The Gap Fact

At one level, one would have to be a collector, an Anglophile, or a 1960s pop culture enthusiast to consider this 14-CD set a good deal. In the U.K., the EP ("extended play" single), which contains more tracks than an ordinary single and fewer than an album, has always been a far more popular format than it is in the U.S. During their heyday, the Beatles regularly released EPs in Great Britain, a total of 13 of them, in fact, between June 1963 and December of 1967, and they're all assembled in this box, complete with original art and sleeves in miniature…

A live document of the Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones sounds enticing, but the actual product is a letdown, owing to a mixture of factors, some beyond the producers' control and other very much their doing. The sound on the original LP was lousy – which was par for the course on most mid-'60s live rock albums – and the remasterings have only improved it marginally, and for that matter not all of it's live; a couple of old studio R&B covers were augmented by screaming fans that had obviously been overdubbed…

This 20-track compilation contains everything from their 1964 self-titled LP, as well as both sides of their three 1964 singles and a cover of Ray Davies' "I Go to Sleep" (found on a 1965 single). Its quaintness and lack of strong tunes (only one of which was a group original) limit its worth to British Invasion obsessives for the most part, with some value for Beatles completists due to the hit cover of "Like Dreamers Do." "No Time," one of several songs co-written by future Honeybus main man Pete Dello, is about the best song, with its moody melody; at their most energetic (as on "See If She Cares") they sound a bit like Gerry & the Pacemakers. The covers of '50s rock classics are dire, but the reading of Davies' "I Go to Sleep," with its eerie organ and high yelping backup vocals, has some curiosity value as the first cover of this song, which the Kinks did not release in the 1960s.

Regardless of who came up with the term "freakbeat" - either Bam Caruso czar Phil Smee created it in the mid-'80s or Richard Allen came up with it as the name for his psych fanzine - it's generally agreed that the Smoke were one of the best examples of the style (along with the Birds, the Creation, Les Fleur de Lys, and a few others) during the "swinging London" era of the mid-'60s. This 23-track comp of feedback-rich primeval psych-beat is highlighted by their finest moment right up front: "My Friend Jack" hit the U.K. Top 50 in 1967, despite the fact that it was banned by the BBC. (According to the excellent liner notes, the Beeb banned the song after the Bishop of Southwark - who misconstrued it as a celebration of drug abuse - contacted EMI head Sir Joseph Lockwood to complain about the song right in the midst of hysteria over a then-recent Rolling Stones drug bust, LSD, and "moral decline")…

Increasingly, and especially in a day and age where music is so widely and readily available thanks to advanced technologies, when a company or act wants to make a good box set, it had better deliver. To its credit, Beggars Banquet did just that with Rare Cult, an astoundingly comprehensive and entertaining collection that packs in 90 tracks over the course of six discs…