The Beatles
The Beatles (Apple)

At the risk of sounding nitpicky, there’s an argument to be made that the fab folks behind The Beatles blew it. If you’re going to go to the trouble of remastering the band’s entire back catalogue, and then fleshing out each of those recordings with replicated art work, extensive liner notes, vintage photos, and a series of mini-documentaries, couldn’t you try a little harder with the packaging? Instead of a coffin-shaped black box, the designers might have gone with a giant green apple. Or a yellow submarine. Or a VW Beetle plastered with cellophane flowers.

But that’s pretty much the only thing that’s disappointing about this meticulously assembled collection, which is a must-have for anyone who even remotely cares about pop music. The band’s first four albums get the stereo treatment for the first time, but where the slavish remastering starts to pay major dividends is when the band’s sonic experimenting starts. For example, pop in Magical Mystery Tour and prepare to get honest-to-God chills at the way the sawing cellos roar in three-quarters of the way through “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

With the Fab Four’s 13 studio releases augmented by a two-disc collection of non-album tracks and the DVD collection of the documentaries, what The Beatles does best is drive home—once and for all—the pure craziness of what George Harrison, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr accomplished in six short years. Pop music was never the same, which is all the reason you need to own this blue-chip landmark.

> Mike Usinger

Various Artists
Fire in My Bones (Tompkins Square)

Subtitled Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel (1944–2007), this three-CD collection is a deep dip into the spiritual side of the old weird America, and at times it gets very weird indeed. Insulated from the commercial pressures of popular music and driven by the kind of religious intensity that can occasionally border on madness, the street singers, storefront preachers, and backwoods congregations featured here deliver performances that range from simple-mindedly pious to genuinely possessed—and, fortunately, the emphasis is on the latter.

Now, I am not a religious person, so I’m listening more for musical content than theological value. Still, I could see worshipping the god that sparked Isaiah Owens’s “You Without Sin Cast the First Stone”, a record so astonishingly crude and vital that it bears comparison to the best of blues surrealists Howlin’ Wolf and James Blood Ulmer. Singing with speaker-shredding fervour, Owens occasionally slips up into a stratospheric falsetto, and he ends his sermon with a feral electric-guitar solo that briefly quotes “Wild Thing” before collapsing into playful chaos. Jack White’s got nothing on this guy, folks.

Then there are the bizarre, mumbling harmonies of the True Loving Five on “Lord, Hold My Hand”, the eerie African singing of the Clear Creek Missionary Baptist Church Congregation on “I Love the Lord”, and the androgynous-sounding Flora Molton’s stomping performance on “I Heard It Through the True Vine”, to mention just a few of the 80 tracks collected here. There’s further good news for budget-minded thrill-seekers, too: if you shop around you can find Fire for less than 20 bucks, making it the kind of righteous gamble even the holy would condone.

> Alexander Varty

Various Artists
Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm (Rhino/Warner)

Music historians often make Woodstock out to be the greatest concert happening of all time, but after slogging through this six-disc set I’m not so sure. The sociopolitical ramifications of the three-day event were immense, no doubt, but there sure were some questionable performances at Max Yasgur’s farm back in the summer of ’69. The hippies must have been too wasted to notice.

Besides insufferable sets by second-rate acts such as Bert Sommer, Quill, and dreadful ’50s revivalists Sha Na Na, 40 Years On gets bogged down with more than a dozen public-service announcements by emcees John Morris and Chip Monck. How many times do you need to hear someone requesting so-and-so report to the information booth, or warning folks about bad acid. It’s slightly more enjoyable to hear Abbie Hoffman grab the mike right after the Who finishes “Pinball Wizard” and rant about the injustice of poet and White Panther Party leader John Sinclair getting 10 years in jail for two joints. Even more enjoyable than that is hearing Pete Townshend order the outraged activist to get off his fucking stage.

If it weren’t for the inspired contributions by Canned Heat, Mountain, CCR, Johnny Winter—and of course showstopper Jimi Hendrix—this package would be a total bummer, man. Just like the poison in those tabs of blue acid.

