Getting “Clue” Plus Some More Exciting La La Land News!

As promised, La La Land Records put the score to Clue up for order yesterday. The soundtrack to the comedy board game adaptation, composed by John Morris, is full of bonus content and limited to 3,000 copies and is yours to order here. (The track list is of course after the jump.)

But that’s not the only exciting La La Land news we have here at The Second Disc. Tomorrow afternoon, we’re running an exclusive interview with the head of the label, MV Gerhard! He’s going to talk about the great year the label in 2010 and what’s coming up for 2011. If you’re a soundtrack lover, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

Come on by around lunch time – say, 11:30 a.m. EST – and enjoy the interview. And what are you waiting for about Clue?

Full “Vs.,” “Vitalogy” Reissue Details Announced

Pearl Jam fans will have a few more black (silver?) circles to spin when Vs. and Vitalogy are reissued this March – and now we’ve got full details on the sets, including deluxe formats.

We mentioned a few days ago that Amazon had shown track listings for each album that had three bonus tracks apiece. It was also assumed that there would be a box combining both expanded albums with additional swag, not unlike 2009’s Ten monolith. And now we have details on all that and more. First of all, in addition to the remastered and expanded albums, there’s going to be a three-disc set that will pair the expanded Vs. and Vitalogy with the fan favorite live show from Boston’s Orpheum Theater in April of 1994. Sounds like a good deal – until you get to the contents of the box.

That set will include four CDs of the same material, leading one to (probably correctly) assume that the show is going to be cut down for the three-disc edition. That’s a bit of a rub, when you consider just how much else is in the box. That would include the same contents of the CDs on five vinyl LPs (one for Vs. and two each for Vitalogy and the Orpheum show), a cassette of the band’s Monkeywrench/Self-Pollution radio show from early 1995, an “80-page composition book filled with photos, drawings and artwork by Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament” and “a glassine envelope containing a collection of Vs. and Vitalogy– era memorabilia including beautiful lithographs of each band member, postcards, posters and much more.”

That stuff’s great for the super-fan, but for those who want to hear the concert in full (and it is supposed to be a great set list), it’s a bit of a rub. And the box looks to be available only through the band’s official Web site, which is particularly unusual as the Ten box was a surprise best-seller.

For vinyl collectors and PJ die-hards, the vinyl Vs. and double-vinyl Vitalogy will be available at indie shops on April 12 for Record Store Day (four days later). The full press release is embedded after the jump; we’ve also included the full Orpheum set list to give fans at least some perspective on what’s to be expected from the eventual live releases.

(And a big tip of the hat to Matt Wardlaw of Addicted to Vinyl for passing this along!)

Review: Tim Buckley, “Tim Buckley”

When Tim Buckley is discussed today, it’s most often in the context of his son Jeff, and the eerie similarities between the lives of father and son, both of whom died at tragically young ages. So Rhino Handmade’s expanded two-CD remaster of Tim Buckley’s debut (Rhino Handmade RHM2 526087, 2011) isn’t just a celebration of a folk-rock classic, but a stunning reminder of his talent on its own considerable merits.

Tim Buckley’s eponymous debut remains a haunting work by a haunted man. Yet like many great talents, Buckley was – for a while, at least – able to channel his demons into lasting art. Hailing from bucolic Orange County, California, the teenaged Buckley had to drive north on the newly-finished 405 freeway to be “where the action is” on the Sunset Strip. It was at The Trip that Buckley’s band, The Bohemians (consisting of singer/guitarist Buckley, bassist Jim Fielder, drummer Larry Beckett and guitarist Brian Hartzler), encountered Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. The Mothers were playing the Trip, and the Bohemians had a connection. The Mothers’ drummer Jimmy Carl Black, who played on the titanic 1966 Freak Out!, was a friend of Fielder’s, having worked with him at an Anaheim music store. (Fielder would have a brief, tumultuous stint in The Mothers between the releases of Freak Out! and its follow-up, Absolutely Free, and then go on to become a founding member of Blood, Sweat and Tears.) Black took a liking to The Bohemians and introduced them to The Mothers’ then-manager, Herb Cohen. It was Buckley alone, however, who captivated Cohen. He took the young singer under his wing, both personally and professionally. As he had negotiated Zappa’s debut on Verve Records, he engineered a deal for Buckley at Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records.

