Romantic tunes played a big part in British reggae charts in the late ’70s and early ’80s as a new generation of aspirational, British-born black kids abandoned roots reggae in favour of our first indigenous black pop style?lover’s rock.

Many of the tunes were nothing more than insipid cover versions of UK pop or US soul hits, but the movement yielded a clutch of genuinely moving songs such as Sharon Forrester’s “Silly, Wasn’t It?” (incidentally, Melody Maker’s reggae single of 1974) and Janet Kay’s 1979 Top 3 hit “Silly Games”, both featured here.

More recent cuts like Chaka Demus and Pliers’ “She Don’t Love Nobody” and Diana King’s “Shy Guy” bring this collection up to date.

Bella Union, formed five years ago by former Cocteau Twins Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie, compiles a darkly delicious double-CD showcase. Though there is, of course, a strong, erm, ‘ethereal’ quotient, there’s infinite variety, from the gnarly Czars to the daydreaming Devics. Lift To Experience ride “Into The Storm”, Kid Loco summons a sleazy “Little Bit Of Soul”, while Raymonde’s own “Worship Me” is warm rain. The verdant violins of The Dirty Three and Garlic’s perilously funny Pavement near-plagiarisms take the biscuit. The 21st century’s 4AD?

At least at last, a four-CD slimline box full of extras and studio outtakes from Seattle’s Posies, started out as a great notion when super-fan Kelly Minnis found himself trading bootlegs of the Bellingham band’s “Lost Sessions”. A chance meeting with founder member Jon Auer, who alongside Ken Stringfellow really is/are the Posies, persuaded all concerned to add meat to the bone of a career which encompassed eight albums, including the loveable Dear 23 (1990) and the immortal Frosting On The Beater (1993), itself a somewhat poetic method of describing a solo activity which is always best conducted undercover.

At Least At Last encompasses college-bound acoustic duo beginnings and rushes through the power pop years to end in a wild rocking implosion at the aptly named Bottom Of The Hill club, San Francisco. Along the way it unearths many nuggets and contains all the stylistic blueprints that turned Auer and Stringfellow into contenders. Having begun as huge Cheap Trick and Big Star fans, they nabbed the job of supporting one and backing the other?wish fulfilment on a grand scale.

Among 66 sharp cuts, fanatics of the band will adore a version of “Beck’s Bolero”, a typically truthful take on Big Star’s “What’s Going Ahn”, and snazzy demonstrations of relationship-twister “Suddenly Mary” and Frosting candidate “Dream All Day”. Add in tributes to Blondie, the Trick and Devo and these Posies are heard in full bloom.

THE RAINBOW BRIDGE CONCERT

PURPLE HAZE

BLUE WILD ANGEL: LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT

The idea that every note Hendrix played is worth hearing is fully explored, and disproved, in these exhaustive releases. The Last Experience is the definitive version of Experience, the soundtrack to the movie of what proved to be Hendrix’s last British gig with Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, at the Albert Hall in February 1969. It’s torpid from the start, as Hendrix leads a string of uninspired jams, before asking, “Does anyone else wanna play guitar? ‘Cos I’m finished.” The Experience and its music were dead weight to him now. A thuggish “Wild Thing”and the climactic amp-smashing are rare highlights on a three-CD box where half the tracks are from the soundcheck?the kind of abuse completists savour.

The Rainbow Bridge Concert (two short CDs) takes us on to Hawaii in July 1970, when Hendrix was in the full flow of some half-realised new directions. Unheard till now (apart from brief snatches in the Rainbow Bridge film), it’s also badly recorded, introverted, exploratory and unsuccessful, like a muffled bootleg of a jazz musician starting down paths he’s too stoned to finish.

August 1970, just two weeks before Hendrix’s death, at the Isle of Wight Festival, at 3am on a rainy, misty English early-morning, in front of a crowd more interested in sleep than future generations’envy that they’re watching the guitarist’s final British show, and at last you can hear Hendrix, fearing failure, suddenly in focus. Covering “God Save The Queen” and “Sgt Pepper”, he loses himself in a 21-minute “Machine Gun” and a still-mutating “New Rising Sun”, returns to high-ringing blues and the bull-elephant roar of “Voodoo Chile”, then banters between songs with easy, flaky charm. Here, finally, you get the full ebb and flow of the man and the long gone night. History, for once, worth repeating.

YETI

BOTH REPERTOIRE

Rising from the ashes of the original Amon D

“Race music” specialist Ralph Peer took a miniaturised Western Electric Recording System to Bristol, Tennessee in 1927 to record local hillbilly performers at $50 per song. Among the 19 hopefuls lucky enough to make their recording debuts over those 10 fateful days were The Carter Family and “The Blue Yodeller” Jimmie Rodgers (both featured here), acts who went on to dominate country on vinyl and over the airwaves in the ’30s and early-’40s.

Seventy-five years on, the passion of these simple, sincere performances still touches the heart.

With abundant sleevenotes by The Yardbirds’original manager Giorgio Gomelsky and Pete Frame’s family tree, this four-disc set documents the group’s progress from 1963 to 1967 in unprecedented detail. Beginning with the complete Crawdaddy recordings with and without Sonny Boy Williamson, the set presents early demos, the Marquee sessions (aka Five Live Yardbirds), and numerous alternative takes and half-finished tracks from the band’s period as a hit singles unit. Anyone interested in The Yardbirds will want this.

