they’ve got at it, fuelled by the feeling that they might not do this again. The results are hugely eclectic.

A remarkable album that manages to pack in a state full of instruments... and sounds as simultaneously vast yet intimately detailed as Polyphonic Spree produced by Brian Eno.

Carrie & Lowell is a delight in every way, surely one of the albums of the year.

An album to live with, to live long.

No Cities to Love is a towering, fists-up record of thundering guitars and soaring hooks.

There are solid guest turns from newcomers such as New York rapper Leikeli47 as well as legends D’Angelo and GZA. But Rapsody herself is the undisputed star, offering up empowerment in droves on the catwalk-worthy Tyra (“damn I’m stunning”) and Serena, an ode to grafting hard for your fortune.

For old Jarrett fans and prospective new ones, it's a must.

These subtle, interesting songs lost out to brasher, more basic tracks – Welcome to New York, Style – on the original 1989 tracklist, but who’s to say whether their inclusion would have affected Swift’s trajectory? Clearly she made a pretty good call on that front. This carbon copy of her blockbuster album doesn’t rewrite history but adds some instantly treasurable footnotes.

Send Them to Coventry sounds like it would have been successful at any time, regardless of extraneous circumstances: it’s too fresh and inventive to ignore.

There are an awful lot of singer-songwriters around exploring the kind of subjects Mitski touches on here: disillusionment, isolation, broken relationships, overindulgence. But it is questionable whether anyone else is doing it with this much skill, this lightness of touch or indeed, straightforward melodic power: in the best possible sense, Mitski feels out on her own.

It’s utterly transfixing – not just for the gorgeousness of the tone, but for the absolute wondrousness of the melodies.