2. The Rolling Stones

The greatest rock & roll band in the world made its best studio album in more than two decades as a band: no celebrity guests or excess sessionmen; just the basic gang of four (with bassist Darryl Jones) on most tracks and "no fucking about," as Mick Jagger put it, on any of the songs. A Bigger Bang is the concentrated stomp of brothers in arms playing in close quarters. There is no room to rest in the Sticky Fingers-style stampede of "Rough Justice" or "Oh No, Not You Again." At times, like on the Delta-porch stomp "Back of My Hand," the lineup is just the surviving founders -- Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, kicking and grinding with the unbroken electricity of four decades. Most important, Jagger and Richards, writing shoulder-to-shoulder as they waited for Watts to beat throat cancer, delivered the songs and vintage lyric venom to match that sound. Jagger may never reveal his real-life target in the savagely political "Sweet Neo Con," but it doesn't matter. You know who you are, and it's gotta hurt.

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