Another EMI Budget Box for Barclay James Harvest

One last new release that slipped through our fingers yesterday: a budget box from EMI U.K., collating five discs of material by Barclay James Harvest.

Taking Some Time On: The Parlophone-Harvest Years 1968-1972 collects all of the band’s first few albums – Barclay James Harvest (1970), Once Again (1971), Barclay James Harvest and Other Short Stories (1972) and Baby James Harvest (1972) – along with all the non-LP singles and B-sides at the time, BBC sessions and other outtakes. This includes everything included on the Harvest/EMI remasters of these albums from 2002 (the mastering is taken from those same discs, as well) as well as this year’s 40th anniversary expansion of Once Again. Last but not least, three unreleased live tracks recorded by Bob Harris for the BBC in 1972 are included as well.

Hit the jump to order this set from Amazon U.K. and a complete discographical rundown.

Smells Like More Details on 20th Anniversary “Nevermind” (UPDATED WITH TRACK LIST)

UPDATE: The track listing is now at the bottom of the post, courtesy of the NME!

Original post: Back on June 22, we reported on Geffen Records/Universal Music Enterprises’ plans for a 20th anniversary edition of Nirvana’s 1991 Nevermind, originally released on September 24 of that year. New details have been released on the set which will arrive in stores on September 27, just three days after the exact anniversary.  Universal has stopped short of providing a complete track listing, but one thing’s for sure. This looks like a box set that should leave you saying anything but “Nevermind” about the classic album described by our very own Mike Duquette as having “firmly solidified Nirvana’s place not only in the pop spotlight, but in the rock canon as well.”

Like most of the other releases in the “Super Deluxe Edition” format, Nevermind will be overflowing with material!  Among the content on this 4-CD/1-DVD set (which will be limited to 10,000 copies in the U.S. and another 30,000 internationally):

• Remastered edition of the album plus associated B-sides
• First complete release of the pre-Nevermind demos recorded at Butch Vig’s Smart Studios in Wisconsin
• “Boombox recordings” of early band rehearsals, containing embryonic versions of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Come As You Are,” “On a Plain” and more
• The Devonshire Mixes, the full album as produced and mixed by Vig, as opposed to the commercially released version that was produced by Vig and mixed by Andy Wallace
• Two previously unreleased BBC recordings
• Full concert recorded at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on Halloween night, 1991, on both CD and DVD
• A 90-page book “full of rarely and never before seen photos, documents and various other visual artifacts of the Nevermind era.”

Too “Super Deluxe” for you?  Universal’s got you covered. Hit the jump for the additional, pared-down releases that are planned for the anniversary, as well as the low-down on the box set’s DVD!

The Smiths Are Out of the Bag: Massive U.K. Box Planned

As we at The Second Disc HQ love to point out, Morrissey once set his scathing lyrical pen on record companies’ propensity for reissues on The Smiths’ “Paint a Vulgar Picture.” Currently, he must be shitting bricks: Rhino U.K. is planning The Smiths – Complete, a box set compiling the influential band’s entire discography, all newly remastered.

Clever fans spotted the presence of the set on the label’s site late last night (we have super-reader Dean H. to thank for hipping us to it), and our good friends at Slicing Up Eyeballs did a post on the whole affair earlier. But trying to order the set would yield nothing.

Now, however, the set is official: the band’s eight albums – studio albums The Smiths (1984), Meat is Murder (1985), The Queen is Dead (1986) and Strangeways, Here We Come (1987); non-LP singles compilations Hatful of Hollow (1984), The World Won’t Listen (1987) and the U.S.-only Louder Than Bombs (1987) and the live album “Rank” (1988) – will be included in the set, all newly remastered by former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr with engineer Frank Arkwright in London’s Metropolis Studios.

The set is available as a vinyl offering or on CD (with mini-LP replica packaging included throughout), but die-hard fans are going to want to check out the super-deluxe version. And what’s on that, you say? Hit the jump to find out!

