These two sets represent CD-reissue sleuthing at its most comprehensive and – if you fear that rock & roll is choking on its own history – most dizzily obsessive. It is either madness or marvel (depending on your appreciation of swinging-'60s minutiae) to devote three discs apiece to the Beau B-ummels, a brilliant and sorely underrated footnote in U.S. mod pop, and the Sunrays, a well-scrubbed Los Angeles combo whose greatest claims to fame were the 1965 sunshine daydream classics "Andrea" and "I Live for the Sun."

I opt for marvel. The Sunrays issued only one album, Andrea, and a clutch of singles from 1964 to 1967, and for all of the baroque-pop allure of the group's Beach Boys-inspired blend of rippling twang and virginal harmonizing, there are moments on Vintage Rays when the band merely sounds like the Lettermen with surfboards. But the earthy glamour of unreleased rehearsals and bedroom demos such as "Got No Time for My Baby" and "I Was a Loser" is closer to the white-soul radiance of the Beach Boys' Friends and Wild Honey albums. As two-hit wonders go, the Sunrays are worth the extravagant reconsideration.

San Fran Sessions is all unreleased material, 60 outtakes from the Beau Brummels' 15 minutes of fame with the Bay Area-based Autumn label ("Laugh, Laugh," "Just a Little"). Sure, it's overkill, but it's the best kind. Blessed with an astonishing singer in Sal Valentino and a prodigious songwriter in guitarist Ron Elliott, the Brummels were San Francisco's missing link between Beatlemania and the Fillmore boom, and San Fran Sessions documents the band's evolution toward electric folk-rock mysticism with meticulous, loving detail. Now if only someone would do the same for the Brummels' superb Warner Bros. catalog.

For information, write to Sundazed Music, PO Box 85, Coxsackie, NY 12051 and Collectables Records, PO Box 35, Narberth, PA 19072. (RS 750/751)

DAVID FRICKE