The Sex Pistols

Even though it reprises all 12 songs on Never Mind the Bollocks (plus five familiar outtakes and B sides) with their tempos and arrangements intact, this is that rare thing, a live album with a life of its own. Its strength is that its historical moment is so definitively over. Thus it compels us to rehear Steve Jones's immense bluesless riffs, Paul Cook's stone simple beats, and Glen Matlock melodic glue as pure sound, and to confront how John Rotten-Lydon's hilariously ill-humored gutter-prophet howl, broadened but not softened with age and a decade-plus of paid acting lessons in Public Image Ltd., defined both a new rock voice and a new rock attitude. (Grade - A-)