What The World Needs Now Is Rockbeat Records

Billy Vera, Alberta Hunter and Jackie DeShannon may not have terribly much in common at first glance.  But they’re just a few of the artists coming your way thanks to Rockbeat Records.  Yes, there’s a new player in the catalogue field, and their slate of reissues proves that they’re ready to make a big impression!

Founded by Arny Schorr of S’more Entertainment and distributed by eOne, Rockbeat counts among its team an alumnus of Rhino Records.  James Austin, the former Vice President of A&R at Rhino, serves in the same capacity at the up-and-coming label.  Rockbeat promises “the release of enhanced CDs and vinyl and the creation of reissues and compilations on a variety of music genres.”  The label is making good on that promise with a diverse group of artists and releases, all of which can be found at its website.  These include releases in genres ranging from blues and country to folk and adult contemporary.  Among the enticing albums already available or in the pipeline: Billy Vera’s career anthology The Billy Vera Story, Alberta Hunter’s Downhearted Blues, Carole King’s Pearls: The Songs of Goffin and King, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s self-titled debut, Dave Edmunds’ Rockpile and Ike and Tina Turner’s Festival of Live Performance.

One upcoming title isn’t a reissue, but should be of great interest to a number of our readers nonetheless.  Jackie DeShannon’s last studio album was 2000’s You Know Me on the Varese Sarabande label.  Since then, fans of DeShannon have had to content themselves with numerous reissues of her original albums as well as anthologies of her finest work.

Rockbeat has just announced the September 27 release of When You Walk in the Room, a newly-recorded collection of some of DeShannon’s greatest hits and personal favorites.  Much like a great catalogue reissue can cast a vintage recording in a new light, DeShannon intends to do the same with the stripped-down acoustic reworkings of her familiar songs.  Guitar, voice and bass are the order of the day, with occasional flourishes of electric guitar or subtle strings. The eleven tracks include both those written by DeShannon (“Put a Little Love in Your Heart,” “Bette Davis Eyes”) and those in her songbook written by others but popularized by Jackie (Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What The World Needs Now,” Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono’s “Needles and Pins”).

When You Walk in the Room is a particularly timely release, coinciding with DeShannon’s 2011 induction into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.  That august institution is currently chaired by Jackie’s contemporary, Jimmy Webb, with Hal David a Chairman Emeritus.  The album isn’t an exercise in recreating the sounds of yesteryear (though DeShannon’s voice has more than held up over the years) in the style of Squeeze’s Spot the Difference or America’s The Hits, but rather an intimate recasting of some cherished compositions, more in the style of Randy Newman’s Songbook volumes.

Hit the jump for more on Jackie DeShannon and Rockbeat Records!

One Stop Shopping: “Complete Collections” Coming From Denver, Washington, Kansas and Shorter

No sooner did your catalogue correspondent pop a very old disc of John Denver’s 1985 Dreamland Express into the CD player than the news arrived that Dreamland Express would be collected along with 23 (!) other Denver LPs in Legacy’s new The Complete Albums Collection.   But that’s not all.  Following the first wave of releases which arrived just over two months ago, the catalogue initiative continues!  For the uninitiated, The Complete Album Collection box sets bring together an artist’s entire tenure at a label (in these cases, Columbia, Kirshner, Sony Classical and RCA) in one tidy box set, with albums in individual mini-LP sleeves and booklets containing brief essays and credits for each album.  The first four artists to receive this treatment were The Byrds, Sam Cooke, Stan Getz and Return to Forever, while joining the beloved country legend Denver in this new batch are jazz greats Grover Washington, Jr. and Wayne Shorter, plus classic rock heroes Kansas.  There is even special material, when applicable.  A rare privately-pressed 1966 LP appears on the John Denver box, Kansas’ live Two for the Show has been expanded into a 2-disc Legacy Edition for its 30th anniversary, and two bonus discs are in the Shorter box collecting the saxophonist’s compositions recorded by his group Weather Report.

We’ll put up track listings later, but in the interest of passing this information to you as quickly as possible, hit the jump for the titles included in each box set and the label-supplied information for each title!  All titles can be pre-ordered exclusively at Sony’s indispensable online PopMarket store.