Thin Lizzy found their trademark twin-guitar sound on 1975's Fighting, but it was on its 1976 successor, Jailbreak, where the band truly took flight. Unlike the leap between Night Life and Fighting, there is not a great distance between Jailbreak and its predecessor. If anything, the album was more of a culmination of everything that came before, as Phil Lynott hit a peak as a songwriter just as guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson pioneered an intertwined, dual-lead guitar interplay that was one of the most distinctive sounds of '70s rock, and one of the most influential. Lynott no longer let Gorham and Robertson contribute individual songs -- they co-wrote, but had no individual credits -- which helps tighten up the album, giving it a cohesive personality, namely Lynott's rough rebel with a heart of a poet. Lynott loves turning the commonplace into legend -- or bringing myth into the modern world, as he does on "Cowboy Song" or, to a lesser extent, "Romeo and the Lonely Girl" -- and this myth-making is married to an exceptional eye for details; when the boys are back in town, they don't just come back to a local bar, they're down at Dino's, picking up girls and driving the old men crazy. This gives his lovingly florid songs, crammed with specifics and overflowing with life, a universality that's hammered home by the vicious, primal, and precise attack of the band. Thin Lizzy is tough as rhino skin and as brutal as bandits, but it's leavened by Lynott's light touch as a singer, which is almost seductive in its croon. This gives Jailbreak a dimension of richness that sustains, but there's such kinetic energy to the band that it still sounds immediate no matter how many times it's played. Either one would make it a classic, but both qualities in one record makes it a truly exceptional album.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Conspicuously absent from the laundry list of influences the Imagine Dragons so often cite is the Killers, the only other Las Vegas rock band of note. Imagine Dragons downplay the glamour the Killers found so alluring but they share a taste for the overblown, something that comes to full fruition on their second album, Smoke + Mirrors. Bigger and bolder than 2012's Night Visions, Smoke + Mirrors captures a band so intoxicated with their sudden surprise success that they've decided to indulge in every excess. They ratchet up their signature stomp -- it's there on "I Bet My Life," the first single and a song that's meant to reassure fans that they're not going to get something different the second time around -- but they've also wisely decided to broaden their horizons, seizing the possibilities offered by fellow arena rockers Coldplay and Black Keys. Despite the bloozy bluster of "I'm So Sorry" -- a Black Keys number stripped of any sense of R&B groove -- the group usually favors the sky-scraping sentiment of Coldplay, but where Chris Martin's crew often seems pious, there's a genial bros-next-door quality to Imagine Dragons that deflates their grandiosity. Certainly, Smoke + Mirrors is rock so large it's cavernous -- the reverb nearly functions as a fifth instrument in the band -- but the group's straight-faced commitment to the patently ridiculous has its charm, particularly because they possess no sense of pretension. This separates ID from the Killers, who never met a big idea they didn't like. Imagine Dragons like big sounds and big emotions -- and, if they can muster it, big hooks -- and the commitment to style over substance gives them ingratiating charm, particularly when they decide to thread in slight elements of EDM on "Shots" (something that surfaces on the title track as well), or Vampire Weekend's worldbeat flirtations on "Summer." Imagine Dragons purposefully cobble their sound together from these heavy-hitters of alt-rock, straightening them into something easily digestible for the masses but, like so many commercially minded combos, how they assemble these familiar pieces often results in pleasingly odd combinations. These guys are shameless and that's what makes them more fun than your average arena rockers.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Delivering on a threat that had slowly been rearing its bewigged head in the band's music over recent releases, self-proclaimed metal gods Manowar turn in their first certifiable symphonic metal album in 2007's Gods of War, which also represents the long-slogging quartet's tenth studio effort, incidentally. Hang on, though: the scale of Manowar's latest ambitions didn't end there (errr, does it ever), as they apparently vowed to make Gods of War just the first in a series of concept albums devoted to different war-mongering deities! For this first installment the chosen subject is Odin, the supreme power of Norse mythology (hence the Runic alphabet used throughout the CD booklet), but the musical framework connecting its songs seems to have been partly inspired by Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle -- though, mercifully, not nearly as long! This explains the unconventional nature of the album's opening statement, "Overture to the Hymn of the Immortal Warriors," and several interludes thereafter, which combine choirs, orchestras, synthesizers, and dramatic narrations for the purpose of advancing the mythological story line recounted by the non-symphonic tracks interspersed throughout. Most remarkable of all, though, is the fact that this forces Manowar's true metal fan legions to endure nearly ten minutes of orchestral fluff until enjoying grateful decapitation by the familiar scissoring metallic onslaught of "King of Kings" (and if you think the wait was hard on them, imagine what it was like for megalomaniacal bassist/songwriter/producer/milkman Joey DeMaio!). The fan-approved bloodshed then goes on via optimal headbanging opportunities like "Sleipnir," "Loki God of Fire," and "Sons of Odin," but even these often require listeners to sit out the mosh pit for tiresome spoken intros and outros; plus, there's the customary torment of the obligatory ballad, "Blood Brothers," to be dealt with (one per album, so says the "Stairway to Heaven" rule). So by the time Ragnarök finally turns off the lights on Gods of War, one is astounded to realize that just half of these 12 cuts actually qualify as heavy metal songs -- the remainder being of the orchestrated/spoken/synthetic stripe, for what amounts to over an hour of half-killer, half-filler experience -- wow! Needless to say, this EP-masked-as-LP charade may be too much to stomach even for veteran self-deluding Manowar followers, already accustomed to the group's used-car salesmen behavior over the years, but perhaps the band can salvage the situation with the next chapters in their proposed war god saga. We shall see.... © Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo

Like most latter-day Manowar outings, Warriors of the World is a mixed affair rife with all of the clichés that make Manowar either Gods or an amusing joke, depending on what side of the inner circle you reside on. No matter how big a fan of the band someone might be, it's hard to take the operatic "Nessun Dorma" and succeeding power ballad "Valhalla" seriously, as they sound like something Spinal Tap would have thought up when not worrying about amps that went to 11. In fact, too much of this disc relies on similar cheeseball balladry that, try as it might to be gallant and heroic, really comes off as self-parody. Fortunately, the disc has enough tracks that do reach higher decibels, including the last four and disc-opener "Call to Arms," that are more indicative of what made Manowar great, namely heavy riffs and heavier attitude that, even when embracing an ethos that many would be embarrassed about, still comes off sincere. Manowar mean it when they sing about the "House of Death" and how they will "Fight Until We Die," and that's why you should love them, warts and all. © Brian O'Neill /TiVo

With Back for the Attack, Dokken's fourth album, they continued to allow their catchy guitar melodies to highlight the record, rather than any of the lyrics and/or songwriting. The band sounds tighter than they ever have before, and Don Dokken and George Lynch remain at the top of their game. While the songs on the album fail to be as catchy as "In My Dreams" or "Just Got Lucky," they remain fun and enjoyable. Back for the Attack certainly isn't Dokken's greatest album, yet it remains a worthwhile listen -- unfortunately, however, it was their last enjoyable studio release.© Barry Weber /TiVo

Maximum Joy gathers one disc of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's career highlights and another disc of remixes by acts like Apollo Four Forty and Rob Searle. Disc 1 features most of Frankie's definitive tracks, such as "Relax," "Two Tribes," "Ferry Cross the Mersey" and the title track, while DJ Rene's mix of "Maximum Joy" and "Welcome to the Pleasuredome: Sander's Coming Home Mix" are some of the fresh perspectives Disc 2 offers on the group's sound. By offering both the original versions and remixes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's output, Maximum Joy offers fans some of the best of both worlds.© Heather Phares /TiVo