At this point, it has become standard practice in the business of making music to re-issue material years after the original release in a bid to beef up a band's stature in the musical community. Think about it—even after a band has moved on to other things or changed creative directions, fans both new and old like a time line of where their favorite band has been and where they're going, or simply to shoehorn the artist in question back into the public eye and perhaps increase catalogue sales. Is it a totally noble enterprise? Perhaps not, but every so often either the band or the label re-releasing the content goes the extra mile and issues something that's honestly special and re-invigorates the content. This year, in addition to the deluge of contrived re-issues, re-releases, greatest-hits packages, there have been a few great, interesting and creative sets to come out that have done just that. These are, in my estimation, the best of the year.
10) Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn 40th Anniversary (3CD)
Offering the original mono mixes of the songs (disc one is a straight reissue) as well as an updated stereo mix (disc 2), this set updates the Floyd with a clearer vision of what was going on. With a little more room to breathe in the stereo environment, tracks like "Lucifer Sam" and "Pow R Toc H" jump out of the speakers and smash listeners over the head with their dystopian eeriness, and the album as a whole (but particularly "Interstellar Overdrive") quivers with nervous energy. Disc 3, however, is something to treasure. Collecting and remastering the singles released in the same period ("Arnold Layne," "Apples and Oranges," "See Emily Play" and "Candy and a Currant Bun") along with previously unissued outtakes, disc 3 distills that nervous energy into blasts of paranoia and willfully neurotic expositions. It's terrifying and fantastic and makes this reissue a must-hear for any fan. (EMI)
9) Nine Inch Nails – Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D (CD & DVD ROM)
A remix disc has coincided with the release of a new Nine Inch Nails album since as far back as The Downward Spiral, so one exploring the possibilities of Year Zero isn't surprising but what makes Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D fantastic is the DVD ROM disc that comes with it. By including the multi-tracked audio from all the tracks on the album, Trent Reznor has basically given fans licence to get as creative as they want with the songs from the album and the chance to show up the producers that cracked open the material on the CD here. Left with open formatting so burgeoning producers can use the computer platform of their choice to remix Y34RZ3R0, for the release that finishes out his record contract Reznor has gotten interactive with his fans. (Nothing)
8) Alice in Chains – MTV Unplugged (CD & DVD)
As bleak and gut-wrenching a testimony as this release is because it illustrates how close to the edge Layne Staley was so many years before his death, it's still pretty incredible to see arguably the last great Alice In Chains show restored unedited to DVD. This set includes a couple of the outtakes from the performance (the false start on “Sludge Factory” and so on) as well as those that were edited out of the original broadcast. A true-to-the-show reissue, MTV Unplugged offers a last look at a great band before they imploded. (Legacy/Columbia)
7) Neil Young – Live at Massey Hall 1971 (CD & DVD)
With no Stills, Nash, Crosby or Crazy Horse to back him up, Neil Young took the stage at Massey Hall with only an acoustic guitar and the house piano to perform a set that became a landmark in the songwriter’s career. Performing what (later) became considered a greatest hits set that featured such future stapes as “Helpless,” “Old Man,” “Down by the River” and “Needle and the Damage Done,” Young plays the role of the lonely troubadour with the courage to be heard. The performance is magical – like unearthing a lost gem at an estate sale—as Young wasn’t yet the institution that he’d become but showing all of the reasons he would be in a remarkably intimate performance. (Reprise)
6) Frank Black – 93–03 (2CD)
Frank Black’s solo recorded output has been characterized by relentless creativity in that, whenever the singer discovers something new that captures his imagination, he simply makes another record to reflect it, but caustic underground rock ‘n’ roll has been a consistent muse both with The Pixies and solo and that’s the end of Black’s musical spectrum that 93–03 focuses on. 93–03 collects tracks from the singer’s first nine albums and fairly homogenizes a decade’s-worth of material but brings focus to what has previously been perceived as totally unfocused. The results are a very strong record in its own right as tracks including “Los Angeles,” “Headache,” “All My Ghosts” and “Manitoba” all converge out of their myriad sources and present the portrait of a wholly gifted but wholly idiosyncratic and bizarre songwriter. The pieces are always in place here: shifting dynamics between punchy, blustery rock and lush melody, propulsive drums and mercurial but measured guitar lines all sealed up and contained within pop structures that threaten to explode every other minute, and never drags or gets boring. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Frank Black production if he didn’t throw a hard left turn in to derail it. Disc two’s live tracks strip the vibe of disc one down and remove the ambiance to present a hard-driving rock ‘n’ roll band in love with the notion of confounding their audiences. While studio versions of most of these tracks can be found on Black’s studio albums, they are invariably the black sheep that add flavor to those albums and collecting raw versions of them here scatters the focus of the record back into the dozen directions that the singer’s output seemed to be going in before he unified it on disc one. Somehow, Frank Black has managed to connect the dots through his solo work only to have the final picture be something that isn’t particularly recognizable and thus compelling audiences to keep listening. (Cooking Vinyl)