> Steve Newton

Hall & Oates
Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall & John Oates (RCA/Legacy)

Hall & Oates were virtually anathema in the 1990s, so the release of this classy four-disc, 74-track set is in itself a validation of their reputation’s revival. The men who defined “blue-eyed Philly soul” but won their greatest success in the ’80s with hand-clapping, chunky-grooved pop-rock were often targets for critics. But it was never due to a lack of songwriting skill, despite the vaguely pornographic ring of their biggest titles (“Private Eyes”, “Adult Education”, “Maneater”).

Setting aside Hall’s occasionally over-plaintive falsetto vocals (and Oates’s moustache), this versatile duo wrote some fine songs indeed, as their record of 28 Top-40 singles would suggest. Fire up Disc 3, and the hopping-through-the-park glee of “You Make My Dreams” and the synth-driven bliss of “Did It in a Minute” kick in almost instantly. Like Michael Jackson’s catalogue, even when these tracks sound dated, they still sound vibrant. Augmenting the fun is a cornucopia of previously unreleased live performances and studio cuts, plus a track-by-track booklet commentary. This collection is enough to keep you up all night, watching YouTube episodes of Yacht Rock and scouring Ticketmaster for the next H&O appearance at your favourite local casino.

> Lucas Aykroyd

Woody Guthrie
My Dusty Road (Rounder)

Woody Guthrie (1912-67) may have the most influential bloodline in American music of the last century. It goes like this: legendary folksinger Joe Hill (shot by firing squad in Utah in 1915) and his Muse begat Woody who begat Bob Dylan and other ’60s folkies who morphed into rockers, country musicians, and Celtic bards. More recently came the Mermaid Avenue albums (1998 and 2000)—previously unseen lyrics by the prolific Guthrie put to music made by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Now comes the real bonanza: a series of fine-quality original recordings by the man himself, unearthed in a Brooklyn basement.

They’re divided into four albums: Woody’s Greatest Hits, Woody’s Roots, Woody the Agitator, and Woody, Cisco & Sonny, the last recorded in 1944 with Cisco Houston and mercurial blues-harp player Sonny Terry. Add a 64-page book with old photos, loads of detail, bits of memorabilia, and postcards by Guthrie, all packaged inside a pint-sized hobo suitcase with a handle and latches, and you have the perfect gift for all the cowboy drifter rebel socialist boho poet misfits—and the Americana archivists—in your family.

> Tony Montague

Rod Stewart offers a nightly prayer of thanks for the invention of hair mousse.

 

Rod Stewart
The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971–1998 (Stiefel Entertainment/Warner Bros.)

It’s easy to forget why we’re supposed to care about Rod Stewart. Once an acclaimed tunesmith and one of the greatest frontmen in rock, Stewart hasn’t released an original song this decade. But he keeps putting out albums, cashing in on nostalgia for old-school soul and the Great American Songbook. What happened? Who knows, but this set revisits the years when the rooster-mopped singer still seemed to care, via alternate versions and outtakes from recording sessions between 1971 and ’98.

Disc 1 offers insight into Stewart’s writing process through early takes of songs whose lyrics would later be rewritten. (From an embryonic “Maggie May”: “I don’t mean to tell ya/That you look like a fella/But I’ll kick your head in one of these days.”)

Discs 2 and 3 suggest Stewart’s slide into mediocrity could have been avoided if he had followed his better instincts. Astonishingly, the hard-charging “I Wish You Would”—a blues rave-up that finds Stewart calling out the changes as his crack band tears the roof off—came from the sessions for 1983’s limp, synthesizer-saturated Body Wishes.

Disc 4 shows Rod the Mod redeeming himself somewhat in the late ’90s. He had given up on songwriting, but at least his choices of covers suggested he was still paying attention. Unfortunately, no one was paying attention to him by that point.

> John Lucas

Henry Cow
The Road: Volumes 1–5 (ReR Megacorp)

Henry Cow
The Road: Volumes 6–10 (ReR Megacorp)

Let me be the first to admit that the mall throngs now gearing up for the Great Shopping Holiday are probably not exactly thrilled that they finally have access to the complete live recordings (plus studio outtakes) of progressive-rock innovators Henry Cow. Let me add, too, that if you’re among the many millions who have yet to hear this unduly obscure band in any form, you’d be better off checking out the five studio albums released during its lifetime, also available from drummer Chris Cutler’s ReR Megacorp imprint. I’d recommend starting with 1975’s In Praise of Learning, but that’s just me.

