The smaller and more intimate music becomes as a whirlwind process in the streaming age, the greater the value of its weightiest, most diachronic collections—the take-it-slow curation of box sets, expanded reissues, and other detailed compilations. Here are some of the most captivating of these collections 2023 had to offer, all of which defy logic and reinterpret history.
The Beatles, 1962-66 and 1967-70
Now that the notorious “last Beatles song,” “Now and Then,” has come and gone—a pleasant ride, a gentle breeze, an AI tweak; nothing more, nothing less—fans of catalog producer and legacy hire Giles Martin’s remodeling efforts on behalf of the Fab Four can rejoice (and spend wise money) on his sonic reconfiguring of the group’s signature songs. Nothing sounds too clean, too loud, or too out of place on “The Red” and “The Blue” album (the weird stereo separation pranks that once plagued the 1962-1965 work are gone), even if their individual tracks’ running order has been shifted around a bit. While everyone anticipates the next major Atmos-mix reissue of the Beatles catalog (Rubber Soul?), I’d kill to hear Martin take on someone beyond The Beatles worth his family’s orchestral maneuvering—The Lemon Twigs, MGMT, or someone yet unheard.
Devo, Art Devo: 1973-1977 and 50 Years of De-Evolution: 1973-2023
Lovers of the squawking robotic craftsmanship of the brothers Mothersbaugh and Casale and their various non-sibling drummers can marvel about how noisy and jarring Devo was in their earliest post–Kent State days, and how radically otherworldly their aesthetic has been from the start. Prescient devolution aside, save for perhaps The Residents, only Devo created music with literally zero connection to anything else within their timeframe. They might’ve smoothed their sonic act in the 1980s to accommodate danceable rhythm and straightened out their oddest angles, but nothing compares to Devo’s urges at their most uncontrollable with these two boxes as living proof.
Read our recent interview with Mark Mothersbaugh that covers these collections and much more here.
Various Artists, The Story of Cadet Records
One of 2023’s most adventurous vinyl box sets—collected and named for Chess Records’ jazz-not-jazz imprint of the 1960s and ’70s—is a marketplace for all manner of brain-splitting, hard-to-place label making. Who else but Cadet would dare to collect Muddy Waters at his darkest (the genius that is Electric Mud) alongside harpist and Black avant-garde goddess Dorothy Ashby’s Afro-Harping (play her version of “Theme From ‘Valley of The Dolls’” loud) and lilting jazz folkie Terry Callier (Occasional Rain), as well as full albums by Etta James, Ramsey Lewis, and more?
Kirsty MacColl, See That Girl 1979-2000
The late, great Kirsty MacColl got a ton of name recognition and holiday airplay around the death of friend and duet partner Shane MacGowan of The Pogues for their “Fairytales of New York” this season. But MacColl was a wunderkind long before she met up with MacGowan—an ornate, contagious, pure pop composer filled with smartly detailed lyrics topped by more bite than a dozen Dracula adaptations. While hits such as “They Don’t Know,” “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis,” “In These Shoes?,” and my personal favorite “Don’t Come the Cowboy with Me Sonny Jim!” are collected within, so, too, are 47 previously unreleased recordings (including her amazingly never-released second album, Real) and duet tracks with Tracey Ullman, Billy Bragg, Johnny Marr, David Byrne, Happy Mondays, and her father, British folk giant Ewan MacColl. An illustrious cast of characters as such and Kirsty still stands out above them all for her unique, flawless, diamond-like brilliance.
Prince & the New Power Generation, Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition)
No sooner than Prince lost his mojo (and his hit-making ability) at the top of the ’90s, up came his take on pure, unadulterated R&B and dirty, melodic funk: Diamonds and Pearls. A fresh set of musicians beyond The Revolution (the New Power Generation ensemble) aid Prince in never-before-heard rarities such as a Live at Glam Slam Minneapolis concert captured in 1992, the haunted blues of “I Pledge Allegiance to Your Love,” and the era-appropriate, slick soul balladry of “Standing at the Altar.”
