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