Holiday Gift Guide |
Still Spinnin'by Donny Kutzbach |
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If you’ve seen all the iTunes commercials, clicked the online music blogs or read the local headlines about a major music retailer closing, then you got word: CDs are dead.
You don’t believe it, do you? No. You’re the type who’s a little to smart to believe everything you see on TV and read.
It is true that the compact disc format is currently in a fight for survival that will be tough to win. The CD, while still the pre-eminent format, has seen sales steadily on the decline since everyone with internet access got swept up in the revolution of online music providers and, the arch enemy of the music industry, file sharing services and illegal music downloading. The world has gone iPod crazy, as it’s the hottest Christmas gift two years running, but there’s still billions of compact disc players and more than enough folks who don’t plan on giving them up any time soon.
The embattled music industry has wised up enough to focus on two things it has in its corner: the back catalogs and the dedicated audience of buyers who want premium products. In a marketplace that is being eaten up by consumers seeking $0.99 single-song fixes, the major labels see that classic brick-and-mortar record store fans want collections with nice packaging and bonus material from their favorite artists.
That adds up to two words that make the mouths of some of Artvoice’s music staffers water: box sets! The holiday season is the time when major labels spring big packaged collections of their thoroughbreds ideal for gift giving. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had ripping open a big box of music, and here’s a few noteworthy choices.
Various Artists – Girl Group Sounds: Lost and Found – One Kiss Can Lead To Another (Rhino, 4 CDs. $69.99)
Forty years before Britney Spears was complaining about “Boys,” the Shirelles hit the subject harder, cooler and much, much funkier with a song of the same title. As Girl Group Sounds reminds us, Britney, Christina and their ilk weren’t the genesis of pre-fab girl pop, and they certainly don’t represent its pinnacle. The teen and twenty-something girl singers of the 1960s weren’t falsely tagged “divas” and didn’t have global media hype machines behind them. What they did have were songwriting teams like Carole King and Jerry Goffin and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, taskmaster producers like Phil Spector and Mickie Most and glorious black vinyl 45s bound for chart rhapsody.
This stellar four-disc set collects 120 songs from the heyday of girl pop. Girl Group Sounds shies away from the obvious hits and digs for the under-appreciated and often unheard gems. In the case of Skeeter Davis, whose country to pop crossover “End Of the World” is a standard, you get the grittier Brill Building number “Let Me Get Close To You.” The collection boasts a kaleidoscope range of styles covering straight ahead pop, Brit invasion rock, r&b, garage, country, soul and beyond.
As we’ve come to expect from the reissue experts at Rhino, Girl Group Sounds is lovingly compiled, researched and packaged. The set is housed in a funky hatbox and includes a 200-page booklet of photo s, stories and commentary offering insight on each artist and song. Girl Group Sounds: Lost and Found offers exuberant tales of boy meeting girl, love coming and going and every manner of teen drama all peeking through the innocent looking glass of the ’60s. This is essential listening.
Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run 30th Anniversary Edition (Columbia, 3 discs, $31.99)
Born to Run could very well be the album of the ’70s. It’s a totem that legions of rock and roll believers point to as the high-water mark. This seamless collection of songs echoes with the themes of coming of age, broken promises, shattered dreams, dead-end futures but is all underpinned by a faraway sense of redemptive hope.
When Bruce Springsteen recorded it he thought it would be the last album that he would ever make. Instead, it made him legend.
Today, Born To Run sounds as fresh as the day it hit the streets in 1975. Scratch that: with the 30th Anniversary Edition, it now sounds fresher.
Springsteen’s words and music (as well as the E Street Band’s sea of massed, virtuosic power) on Born To Run were vital from the moment they were unleashed and have remained so 30 years on. Listening to the record from a sonic standpoint, however, maybe not so much. The Boss’ catalog, particularly since advent of CDs, has been one of the poorest served of any major artist. If you put on a Springsteen disc on side-by-side against other remastered classics, it doesn’t hold up. The sound is flat and lacking the vibrancy of an old recording properly mastered from the original tapes using new technology. But, at last, the layered glory of Born To Run basks in all its deserved audible power with this painstakingly remastered edition.
In addition, the set includes a pair of DVDs that contain more of Springsteen’s work from the era. The first is the documentary “Wings for Wheels” where nearly every detail of the birthing of Born To Run is uncovered by Springsteen and those who helped make the record. The second disc captures a performance from London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1975—Springsteen’s European debut—and is an elemental live document. Springsteen and E Street deliver a show of epic proportions; an all-out, soul-satisfying, and maybe even saving, bit of rock and roll.
Billy Joel - My Lives
(Columbia, 5 CDs, $47.99)
Whether or not you’re ready for a reevaluation of the career of one William Martin Joel, you get it with My Lives. If you revere this American hit maker for his countless string of platinum records and radio-dominating singles, then you’re hungry for such a retrospective. If you discount and dislike Joel for possible pop-chart pandering, a Broadway musical and the Brinkley years then you’re not. Should you fall in the latter category, however, be prepared to have your preconceptions about Billy Joel at least provoked and possibly reconsidered altogether.
On this set the piano man from Hicksville, Long Island unwinds his entire career and digs beneath the hits to show a body of work that will make you forget about the million-plus records he’s sold and hear the artist underneath.
Sure, the hits are there. You hear early demos of them—alternate versions galore—and you get a string of them all in a row on the DVD (a box set add-on that seems to be obligatory these days) taken from his 1994 tour. That stuff can all be interesting in its own right, but it’s not largely what makes My Lives special.
What does make it special is a song like 1970’s “Amplifier Fire” from Joel’s pre-fame and organ-frenzied acid rock combo Attila. The chameleon character shows shades of Randy Newman on the unreleased demo “Cross to Bear,” ably covers Dylan not once but twice and apes his idol, Ray Charles, while dueting with him on “Baby Grand.” The early demo of one of Joel’s greatest songs, “Miami 2017,” is made even more captivating, and the wistful “And So It Goes” is even more powerful here in its nakedness.
The one drawback is that discs three and four focus entirely on Joel’s work from the last fifteen years, including bloated stadium tours with Elton John and his meandering symphonic music, which proves to be some of his weakest moments.
Still, it’s hard not to enjoy this collection as a sort of “Another Side of Billy Joel.” Not only is My Lives far more interesting than any Greatest Hits or Essential collection bearing his name, it’s more thorough and satisfying. Like the cartoony black and white portrait on it’s cover (painted courtesy daughter Alexa Ray) it’s a very different and ultimately absorbing look at the man.
Various Artists – Crunk Hits
(TVT, 1 disc, $17.99)
This is a single disc, not a box set, but still an interesting CD commodity in the times of iTunes and a no-brainer as a gift idea. Since consumers are pointing and clicking to single downloads, here’s a chance for 18 songs for less than that, and a commemorative, shiny silver disc to hold the songs… er, files is included. Exactly as the title advertises, every track on Crunk Hits is a certified hit and a club banger of ass-shaking excess shouted by diamond-teethed MCs. A whopping seven of them include crunk majordomo Lil’ Jon and 2004’s funkiest single, Usher’s “Yeah!” Just because you can’t buy your loved one 24-inch rims doesn’t mean that he or she can’t roll in style with Three 6 Mafia’s after-market-wheel epic “Ridin’ Spinners.”
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