Read our full review of Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition) here.
Joni Mitchell, Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years 1973-1975
After the shimmering folkie bliss of Mitchell’s first two Rhino label Archives volumes comes a creative high watermark: the demos of late 1971 through 1975 that made up For the Roses, Court and Spark, and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. From its convivial sessions with Graham Nash, David Crosby, and James Taylor, and one-offs with Neil Young (their “Raised on Robbery” and “You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio)” are an odd listen if you love her original versions), to its wealth of wonderful outtakes, you’ll hear Joni Mitchell in a completely new light. In particular, her move into Burundi rhythmic patterns and synthesizer work on Hissing—how she and her collaborators got from point A to point B is worth a study all on its own.
Read our full review of Archives, Vol. 3 here.
Various Artists, Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos
For all of its hitmakers including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Sam & Dave, Stax’s behind-the-scenes songwriters—a close-knit, longtime team of melody makers, arrangers, lyricists, and studio musician—rarely get their due for the label’s successes on Billboard’s Pop Top 100, let alone its R&B charts. This seven-disc box and its 146 demos rights that wrong with raw, early recordings from Stax songwriter/producers/musicians Mack Rice, Steve Cropper, Deanie Parker, Bettye Crutcher, Homer Banks, John Kasandra, and more. Plus, legendary soul writer Robert Gordon connects the dots in an illuminating, fact-filled essay.
Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, The Songs of Bacharach & Costello
Costello and Bacharach only made one album together, 1998’s ornately torchy and hugely sophisticated Painted from Memory, which is remastered and expanded here. But Elvis highly regarded the art of being Burt forever, starting with Stiff Records and the Attractions’ cover of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” a habit EC happily found hard to break. The mega-find within this box set, however, is the 16-track Taken From Life disc, which features tracks Bacharach and Costello had written for a long-planned, plushly arranged, and eventually aborted Broadway musical named for their 1988 collaboration. Stage producers—start the conversation.
Read our full review of The Songs of Bacharach and Costello here.
Fun Boy Three, The Complete Fun Boy Three
The late vocalist/lyricist Terry Hall, Lynval Golding, and Neville Staple left Jerry Dammers’ original version of The Specials as this singing trio were more than just ska rude boys. Nobody could imagine how much more until the arrival of Fun Boy Three’s genuinely weird, electronically induced, worldly sense of production technique and pop songcraft starting with 1981’s “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum).” This five-CD and one-DVD Complete box set lives up to its name, providing everything silly and sinister-sounding from FB3 including demos, appearances on the BBC’s Top of the Pops, and their precocious MTV videos.
Nina Simone, Four Women: The Complete Recordings 1964-1967
Simone’s time at the Phillips label defined everything sultry, soulful, and socially protesting about the vocalist, composer, interpreter, and activist. Beyond the simmering, syncopated epic that gives this seven-album box its title (one that ripely displays the full history of Black American womanhood in whisper-to-primal-scream detail), the entirety of this collection shows that Simone was a crucial experimenter when it came to the advancement of the blues, jazz, folk, and soul.
Read our full review of Four Women here.
The Teardrop Explodes, Culture Bunker 1978-82
Julian Cope’s scattershot sense of psychedelia (eventually krautrock, too) and Brit-lit-witty lyricism was the basis for The Teardrop Explodes’ post-punk brand of magic reality and wriggly pop contagion. And while Culture Bunker compiles all the band’s singles and B-sides, it’s the immense wealth of 57 previously unheard tracks that shows off just how much more weird and wondrous TTE could’ve been had Cope not exploded the band itself.
Charlie Parker, Bird in LA
Cherished for his music made in and dedicated to New York City, saxophonist and bebop avatar Charlie “Bird” Parker created and composed some of his best music in the City of Angels, alone or with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie during 1945’s two-month residency at Billy Berg’s Hollywood Supper Club and the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) series. The Bird loved the sun and shadow of fantastic LA, and this box is a telling tribute to that time.
Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
In 2023, Island/UMe, Tom Waits, and his wife and collaborator Kathleen Brennan remastered the whole of Waits’ post-jazzbo-Kerouac Elektra catalog and the pre-lo-fi-skronk of his ANTI- work. That starts with the cinematic, carnivalesque, Beefheart-like clamor of Swordfishtrombones—an album that rarely gets credit for inspiring an entire generation of noisy songwriting crooners that followed in its wake.
Read our essay on Swordfishtrombones and Waits’ other albums from his Island era here.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ongaku Zukan and Music for Film
With the 2023 passing of the inventive composer, collaborator, and multi-genre musician, any celebration of Sakamoto feels especially welcome. And while it’s lovely hearing bits and pieces from the wealth of cinematic scores where Sakamoto fashioned dissonant, lush, ambient orchestrations, the re-release of his fourth, Japan-only 1983 solo album, Ongaku Zukan (“Musical Encyclopedia”), is a rare delight. Armed with his lively, jazzy piano sounds and a Fairlight CMI sampler, Sakamoto ran the gamut of styles—electro pop, jazz fusion, soft-core techno, futuristic ambient. Plus, differing versions of the new Ongaku Zukan package come with 7-inch 45s and 12-inch EPs with additional tracks.
Frank Zappa, Over-Nite Sensation (Super Deluxe Edition)
The Zappa Family Trust’s association with Universal Music Enterprises has been a revelation, dropping as they have several never-before-heard Halloween concerts from 1973 and 1981 (with seasonally appropriate masks in each box), freshly discovered live shows, expanded editions of fan faves from the Hot Rats Sessions, Sheik Yerbouti, and Burnt Weeny Sandwich, and more. But this new 50th anniversary celebration of Over-Nite Sensation—the gateway album into Zappa’s wide-ranging oeuvre and all of its various colors and humors—is truly satisfying in its several mixes of the original record (quad, too) and nearly 60 rare studio and live cuts including previously unreleased concerts from the Hollywood Palladium and Detroit’s Cobo Hall.
Brian Auger, Complete Oblivion Express
Though Brian Auger became a chart-topping psychedelic pop sensation with his Trinity band and their track “Wheels on Fire” with vocalist Julie Driscoll, it was the British B-3 organist’s past as a soulful blue jazz instrumentalist and the electronically induced future-forwardism of fusion that made the team behind Oblivion Express—and this box set—a marvel.
Read our full review of Complete Oblivion Express here.
The Who, Who’s Next/Life House (Super Deluxe Edition)
It would take a huge book and many hours of music to explain what Pete Townshend was thinking after he made Tommy—and that’s the point of this 10-CD box set and oversized memoir, which captures all that The Who put into his aborted Life House project and beyond between 1970 and 1972. While most of Townshend’s words, music, and early synthesizer studies morphed into classics such as Who’s Next and Quadrophenia, there’s so much more spiritualism, individualism, and Keith Moon at stake across the wild entirety of this box.
Read our full review of Who’s Next/Life House Super Deluxe Edition here.
ABC, The Lexicon of Love (40th Anniversary Edition)
It’s hard to believe that Trevor Horn’s glossy production of songwriter and crooner Martin Fry’s first sleek epic with ABC could sound brighter and bolder. Yet done up in this new anniversary edition’s half-speed mastered sound—along with rare 12-inch singles, demos, and live performances from the time of its initial release—Lexicon of Love’s 40th anniversary reissue manages that trick while displaying Horn’s grand signature of mixing Technicolor electronics, cutting rhythms, and regal orchestration.
The Replacements, Tim: Let It Bleed Edition
Forever beloved by devotees of Paul Westerberg’s rawest, gawkiest collection of songs, the original Tim album of 1985—in this new setting—is given a fresh coat of paint and crispness care of an Ed Stadium remix, a hearty mistake-erasing remaster of its original Tommy Ramone production, a largely unheard live disc from Chicago in 1986 during Bob Stinson’s final tour with Westerberg and co., and enough outtakes and alternate versions to make any doubter a believer—and every acolyte even more wildly in love with The Replacements.
