Talking Heads Once

Talking Heads fans have been waiting a long time to have the band's eight studio albums remastered and reissued, but they may find that the long-awaited revamping of the group's catalog is somewhat problematic. Instead of being released as individual titles, all eight titles were boxed and reissued as an expensive set, Talking Heads Brick (this box retails for $149.99; individual releases are tentatively scheduled to follow, three to four months after this set's October 2005 release) – and they're not issued as CDs, they're only available as DualDiscs, a format that contains a CD on one side and a DVD on the other.

Talking Heads' 30th anniversary is commemorated in typically artful style here, sonically upgrading their eight, era-defining albums via bonus-packed Dual Discs and encasing them in a molded white plastic box intricately embossed with the band's song titles. Each disc contains complete album tracks and bonus cuts remastered in High Resolution Stereo on its CD side, while the DVD programming on the flip offers up the audio tracks in expansive new 5.1 Surround Sound mixes, with all of the sonic upgrading personally supervised by Jerry Harrison. Those long overdue audio improvements alone would make it an attractive set, but fans of the band will find its wealth of bonus music (various B-sides and previously unreleased outtakes) and video (including a number of rare live clips seeing their first release here) supplements equally intriguing.

Released four years after the Talking Heads called it a day with 1988's Naked, Popular Favorites provides a thorough overview of one of the most important American bands of the '80s. From tightly wound early efforts such as "Psycho Killer" and "Don't Worry About the Government" to the seriously funky likes of "I Zimbra" and "Burning Down the House," David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Franz grew as musicians as they stretched the original concepts of the unit to the breaking point. Over the course of two discs and 32 selections, the anthology chronicles the Heads' development from Bowery art punks (albeit of the most civil stripe) to unlikely arena stars. A smattering of unreleased tracks and notes from the original quartet nicely flesh out the retrospective.

Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters later this year, and now, the Talking Heads concert film is getting a shiny new soundtrack to go along with it. Rhino is issuing an updated deluxe edition on August 18th, complete with the film’s full setlist as well as two previously unreleased songs.