A Vaughan Williams Christmas

Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea

She Remembers Everything (Deluxe Edition)

Rosanne Cash

One sign that gift-giving season has arrived is the release of critically acclaimed rock ’n’ roll albums in boxed, freshly remastered, multidisc editions tantalizingly marketed as the best-ever way to experience the music contained therein. It’s an impression cemented by the enthusiastic reviews that inevitably flood the relevant publications and that get collated into verbal highlight reels for the packages’ Wikipedia entries.

Love and Wealth: The Lost Recordings

The Louvin Brothers

If there’s such a thing as the perfect pop song, Ervin Drake’s “It Was a Very Good Year” is it. The evocatively elliptical lyrics are so exactingly tailored that they’d hold up as poetry if it were possible to read them without simultaneously hearing their accompanying melody—which is also evocatively elliptical and exactingly tailored.

Kaleidoscope

Cyrus Chestnut

The posthumous careers of Tom Petty and Prince have begun.   

Petty’s began on Sept. 28 with the release of An American Treasure (Reprise), four CDs’ worth of meticulously curated outtakes, live performances, alternate versions, early takes, remastered “deep cuts,” and other esoterica culled from Petty’s solo, Heartbreakers, and Mudcrutch recordings. It has everything, in other words, but the Traveling Wilburys (and the singles—those are what Geffen’s forthcoming The Best of Everything is for).