Joel's Songs in the Attic is a very careful edit of his scuffling days. These cuts are gimcracks from a catalog that didn't catch fire until the release of The Stranger in 1977, and Joel, very much aware that they show his development from intent greenhorn to creator of standards, plays them with self-absorbed vigor.

It's precisely this vigor, along with Joel's canny pugnaciousness, that lifts Songs in the Attic above the level of a pop-rock rummage sale. At his best, Billy Joel is an angry, defensive wiseacre of a songwriter, so angry about his own suburban angst that he storms with exquisite impatience from typewriter to piano, scarcely noticing the shift in keyboards as he skillfully sketches his all-American rage…. [He] grew up to simultaneously mock and admire the fierce follies of the middle-class dream, turning out car-radio singles that forged a neat link between Barry Manilow and...