The sets in this year's batch contain punk rock's prototypes, swirly pop dreams, and primal blues.

The Clash
The Singles (Sony/BMG)

At first it seems like a rip-off. With Joe Strummer’s death ensuring that the Clash will never record again, the folks at Sony have been forced to come up with innovative ways to flog a decidedly dead horse. In 1999, the band’s entire back catalogue was remastered, with the discs packaged in a single box simply titled The Clash. This, no doubt, proved irresistible to fanatics, who not only already owned all of the Clash’s albums, but also the mid-’90s boxed set, Clash on Broadway.

That The Singles promises “all 19 UK singles plus bonus tracks in their original sleeves” is fair warning that completists won’t be finding songs here that they haven’t heard a hundred times before. Unexpectedly, though, this might not only be the perfect Christmas gift for the Clash fan in your life but also the band’s most exciting collection to date. You get 19 re-creations of the band’s singles, each in its own sleeve and each manufactured to look like black vinyl. Spread them out and you can trace the way the Clash evolved from straight-out-of-the-gutter street punks (1977’s “White Riot/1977” has them sporting graffiti-splattered shirts and pants) to slick hit-makers (kudos to the art director responsible for the David LaChapelle–quality photo that graced “Rock the Casbah”). What The Singles really gets across, however, is why the Clash was—back when coked-out longhairs with flared pants ruled rock—once known as The Only Band That Matters. Flip through the liner notes and you’ll find gushing testimonies from luminaries ranging from Beastie Boy Mike D (“The Clash were probably the first group that I lived and breathed for”) to Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh (“Every time you put it on you were making a statement,” he writes of “Clash City Rockers”). It would be easy to go on and on, but there’s no point when Pete Townshend can sum it up for you. “The Who just played at Brighton Centre,” he writes, “and all I could think of while we played was that I had once played with The Clash on the same stage in 1981.” Colour him thrilled, which is exactly what you’ll be by The Singles.

> Mike Usinger

Cocteau Twins
Lullabies to Violaine (4AD)

This four-disc set is a must for Cocteau Twins followers who already have all of the alluringly odd Scottish band’s full-length releases. The 59-track box compiles all the material from the Twins’ singles and EPs, starting with 1982’s Lullabies and ending with 1996’s Violaine. Many of the songs here have never appeared on an album, which makes this set the best way to collect them all, unless you feel inclined to spend an inordinate amount of time on eBay.

Listened to in chronological order, Lullabies to Violaine traces the Cocteau Twins’ sound from a mildly abrasive post-punk assault to the warmest swirl of ethereal tones imaginable. It’s a treat to hear Robin Guthrie’s guitar work evolve from the icily metallic shards of “Peppermint Pig” to the ocean-sized shimmers of “Pink Orange Red” and the effects-drenched pop jangle of “Iceblink Luck”.

Apart from a few early pseudogothisms, the Cocteau Twins’ music has aged very well. That’s because the group never really sounded contemporary to begin with. It always seemed to be beamed in from another dimension—a world of warm, blankety sensuousness. This is largely due to the talents of singer Elizabeth Fraser, whose stratospheric cooing and invented vocabulary made Sigur Rós possible. The booklet doesn’t offer much beyond recording locations and release dates, but information seems like a secondary concern here. Everything is packaged in a strangely fleshlike material called “Curious Soft Touch Milk”, which adds a tactile dimension to the listening experience.

> John Lucas

Tori Amos
A Piano (Rhino)

Rhino dropped the ball on this: for only a few dollars more, the plastic keyboard that tops A Piano’s Bösendorfer-black casket could have been a functional made-in-China mini-synth. What Tori Amos fan wouldn’t want to contribute their own countermelodies to “Little Earthquakes” or “Snow Cherries From France”?

I’m kidding, sort of. Anybody who’s going to shell out the big bucks for this elaborately packaged five-CD survey is likely to consider Amos’s work perfect and unalterable, which it is. Contrary to pop music’s usual practice of reflecting its audience’s concerns, Amos has made a career out of voicing opinions that are hers and hers alone: who else could sell millions of CDs while assuming the identity of a volcano or a dolphin? Her best songs, in fact, are usually rooted in very private happenings: a rape inspired “Me and a Gun”; a miscarriage prompted “Playboy Mommy”. Unlike most who adhere to the notion of art as catharsis, however, Amos builds enough energy into her performances that the healing is transferable.

Potential purchasers should note that only a few previously unreleased items are included here. Of them, only one, “Not David Bowie”, is up to the usual standard of Amos’s work, although its glam-boogie underpinnings suggest that it might more properly have been called “Not Marc Bolan”. A Piano does include a whole disc’s worth of rare B-sides, though, which only the truly Amos-obsessed will already own. Even if they didn’t, they’d still want to possess this package for its talismanic power. The rest of us will find it a fascinating look at an artist who has moved from graphic descriptions of sex and violence to a more abstractly spiritual perspective without losing any of her enigmatic appeal.

> Alexander Varty

Robert Plant
Nine Lives (Rhino/Warner)

Only hard-core fans of Robert Plant’s post-Zeppelin output should invest in this 10-disc set, which includes his nine solo albums—from 1982’s Pictures of Eleven through last year’s Mighty Rearranger—plus bonus tracks and an hourlong DVD.