For Henry Cow’s hard-core advocates, however, the long-overdue appearance of these archival recordings is cause for”¦ well, jubilation is probably a bit extreme, but certainly warm satisfaction has ensued from the hours I’ve spent immersed in their riches. Beginning with the first proto-Cow scrabblings of 1968 and ending with a DVD of an astonishing open-air concert in 1976, the 10 discs that make up The Road’s two boxed installments go a long way toward illuminating this band’s notoriously complex sound, which mixed new-music and free-jazz experimentation with a dash of Brechtian cabaret and occasional hints of post-Yardbirds abandon. They also find these young musicians flinging themselves furiously at the boundaries of the possible, and occasionally breaking through—an achievement well worth celebrating even after all these years.

> Alexander Varty

Gary Moore
Essential Montreux (Eagle)

Got someone on your Christmas list who’s a huge fan of wailing rock guitar? Then look no further than this five-disc feast of fret-burning action by Irish guitar hero Gary Moore. So what if it contains no less than four live versions of Otis Rush’s “All Your Love”? That tune kicks ass!

Essential Montreux captures hard-rocker turned blues-rocker Moore in sets recorded at Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival in 1990, ’95, ’97, ’99, and 2001. For the most part Moore concentrates on material from his post-metal output that began with 1990’s Still Got the Blues, but there are some interesting sidetracks, such as his blistering version of Roy Buchanan’s “The Messiah Will Come Again”. Fans of Moore’s pre-blues period will appreciate the inclusion on Disc 3 of the Celtic-tinged “Over the Hills and Far Away” and the gorgeous “Parisienne Walkways”, which he cowrote with former Thin Lizzy bandmate Phil Lynott.

In ’95 Moore released Blues for Greeny, a tribute to his hero Peter Green, so it’s no surprise that the set from that year includes four Green-penned numbers, including “Merry-Go-Round” and “Long Grey Mare” from Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1968 debut. Other blues and rock greats covered on Essential Montreux include Willie Dixon (“You Don’t Love Me”), John Mayall (“Key to Love”), B.B. King (“You Upset Me Baby”), Freddie King (“The Stumble”), Elmore James (“The Sky Is Crying”), T-Bone Walker (“Stormy Monday”), and some dude named Jimi Hendrix (“Fire”).

> Steve Newton

The Doors display the manic energy that made them a great live band.

 

The Doors
Live in New York (Rhino)

The Doors don’t exactly start out with a bang on Live in New York, a six-CD set capturing four shows at NYC’s Felt Forum on January 17 and 18, 1970. Need proof that the hippies were indeed every bit as mellow as we’ve been led to believe? Consider that no one starts howling like an enraged loogan when, at the start of the two-night stand on Disc 1, the band ambles on-stage and then takes four buzz-killing minutes to tune its guitars and test out the drums. Evidently, sound checks hadn’t been invented yet.

Live in New York delivers amazing, clear-sounding versions of all the hits—“Roadhouse Blues”, “Light My Fire”, “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”—and some embarrassingly dated-sounding fill (“Blue Sunday” and Disc 5’s pompously overblown opus “Celebration of the Lizard”). On the revelations front, the Doors prove they might have been, musicianship-wise, one of the most underrated bands of the ’60s; check out Robby Krieger’s crazily inventive guitar work on Disc 2’s “Five to One”. What’s disappointing is the utter lack of insanity or passion in the note-perfect performances.

With the band doing two separate shows a night, the later sets are a little more ramped up. But the occasional false start aside (Disc 4’s “Alabama Song [Whisky Bar]”), this is a band at the top of its game, tackling the material with a sense of honed professionalism.

In other words, if you want a cock-wagging, drunken, cussing frontman doing his best to start a riot, you’ll have to wait for Live in Miami ’69. The added bonus will be that that document probably won’t feature three different versions of “Ship of Fools”, four of Roadhouse Blues”, and a whole shitload of sound-check interludes that will leave you wondering what exactly those laid-back hippies were smoking to make them so patient.

> Mike Usinger