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This week sees the vinyl release of Dick’s Picks Volume 5, the fifth live album in the Dick’s Picks series of releases by the Grateful Dead.
This set features a full concert, recorded on 26 December 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium Arena in Oakland, California. It was originally issued on CD back in 1996.
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We have some pictures of this Eagles vinyl box coming soon, but Rhino have done an excellent job with the packaging with gold foil blocking, textured sleeves, posters included and other details meticulously recreated. The six-LP set is currently £66 on Amazon UK (having come down from over three figures) which is significantly cheaper than the US price of $140 which equates to about £85.
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In February 2014 Universal Music will release Rainbow: The Singles Box Set 1975-1986.
This set will feature 19 CDs in replica single sleeves, housed in a rigid box with lift-off lid. All the original single mixes have been remastered for the box which also comes with a 32-page booklet featuring detailed annotations on each release as well as sleeve notes by Andy Francis, an authority on the band. Full track listing can be found below.
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Paul Rymer guest reviews the Japan-only 2CD 30th Anniversary Edition of Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s soundtrack to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence as well as the companion release Coda.
Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983) is one of those unusual films that has gained a greater reputation over time; it is the film debut of Takeshi Kitano, who later went on to become an award winning director and writer; Jack Celliers is one of David Bowie‘s best regarded acting roles, and the soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also plays a leading role in the film) has lived on beyond the silver screen, most recently forming part of Anne Dudley’s Rhythm Of A Decade performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra at London’s South Bank Centre.
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With this year’s obsession with David Bowie‘s The Next Day you’d think he hadn’t produced any decent work since 1983′s Let’s Dance.
The reality is that between 1993 and 2003 Bowie produced seven studio albums (counting Buddha of Surburbia) of which three are at least as good as (if not better) than The Next Day.
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Universal/Polydor’s Eric Clapton Give Me Strength: The ’74/’75 Recordings is released today.
This is a generous six-disc set, packaged in a landscape book (very similar to last year’s Velvet Underground & Nico super deluxe edition). The 60-page volume is well-laid out with lots of great period photography and includes an essay by John Lynskey on this period in Clapton’s career.
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It’s quite hard to determine the point of releasing Bob Dylan‘s Complete Album Collection, Vol. One on a USB stick, housed in a (non-working) harmonica.
Although it was originally announced as containing better-than-CD quality audio, Sony ended up updating their marketing material and the digital files on here are actually 16bit /44.1kHz FLAC format, which is identical quality to what’s on the CD version. In other words the ‘carrot’ of hi-res Bob Dylan disappeared.
If you’re interested in the mechanics of how the USB stick works, the process is that you plug it into your computer and (for Mac owners) you navigate to the drive called “DYLAN” and double click on a file called ‘MacStart’. That launches the interface which looks like this:
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The death of Lou Reed makes the reissue of The Velvet Underground‘s second album White Light / White Heat all the more poignant. This Super Deluxe Edition echoes the packaging of last year’s Velvet Underground & Nico set although it only contains half the number of CDs (three). 
Expanded versions of 461 Ocean Boulevard, There’s One In Every Crowd and E.C. Was Here (all with previously unreleased material), plus a disc of Freddie King sessions AND a blu-ray audio with hi-res surround sound versions (including an unreleased Elliot Scheiner 5.1 of 461 Ocean Boulevard) make this set an absolute feast for Eric Clapton fans.
This massive box is effectively the entire studio catalogue of John Mellencamp – 223 tracks over 35 years. Includes bonus offerings with many of the albums.
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This vinyl box collects all of Dire Straits‘ albums on heavyweight 180g vinyl. Brothers In Arms and On Every Street are double LPs meaning this is an eight-LP set.
At £76 on Amazon UK at the time of writing, that’s under a tenner per vinyl which seems like a pretty good deal. Bernie Grundman has mastered the first four titles from analogue masters, with lacquers cut by Grundman and Chris Bellman.
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Universal Music will reissue Ocean Colour Scene’s 1997 album Marchin’ Already as a four-disc box set in February 2014, as well as re-releasing a two-CD deluxe edition of their debut a few weeks earlier
For the Marchin’ Already box (which will also be issued as a two-CD deluxe), the original album takes up the first disc and is joined by a second CD of B-sides, radio sessions and previously unreleased demos. A further audio disc offers up a hour of live performance capturing the band’s gig at the Manchester Apollo on 22 February 1998 and a DVD – Travellers Tunes: Live at Stirling Castle (originally a VHS release in ’98) – completes the set.
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