All the joy, pathos, and drama is contained within a miniature replica of the original Motown building. You can listen to the joyous music and just imagine, within those hallowed halls, the backing musicians getting screwed out of a living to the beat of a generation coming of age. "How Sweet It Is," indeed!
Genesis: 1970-75 (Rhino) For prog-rock fans, the recent Genesis deluxe- treatment remasters have been torture — even greater torture than the constant humiliation and self-hatred that comes with being a prog-rock fan in the first place. Inexplicably moving backward chronologically so as to put off the Peter Gabriel–era material for last, it's almost as if Rhino took to heart the scene in American Psycho where the titular '80s serial killer, in a lengthy monologue on the enduring legacy of later Genesis and solo Phil Collins, dismissed Gabriel's Genesis as "too artsy, too intellectual." And there is a certain logic to that. The Peter Gabriel of Genesis, before he became an inspirational godhead of world music in the '80s, was a complete and utter loon, painting his face white, wearing his hair in an inverse mohawk and squawking songs about hermaphrodites and killer plants on top of overly busy polyrhythmic mumbo jumbo. But at the same time, the band had a power and naive over-ambition that peaked with the watershed prog twofer The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which is included here, along with every other Gabriel-era album and a cornucopia of live video footage.
New Order: Movement / Power, Corruption, & Lies / Low-Life / Brotherhood / Technique (Collector's Edition) (Word Entertainment) When the three surviving members of Joy Division transmogriphied their anguish over their lead singer's suicide into dance-floor abandon as New Order, they also ushered in a new era of the pop single. They released song after song that became massive hits with no corresponding album. "Blue Monday" became the best-selling 12-inch single in UK history, and yet if you just bought New Order's albums, you'd be in the dark on a huge part of their legacy — which is why these reissues are so crucial to re-contextualizing the groundbreaking new-wave band's music.
Each album included is accompanied by a second disc of non-album singles and B-sides, and in many cases the bonus disc practically eclipses the album itself. Their 1981 debut, Movement, for example, is a dark and ephemeral work, from a band discovering themselves through an embryonic membrane. Hearing the clarion chime of "Ceremony" after the dreariness of Movement closer "Denial" is like waking up from a nightmare to a sunny day. Similar epiphanies await on the rest of these crucial re-issues.
Pavement: Brighten the Corners, Nicene Creedence Edition (Matador) Pavement were not the only '90s band of self-styled musical amateurs to be put on a pedestal by a burgeoning alternative fanbase, only to disappoint with actually learning how to write a song and play their instruments on the way to becoming professional musicians. This double-disc re-issue of 1997's Brighten the Corners, removed by 11 years from the context of alt.rock's crumbling final moments, reveals a rough-and-tumble band of record collectors turning into accomplished songwriters on par with their classic-rock idols. The re-issue includes a truckload of live and radio sessions from the time, as well as essential B-sides, such as "No Tan Lines" and "Cherry Area" from the Shady Lane EP, that showed chief Pavedude Stephen Malkmus crawling out from underneath his Mark E. Smith worship to crystallize his own idiosyncratic and vaguely creepy classic-rock-weirdo vibe.