5) Sebadoh – The Freed Man (1CD)
Typically speaking, a single-disc re-release wouldn't be the standard fare for a best-of re-issue list because, to put it bluntly, you could've simply gone out and bought the original album and gotten the same content. The reissue of The Freed Man is different though. Since its original release in 1989, The Freed Man has been re-issued no less than four times—each with a different track list. The newest version, however, is the most comprehensive and actually goes above and beyond the original by leaps and bounds. Clocking in at fifty-two tracks in seventy-nine minutes flat, this disc restores the original sequence of the album, cleans up the production without losing the original spirit and adds a few tracks recorded around the same time for fans to enjoy. The beauty of it is that while things have been added here, at no point does the record sound like a reissue in that all the tracks fit together in a strange way. There’s no debating that The Freed Man is a flawed record—it goes in a staggering number of directions at once—but that’s part of the appeal; it’s dirty, meandering, pure, ambitious, fearless and absolutely beautiful. (Domino)
4) The Traveling Wilburys – The Traveling Wilburys Collection (2 CDs, 1 DVD)
What makes Traveling Wilburys unique is that, rather than for financial gain, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty came together out of mutual respect and the beautiful hand of serendipity; and they liked the results so much in fact the collaboration yielded revitalizing music for everyone involved and only ended with the death of Orbison. Like The Ramones, these superstars all changed their names for the project, put their egos and careers aside, and just play roots music for the love of it; clearly revelling in the pure joy of just playing together. And wouldn’t you know? The songs rejuvenate them too; “Tweeter And The Monkey Man” is Bob Dylan’s finest moment between Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind; “Handle With Care” may be Harrison’s finest post-Beatles song and when Tom Petty’s lonesome Telecaster howls up anywhere on the record, that’s when you feel it in your bone marrow and you know it’s real. The post-Orbison Volume Three does offer slightly diminished returns but the nobility is still there in “Deadly Sins,” “Where Were You Last Night?” and “The Devil’s Been Busy.” At that point, anyone listening knew it was over—with one link missing, the chain was broken—but for these twenty-five songs, the stars aligned and it all went right.
3) Negativland – Our Favorite Things (CD & DVD)
For the first time in their history, Negativland has now released a collection of their best-known tracks on a DVD complete with brand new video content and the results are as disturbing as they are illuminating. Potentially even more inflammatory than any audio that the band has ever released because of the sensory-depriving volume of footage alone; snippets of old Western films, transcripts of Casey Kasem’s rant on “U2,” manipulation of Ariel from The Little Mermaid and the “down and to the left” footage of the JFK assassination are just a few of the images ram-rodded together on Our Favorite Things. The soundtrack, of course, is what holds the melange together and there’s no mincing words here, this is honesty with a baseball bat delivered in Negativland’s inimitable way: laugh-out-loud funny because it’s explicit and outrageous. (Seeland)
2) Bob Dylan – Dylan (3CD)
All of Bob Dylan's greatest hits albums released since 1965 have been very cursory because of the sheer duration of his career; after all, how does one condense almost fifty years of work down into eighty-two minutes? You don't; and that's why in addition to still another painfully cursory greatest-hits package (the single-disc Dylan), Columbia issued a 3-disc deluxe edition that takes a proper look at the scope and breadth of Bob Dylan's music. Each facet of the songwriter's career gets its due here; from Dylan's early folk purist beginnings to the different turns the songwriter's career has taken from going electric to dealing with middle age to elder statesmanship and every career revitalization in between. What sets this set apart is that it doesn't feel thrown together or like it offers dessert only; while the blockbuster hits are all accounted for, this set also has a selection of songs that give context and colour and enrich it rather than clutter it. That said, this set is unequivocally the closest to a complete portrait of Bob Dylan ever offered in a single package to date. (Columbia)
1) Nirvana – Unplugged In New York (DVD)
At this point, every ounce of the minutiae surrounding Nirvana’s Unplugged show has been so well documented that those things feel as if they've taken on the same amount of fame and infamy as the performance itself. It has been so exposed that even passing fans feel like they know every microtone and every image—except that, before now, the show has never been released in its entirety. Finally available on this DVD for the first time are the songs that were edited out of the original broadcast, "Something In The Way" and "Oh, Me," as well as the footage of five songs from sound check and a lot of stage dialogue that neither made it to TV nor was the audio included on the album upon its release in 1994. That additional footage is the revelatory material on this DVD; since the singer's death the miracles of editing for broadcast have made the show impossibly dour, heavy, and look like it was conscious foreshadowing of what would happen less than six months later in the space above Cobain's garage, but that isn't true at all. Unplugged was, at its core, a magical performance not because of the moribund circumstances that followed it but because Nirvana willed it into existence. Unplugged showcased Nirvana as songwriters and the performance ended up being timeless because of that. Fourteen years later and the set is still as vital and carries all the weight it did when they sat down to tape it. That is the mark of a great band and a great show. (DGC)
