The Who’s Great Lost Masterwork, ‘Life House,’ Finally Gets Its Due in Massive ‘Who’s Next’ Boxed Set: Album Review

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Contemporary music is filled with great unreleased albums — the Beach Boys’ “Smile,” Marvin Gaye’s “Love Man,” the Clash’s “Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg,” David Bowie’s soundtrack to “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” multiple titles from Prince, Kanye West and Neil Young — many of which were never truly existed in anything resembling finished form.

Usually, such albums turn out to be overblown in terms of their significance, leaving die-hard fans trying to piece together the ultimate version of a tantalizing missing link in a beloved artist’s catalog from scraps that were never a whole in the first place.

Many have ultimately been released in one way or another, like “Smile” — which scrapes the scraps of Brian Wilson’s sprawling sessions into a massive 9-CD boxed set — or, more satisfyingly, Young’s “Homegrown,” an album completed in 1975 that was finally released in complete, unaltered form 45 years later, complete with a note from the artist himself, apologizing for holding it back for so long.

And after 52 years, perhaps the greatest mythological album of the rock era — the Who’s aborted 1971 project “Life House,” from which “Who’s Next,” one of the greatest albums of the rock era, emerged — is finally getting its true day in the sun, in the form of a massive 10-CD box with a giant, fact-and-photo-filled book that takes at least six of those CDs to read.