Everyone needs a little Mathis James Reed in their lives, and this reissue of the 1958 Vee Jay disc is a great place to rectify any omission. Not just a guitar genius but a true giant of rock’n’roll vocalese, Reed’s repertoire informed the white boy R&B and pop school as surely as did Chuck Berry’s. Plug in here for “Go On To School”, “You Got Me Crying” and welcome finds like “High And Lonesome” and the countrified and funky “She Don’t Want Me No More”. Vital sounds.

DEATH CERTIFICATE

THE PREDATOR

LETHAL INJECTION

ALL EMI

After an acrimonious split from NWA in 1989, LA’s Ice Cube recruited East Coast pioneers The Bomb Squad to produce his solo debut, 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. This resulted in a brilliantly wound-up, pissed-off album that found Sadler and Shocklee’s hypertense kineticism pushed to new heights and an on-point Cube flinging hatred in all directions: It’s also indecently funny?the chorus of “Fuck You, Ice Cube!” on “The Nigga Ya Love To Hate” still raises a sardonic chuckle. Death Certificate (1991) was a time-marking exercise, albeit a bruising one which now includes the crucial “Kill At Will” EP (featuring ghetto lament “Dead Homiez”) but ’92’s classic The Predator marks Cube’s greatest achievement to date. A flawlessly paced and produced album which grudgingly acknowledges light (“It Was A Good Day”) as well as dark (“Now I Gotta Wet ‘Cha”), today it stands alongside Cypress Hill’s “Black Sunday” as a pinnacle of early ’90s gangstadelia. Lethal Injection (1993) unfortunately upped the misogyny quota?see “Cave Bitch”?and by this time Cube’s head had been turned by Hollywood and the music shifted into second place. Shame.

WHO’S NEXT

BOTH POLYDOR

Originally released in 1966, A Quick One was The Who’s second album, designed to showcase the writing talents of the band, each of whom contribute songs. The stand-out track was the nine-minute mini opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away”, a sort of trial run for Tommy. Available here for the first time in remastered stereo, it also features various contemporary B-sides and most of the Ready Steady Who EP. Who’s Next (1971), which defined the group’s live set for the 1970s, here reappears in a two-disc Deluxe Edition, including a 75-minute live concert recorded at the Young Vic. The main album comes with six bonus tracks, plus extensive notes and new graphics. Top value, great music.

Ben Watt

NORTH MARINE DRIVE

BOTH CHERRY RED

In 1982, Thorn and Watt were Hull University students, both signed to the southern indie Cherry Red though, amazingly, they hadn’t met. That year, Watt recorded North Marine Drive for

THE MOD GENERATION

THE SKINHEAD GENERATION

THE NORTHERN SOUL GENERATION

THE SOUL BOY GENERATION

THE MOD REVIVAL GENERATION

THE RARE GROOVE GENERATION

THE ACID JAZZ GENERATION

ALL CASTLE

It’s difficult to picture the youth of 2003 mustering up the audacity to walk the streets dressed like Edwardian gents with sculpted duck’s arse hair-dos dripping with pomade while tottering on soles as thick as tractor tyres. Today, kids play ‘beat-em-ups’ on X-Boxes. Back then, they rumbled for real. So we’d like to believe anyway.

There will always be something richly romantic about the benchmark youth cults?the teds, the mods, the northern soul boys. On the surface all hemlines and haircuts, there was still plenty of musical passion behind the elitist fashions as demonstrated on these eight accompanying compilations to the S.O.U.L. TV documentary series. Nearly all exemplify young English white kids’ love affair with black music, be it the Skinheads’ appropriation of Jamaican ska, the northern soul crowd’s debt to East Coast R&B, the ’70s soul boy and rare groove sets’ shift towards funk and finishing with the ’80s acid jazz gang’s reinvention of Blue Note and hip hop as a man-made genre unto itself. Like aural dictionary definitions, these discs do a grand job of marking out each generation’s stylistic boundaries, aided by series producer Eddie Piller’s instructive sleeve notes.

Personal preference will, of course, be dictated by one’s own gang allegiance, though it’s hard not to recommend the excellent Mod CD or even its somewhat farcical sequel showcased on 1979’s Mod Revival (Secret Affair’s ridiculous “Time For Action” included). But nothing really tops The Teddy Boy Generation. Its opening hat-trick of Vince Taylor (the original “Brand New Cadillac”, even better than The Clash’s cover), Hank Mizell (“Jungle Rock”) and Johnny Burnette is simply unbeatable. Who needs the New Rock Revolution when the old one sounds this good?

Turning the post-’70s Love albums Out Here and False Start into a slimline disc is an exercise that will only appeal to the most completist Arthur Lee devotee, although liner note snaps of hard-to-find singles are a teaser. This Love Mk III arrived with the premise that the musicians couldn’t stand recreating Forever Changes et al, hardly likely to endear them to anyone now. Even so, the funky blues cul-de-sac isn’t the only direction. “Willow Willow”, “I Still Wonder” and “Stand Out” are archetypal sweet Lee moments; the Hendrix collaboration, “The Everlasting First”, recorded at London’s Olympic Studios, is no great shakes.

