This exemplary four-disc box takes the high road, attempting nothing less than an honest reconstruction of the Who's stormy, adventurous, uneven pilgrimage. While offering an evenhanded cross-section of single hits and classic album tracks, 30 Years garnishes the expected high points with B-sides, alternate and live versions of familiar tracks, and the quartet's earliest singles as the High Numbers…
There's little question that Shout! Factory's double-disc compilation The Marshall Tucker Band Anthology: The First 30 Years is exhuastive. It spans 32 songs, sampling from 20 albums, running more or less in chronological order, and giving a good idea of the group's narrative…
This set collects the seven studio albums from 1984′s Red Roses For Me to Pogue Mahone from 1996 and adds a previously unreleased live album The Pogues with Joe Strummer Live In London (recorded in December 1991). There have been Pogues reissues before of course, notably in 2004 when the albums were re-released on CD with bonus tracks. Rhino also issued an Original Album Series collection in 2009 that brought together the five Shane MacGowan albums in the usual card slipcase packaging. So while in some ways 30 Years treads familiar ground, there is still much to recommend it. First off the band were involved in the project, and were keen to have their say. The decision to revert back to ‘just’ the albums and lose the 2004 bonus tracks was theirs, for instance. Another example of the band’s input was the cover design of the box. The literary types amongst you might notice that the typesetting and design is ‘inspired by’ an edition of James Joyce’s landmark work Ulysses.
It's not billed that way but given the Who's productivity since their initial split in 1982, it's difficult not to view 2019's Who as the band's final album. It's only their second album in 37 years, and if it takes them another 13 years to complete a third – that's the length of time separating Who from 2006's Endless Wire – both Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey will be well into their eighties, a seemingly unlikely age for new work by rockers. Then again, the Who have long outlived Townshend's youthful desire to die before he gets old, a fact he began to contend with during the mid-'70s, when he chronicled his middle-aged disappointment on Who by Numbers.
Rushed out in 1970 as a way to bide time as the Who toiled away on their follow-up to Tommy, Live at Leeds wasn't intended to be the definitive Who live album, and many collectors maintain that the band had better shows available on bootlegs. But those shows weren't easily available whereas Live at Leeds was, and even if this show may not have been the absolute best, it's so damn close to it that it would be impossible for anybody but aficionados to argue. Here, the Who sound vicious - as heavy as Led Zeppelin but twice as volatile - as they careen through early classics with the confidence of a band that had finally achieved acclaim but had yet to become preoccupied with making art. In that regard, this recording - in its many different forms - may have been perfectly timed in terms of capturing the band at a pivotal moment in its history…
Combining the two rarities albums "Who's Missing", "Two's Missing" is a smart move since it gathers the bulk of the songs that haven't appeared on The Who's respective album…