AQUEMINI

BOTH LAFACE/BMG

ATliens (1996) sees Dr

Only six new tracks on this first posthumous release from Aaliyah, a pretty thin return compared with afterlife grafters like 2Pac. Perhaps that’s blessing. The bulk of I Care 4 U has been filled out with Aaliyah’s greatest hits, her silvery and subtle reconfigurations of R&B. Winding back to “One In A Million”, “Are You That Somebody” and “Try Again”, it’s clear she’ll be remembered for two things: as an understated antidote to prevailing diva histrionics; and as the first major artist to benefit from the kinetic science of Timbaland. The unreleased, Timbaland-free tunes are decent enough, especially “Don’t Know What To Tell Ya”, although hardly earth-shattering. Still, a nice summation of an unusually graceful, unhappily short career.

This 26-track reissue is subtitled “Greatest Hits 1965-71”, which is optimistic to say the least since, in her entire career, Nancy Sinatra had only half a dozen hits at best. The majority of songs collected here are by Oklahoma producer/writer Lee Hazlewood, who inaugurated Sinatra’s modest stardom with the classic “These Boots Are Made For Walkin'”, which inevitably opens this disc.

One for the discard pile.

LET IT COME DOWN

BMG

As rumours of the forthcoming Spiritualized album suggest a rawer sound, it’s a good time to revisit their last two gilded recordings. Ladies And Gentlemen (1997) remains the obvious touchstone, the point where Jason Pierce’s ambitions to expand the sonic and emotional parameters of rock’n’roll?with free jazz, formal composition, gospel, voodoo blues?were most fully realised.

In most hands, such grandiosity would be folly. And, certainly, the dense orchestrations of Let It Come Down were sceptically received in 2001. Yet it sounds tremendous, as Pierce asserts his love of embellished classic song forms:Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds In Country & Western Dion’s Born To Be With You; Elvis’ “American Trilogy”.

Let’s hope the new direction proves as satisfying.

Marden Hill

CADAQUEZ

Various Artists

THE COOL MIKADO

ALL

Consisting of David Marks (a one-time Beach Boy, filling in while AI Jardine completed his dentistry studies), garage rock alumni Matthew Moore, Andy ‘Drew’Bennett and Larry Brown (both previously in LA fuzz rock supremos Davie Allan And The Arrows), The Moon spent a staggering 540 hours in the studio (much of it stoned, apparently) producing the 30 minutes of music for their 1967 debut Without Earth.

Unpromoted by its cash-strapped label, it failed to chart, a fate also suffered by 1969 follow-up The Moon. Competent but unexceptional, the band failed to transcend the limitations of the psych-rock genre.

E=MC

California’s CVB were prototypical alt.rockers with a penchant for campfire punk, mutated folk-blues, ska, weird Slavic polka and absurdist lyrics. Telephone Free Landslide Victory (1985) was a scattershot debut, ranging from the bizarre (“Where The Hell Is Bill?”) to the exhilarating (“Take The Skinheads Bowling”). By the 1986 follow-ups II & III and Camper Van Beethoven, they had become thrillingly tight and tough (though no less surreal?see “ZZ Top Goes To Egypt”), prompting an ill-prepared move to Virgin after 1987 EP Vampire Can Mating Oven (here augmented with extras as 1993 compilation Camper Vantiquities). The fifth CD?Greatest Hits Played Faster?captures their crumpled, inspirational live brilliance just before splitting in 1990.

For a while in the early ’80s they were known as The Inalienable Right To Eat Fred Astaire’s Asshole. But by 1983, the Texan art-scatologists congealed around Gibby Haynes were known as the relatively inoffensive Butthole Surfers. These are their first two records, a six-track EP and a surprisingly competent live follow-up. More surprising yet, they remain hilariously good, and more coherent than most will remember. A brain-busting fusion of hardcore (especially The Dead Kennedys), super-strength acid rock, shit-caked iconoclasm and adolescent gags, the Buttholes don’t shock as much now. But, by God, they still rock, somehow.

Subtitled “50 Gospel Greats”, this collection draws together top tracks by most of the major figures in the field, including Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Staple Singers, The Swan Silvertones, The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, The Golden Gate Quartet, The Dixie Hummingbirds, The Soul Stirrers, The Edwin Hawkins Singers and Etta James. Rarely does one get a chance to hear such an all-embracing compilation and the experience is deeply impressive. All that’s missing is a more detailed account of the artists involved. Apart from that, this comes recommended.

Back in the day when pop was like one long Million Dollar party, Brian Wilson was a far more genial Hollywood host than his subsequent legend suggests. Given carte blanche by the new enlightened regime at Capitol Records, inspired by such peers as Phil Spector, Nick Venet and Gary Usher, Wilson was fired by his own genius and imbued with the spirit of the day. While The Beach Boys were churning the cream of their early repertoire, in the studio or on the road, Wilson filled his workaholic week with a variety of extraneous projects that put the roof on Spector’s four walls of sound.

This compilation gathers together blissed-out examples of his craft as he polished the surfboard sound into the super productions of All Summer Long and Today! There was no shortage of talent to spot?in the case of The Honeys, a vocal sister act, Brian even married singer Marilyn Rovell, a woman whose role as his muse has never really been grasped. The complexities of Wilson’s work contrasted with the deliberate teen angst and sly humour of the tunes he whipped into shape for tough girl Sharon Marie, smart guy Gary Usher and the splendidly named Rachel & The Revolvers.

Brian not only oversaw these nuggets, he tended to write them in collaboration with his favoured lyricists, and often provided the harmonised counter chorus, the release valve in so many Boys songs. To that end, Pet Projects is a must-have item for Beach bums. Not only does it hang like a perfect pair of Capri pants, it also reminds us of the greatness of post-Honeys masterpieces like American Spring’s “Shyin’ Away”. With super-rare inclusions such as Glen Campbell’s slant on the witty, autobiographical “Guess I’m Dumb”, this is a vital part of the BW soundtrack. A Gold Star gem for all you Pet lovers.