As much as any record, CSN's 1969 debut ushered in the early 1970s singer-songwriter boom. Yes, this was a group but it was one made up of three equal composer/vocalists, each with a heady resume-Crosby an ex-Byrd, Stills in Buffalo Springfield, and Nash a former member of the Hollies. Each supplied distinctive material and contributed to CSN's trademark harmonies. The addition of Neil Young made the supergroup an edgier outfit. There's a purity to the original trio recording, however, that would never be recaptured. -Steven Stolder.

Here's Dave Grohl as you've seldom seen him before: not just live, but as the title Skin And Bones may hint, stripped down to his acoustic core. Well actually, not quite. Rather than just Grohl and a six-string, this collection - recorded at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles - harks back to the ensemble feel of Nirvana's 1994 album Unplugged In New York, familiar songs rebuilt by the Foos and a cast of musicians including violinist Petra Haden, keyboardist Rami Jaffee and even a member of that now legendary Nirvana session, Pat Smear. Stripped of the anthemic breeziness and solid, muscular riffing that have become Foo trademarks, Skin And Bones relies more on prettifying the arrangements with strings, shakers and slow splashes of cymbal, and occasionally uncovering new levels of pathos beneath the sweat and grit. "Walking After You" feels custom-written for this format, while the crescendos of "My Hero" gain a little more humanity in this more intimate setting. And when the bigger hits come, Grohl makes up for the absence of feedback and fireworks with sheer frontman charisma, summoning up some throaty Springsteen emotiveness on "Best Of You" and climaxing with a heroic "Everlong". -Louis Pattison.

Neil Young has recorded many live albums, but none capture his two dominant musical personalities with as much power as 1979's Rust Never Sleeps. The acoustic side opens with "My, My, Hey, Hey (Out of the Blue)", a devastating anthem about the state of rock & roll. Comparing the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten to the late Elvis Presley, Young delivers perhaps his most famous line: "It's better to burn out than to fade away. " Side two demonstrates the emotional power of Young's hard-rocking quartet, Crazy Horse, with the scathing political songs "Powderfinger", "Welfare Mothers", and the loud reprise of "My, My, Hey, Hey". -Steve Knopper.

"Bagpipes", a song written as the soundtrack to a Michel Gondry music video, Patti Page's musical shadow, and Jack and Meg co-narrating a scavenger's rummages: it must be time for Icky Thump, the many-flavored riposte to 2006's Get Behind Me Satan. The duo starts big with the title track-Jack's fast-tumbling, falsetto-tinged lyrics jagging on hyper keyboard-sounding segues and Meg's pounding drums. They rarely shy from an idea, invoking acoustic Bob Dylan to frame "300 M. P. H. Torrential Outpour Blues", but interjecting a series of distortion-laden guitar paroxysms for good measure. The end of Icky, on "Effect and Cause," is where Jack's trademark vocal warble and spare, quick acoustic strums meet Meg's single-minded beats. Everywhere on Icky giant riffs leap and shout, with Flamenco horns and those eerie bagpipes and rhythmic shifts and Jack's impatient vocal kinetics, marking new territories even as the White Stripes again populate them with vintage ideas. -Andrew Bartlett.

If Metallica and Slayer invented speed metal, Anthrax brought it to the East Coast and imbued it with the attitude and excitement of New York hardcore. Among The Living is their finest hour-a roaring, adrenaline-pumped collection of flailing beats, precise, razor-edged riffs and shout-along refrains. Unlike most full-throttle metal vocalists of the era, Joey Belladonna chose to sing as well as shout, giving songs such as "Among The Living", "Indians" and "Efilnikcufecin" ("nice fuckin' life" spelled backwards) a decided melodic edge. Yet Scott Ian and Dan Spitz's buzz saw guitar flurries, and Charlie Benante's insistent drumming, prevented the songs from ever degenerating into the run-of-the-mill heavy metal they so despised. -Jon Wiederhorn.

Punk's death knell had already been called, but London Calling found The Clash fighting a heroic rear guard battle. Having shelved the no-frills heads-down thunder of The Clash and Give 'Em Enough Rope, London Calling was an extravagant benchmark. Ostensibly about the ideological and real struggles that rent British society asunder at the end of the 1970s, London Calling was couched in the language of revolutionary desperadoes. Influenced by reggae and ska, and augmented by the Irish Horns, the result was one of the most heady, celebratory rock & roll records to have come out of the punk movement. For every traditional rabble-rouser like "Rudie Can't Fail" or "Revolution Rock", though, there was a starker truth to London Calling found in "Guns Of Brixton", or a shred of poignancy in "Lost In The Supermarket" that confirmed The Clash's ideological importance to a generation. Seldom, if ever, had punk sounded so gloriously righteous, but so damn right. -Louis Pattison Bursting at the seams with creative energy, the Clash's stunning 1979 double album more than made up for the artistic and commercial disappointment of its predecessor, '78's tried-too-hard Give 'Em Enough Rope. With ex-Mott the Hoople producer Guy Stevens harnessing their sound as never before, the band yielded what proved to be the best work of their career. Bouncing from hard-rock (the apocalyptic-vision of the title track) to rockabilly ("Brand New Cadillac") to reggae ("Rudy Can't Fail") to pop (the Top Forty hit, "Train in Vain"), the Clash knocked down all musical walls and, in the process, ended the argument over punk's viability in the U. S. [+]

