Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums

Nothing succeeds like excess, at least that's the case with Queen's breakthrough classic, A Night At The Opera. On one level, the title is a reference to the band's operatic pretensions as evidenced here on the classic Bohemian Rhapsody. It also happens to be the title of a Marx Brothers movie, and the reference isn't lost on Queen, who seldom scaled the heights of pomprock without a knowing wink. The album is remembered for its meticulously produced bombast, but the truth is that there's a wide variety of material here, from the gorgeous piano-based You're My Best Friend and the McCartneyesque 39, to the music-hall-style Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon and the pedal-to-the-metal rockers Death on Two Legs and I'm in Love with My Car. A Night at the Opera is widely considered to be the quintessential Queen album and justifiably so.

This fall marks Queens return to studio recording for the first time in 13 years, to commemorate that occasion, Universal has created the Queen on Vinyl Collectors Edition re-issue program in which every Queen studio album is to be released on vinyl LPs over the next two years. The original albums are being re-issued correct in every detail to the original releases, including inner sleeves, packaging and bonuses.