Stadium Arcadium

The twenty-eight-song, box-set-length Stadium Arcadium isn't a middle-aged concept album about trading in your tube sock for a tux. But the band's ninth studio album is the most ambitious work of its twenty-three-year career — an attempt to consolidate everything that is Chili Peppers, from their earlier, funnier funk-metal stuff to soul-baring "Under the Bridge"-style balladry to Californicating vocal-harmony pop. And unlike the Foo Fighters' similarly expansive but bloated double disc In Your Honor, and almost every other double album of the post-vinyl era, the band pulls it off. It's a late-career triumph that could pass for another, lesser group's greatest-hits collection.