St. Anger shows that we should never underestimate the regenerative powers of Metallica. Following the stripped-down Load and Re-Load, they've returned to the raw, vitriolic savagery of their earlier canon, using 1984's Ride the Lightning as their template. The title track provides the psychic lynchpin of the album by combining the bombast and defiance of the band's earliest high-water marks with more deliberate lyrics and emotional nakedness. Equally cathartic is "Some Kind of Monster," a lumbering beast of a song that declares "This is the voice of silence no more". Despite that claim, there's an economy to these lyrics; James Hetfield's raw-toothed growl only occasionally punctuates the menacing soundscapes. In fact, "Dirty Windows", the standout track here, is a shimmering five-minute instrumental that's free of the baroque trappings that sometimes clutter the Metallica landscape. -Jaan Uhelszki, Amazon. com.

Every Foo Fighters album, up to and including their fourth studio disc, One By One, fluently merges rock menace with unabashedly cheery melody and thoughtful if somewhat cryptic lyrics. So while insistent, guitar-terrorised tracks like "All My Life" and "Times Like These (One-Way Motorway)" don't expand the Foos' oeuvre, they're as catchy as hell and well worth the proverbial price of admission. Those searching for veiled Nirvana / Courtney Love references will no doubt unearth them (or unearth what seem like veiled references), while longtime fans can relax in the knowledge that a seasoned pro like Grohl knows better than to meddle with a truly winning formula. True, there's a certain sameness to the spiky, percussive bursts of punk-pop tabled by the Foo Fighters. Yet it's pretty hard to fault players as palpably enthusiastic as Dave Grohl and his gang. -Kim Hughes.

At a certain point, bad taste and bombast becomes so excessive and so grandiose that they're no longer an easily dismissed irritation but an astonishing monument to the warped imagination. Such a monument is Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, the long-delayed sequel to 1977's Bat Out of Hell. Once again songwriter/producer Jim Steinman has isolated high-school parking-lot aphorisms and inflated them to Wagner-on-Broadway proportions, casting Mr. Loaf as a heavy-metal Ezio Pinza. Typical of the album's strategy is its big hit single, "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)". Steinman piles on the guitars, drums, synthesizers, and choral voices as if he were Phil Spector producing Kiss playing the Who songbook. The rest of the album tackles the themes of teenage lust, frustration, and rock & roll fantasies in similar fashion. It's somehow beside the point to complain about the puerile lyrics, the leaden rhythms, the derivative melodies, the histrionic vocals, or the overblown arrangements. Steinman knows how to push his audience's buttons, and with Meat Loaf's help, he hits those buttons with a sledgehammer. -Geoffrey Himes At a certain point, bad taste and bombast becomes so excessive and so grandiose that they're no longer an easily dismissed irritation but an astonishing monument to the warped imagination. [+]

Here's the problem that faced Jack Black and Kyle Gass when it came to making The Pick Of Destiny: how do you top your last effort, 2001's self-titled debut, when it contained the tale of how you wrote (and then forgot) "the best song in the world" ("Tribute")? A toughie, but if you're megalomaniacal comedy-rock duo Tenacious D, anything is possible - even if it contravenes plain logic and several laws of physics. A pumped-up hard rock opera that sees Black and Gass hunting for the eponymous guitar-plucker, the possession of which confers superhuman rocking abilities on its owner, The Pick Of Destiny both rocks hard - how could it not, with Dave Grohl behind the drumkit? - and rocks funny. The opening "Kickapoo" is an operatic scene-setter that features guest spots from both Meat Loaf (whose vocals, curiously, sound restrained next to Black's goofy rock howl) and ex-Sabbath man Ronnie James Dio, who imparts some secret wisdom in the arts of rocking. Other highlights come with "Classico", which recreates Mozart and Bach with added swear words, and "The Government Totally Sucks", which (as you might expect) makes up in passion what it lacks in insight. A comedy record, in other words, you'll actually want to listen to. -Louis Pattison.