Every year, recording companies plunge deeper into their vaults, unveiling demos, outtakes, rough drafts, live recordings and more. The boxed sets that emerge from those excavations are reminders of all the options and decisions that go into every official album release. This year’s crop reveals artists at work, with plenty of opportunities to second-guess — or appreciate anew — their stray inspirations and forking paths. Here the pop and jazz critics of The New York Times discuss 18 of the year’s most notable boxed sets.
Robbie Basho, ‘Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings’
(Tompkins Square; five CDs plus digital album, $45.98; digital album, $24)
Like his friend John Fahey, Robbie Basho (1940-1986) composed and played acoustic guitar pieces that communed with the resonances of wood and steel and carried folky fingerpicking into contemplative realms. But Basho also immersed himself in Asian music, often drawing on non-Western modes, and he mastered rapid-fire strumming techniques that conjured overtones like the mist thrown off by a whitecap; he could be meditative and frenetic at the same time. “Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan” opens a trove of Basho’s live recordings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of them surprisingly well-miked with quiet, raptly attentive audiences. His stage patter and occasional vocals are modest, but his guitar work is prodigious in its concentration, propulsion, warmth and sheer stamina. JON PARELES
Clouddead, ‘Clouddead’
(Superior Viaduct; three LPs, $49)
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the hip-hop underground was moving past logorrhea toward full abstraction. Few embodied that more completely than the members of the free-form Anticon collective, which had a cultlike following and tentacles slithering in many disparate corners of hip-hop eccentricity. Clouddead — which featured Why?, Doseone and Odd Nosdam — was a trio of counterculture, bizarro-world experimentalists with an almost fully deconstructed style. This album collects a series of six vinyl EPs originally released in 2000 and 2001; the sound is eerie, uncanny, erratic. At any moment, there might be shards of rhymes, edge-less sound effects, woozy samples, sudden bursts of glossolalia, a sense of there being no single right answer. JON CARAMANICA
Alice Coltrane, ‘The Carnegie Hall Concert’
(Impulse!; two LPs, $38.98; two CDs, $22.98; digital download, $9.99)
In early 2024, the surviving family of Alice Coltrane, along with the John & Alice Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, Long Island, inaugurated “The Year of Alice,” a sweeping program of events and releases honoring the harpist and pianist. The centerpiece: this illuminating 1971 live set, previously only available as a fragmentary bootleg, which helpfully fleshes out a portrait of Coltrane that, in recent years, has begun to seem reductive. Much of Coltrane’s rediscovery has centered on “Journey in Satchidananda,” an album dedicated to her spiritual adviser at the time that is given over to a gently swirling serenity. Two pieces from that release open this performance, part of a benefit for Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga Institute, but it’s in the second half, when Coltrane switches from harp to piano, that the fireworks really commence. During a near-30-minute performance of her husband, John’s “Africa,” she stokes a wave of ever-cresting energy, powering a mighty ensemble featuring two bassists, two drummers and on saxophones, a pair of John’s most accomplished disciples, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp. HANK SHTEAMER
Elvis Costello, ‘King of America & Other Realms’
(UMe; six CDs, $139.98; two CDs, $19.98)
Elvis Costello’s 1986 album “King of America” was his pilgrimage toward country and rockabilly, filled with admiration for American music and mixed emotions about 1980s America. Abetted by T Bone Burnett, Costello worked with musicians rooted in the South, including members of Elvis Presley’s band. The six-CD boxed set gathers other unreleased Southern collaborations — with Allen Toussaint, Dave Bartholomew, Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens and Ralph Stanley — and songs informed by the pithiness of classic country. The set’s peak is a twangy, roistering 1987 Royal Albert Hall concert — mixing Costello’s songs and roots-rock oldies — backed by his too cleverly named American band, the Confederates. PARELES
Drake, 100 gigs for your headtop
(100gigs.org; free)
