Though his bandmate Neil Young is more often fetishized for his contributions to Buffalo Springfield and CSNY, this set makes clear Stephen Stills' creative depth -- as a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and as a singer.

Featuring 82 tracks from across a 50-year span, with 21 from…

Still sizzling with unbound fury, Iggy Pop and the Stooges rejoin their white-knuckle search for meaning, though what they find isn't any prettier 40 years later. Hell, at times, it's just as terrifying.

Surviving will do that. There's a concurrent perspective, sure, but…

Richard Thompson amps up the dying-light rage that has always made for his best albums, while smartly avoiding the studio trickery that sometimes muted his gift during the Mitchell Froom years.

The results on Electric, produced by Buddy Miller, make good on the promise of…

No, Black Country Communion wasn't Glenn Hughes' first uber-talented amalgam. For that, you'll have to go back to the early 1970s, and Trapeze -- a band whose music leaps to life in this newly released double live set.

On one level, Live in Wolverhampton: Official Bootleg --…

Eric Burdon, of War and the Animals fame, makes his intentions on 'Til Your River Runs Dry clear early on -- with the raucous, witheringly honest "Old Habits Die Hard." Born in troubled times, he goes on to make his share of it, too.

Later, Burdon imagines a presidential…

For those who don't know much about Duane Allman beyond the Allman Brothers' At Fillmore East and Derek and the Dominoes' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, this ambitious seven-disc, 129-song set is a revelation.

Hurtling along with the same restless, furiously creative…

Jimi Hendrix's legacy has been so brazenly, endlessly plundered, it's fair to approach any so-called "new" material from the late guitarist with a deep distrust. Circumspection this time soon transforms into pure joy.

Exploring a series of roving, post-1968 sessions after the…

There is a majestic weirdness to Camper Van Beethoven, recaptured in all of its freak-flag glory on La Costa Perdida, their first studio effort in some eight years.

The album, issued via 429 Records, traverses across a dizzying soundscape, pausing just long enough to delight and…

This is the sound of a leaf, tumbling end over end just above the outstretched grass. The sound you hear in between heartbeats. The sound that clouds make as they move across the sky.

You’ll hear all of that, and more, if you listen closely enough to Lux, Brian Eno’s first solo recording…

All you need to know, really, about Irish punk rockers Pogues is right in their name, taken from a Gaelic phrase meaning "kiss my arse." Confounding expectation, they played softly as often as they played loudly, with heart prominently on their sleeve.

This new Very Best of…

Always a fluid amalgam, even in their heyday, the Yardbirds have every right to continue forward -- though former big-name members like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page are, of course, long gone.

The question, though, is whether or not a group that still includes Jim McCarty and…

Tempest, with a scarifying Titanic narrative as its centerpiece, promised to be the ever-enigmatic, never-tiring Bob Dylan's most somber, ruminative work yet. But it's different in the listening.

For all of the album's off-handed menace, for its many betrayals, for all of its fiery…

Pity the poor Brits, who only received the first side of this album as an EP. After all, Side Two of the 1967 American version of Magical Mystery Tour would include the single greatest double-sided single in Beatles history -- “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” -- when Capitol paired…

For years, Kiss has had as its bellowing mantra the phrase: "You wanted the best, you got the best!" For me, the request was always simpler, more straight forward: I want them to rock.

Nothing self-conscious or too referential. Nothing  too high concept. Just do what they do: Party music for the…

Battle Born, the new release from the Killers, is rich with propulsive arena rock songs that feature chiming guitars, new wave synth sounds and lyrics that echo the sentiment of certain heartland singers. This may sound like an unlikely amalgam of music styles, but for the Killers, the Las Vegas band…

Like many of his contemporaries, Neil Young will forever be associated with the 1960s. On Psychedelic Pill, he joins together with Crazy Horse to construct a fiery requiem for the decade, and to chart a path away from its crushing disappointments.

He begins, I think brilliantly, at the…

There's a deeply personal feel to this new album, and a grinding loudness. That incompatible juxtaposition can make for a difficult entry into Heart's forthcoming album Fanatic.

It is, on its face, a confessional recording. There's "Dear Old America," which traces the story of a soldier…

After signing to Mercury Records, the Gaslight Anthem teamed up with super producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Springsteen) to produce their fourth album, Handwritten. The band left the homeland of New Jersey to record in Nashville, holing up in a house where everything was recorded with the four guys…

It is still, by any measure, their most unusual, yet satisfying album -- that moment when the power and mystery of Los Lobos music found its fullest flowering in the off-the-wall pop atmospheres created by Mitchell Froom.

They'd put out tougher albums, albums that connected more directly with their…

Silver Age is that rarest of Bob Mould records: An unadorned, primal rocker, all bloody-knuckled riffs and flinty attitude with little or no introspection, much less sentiment. That makes sense, in many ways.

After all, this project arrives not long after Mould oversaw the reissue of his former…