3 Perfect Classic Rock Albums Overflowing With Music

One of the best aspects of rock and roll music is that you can get an old guitar from a used shop and plug it into an equally old amp and play loud. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Maybe a neighbor has an old drum kit and together you two can create songs until your other neighbors complain. What could be a better way to spend some time?

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But rock music is also not just relegated to the simple and garage-based. Sometimes you come across a lush, gilded rock and roll song. Other times you find albums that are written along these lines—with big instrumentation, strings, backup singers. The whole nine yards. Rarely do you come across a perfect album of this sort. However, there are a few.

Here below, we wanted to explore three such examples. A trio of LPs that are great from top to bottom, front to back, and exhibit a style of rock music that is overflowing with music.

[RELATED: No Skips: 4 Classic Rock Albums You’ll Never Have to Fast-Forward]

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles (1967)

Released in 1967, this was an album from the British-born band The Beatles that was inspired by another on this list. Sgt. Pepper’s boasts a big number of the band’s most famous songs. But even the album itself is perhaps the group’s best remembered and most beloved. On it, tracks include the title song, “With a Little Help From My Friends,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” But each of the tracks opens your mind and turns it into a colorful garden. It’s a wonderful trick that listeners return to over and over.

The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd (1973)

This is a gooey album rich with voices that seem to come and go from within your own head. There are giant guitar solos, sweeping vocal solos, creative highs, lyrical genius, and a sense the world is always collapsing in on itself. Pink Floyd is remembered as one of the greatest classic rock bands ever but they are still somehow underrated for their massive musicianship and ability to piece it all together into an ecosystem of wonders. And this 1973 LP is a perfect example of that. No tune is worth skipping—from “Time” to “Money” to “Us and Them.” It’s an album you’re more likely to listen to two times in a row than missing a song from its track list.

Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys (1966)

There might not be a Sgt. Peppers if there hadn’t been a Pet Sounds. Brought to you by the Los Angeles-born harmonious rockers, this album from the Brian Wilson-led band was vibrant and elusive, wide-ranging and tight. With Wilson’s knack for instrumentation, layering, and sentimentality, he produced an incredible album that is delicious like a candy shop and challenging like a good novel. It’s like you’re going through a musical jungle and at the end of it is a serene beach with white sand, blue water, and the best band in the world playing for you.

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