In August, Drake modeled a next-wave method of oversharing. On a new website, he released a handful of new songs — but more important, a boatload of old ephemera, the sorts of things that might have populated a boxed set a decade or two ago but is now destined to be passed around via zip files. The video clips are seemingly random, but they add contour to different parts of his legacy — Drake recording the remix verse for Migos’s “Versace”; taking in his personal Boeing 767, dubbed Air Drake, for the first time; a studio session laying down a reference track for Ye. In total they present Drake as an eager student or a savvy planner, sometimes both at once. From a distance, it appears that these files were released as a potential palate cleanse following Drake’s spring quarrels with Kendrick Lamar. Or perhaps the data dump represents an upturned middle finger to his record-label partners, demonstrating that he can always go straight to consumer. But maybe the true reason is something more elemental: Drake is at his most pure when telling all. CARAMANICA
Bob Dylan and the Band, ‘The 1974 Live Recordings’
(Columbia/Legacy; 27 CDs, $129.98)
It made sense to record throughout the 1974 tour by Bob Dylan and the Band. It was a triumphant, crackling, arena-scale validation of the music that had divided fans less than a decade earlier, from a singer who always improvises and a band with deep roadhouse reflexes. There were many more incendiary performances — and subtler ones — than could fit on the shouty live album, “Before the Flood,” that was quickly released on LPs in 1974. But dumping a whole archive of 431 tracks on 27 CDs, with variable sound quality and many songs repeating from concert to concert, simply abandons a producer’s job of quality control. A curated six-CD distillation would have been a joy. And the Band’s own songs are still in the vaults. PARELES
Green Day, ‘American Idiot (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’
(Reprise; eight LPs, $199.98; four CDs, $69.98)
Twenty years have gone so fast, indeed. Released six weeks before the 2004 election, Green Day’s bombastic blockbuster seventh album, “American Idiot,” remains one of the defining pop cultural mementos of the George W. Bush era — an epic, hook-stuffed and defiantly ambitious rock opera, in the tradition of the Who’s “Quadrophenia,” that gestures broadly toward political unrest and eventual salvation. The previously unreleased demos and rereleased bonus tracks that comprise this 20th anniversary box show that from the album’s earliest stages, Green Day was thinking big. The demo of what would become the LP’s climactic suite, “Homecoming,” contains some rough, goofy filler lyrics but already has a complicated multipart structure and a 10-minute run time. Material from two pristinely recorded live sets — one at New York’s Irving Plaza from the day the album was released, and another the following year in Tokyo — provide a snapshot of the pivotal moment when these sneering California punks transformed into bona fide arena rockers. LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Margo Guryan, ‘Words and Music’
(Numero Group; digital download, $20; 2 CDs, $30; 3LPs, $66)
The sweet, sleepy and surprisingly sophisticated sounds of Margo Guryan have gone through various cycles of rediscovery, but a recently released tribute album featuring indie-pop luminaries including Clairo and Frankie Cosmos suggests that her influence is at an all-time high. Born and raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, Guryan was an admirer of Bach and Brian Wilson who was mostly content to pen songs for other artists. But her lone solo album, “Take a Picture,” gained a cult following who appreciated her wry candor, clever lyricism and charmingly wispy voice. That enduringly lovely album is here in its entirety, alongside some rightly beloved recordings first released on the 2001 collection “25 Demos.” But the true revelation of the 46-track treasure trove “Words and Music” is its emphasis on the earliest part of Guryan’s career, when, fresh off a stint at the Lenox School of Jazz that found her working alongside Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, she wrote eccentrically phrased, compositionally refined tunes for artists like Chris Connor and Harry Belafonte. Guryan considered many of her recordings demos meant to later be sung by artists with more robust and traditionally virtuosic voices. But — in the aftermath of bedroom pop, indie-rock and all other subgenres of self-recorded D.I.Y. music — this unassuming quality now makes Guryan’s music sound strikingly modern. ZOLADZ
Hugo Largo, ‘Huge, Large and Electric: Hugo Largo 1984-1991’
(Missing Piece; three LPs, $59.99; two CDs, $35.99)
