Talking Heads

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.