Nine Lives isn’t Christmas music, obviously, but that didn’t stop me from reviewing it at home while our tree was being decorated. “This is old-time music,” announced nine-year-old Tess as she pranced around in her cotton jammies to the strains of “Rockin’ at Midnight”, the old Roy Brown cover off 1984’s The Honeydrippers: Volume One. Even though it features guitar greats Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, I’ve never been thrilled by Plant’s excursion into ’50s blues. And judging by his indifference, our four-year-old, Danny, wasn’t either. If the living-room boogie doesn’t inspire him to do a Batman leap off the ottoman and land dangerously close to the TV stand, I know something’s wrong.

“This song officially sucks,” declared my wife, Dawn, as she lovingly hooked a teddy bear to a branch. She was talking about “Hip to Hoo”, the opening track on 1985’s Shaken’N’Stirred, and one of the more blatantly ’80s-sounding losers in the bunch. I had to agree, but I wasn’t about to run over and flick off the stereo. We’re a family; we can suffer together.

As if to make up for the questionable quality of the tunes, Nine Lives comes in a classy package with painterly echoes of Nick Bantock’s work. It includes a full-colour, 62-page booklet, and the CDs are nicely bound in separate sleeves with images of each original album cover. But here’s two words for die-hard Plant fanatics silly enough to think that his solo efforts rank with the heights he reached before: Physical Graffiti.

> Steve Newton

Billy Bragg
Volume I (Cooking Vinyl)/Volume II (Outside Music)

These two boxed sets offer a cornucopia for Billy Bragg fans, spanning his career from 1981 to 2002, save for the Mermaid Avenue work with Wilco. Each follows the same format, with four original studio albums, four full-length bonus discs, and one DVD. They add up to some 18 hours of rock, pop, and folk from the bard of Barking, gleefully mixing the personal and the polemical.

The artwork is excellent, and the notes contain brief but illuminating intros by long-time friends and accomplices Wiggy and former Clash manager Peter Jenner. Lyrics to all the songs on the studio albums are reproduced in clear type, and confirm Bragg’s status as one of the most consistent and intelligent writers of the past 25 years. But the star attraction here is the rare and previously unreleased material, starting with a clutch of quintessential garage-rock recordings—rough and crackling with energy.

Some songs on the bonus discs were originally B-sides, but most of them are demos or alternate takes. There are also new pieces, including raw gems like “The Cloth” and “Loving You Too Long”. The songs of others are also rejuvenated. Bragg’s passionate solo rendition of the union anthem “Which Side Are You On?”, recorded in 1984 at the height of the British miners strike, is a militant classic. He also delivers great versions of Phil Ochs’s “Joe Hill”, Paul Weller’s “That’s Entertainment”, and Ian Dury’s “Billericay Dickie”.

The DVDs feature a British TV-show interview from 1985, a fine 14-song solo gig in Lithuania in 1988, and a fabulous concert in London three years later with the singer-guitarist in top form and accompanied by a full band. Bragg recently published his first book, The Progressive Patriot; this pair of beautifully produced volumes amounts to his musical autobiography.

> Tony Montague

Vince Gill
These Days (MCA Nashville)

Nearly 30 years into a career that has won him more Grammys than any other country artist, Vince Gill cements his place on the roll of great American songwriters with These Days, a four-disc collection of new material that plays like a greatest-hits set. Gill is considered royalty in Nashville, but he’s always been something of an outsider to the country-music scene, his high, sweet voice and wistful sentimentality evoking Brian Wilson, not Hank Williams. That voice has always been Gill’s calling card, but it’s really only with 2003’s Next Big Thing that he declared himself a full-fledged auteur, writing, recording, and producing his most personal statement to date.

Next Big Thing was a necessary warm-up for These Days. Over the set’s thematically organized four discs, Gill offers his subjective account of country’s patchwork history, from its bluegrass roots through its intersection with other great American forms, from rock ’n’ roll to jazz. Above all, the veteran offers a master class in tunefulness; the songs here aren’t so much catchy as elemental, as if their melodies had always existed, waiting to be discovered.

In his capacity as coproducer, the Oklahoman presents these tracks in a very band-centric context, highlighting the contributions of his talented and tastefully restrained cast of collaborators. Whether fronting a honky-tonk hoedown (on the C&W disc), a Springsteen-style horns-and-all rave-up (on the rock record), or the timeless interplay of fiddle and mandolin (on the bluegrass set), Gill is effortlessly commanding throughout, here playing the full-throated heathen, there the repentant sinner in his lover’s arms. No matter their generic form, the songs on These Days are all, in the strictest sense, love songs, and unabashedly so. Whether Gill is singing about his wife, his country, or his maker, his voice conveys the rare grace of an artist at the top of his form.

> Martin Turenne

Gram Parsons
The Complete Reprise Sessions (Reprise/Rhino)

That day way back in 1973 when Gram Parsons booked into the Joshua Tree Inn, he was looking for UFOs or God or whatever in a liquor-morphine cocktail. What he found instead was the final curtain, age 26, his second solo record not even in stores yet. Which is a shame no matter how you slice it because the world lost not just a screwed-up southern boy with a taste for opiates but the chance to hear how the Nick Drake of American music might have sounded after he’d grown up a little. The country-rock sound Parsons was forging with Emmylou Harris was so different from his previous work in the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, you have to wonder how radical the next step in his evolution might have been.

