Dangermouse The Grey Album 2004

Listeners used to the Hanover Band will need no prompting to buy this excellent series of performances, excellently recorded. They avoid some of the more quirky and, to some, off-putting aspects of period performance. There are no ugly bulges of tone and wirey shafts of under-nourished violin tone. The wind and brass play bang in tune and the instruments are fully under the control of these top players.

The Smithereens already have a single-disc compilation, 1995's excellent Blown to Smithereens: The Best of the Smithereens. Released in 2004, From Jersey It Came! The Smithereens Anthology expands on that collection, taking 15 of its 16 songs (a cover of the Outsiders' "Time Won't Let Me" is left behind) and adding 24 other tunes, including their version of "Downbound Train" from a Bruce Springsteen tribute and a selection from 1999's God Save the Smithereens, for a grand total of 39 tracks over two discs…

If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' LOVE sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track. Ever since the turn of the century, mash-ups were in vogue in the underground, as such cut-n-paste jobs as Freelance Hellraiser's "Stroke of Genius" – which paired up the Strokes' "Last Night" with Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" – circulated on the net, but no major group issued their own mash-up mastermix until LOVE in November 2006.

If boiled down to a simple synopsis, the Beatles' LOVE sounds radical: assisted by his father, the legendary Beatles producer George, Giles Martin has assembled a remix album where familiar Fab Four tunes aren't just refurbished, they're given the mash-up treatment, meaning different versions of different songs are pasted together to create a new track…