For Tim Buckley, Elektra only wanted the best. Holzman himself helmed the singer/songwriter’s debut album with the label’s house producer Paul Rothchild, a name now familiar to fans of The Doors and Janis Joplin. Rothchild was aided by his frequent associate, engineer Bruce Botnick. Fielder remained on bass, joined by Lee Underwood on lead guitar (beginning a fruitful relationship with Buckley) and Billy Mundi of The Mothers on drums. Mundi, later a founding member of Rhinoceros, enjoyed a longer association with Zappa’s unit than Fielder, playing on a number of Zappa’s albums including We’re Only In It for the Money and Uncle Meat. Tim Buckley was a luxury project by any account. Van Dyke Parks had just been in the throes of creating Smile with Brian Wilson when he was enlisted to overdub keyboards, and seasoned pro Jack Nitzsche brought his usual majestic touch as composer of the album’s string arrangements.

How does Rhino’s remastered and expanded Tim Buckley stack up? Hit the jump to find out!

UPDATE: Marley Versions Aplenty

The release of Live Forever, Bob Marley’s last concert on CD, yielded the first retail exclusives for a catalogue title in 2011 – a T-shirt for Target buyers and a bonus disc for Best Buy customers – and we have some more detail about the offerings at each store.

For reasons I can’t wrap my head around, Target is also offering a third version of the set – not only the double-disc edition with and without the T-shirt, but a pared-down single-disc version of the album. While the full version of Live Forever, spread across two discs, is in a digipak, this Target-exclusive “highlights” disc is in a jewel case, instead. It’s relatively cheap at $7.99 (this week’s sale price), but why would anyone want to avoid the extra $4 for the full concert – particularly when so many live archive sets get cut down?

The Best Buy bonus disc, meanwhile, collates five rarer studio tracks found on compilations and deluxe reissues along with an embedded video of an interview with the Marley family. These tracks had previously been released as an iTunes EP, but it’s always nice to get these tracks on disc. (Thanks to super-reader Don for the tip!)

The track lists for the amended Live Forever and the Best Buy-exclusive disc are after the jump.

A Little More “Love” is All You Need: iTunes to Release Another Beatles Album, Expanded

Despite the less than stellar reception by yours truly, The Beatles’ partnership with iTunes has been a massive boon for The Fab Four’s catalogue. And that boon looks to get a little bigger next week, when EMI and Apple release another one of the band’s albums for download: the soundtrack to Love, the band’s Cirque du Soleil show.

Created in 2006 for The Mirage in Las Vegas, Love combines the artistic and acrobatic aesthetics of the Montreal-based entertainment troupe with the music of The Beatles in an impressive multimedia display. (It was the first marriage between Cirque du Soleil and rock music; Viva Elvis! followed last year and Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour will bow this fall.)

In a bold stroke, the soundtrack to Love was built by Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles from the multitracks of some 130 Beatles songs and demos. It’s essentially the ultimate Beatles mash-up, and in the days before the remasters of the band’s catalogue it was one of the freshest spins on some old favorites.

Both Love and the 2008 documentary All Together Now (which chronicled the making of the show) will be released on iTunes next Tuesday, February 8. The notable distinction for collectors, of course, is the addition of two tracks not present on the original disc: remixes of “The Fool on the Hill” and “Girl.” It is not known if the tracks will be album-only (so far, the album is able to be pre-ordered as a whole), nor is it known if the versions of “Revolution” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.” will be extended as they were on the DVD-Audio version of the LP. (That would be a particular boon to collectors!)

We’ll report back once the album comes out digitally; in the meantime, reacquaint yourself with the track list after the jump.