The curious won’t find answers in The Complete Reprise Sessions, which reissues GP’s two solo discs, plus some archival interviews of negligible worth and a disc of outtakes from the GP and Grievous Angel sessions. Parsons fans dream of some treasure trove; this ain’t it. Sad.

> John Burns

Various Artists
Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival 1961–1965 (Smithsonian Folkways)

In the early 1960s, a newly minted organization calling itself Friends of Old Time Music set about organizing a series of concerts in New York that are today regarded as pivotal moments in the revival of interest in the American folk tradition. The 14 concerts, held between 1961 and 1965, helped introduce a modern urban audience to an impressive array of talent. Some of these were known to folkies through Harry Smith’s epochal 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music (which compiled commercial recordings from the pre-Depression era); others through the field recordings of Alan Lomax. Still others were unknowns from the hollers of Kentucky and Tennessee who were keeping their regional traditions alive.

F.O.T.M. had the foresight to record the concerts, which featured an astonishing group of performers, including Dock Boggs, Maybelle Carter, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, Doc Watson, and Mississippi John Hurt. The recording quality isn’t always ideal, but the performances are above reproach. Of the 55 tracks collected here, 52 are previously unreleased. Perhaps someday Smithsonian Folkways will see fit to issue each concert in its entirety. Until then, this three-disc sampler and the accompanying book offer a more-than-adequate look back at a crucial point in the history of American music.

> John Lucas

Miles Davis
The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia/Legacy)

Although most of the performances featured here are being made available for the first time, a few heavily edited tracks from this Washington, D.C., club booking found their way onto Live/Evil—and that 1971 double LP’s title remains as good a description of this music as any.

The performances are most definitely live. The less-than-studio-grade sound makes that clear, but an even more obvious tip-off can be found in the four different versions of “Honky Tonk” that, collectively, eat up 80 minutes of this six-disc set’s running time. A loose blues anchored by former Motown bassist Michael Henderson’s throbbing Fender, the tune is not just different every time but different from minute to minute: sometimes it rocks, sometimes it drags, sometimes it’s atomized into squalling sprays of noise, but it’s always an expression of the moment.

By 1970, Davis had come a long way from the sensitive balladry and formal dynamics of his quintet recordings for the Prestige label (also reviewed in this issue). As he moved through the 1960s he built ever more space and silence into his music; paradoxically, this allowed him to widen his scope. By the time this band hit the Cellar Door, there was room for Gary Bartz’s gospel-style sax shouting, Airto Moreira’s cricket-chirp percussion, Joe Zawinul’s funked-up wah-wah piano, and Jack DeJohnette’s scalpel-sharp cymbals, as well as the leader’s increasingly acerbic trumpet and, on discs 5 and 6, John McLaughlin’s abrasive electric guitar. But Davis is very much at centre-stage here, and the intensity climbs whenever he moves to the microphone. Ducking and weaving like a boxer, his trumpet doesn’t so much dominate as choreograph this music, which might be dark as all hell but remains one of the most exhilarating sounds of the past century.

> Alexander Varty

Yes
Essentially Yes (Eagle)

I used to be a huge Yes fan back in high school. Guitarist Steve Howe was godlike to me, and I used to keep the triple album Yessongs unfolded across my dresser, the better to gaze appreciatively at Roger Dean’s wicked sci-fi artwork. But the band has gotten increasingly lame since the ’80s and hasn’t put out a decent new release in some time. Essentially Yes certainly isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about that.

This five-disc package is a collection of four studio albums—1994’s Talk, 1997’s Open Your Eyes, 1999’s The Ladder, and 2001’s Magnification—plus an “exclusive disc” of Yes recorded live at Montreux in 2003. The only bonus track on the studio discs is a “special version” of “The Calling” on Talk, although I have trouble figuring out what’s so special about it. Sounds like they just added a minute to the opening track, which was a formulaic bore to begin with, showcasing guitarist Trevor Rabin’s typically unimaginative wanking.

Not surprisingly, the live disc—even though it isn’t particularly well produced—is the most impressive of the five, if only because it includes “Siberian Khatru”, “And You and I”, and “I’ve Seen All Good People”, all concert staples from the Yessongs era. Essentially Yes is strictly for hard-core Yes fans who just can’t get enough of Jon Anderson’s hippie-dippy lyrics and high-pitched vocals. Even I grew out of my tolerance for that.

> Steve Newton

Sublime
Everything Under the Sun (Geffen)

Sublime weren’t the first white punks to lovingly embrace reggae and dub; for better (“[White Man] in Hammersmith Palais”) and worse Sandinista!, the Clash beat them by a good 15 years. The Long Beach trio of singer-guitarist Brad Nowell, drummer Bud Gaugh, and Eric Wilson did, however, do the sound of Jamaica better than any North Americans before them. Aimed squarely at completists, Everything Under the Sun doesn’t exactly live up to its advertising. Ska-tastic tracks like “Really Wanna Know” and “What I Got” are nowhere to be found on the three audio discs. The same goes for “April 29, 1992 (Miami)”, a brilliantly groove-heavy tribute to the Rodney King riots that remains one of the ’90s greatest alt-nation songs. What you get instead are 60 previously unreleased tracks ranging from a Snoop Dogg remix (“Doin’ Time”) to live cuts (the reggae jam “DJ’s” is listed as being recorded at a “backyard party”) to radio on-air sessions (a faithfully thrashy cover of Minor Threat’s “Minor Threat”.)

