The Best Box Sets of 2022
This year’s best crop of archival sets ranged from deep dives into classic albums by David Bowie, Guns N’ Roses, and the Beatles, a box that enhances the legacy of New York punk’s greatest pop band, and several sterling sets by heroes of live rock & roll.
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The Beatles, ‘Revolver Special Edition’
No Beatles album has a mystique quite like Revolver. John, Paul, George, and Ringo threw all of their craziest ideas into their experimental 1966 masterpiece, turning Abbey Road Studios into a hotbed of madcap creative frenzy. Revolver was underrated for many years — especially in America, where the complete album didn’t even get released for 20 years. So it took time to get recognized as the Beatles’ boldest, brashest statement. But the shock of the new Special Edition, with a treasure trove of unheard outtakes, is realizing there’s so much more to these songs than anyone knew. Hearing the new Revolver is a revelation that takes time to sink in for real: proof that the world is still underrating the Beatles. —R.S.
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David Bowie, ‘Divine Symmetry’
Divine Symmetry, subtitled The Journey to Hunky Dory, is a treasure trove of five discs containing raw demos, radio sessions, a rare live concert, and alternative mixes, following Bowie as he created his first classic album, in 1971. Divine Symmetry’s demo recordings, nearly all of which have never been officially released, show all the ways Bowie tried to figure out how to fill what he referred to as Bob Dylan’s “leadership void.” The songs that didn’t make it to the Hunky Dory studio version are especially revealing; each shows Bowie was woodshedding new characters. Likewise, the three live recordings here demonstrate Bowie’s maturation. Taken as a whole, you can hear how this was the moment when David Bowie realized he could fill the void and lived up to his threat in “Changes”: “Watch out, you rock & rollers.” —K.G.
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PJ Harvey, ‘B-Sides, Demos & Rarities’
PJ Harvey has released nine studio albums to date (she recently told Rolling Stone that a 10th would come out next year), and along the way she has discarded many songs that were just as good as the ones that found homes on her albums. This year she released a sizable chunk of her lost sheep on the impressive box set, B-sides, Demos & Rarities, which contains 14 previously unreleased tracks among its 59 songs, rounding out her long-running archival project. The set is full of revealing highlights, especially demos from the early Nineties that expand our sense of the blunt-force brutality of classic Harvey albums like Dry and Rid of Me. —K.G.
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Paul McCartney, ‘’The 7″ Singles Box’
Packaged in a redwood-pine and birch-ply wooden art crate, this beautiful collection of 80 7-inch singles and 159 tracks spans Sir Paul’s entire career, from his 1971 debut solo single “Another Day” to a 2022 Record Store Day version of his 2021 song “Women and Wives,” with a remix from St. Vincent as its B side. The set also includes 7-inch versions of songs that previously only existed as CD singles, digital downloads, bonus tracks, as well as a 148-page book with a foreword from McCartney and an essay by Rolling Stone senior writer Rob Sheffield. You can spend hours just flipping through the covers, which replicate the sleeves of releases in 11 different countries. Along with being a completist’s treasure trove, the singles format makes it a fittingly lavish tribute to the ongoing life’s work of one of music’s greatest songmakers, and record releasers. —J.D.
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Guns N‘ Roses, ‘Use Your Illusion (Super Deluxe)’
On their evil-twin confessional testaments, Use Your Illusion I and II, Guns N’ Roses could be the Stones, Elton John, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, N.W.A, and Nine Inch Nails, depending on the song and sometimes at the same time — but still always sounding like themselves. Together the albums spanned nearly three hours. You’d think with so much material that a box set would include demos and work-in-progress versions of songs, but this collection instead focuses on Guns N’ Roses, the live band. The two lengthy live shows on the three bonus discs present GN’R at interesting points in the use and abuse of their illusions — one a small club show, another at a bigger venue, both presenting an image of the Guns N’ Roses we know today: big, deafening, and kings of the jungle. —K.G.