Beyond My Bloody Valentine, much of the silvery dreampop of the early ’90s has aged badly:hamstrung by insensitive productions; superseded by electronic solipsists. A pleasure, then, to discover how well Kitchens Of Distinction stand up. Julian Swales’ multi-dimensional guitar washes are still transporting, but it’s their zeal, humanity and surging tunes which really shine through in 2003. That, and the fact current New York darlings Interpol often sound like a KOD tribute band. Shame, though, that openly gay singers like Patrick Fitzgerald remain scarce in the covertly homophobic world of indie rock.

GRATEFUL DEAD

ANTHEM OF THE SUN

AOXOMOXOA

LIVE/DEAD

WORKINGMAN’S DEAD

AMERICAN BEAUTY

GRATEFUL DEAD [LIVE]

EUROPE ’72

HISTORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD VOL 1 (BEAR’S CHOICE)

ALL RHINO

When Jerry Garcia died in a drug treatment facility in California on August 9, 1995, most people assumed the Grateful Dead’s “long, strange trip” was surely over. Without Garcia, it was argued, the heart and soul of the Dead had passed away.

That wasn’t the entire case. The huge body of live and studio work they’d left behind had been an on-the-road legacy; now it became their salvation. All of these albums were available in the 2001 ‘coffin box set’, which retailed at around the

Dipping into the rarities bag, this 14-track compilation of soul and funk duets is designed to appeal to hardcore collectors rather than the general audience. Some of the tracks indeed are so rare that they have been transferred to disc from vinyl complete with obtrusive surface noise. Relative sound levels are likewise very roughly calculated. Among the participants are James Brown and Marva Whitney, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Ray Charles and Lillian Ford, and, amazingly, Peters and Lee. Strictly for specialists only.

Picture the wooden shack stove and pull up a rocking chair for this splendid reissue of 1959’s disc, augmented with a different take on “I’m So Worried Baby” and a chilled-out “Unfriendly Woman”. Remarkably prescient blues sounds live here in the shape of Hooker classics like “Dimples”, “Crawlin’ King Snake” (as covered by The Doors) and the standard “Boogie Chillun”.

It’s a quiet storm of controlled chaos from the man who put the grits in the Grammies.

Putting the techno into technology, Mute’s electronic sub-label are releasing this meaty compilation of rarities and former 12-inch singles in both 16-track CD and 28-track MP3 format. But who gives a fuck where the sound comes from, the only valid test is: does it rock? And yes, it mostly does, from the sci-fi Tardis whooshes of Umek to the beatific glitch’n’glide of Luke Slater, and from SI Futures’ sublime Kraftwerk pastiche “Eurostar” to the glistening Moroderesque pulses of 1st Bass. Quality and diversity prevail, with old-guard names like Derrick May and Nitzer Ebb holding their own against younger acid kids. Akufen’s blistering remix of Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag”, for example, still sounds like disco-punk musique concr

The first of two Beeb collections scheduled this year (Vol 2’s 1971-73 Peel Sessions follows), this two-CD set captures Canterbury’s finest pot-noodlers in transit from May Day psychedelia to anarchic otherworldliness. From a previously unreleased 1967 session with Kevin Ayers (including a “Clarence In Wonderland” dewier and jauntier than his 1970 Shooting At The Moon version) to 1971’s “Eamonn Andrews/All White”, the trip from acid skylarking to squawking freeform jazz remains a startlingly expressive, if at times awkward, vision. Robert Wyatt’s “Moon In June” is a standout.

Memphis power pop is such an ever-expanding genre that Big Star’s Alex Chilton, the godfather of the scene, must wish he’d taken out copyright. The Scruffs are one of several pre-Replacements acts who tapped into that antsy girls-on-my-mind mood and pursued the blend of melancholia with added rock’n’roll rush to a logical conclusion. Fronted by Stephen Burns, this second Scruffs album (recorded in 1978/9) contains band staples like “Go Faster”, “Alice, Please Don’t Go” and the post-Flamin’ Groovies blood-letting of “Treachery”. Burns still fronts a Scruffy outfit and is big in Japan and Scotland?natch. Definitely one for the gurls.

A major influence on Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and many more, Elmore James died in 1963, just as young British and American players were customising his scything fury for the mass market. But this intensive three-CD set shows his visceral but good-humoured style was still red hot on his final recordings for entrepreneur Bobby Robinson. With his vibrato guitar and anguished vocal at a peak, James’ magisterial reach is thrilling and indomitable, defying anyone to take his crown.

Dan Treacy is revered by some as a paragon of scruffy, scuffed outsider pop art, a punky British answer to Arthur Lee or Skip Spence. The fact that these devotees are the kind of people who hail Edward Ball as a genius and covet Biff Bang Pow! seven-inches speaks volumes. Sure enough, here we have the odd flash or two of inspiration (notably “King And Country” and “How I Learned To Love… The Bomb”) stifled by a general air of disappointment and opportunities missed. While the na

Kelly was unique in being a British white female singer working solely in the blues. The antithesis of Janis Joplin, this straight-faced performer based her vocal and guitar styles on male blues singers like Son House. This 45-track double features Jo Ann with a slew of helpers, including Tony McPhee and Mick Fleetwood.