The cover songs here show Sublime to be just as infatuated with Bad Religion (the L.A. punk band’s “We’re Only Gonna Die” is given a spliffed-out makeover) as Bob Marley (“One Cup of Coffee/Judge Not” smells like Kingston ganja). But unless you’ve got a homemade tattoo that pays tribute to Nowell, who overdosed just as Sublime was taking off, you’ll have little use for this collection of odds and ends, a lot of which will test the patience of even hard-core fans. (“Soundcheck Jam”, for example, is exactly that.) The live footage–heavy DVD is strictly amateur hour. The highlight is a pre-stardom Gwen Stefani performing “Saw Red” with Nowell and company at a 1995 radio festival. The lowlight? As famously cheeba-dazed as the members of Sublime were during their brief run, they had nothing on whoever lit and shot “Leaving Babylon” poolside in Costa Rica.

> Mike Usinger

Sufjan Stevens
Songs for Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty)

Key to the art of gift-giving is balancing what the recipient wants with what the giver would like to give. With the five-CD set Songs for Christmas, Sufjan Stevens’s second compilation of odds ’n’ sods this year, the indie-rock it boy edges toward joining the likes of Sarah McMilkingItLachlan and her ilk, who exploit their fan base’s desires by plying it with more compilations and rehashed leftovers than new material.

A collection of original tunes and covers of seasonal classics (including 15th-century French and German carols) that Stevens has recorded at home every year since 2001, Songs for Christmas ranges from low-key folk tunes to guitar-fuelled blazers. “Soof-yan’s” idiosyncratic charm is well-represented with titles like “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!)” and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”, as is his knack for catchy and strikingly original melodies, such as the upbeat “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!”.

While there certainly are gems among the 42 songs, particularly the delicate harmonizing on “Joy to the World” and “The Little Drummer Boy”, an edited collection would have provided consistency and cohesion. Stevens achieves his goal of exploring the excesses of the holiday season with an overwhelming quantity of songs. Ironically, although they’re about one of the most magical times of the year, the best songs in the collection don’t reach the majestic heights of Stevens’s previous albums. Though this cheaply priced boxed set will appease fans, it leaves room to wonder if a cookbook, gender­-themed tour, and appearance on Martha can’t be too far behind.

> Craig Takeuchi

The Pretenders
Pirate Radio (Rhino/Warner)

Chrissie Hynde wasn’t the first woman to form a rock ’n’ roll band, but she was arguably the most important. She’s smart, street-wise, tough as black leather, and scarily articulate; without her there might not have been a Courtney Love, Liz Phair, or Brody Dalle. She was the first to prove that the girls could not only rock as hard as the boys but also drink them under the table.

America knows her primarily for her Top 40 hits—“Brass in Pocket”, “Middle of the Road”, “Back on the Chain Gang”, all included here—but Hynde arrived on the scene with impeccable street cred. Akron, Ohio’s favourite daughter may have grown up on the Kinks and the Stones, but her move to London in the mid ’70s gave her a front seat for the punk explosion. She wrote for NME, hung with the Clash and Sex Pistols, and dreamed of starting a band of her own.

Pirate Radio features alternate (and inferior) versions of songs like “Precious”, previously unissued tracks, and live takes, but the best material here comes from the first incarnation of the Pretenders, back before guitarist James Honeyman-Scott overdosed and bassist Pete Farndon was sacked for heroin abuse. Few new-wave bands played with the locomotivelike force heard on “Tattooed Love Boys” from the band’s eponymous debut. Hynde never recovered from the loss of her initial collaborators, but there are still moments of melancholy magic on the later discs, including “Back on the Chain Gang” and “My City Was Gone”. The DVD features footage of the original lineup culled from British television programs. The cameraman spends more time shooting the whipped-up studio audience than he does the Pretenders during “The Wait”, but not even that detracts from the fact Hynde is right up there with Keith Richards as one of rock ’n’ roll’s all-time cool kids.

> Mike Usinger

Lead Belly
Important Recordings 1934–1949 (JSP Records)

This set of 96 Huddie Led­better (better known as Lead Belly) songs is as good a collection as any to showcase the legendary southern bluesman’s repertoire. It could even call itself better than some because of its inclusion, for the first time on CD, of an extended version of “Leaving on the Morning Train Blues”. England’s blues-and-jazz–oriented JSP label does its usual workmanlike job of cleaning up the old releases, usually skimping on extras and extensive liner notes but presenting quality music in massive doses, here on four discs containing mostly studio recordings done in intensive sessions in New York City from 1935 to the late 1940s. After folklorists John and Alan Lomax “found” Lead Belly—while they were touring southern prisons to record songs for the Library of Congress—the oft-incarcerated tough guy made field recordings both inside and outside prison walls for the father-son team before travelling with them to NYC. There, Lead Belly cut 78s for the American Record Corporation, a few obscure companies, and Moses Asch’s label. Included in this set are tunes from a rare Hollywood contract and some New York session work with the likes of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee; the compilation ends with a live concert recording of “Shine on Me”, put to vinyl just a few months before Lead Belly’s death in December 1949. The larger-than-life entertainer’s storytelling performance style is well-represented with such standards as “Midnight Special”, “Irene”, “Rock Island Line”, “John Henry”, and “Gallis Pole”, and there is a firecracker version of “The Bourgeois Blues”. The novelty items for those unfamiliar with Lead Belly’s range of material (said to number more than 500 songs) might be the history-based titles such as “The Titanic”, “The Hindenburg Disaster” (parts one and two), “Mr. Hitler”, and “Howard Hughes”.