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Blondie, ‘Against the Odds: 1974-1982’
In the late Seventies, Blondie were the poppiest band of CBGB’s first punk wave. But after they hit Number One in early 1979 with “Heart of Glass,” their pasticheurs-and-proud approach foretold the way hits of the future would be stitched together from different genres. Against the Odds collects Blondie’s first six studio albums, along with scads of odds and ends and a hefty illustrated history. The last disc contains a pulsating, low-fi cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and a trio of “synth mixes” of “Heart of Glass,” “War Child,” and “Call Me” — no vocals, no drums, just machine throb. In 2022, you’ll be hearing them in DJ sets soon. Blondie: still ahead of their time. —M.M.
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Tom Petty, ‘Live at the Fillmore, 1997’
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers spent the vast majority of their live career in arenas, amphitheaters, and stadiums, playing sets centered almost entirely around their hits. But in early 1997, they booked a 20-night stand at the intimate Fillmore in San Francisco with the plan of doing something very, very different. Every night was a wildly different affair packed with incredible guest covers (“Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” “Eight Miles High”), deep cuts (“Cabin Down Below,” “Heartbreakers Beach Party”), and big-name guests like Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker. The shows have been heavily bootlegged over the years, and they finally came out officially this year in a four-disc box set that cherry-picked the best moments from all 20 nights. It’s the Heartbreakers at their absolute peak as a live band. —A.G.
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Elvis Presley, ‘Elvis on Tour’
So much love has been showered upon Elvis Presley’s 1973 Aloha From Hawaii special that it’s easy to overlook what led up to the historic concert. The Elvis on Tour six-CD box set zeroes in on Presley’s 1972 U.S. run, assembling four full concerts from the tour. While much of the setlist leans on Presley’s usual Seventies suspects (“See See Rider,” “You Gave Me a Mountain,” Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie”), it’s fun to hear Elvis change his inflection here and there — probably to keep himself from getting bored. It’s the two discs of rehearsals, though, that pack the most surprises: Presley teasing his musicians in “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” vamping through Marty Robbin’s “El Paso,” and delivering spine-tingling renditions of the gospel songs he so adored. —J.H.
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The Beach Boys, ‘Sail On Sailor – 1972’
On this six-disc dive into a period long seen as slight in the Beach Boys canon, Holland and its outtakes (like Dennis Wilson’s starkly beautiful “Carry Me Home”) remain quirky but soulfully earnest, and So Tough is more sophisticated and elegant than its cheesy title implied. Hearing songs from those records played live, on concert recordings jammed in here, adds to the sense that this was the band’s last truly creative, all-surfboards-firing era. Extra treat: When someone in the Carnegie Hall ’72 crowd calls out for “Sloop John B,” a peeved Mike Love scolds, “We started with that, you dummy!” —D.B.
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Prince and the Revolution, ‘Live’
Even hardcore Prince fans — and in 1985, that meant everybody — missed the original VHS tape of this extraordinary show from Syracuse, New York, the climax of the Purple Rain tour. But Prince and the Revolution: Live has gotten remastered from source tapes found in the Paisley Park vaults. The Revolution let all their horses run free, turning “Baby I’m a Star” into a ferocious 10-minute funk jam. It’s the definitive live document of Prince in his first flush of world conquest, though he was already scheming to push the Revolution to even bigger heights. As he tells the crowd, “My band is great — but I’m still the greatest!” —R.S.
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The Cure, ‘Wish: 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition’
A masterclass in melancholy, the Cure’s triple-disc Wish deep dive shows the genesis, evolution, and eventual beatitude of the group’s leap from the alternative underground into the mainstream. Although the remastered version of the album included here shimmers better than the original and has a greater depth of sound, the discs of previously unreleased demos and rarities are what will appeal most to Cure-itans. The early versions of “Cut” and “A Letter to Elise,” from 1990, show how they sped up and filigreed the songs for the 1992 album, while the nearly two dozen instrumentals sound like blueprints for unfulfilled wishes. Seeing how many directions they could have gone in, it’s easier to understand why Smith & Co. are coming up on 15 years since their last album: There’s just so much to choose from. –K.G.