Van Lear Rose is remarkably bold, celebratory and honest. It's a homecoming for a small-town musician gifted with poise, humor and compassion, but at its very heart, it's happy to be just a kick-ass country record.

The ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

None of the bonus material on Kid Amnesiae, the third “bonus” disc accompanying the two studio albums, has the same revelatory quality as the inclusions on OK Computer OKNOTOK 1997 2017. ... It was the indelible sounds they made on Kid A and Amnesiac, more than any of the album’s digital age paranoia or its baleful view of the future, that comprise the band’s enduring legacy. Those sounds break free of anything you might want to attach to them.

Led Zeppelin is one of music's most assured and fully realized debuts; individually, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham were great players, but the whole of their sound somehow exceeded the sum of its parts. But even above the instrumental virtuosity, Led Zeppelin is a triumph of production, each part clear and forceful but adding up to something even more powerful.

How the West Was Won serves up their muscle, sweaty heart and golden grandeur in an exhaustingly persuasive light. That, and a hundred of the best riffs you've ever heard.

Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d city did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse.

You don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.

The Little Match Girl Passion is as much a devotional piece as the Bach Passion it is modeled on, and with it, Lang has produced the most profound and emotionally resonant work of his career.

These four discs ultimately do what any good box set should do: In tracing the band's trajectory from power-pop progenitors to post-pop tinkerers, Keep an Eye on the Sky presents a history of the band that could not be gleaned from the albums themselves, using finished studio tracks along with demos and rarities to give a fuller picture of the musicians, their dynamic, and their songs.

If the demos collection presents the fables of R.E.M.’s deconstruction, its concert-disc complement—capturing the only show they performed in support of Automatic for the People—is an essential document of their onstage chemistry. ... It’s an album that—in surveying a fraught political landscape, the fragility of our mental health, and the fate of our planet—still speaks emphatically to our current condition.

The Sabbath may be Black indeed, but there’s room for both light and shade, and Vol. 4 is a masterful evocation of both by the band that did it better than anyone.

Siamese Dream's songs don't blend into each other, but some transitions exist; each stands out in a brilliant sequence, forming perhaps the best concept album they ever made.

The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own. The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay.

The first half of CD2 is the apex of Burial’s dancefloor material, truly as good as it gets.

This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.--a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.

What's here is brilliant, beautiful, and, most importantly, finally able to stand tall on its own.

Her themes of desire and fuckery are vivid and emotionally complex.

The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. What distinguishes this collection is its scope.

Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off.

The bonus disc is a mildly interesting amalgam of alternate mixes and rough takes--the kind of stuff anyone but the most dedicated obsessives will listen to only once--and there’s little advance here lyrically from the debut, but II is still close to perfect.

The numerous early takes and rough demos have a diehard appeal (there’s a reason Metallica has a dedicated archivist on their payroll), though the live recordings present a band going through its most monumental transition punctuated by monumental tragedy. Recording a masterpiece was the easy part. Genius does not appear out of thin air and Puppets was a culmination of Metallica’s influences and forward direction, so yes, it will give you a more rounded sense of how a masterwork came to be.

It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. The lyrics are striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs.

Black Messiah pulls together disparate threads few predecessors have had the smarts or audacity to unite.

On Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part.

Twenty-plus years after its initial release—and commemorated here with a gargantuan 13-piece box set that exhaustively pieces together its rocky origins—it has never sounded so enduring.

Sometimes the single versions here are superior to the album edits, 12-inch mixes, and other edits, but not always. It is also possible to imagine a more nuanced and inventively sequenced gloss of Pet Shop Boys’ career than this chronological survey. But there is particular value to this nerdy historicism.