> Martin Dunphy

The Doors
Perception (Rhino/Warner)

Anyone put off by surviving Doors members Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek’s attempts to cash in on the band’s legacy by scooping up Jim Morrison look-alike Ian Astbury for last year’s Doors of the 21st Century tour can take solace in this extravagant package. Perception features all six original Doors albums on six remastered CDs, with a total of 24 rare and previously unreleased bonus tracks tacked on. And for fancy-pants home-theatre types, each album is also provided in DVD-audio format with 5.1 Surround Sound, plus a couple of video clips thrown in for good measure.

For those who enjoy reading while they listen, there are new liner notes for each album, penned by the likes of insightful Rolling Stone scribe David Fricke and original Doors engineer Bruce Botnick. And after you’ve learned all there is to know about the Lizard King and his cronies, you can peek through that little peephole on the front of the box and crank a plastic wheel to view wee promo shots of the guys. Or you can just smoke a doob and blow your mind staring at the optical illusion just below the peephole. Charismatic as he was, in his mind-altered state Jim Morrison could be mighty flaky, and that cosmic aspect comes through on bonus tracks like the 17-minute “Celebration of the Lizard (An Experiment/Work in Progress)”. If you’re just looking to score the band’s best tunes—ones like “L.A. Woman”, “People Are Strange”, and “Break On Through (to the Other Side)”—you may want to skip this pricey package (which is selling for $155 on Amazon.ca) and pick up The Best of the Doors, a two-disc collection from 2000. It’ll take up a lot less space in your house, and you’ll have saved enough cash to buy an acoustic guitar to strum along on.

> Steve Newton

The Byrds
There Is a Season (Columbia/Legacy)

All the Byrds anyone could ever want and then some. When Columbia/Legacy’s Bob Irwin and Byrds founder Roger McGuinn set out to assemble There Is a Season, their intent was to represent the Sunset Strip’s favourite sons from beginning to end. This they’ve done, but since the band’s beginning was rocky and its end a matter of diminishing returns, any four-disc retrospective is going to contain more chaff than wheat.

The coproducers get bonus points for dredging up three Jet Set and Beefeaters tracks from 1964; former folkie McGuinn was among the earliest Americans to recognize that the Fab Four were more than three pretty faces and a snout. By the time the 12-string guitarist had assembled the Byrds proper, he’d picked up a pair of potential stars in the form of David Crosby and Gene Clark, but one had ego issues and the other was a seething bundle of neuroses. Internal battles and a rushed recording schedule didn’t bode well for the band’s quality control, but its early singles—Clark’s “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and an amped-up version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” chief among them—rank with the best of the era. That gems-among-the-muck pattern continued even after Clark and then Crosby left, although the latter’s gorgeous “Everybody’s Been Burned” was, in 1966, the group’s last undeniably mind-blowing moment. With the world shifting into psychedelic high gear, the Byrds turned right, covering wimpy Carole King pop and, on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Grand Ol’ Opry songbook. The ensuing records weren’t entirely bad—at least not until 1971’s Byrdmaniax, which was unlistenable even then—but this band burned brightest early on.

> Alexander Varty

Various Artists
A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box (Rhino)

The ironic thing about compiling a comprehensive introduction to the founders of goth music is that the most important of the artists involved have little use for the label. The likes of Siouxsie & the Banshees, Joy Division, and the Cure had their roots in the spiky-haired days of ’70s punk, and they only had the G word applied to them in retrospect. “I think Gothic doesn’t really exist,” Daniel Ash of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and Tones on Tail is quoted as saying in this set’s extensive liner notes. “I think it’s a figment of somebody’s imagination. In all honesty, Goth in England meant too much makeup and no talent.” Elsewhere, Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins jokingly argues, “I was way too fat to be a fucking Goth.”

All of which is a good way of saying that you don’t have to possess a wardrobe consisting of six shades of black in order to enjoy A Life Less Lived, which comes in a fancy corseted box. The four audio CDs and one DVD cover a good range of the darker strains of popular music—some of it postpunk, some of it new wave, some of it proto-shoegaze—spanning (mostly) 1979 to 1989. That there aren’t more selections of recent vintage is probably a good thing, as that would open an even bigger can of worms in the what-is-goth debate.

Containing tracks by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the Cranes, Dead Can Dance, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the Jesus & Mary Chain, A Life Less Lived is a worthwhile walk on the far side of midnight, even for those of us who have never been inclined to tease our hair up into a Robert Smith–approved rat’s nest.

> John Lucas

Various Artists
The Legendary Sounds of Sun Studios (Metro Triples)

The box of this three-CD set states that “the sleeve notes are by John Crosby,” which is surprising, because there aren’t any. We’re just given lists of performers, song titles, and composers. There’s nothing else—no indication of when each recording was made or who the musicians were. Too bad, because the Sun Studios have rich stories to tell. It was in the unassuming premises in Memphis, Tennessee, that Sam Phillips recorded many of the greatest blues, country, and rock ’n’ roll artists of all time.

Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and Little Milton are all featured on this compilation, though absent is the studio’s brightest star, Elvis Presley. Each disc has more than 20 cuts, roughly divided between classics such as Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” and little-known gems like Sleepy John Estes’s deeply soulful “Policy Man Blues” and the wonderfully titled instrumental “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” by Michael Yelvington. There’s also the occasional dross such as the Five Tinos’ bland doo-wop pop on “Sitting by My Window”.

To listen to this box set is to take a spin through the rockabilly, country, and blues of the ’50s and early ’60s in America, which makes it all the more pathetic that Metro Triples doesn’t provide a guide to the backroads.

> Tony Montague

Bill Evans
The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (Riverside)

Bill Evans was one of the greatest and most influential jazz pianists. Two years after working on Miles Davis’s cool-jazz classic Kind of Blue, he was caught on tape leading his own trio in New York City. This three-album boxed set contains the spirit of Big Apple jazz, vintage 1961. Here are all the recordings—with three separate takes of both “Gloria’s Step” and “All of You”—made on June 25 at the Village Vanguard club. The curiously named recording engineer Orrin Keepnews, the only key player from the sessions who’s still alive, contributes a brief but excellent essay for the notes. The portrait of Evans’s tortured genius at that time is a fascinating one. Though he looked so conventional in his specs and short slicked-back hair, the king of the cool ivory sound was strung out on drugs.

There are five different perform­ances recorded here, and Evans is at the top of his game at all times. His piano is deeply relaxing yet always alert, supple, and subtle in its darting, understated improvisations. The inspiration in the air is almost tangible as Paul Motion’s light drumming creates the perfect foundation for the interplay between Evans and his extraordinary bassist, Scott LaFaro. The 25-year-old LaFaro is as much the lead musician as Evans is; he wrote many of the compositions, plays with sustained brilliance, and was clearly bound for greatness until fate intervened a few days after making these recordings, when he crashed his car and was killed.

> Tony Montague

Waylon Jennings
Nashville Rebel (BMG)

Anyone can claim to be a rebel, but it takes a special kind of outlaw to pull a gun in the middle of a recording session and threaten to start shooting. That’s what Waylon Jennings did in the spring of 1970, after he’d finally got sick of Nashville and its attempts to sanitize country music. For a good idea of how the showdown changed the career of the country icon, start with Disc 2, which kicks off with “The Taker” and “Mississippi Woman”, both slickly produced by veteran Music City hit maker Danny Davis. Recorded eight months after those sessions—which was right around the time the .22-caliber pistol made its big studio appearance—Track 3, “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)”, finds Jennings debuting the earthy, uncluttered sound that would eventually make him a legend.

Packed with photographs that chronicle the country giant’s metamorphosis from ducktailed rockabilly bad ass to bearded (and decidedly uncountry-looking) hippie, this lovingly assembled four-CD set makes a good case that the singer was indeed, as he liked to advertise himself, an outlaw. The songs date back to 1958 (starting with the Buddy Holly–produced Cajun oddity “Jole Blon”), but things didn’t really get great until the mid ’70s. That’s when Jennings finally got belligerent enough to take on Music City, insisting on hiring his own producers and backing musicians, and picking his own recording studios and album artwork. The string of now-classic hits that followed—“This Time”, “Good Hearted Woman”, and “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)”—changed the sound of country music. And while Nashville eventually wrested control back from renegades like Jennings, this boxed set will remind fans that the rebel had one hell of a run.

> Mike Usinger

John Mayall
Essentially John Mayall (Eagle)

The lineup of guitar slingers on this five-CD package is enough to make any blues-rock devotee start foaming at the mouth: Peter Green, Eric Clapton, Gary Moore, Mick Taylor, Billy Gibbons, Otis Rush, Steve Miller, Walter Trout, Jeff Healey, Steve Cropper, and Jonny Lang. Such is the pull of John Mayall, the legendary British blues vocalist, keyboardist, and harmonica ace. As a bandleader, he draws more killer string benders than a Les Paul tribute concert.

Essentially John Mayall includes four previous Mayall CDs—Padlock on the Blues, Along for the Ride, Stories, and 70th Birthday Concert—as well as a disc of “exclusive live rarities”. Four of the five discs feature Mayall’s band, the Bluesbreakers, and they sound great on the cleanly produced studio recordings, even if Mayall’s songwriting—especially on tracks like “When the Blues Are Bad” and “Kids Got the Blues”—is predictable.

I’ve never been terribly thrilled by the guy’s tired-sounding vocals, either, but always put up with them to hear the accompanying players—people like Clapton, who wails away on a version of Freddy King’s “Hideaway” on the rarities CD. That same disc sees the fabulous Green doing six-string damage on a shabby recording of “Double Trouble”, the Otis Rush tune that Stevie Ray Vaughan named his band after. The more recent live material features primo Bluesbreakers guitarists Coco Montoya and Buddy Whittington and ranges from the ruggedly catchy “Mail Order Mystics” to the downright corny “Undercover Agent for the Blues”.