Even in the downtown 1980s New York City nexus of art, punk, noise and Minimalism, Hugo Largo was a singular band. With a lineup of two basses, violin and the cabaret-operatic mezzo-soprano vocals of Mimi Goese — no drums, only an occasional guitar — Hugo Largo offered something different. It performed oblique, contemplative, tolling but sometimes startlingly dramatic songs. Hugo Largo had fans in Michael Stipe (as producer and guest musician) and Brian Eno (as label head), but it didn’t last. This complete collection includes The group’s two studio albums, the ambitiously arty “Drum” and the more refined “Mettle,” along with a disc of unreleased and live tracks that captures some rawer moments. PARELES
Joni Mitchell, ‘Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980)’
(Rhino; six CDs, $79.98; four LPs, $99.98)
The most thrillingly experimental five-year period of Joni Mitchell’s career is chronicled comprehensively — across seven hours of music! — in the fourth volume of her consistently revelatory Archives series. “The Asylum Years” finds Mitchell gradually turning away from the more traditional rock sounds that so many of her contemporaries were taking to the bank in the mid-1970s, and instead finding a more expansive musical language in the world of contemporary jazz, eventually collaborating with such fellow visionaries as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. The previously unheard early demos of material destined for “Hejira” and “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” are fascinating, but what’s clear from the wealth of live material here is that Mitchell honed these ever-evolving compositions on the road, and that being constantly, restlessly in motion during this time clearly stoked her creativity. “I’ve got this tune that has been growing,” she excitedly tells an audience during a stop on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, by way of introducing “Coyote.” “It started off with two verses and a couple of nights later I added another one, and last night I got a fourth one.” What a joy, to get to hitch along on the ride. ZOLADZ
The Police, ‘Synchronicity (Super Deluxe Edition)’
(A&M; six CDs, $124.98)
“Synchronicity” — the fifth, final and best studio album by the Police — was polished and tautly controlled. The vastly expanded boxed set reveals instead how elastic the songs were, not just while the Police were working them out in the studio but in their afterlives onstage. Tracks from recording sessions show how the Police carved spaces into their arrangements, decluttering them to add breathing room. And two CDs from a concert in 1983 exult in remaking the grooves yet again, juiced with extra adrenaline. PARELES
Lou Reed, ‘Hudson River Wind Meditations’
(Light in the Attic; two LPs, $26; one CD, $15; digital download, $8.99)
Lou Reed initially composed the long, luminous and thoroughly mesmerizing drones that make up “Hudson River Wind Meditations” for his personal use, to soundtrack his tai chi practice, acupuncture treatments or meditation sessions. When enough acquaintances started asking him for copies, he decided to release it in 2007. It would be Reed’s final album, and a surprisingly tranquil if suitably uncompromising coda to his discography. Earlier this year, the archival label Light in the Attic gave “Hudson River Wind Meditations” a reverential reissue, which features a remaster of the original release by the engineer John Baldwin, prints of Reed’s contemplative photographs of the Hudson and a booklet that contains, among other things, a new conversation about the album between Reed’s widow, Laurie Anderson, and the writer Jonathan Cott. “In my place, I have it going all day,” Reed says in a typically terse 2007 interview included in the set, “which is better than listening to traffic.” ZOLADZ
Talking Heads: ‘Talking Heads: 77 (Super Deluxe Edition)’
(Rhino; four LPs and four 7-inch singles, $149.98; three CDs and one Blu-ray, $99.98)
The bare-bones, wide-eyed, brilliantly gawky sound of Talking Heads was fully formed on “Talking Heads: 77,” the band’s debut album. Its expanded reissue also gathers B-sides and outtakes, including a version of “Psycho Killer” with Arthur Russell cutting loose on cello and a (wisely shelved) version of “Pulled Up” with a horn arrangement. The big reveal is the band’s full 1977 live set from its last show at CBGB. A high-voiced David Byrne sounds nervous in his between-song patter. But he’s absolutely unbridled from the moment the band kicks in, yelping and growling and barking and babbling over arrangements that had been honed to perfection over years of gigs on that same club stage. PARELES
Tsunami, ‘Loud Is As’
(Numero Group; five LPs, $100-$110; digital $20)
