I was always easy to buy for during the holidays. One Christmas my mom bought me The Cars’ Shake It Up and my sister got me The Police’s Ghost In The Machine. My uncle got me Steve Miller’s Book Of Dreams. There. Done.
I think a lot of people are like me to an extent. Sure, they regularly go digital and seldom look back, but for the holidays they’ll gladly go for a nicely packaged collector’s edition. This year finds quite a few available for all those music fanatics on your list. For proggers youngish and older, Porcupine Tree unleashes Octane Twisted, a live edition of their album The Incident with a career-spanning second disc in tow.
Octane Twisted is available by clicking here
.
Neo-prog band Marillion roar back from a quasi-hiatus of live releases with Sounds That Can’t Be Made. The single disc is worth the effort of seeking out for the music, but the goldmine is the Campaign Edition version that comes from their website. Along with the CD is a DVD featuring a feature-length “Making Of” documentary, a hardback book featuring incredible illustrations from several of the band’s visual contributors, and it is all wrapped up in a slipcase elevating the collection from album release to art object.
You can purchase this bookset exclusively from Marillion.com by clicking here.
Last year’s cd/dvd reissue of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was sumptuous but pricey. This year’s offering of Thick As A Brick has one newly-remastered CD, a DVD with Surround Sound remix from Steven Wilson, a reproduction of the St. Cleve newspaper and several behind-the-scenes written accounts added to the final hardback book. It is also, for the financially-impeded, easily more affordable than the Aqualung set was.
Thick As A Brick 40th Anniversary Edition is available by clicking here
.
Peter Gabriel’s career-redefining So roars back as an Immersion set, much like the Pink Floyd box sets of Wish You Were Here, Dark Side Of The Moon, and The Wall from last year. It too is an expensive purchase, but if there is a Gabriel fan on your list this is probably an item they cannot do without.
You can obtain the big time So box by clicking here
.
On the other end of the music spectrum, Kiss will let loose with the Casablanca Singles box set which will contain the 45s from their meteoric rise in the 1970’s, housed in reproduction sleeves in a tidy box.
The Kiss Casablanca Singles Box Set is available by clicking here
.
Speaking of records, the long-awaited heavyweight vinyl versions of The Beatles box is coming as well, and it is on the expensive side…but for the Beatlephile in your life, it may be indispensable.
Click The Beatles Stereo Vinyl Box Set
to order.
Now you might ask, “But Dunphy, I want to get you a gift this Christmas, so what would you like?” First off, why, thank you! Second off, here it is in all it’s soulful splendor — ba-dow! — Bill Withers: The Complete Sussex & Columbia Albums Collection
pulling together all the albums of one of pop music’s all-time greats. That would be quite a fine thing to find under my tree, and probably would be equally welcomed by anyone who recognizes the golden era of soul music.
There’s plenty more available to you this holiday season, from the big reunion album King Animal
from Soundgarden to another big reunion album Music from Another Dimension!
from Aerosmith, so as the long, lost media store chain Record World used to say in their old TV commercials, “Give the gift of music!”
Comments