> Steve Newton

Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Legacy)

In hindsight, it sounds every bit as insane as country blue blood Hank Williams III tackling Black Flag’s “No Values”. Nonetheless, in the late ’30s Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys set about proving that hicks could swing with the best of the big bands. If Glen Gray had grown up dirt-poor in backwoods America, he might have recorded “Pray for the Lights to Go Out”, which combines potato-sack-simple guitar and no-frills piano with woozy horn flourishes and tux-and-tails crooning. Like Wills’s signature tune, “San Antonio Rose”, the song proved that the leader of the Texas Playboys drew up his own rules. (When he made his first appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, he insisted of performing with a drummer at a time when “modern” instruments were banned from the country institution’s stage.) Over the course of a five-decade career, Wills would dabble in everything from bebop (“Takin’ It Home”) to ’50s rock (“Cadillac in Model ‘A’”) to the classic country sound that eventually would make Bakersfield, California, famous (“Hometown Stomp”).

The lovingly assembled four-CD Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys traces the bandleader’s evolution from Lone Star state minor player to national phenomenon. The singer had a vision right from the beginning, as early tracks like “Maiden’s Prayer” and “Spanish Two Step” established the group as an old-timey string band with a thing for horns. Disc 4 sums up everything that continues to be wrong with country today, as you can hear Nashville leaching the colour out of the Playboys’ music in sessions recorded in the ’60s and ’70s. Other than that, the western swing innovator who made both the rock ’n’ roll and country halls of fame is presented here as nothing less than a visionary genius, while promo photos in the liner notes prove he was also one impossibly stylin’ mofo.

> Mike Usinger

Tortoise
A Lazarus Taxon (Thrill Jockey)

Praise to Thrill Jockey for keeping this three-CD, one-DVD retrospective so affordable: I paid less than $30 at my local record store. But the Chicago label also deserves a kick or two for its shoddy packaging: A Lazarus Taxon’s flimsy box started to fall apart the moment the shrink-wrap was broken. Caveat emptor, and handle with care.

The music is a lot more durable than its container, even if this is really a fans-only treat rather than a must-buy introduction. There are a lot of sketches here, a few not entirely necessary remixes, and a whack of droning experiments: casual listeners would be better off sampling Millions Now Living Will Never Die, TNT, or Standards. True devotees will be thrilled from the moment they press Play, however. Disc 1 opens with a nearly 12-minute-long version of “Gamera”, previously available only on a long-out-of-print EP, that has to rank as one of the finest things Tortoise has ever recorded. It’s also a kind of manifesto for the instro-rock group, incorporating as it does several of its signature obsessions, ranging from the John Fahey–inspired acoustic-guitar introduction to the drum ’n’ bass–style backwards percussion that surfaces toward the end. Tortoise has always placed sound above image, and so it’s not surprising that most of the Lazarus Taxon DVD consists of video-wallpaper versions of the band’s more filmic tunes, featuring lots of time-lapse skies and grainy urban sequences. But there are gems here, too: “Ten Day Interval” and “Othello”, recorded live at the Deutches Jazz Festival, find an expanded version of the band in minimalist and free-form mode, respectively, and a mimed version of “Seneca”, cut for a TV show called Chic-A-Go-Go, plays out like low-budget Flaming Lips, complete with monkey masks and a dancing fun-fur rabbit. What else could anyone want?

> Alexander Varty

Richard Thompson
The Life and Music of Richard Thompson (Free Reed)

The Life and Music of Richard Thompson is a mess, both physically and conceptually. Open the box and you’re confronted with five CDs, an informative but awkwardly designed 168-page book, and no fewer than seven separate flyers, ranging from a reproduction catalogue for Vincent motorcycles to a mail-in coupon that entitles the bearer to a sixth disc of rare Thompson. Start listening, and the untidiness of the whole project becomes even more apparent: there are live cuts and studio tracks and home demos and radio sessions, cut on everything from cassette to the latest digital technology. Sound quality is all over the place, and although the five discs are organized thematically, that’s not always immediately apparent.

That said, at least half the music’s undeniably brilliant.

What this set most closely resembles is a trawl through some Thompson obsessive’s treasure chest, which it is: compiler Nigel Schofield’s obviously nuts about the man, and appears to own every note R.T. has every recorded. That’s Life and Music’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Next to completist-only tracks pried from Thompson’s reluctant fingers are raw beauties inexplicably absent from any of his studio albums; for every shoddy soundboard tape there are two or three shining audio gems. Thompson being Thompson, the great songs, fervent guitar solos, and aching vocals far outweigh the clunkers.

The highlights are too many to mention, but it’s worth pointing out that the Covers and Sessions disc includes Thompson’s version of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again”, in which he turns the former pop moppet’s signature track into a strutting acoustic sing-along, and then into a Renaissance madrigal. That’s just one example of why, messy or not, Thompson’s Life is worth your time.

> Alexander Varty

John Lee Hooker
Hooker (Shout Factory)

Shout Factory’s John Lee Hooker retrospective is being touted as the first serious attempt to survey the Mississippi legend’s lengthy history. It’s an essential purchase, according to blues mavens everywhere—and so it is, if you don’t mind paying a four-CD price for a three-CD set. That’s because Hooker’s fourth disc is dedicated to the singer-guitarist’s late-career collaborations with a bevy of famous admirers. Mostly remakes of earlier hits, they generally fail to recapture the mystique of the originals, either because the guest stars are overly deferential to the aging Hook or because they stomp all over him.

