Blue Oyster Cult

Blue Öyster Cult marks time with a second live album on which they turn out good, if redundant, concert versions of recent favorites like "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and "Godzilla" and add to their repertoire of live covers such oldies as the MC5's "Kick out the Jams" and the Animals' "We Gotta Get out of This Place." A perfectly acceptable, completely unnecessary souvenir record from a hard-touring band of the '70s. (It should perhaps be noted that the mid- to late '70s was a period when more live albums than usual were being released, especially in the wake of Peter Frampton's massively successful 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive!.)

76 minutes of "thinking-man's metal," courtesy of Blue Oyster Cult! Includes all their hits- (Don't Fear) The Reaper; Burnin' for You; In Thee , and Shooting Shark -plus Godzilla; Joan Crawford; Black Blade; The Red & the Black; I Love the Night; Astronomy , and six more Cult classics.

In 1999, Mobile Fidelity reissued Blue Oyster Cult's first two albums, Blue Oyster Cult (1972) and Tyranny and Mutation (1973) on a single 24-karat gold CD that was aimed at audiophiles. Hearing the albums back to back on the same disc, one is reminded how much crisper, tougher and sharper Murry Krugman and Sandy Pearlman's production was on Tyranny and Mutation – it's a production that's more suitable for a heavy metal/hard rock band…

The 2012 box set Original Album Classics rounds up the five albums BOC released between 1975 and 1983: On Your Feet or on Your Knees, Some Enchanted Evening, Cultosaurus Erectus, Fire of Unknown Origin, and Revölution by Night. Every one of these CDs is packaged as a mini-LP in a paper sleeve, making this a handsome, affordable way to get the prime of Blue Öyster Cult in one fell swoop.

This is useful, and confounding. This is truly a Blue Öyster Cult singles comp, but not in the usual sense. Over 20 tracks, it rounds up BÖC singles released all over the world, which keeps it from being just another best-of. For instance, take the final cut: "Astronomy." This is not the original released on Secret Treaties but the redone version issued on Imaginos issued in 1988 and a single distributed only in the U.K. and Holland. And so it goes with this thing. Many of these cuts were issued as singles in the United Kingdom, or in Japan ("Moon Crazy," "Flaming Telepaths") or Europe, marked by the inclusion of tracks like the live read of "We Gotta Get Outta This Place," released in Germany as a single, or "Fallen Angel," released in Spain.