The Washington, D.C. area was a stronghold of fiercely independent post-punk determination. “Loud Is As” collects the complete catalog — three albums and two more discs of singles, compilation tracks and live recordings — of one of the scene’s most underappreciated bands, Tsunami. Formed in Virginia by its two singers, guitarists and lyricists, Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson, Tsunamic played knotty, churning, smart, impassioned songs that were full of unexpected twists and contrasts, from meter-shifting blasts to thoughtful waltzes. As indie-rock was succumbing to corporate temptations in the 1990s, Tsunami often sang about battling for integrity: as musicians, artists, women and workers trying to pay the rent. “I won’t be formed to the ready-made / Or matched to the cut of the retrograde,” Tsunami insisted. PARELES
McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, ‘Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’’
(Blue Note; two LPs, $39.98; two CDs, $32.98; digital download, $9.99)
Archival jazz releases tend to arrive with hyperbolic claims touting something revelatory, but this one — a 1966 performance at the East Village venue Slugs’ Saloon newly sourced from the personal archive of the drummer Jack DeJohnette — actually does feel like a momentous addition to the fossil record. The reasons: exceptionally vivid sound; the top billing of two jazz giants, the pianist Tyner and the saxophonist Henderson, who could still stand to be better known by non-aficionados; and an absolutely burning rhythm section, pairing DeJohnette, then at the outset of a hugely impactful, still ongoing career, and a gifted, in-demand bassist, Henry Grimes, who would soon disappear from the scene for 30-plus years. At a time when a burgeoning jazz avant-garde was pulling strongly toward abstraction, it’s exhilarating to hear these postbop masters holding down a kind of center in a series of marathon workouts, swinging like mad while harnessing an energy that can feel superhuman. SHTEAMER
U2, ‘How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb’
(Interscope; eight-LP super deluxe edition, $299.98; five-CD super deluxe edition, $120.99; two-LP Re-Assemble Edition, $54.98)
U2’s 2004 album, “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” was one of the band’s peaks: brash and turbulent, supercharged with guitar riffs but also suffused with longing and loss. The deluxe 20th anniversary reissue is expanded with a dynamic concert set and 10 songs from the same sessions: six that would be reworked and eventually released, four previously unheard (and slightly reworked in recent sessions). They’re a glimpse of U2 without its last painstaking layers of studio polish, and all the more immediate for it. The 10 additional songs are also available online. PARELES
Various Artists, ‘Super Disco Parata: De Tepito Para El Mundo 1965-1980’(Analog Africa; two LPs, $34.99; one CD, $18.99)
This consistently cheery compilation revisits a stretch of time in which Mexico City’s sonideros — mobile sound system D.J.s — were scrambling to keep their crowds moving by any means possible. Often, that meant spinning bootleg vinyl, which featured illicit, repressed hits from other Latin American countries, and sometimes blunt-force remixes designed for maximum boogie impact. These electronic cumbias, among other styles, are charmingly rinky-dink, and the result is that you encounter these songs — including a wild, game-show-theme rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth, by Enrique Lynch — as they were actually heard in their day: slightly out of focus; leaning into their whimsy and their shuffle; squeaky and fun. CARAMANICA
Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy, ‘The Mighty Warriors: Live in Antwerp’
(Elemental Music; two LPs, $47.14; two CDs, $26.18)
The playing styles of the pianist Mal Waldron (weighty and insistent) and the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy (limber and resolutely droll) seemed like an unlikely match, but their combination was a piquant delicacy of left-of-center jazz. The two worked together from the late ’50s — when they first recorded together on “Reflections,” a Lacy-led set of Thelonious Monk tunes — up until Waldron’s death in 2002, and though their collaboration is exceedingly well documented on record, this beautifully captured 1995 live set instantly feels like a top-tier addition to their joint catalog. Powered by a superb rhythm section (the bassist Reggie Workman and the drummer Andrew Cyrille), the pair lean into their most high-energy impulses, flaunting their idiosyncrasies in roomy performances of originals by each, as well as a pair of Monk favorites and a bracingly exploratory Workman piece. SHTEAMER
The post Digging Deep for Musical Gems: The Year in 18 Boxed Sets and Reissues appeared first on New York Times.