The best of the remakes, including those with Jimmie Vaughan and Los Lobos, occasionally rise to the level of first-rate bar-band fare, an approach that worked for classic-rock hacks Canned Heat a decade earlier. In fact, the one-chord workout “Peavine”, from 1971’s Hooker ’n Heat, is among the highlights of the third CD; astute listeners will note how it demonstrates John Lee’s influence on Mississippi hill-country performers such as R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.

Unsurprisingly, though, it’s the first two discs that provide the greatest satisfaction. Disc 1 is Hooker at his rawest, alone with only an amplified guitar for company, and it’s pure, spooky magic. No other post–World War II bluesman, with the possible exception of J.B. Lenoir, so perfectly illustrated the African origin of the blues or sung so nakedly of pain and alienation. Disc 2 finds Hooker assuming the mantle of R&B star; thanks to songs like “Big Legs Tight Skirt” and “I’m So Excited”, it’s a party in a small plastic box.

Two discs of pure blues perfection, one that’s pretty good, and one that’s better forgotten—on the whole, we can live with those odds.

> Alexander Varty

Various Artists
Original Fado de Lisboa (Membran International)

Fado is a musical genre that’s become a symbol of the Portuguese nation and its nostalgic soul. Its songs are characterized by a sense of deep yearning, evoking times past and, above all, loves lost.

Original Fado de Lisboa is a four-CD collection, with each featured artist getting two successive cuts. The meagre liner notes name the performers, but give no bio- or discographical information. Figures such as the great Fernando Maurício, known as the king of fado, rub shoulders with minor and virtually unknown artists like the mono-named Alexandra, who opens the first album. No lyrics are printed, in Portuguese or in English. Although there are some very fine performances from well-known fadistas such as Maria Valejo and Maria de Fé, Original Fado de Lisboa feels as if it’s been thrown together by German record label Membran International to exploit the current revival of fado. The impassioned music deserves a far better showcase than this glossy-looking but shabby-hearted compilation.

> Tony Montague

Fats Waller & His Rhythm
If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It (Legacy)

Music historians agree that hip-hop’s first hit was “Rapper’s Delight”, recorded by the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. But swing fans know better: Fats Waller beat the Gang by more than 40 years. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Consider this: Waller’s “The Joint is Jumpin’”, which was waxed in a New York City studio on October 7, 1937, features references to controlled substances, concealed weapons, and gratuitous acts of violence, as well as a spoken-word narrative heavy on innuendo and slang. It even ends with police-raid sound effects. What could be more hip-hop?

Sure, it’s a stretch. But if Waller didn’t invent rap, then he certainly laid some of its foundation, and If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It suggests that he was influential in a lot of other areas as well. Check out the pounding instrumental break that graces “Up Jumped You With Love”, from 1942: it’s pure rock ’n’ roll. Elsewhere, the corpulent keyboardist anticipates bebop, jump blues, and even funk. Who knows where he would have gone had hard work and pneumonia not cut him down in 1943?

Waller’s mugging stage persona and easy-going nature has led to his being typecast as an entertainer, pure and simple; he was much more. A piano virtuoso who played the classics to relax, he had an uncommonly deft touch and gorgeous tone. And he was an even more accomplished singer, not so much for his range as for his flexibility; some of his songs are three-minute film scripts set to music, with Waller playing a variety of assertive, consoling, lascivious, and comical roles.

The time is ripe for a re-evaluation of Waller’s contributions to popular music, and this handsome triple-disc set could well be the catalyst.

> Alexander Varty

Various Artists
Fonotone Records (Dust-to-Digital)

“There ain’t no folk music today. There hasn’t been any real folk music in 35 years, that went out years ago. It was the greatest music in the world.” Strangely contemporary thoughts: that could be Bob Dylan pontificating from his XM Radio perch. But it’s not; it’s Fonotone Records founder Joe Bussard, interviewed by Swedish folk fan Eva Gundersson in 1966.

The Fonotone story epitomizes what happens to record collectors when they’re allowed to run free: they start record labels. Inspired by the 78-rpm treasures he’d been collecting since he was a kid, the Maryland-born Bussard decided that it might be a good thing to make his own 10-inch recordings of the raw country, bluegrass, and blues sounds that he loved. This, by the way, was in 1956, just as the 78-rpm format was going the way of the dodo. By the time he closed Fonotone at the tail end of the 1960s, Bussard had helped precipitate the very folk revival he despised. He also gave the jug-band movement its template, preserved the kind of old-time–y country that gave O Brother, Where Art Thou? its kick, introduced guitar innovator John Fahey to the world, and cut more than a few novelty sides of his own under such pseudonyms as the Tennessee Mess Arounders and the Possum Holler Boys.

Bussard probably didn’t make a dime from his labours, but in time he inspired a truly fascinating documentary (Desperate Man Blues) and now this five-CD collection of 131 Fonotone classics, housed in a cardboard cigar box along with a 162-page label history, 17 promotional postcards, and even a souvenir bottle opener. Bussard’s still kicking, too, offering custom­-made cassette tapes from his collection of more than 25,000 archival recordings. (See www.bluesworld.com/BussardTapes.html for details.) A more knowledgeable guide to the long-gone world of the shellac disc would be hard to imagine, and this handsome box is a fine place to start exploring.

> Alexander Varty