Living Colour – Time's Up (Green vinyl)

"All the rivers have died," wails vocalist Corey Glover at the start of Living Colour's landmark second album, Time's Up. "Moment by moment," he warns, "Day by day / The world's just slipping away." The song in question, the title track, mostly flies by at a breakneck, Bad Brains-inspired pace as the New York City quartet offers its take on jackhammer hardcore.

So begins a start-to-finish listening experience that still stands as a towering example of what a rock band is capable of when it stretches out and reaches for as many horizons as it can conceive, writes Diffuser. Living Colour's ability to blend the driving single-mindedness of hardcore with the anthemic, sing-along-and-pump-your-fist aspect of arena rock is but the first example of many here where the band demonstrate their ease in transitioning from one genre to another. Nowhere else in the Living Colour catalog is this quality on display quite as vibrantly as it is on Time's Up. Released in the summer of 1990, the album includes guest artists Queen Latifah, Doug E. Fresh and James Earl Jones.