POP/ROCK
Wilco, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" Super Deluxe Edition (Nonesuch)
Wilco's landmark fourth album was released just one week after the tragic events of Sept. 11. Had the Chicago band retired then and there, its legacy would still be intact today. Happily, Wilco is still vital, still active, still evolving. This eight-CD set (also available on vinyl) is a testament to the band's ability to grow even as Wilco's world was beset with upheaval. For starters, the band's record company, Reprise, refused to release "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" because it represented too radical a shift from Wilco's previous roots-rocking albums. Moreover, the band's drummer was fired and its co-founder, Jay Bennett, left soon afterward. Yet Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy and company pressed on and created a masterwork, (whose evolution is chronicled in the 2002 film "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart").
Eerie, enigmatic, experimental and enticing, the album's 11 songs sound both fresh and world-weary, carefully constructed and disorienting. The addition of 82 previously unreleased tracks offers different iterations of the album that finally was released. And the inclusion of an 82-page book and conversations with Tweedy and others provide welcome insight.
GEORGE VARGA, San Diego Union-Tribune
Guns N' Roses, "Use Your Illusion I & II Super Deluxe" (UME/Geffen)
In 1991, no band was bigger than Guns N' Roses, and on the two albums it released that year, it showed. Here was a group grappling with ambition using several different, sometimes competing tactics — songs that had the feverish intensity of metal, songs that touched on politics, songs that ran nine minutes long. These multiplatinum albums are epically unkempt, for better and worse — it doesn't get much blowzier, and it doesn't get much more rollicking, or arrestingly melodramatic. This doorstopper release is a sprawling seven-CD boxed set (also in vinyl) for a sprawling pair of albums. There's a book rich with ephemera and recordings of two live shows. For capturing this era of this band, this excess is appropriate, but also telling. Implosion was around the corner — these albums would be the last full-length releases of original music it would put out for 17 years.
JON CARAMANICA, New York Times
