Deep catalog keeps getting deeper. Boxed sets now delve into alternate takes, outtakes, studio chatter and video. They round up stray B-sides and compilation tracks; they consolidate careers across labels. They also remix old material for new media. And some repackage everything an act has released — and more — in exhaustive sets. Here, the music critics of The New York Times review the year’s most notable sets of three or more CDs; a selection of greatest-hits and live collections will appear next week. JON PARELES
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards
When Tom Waits was assembling “Orphans” from songs that had never reached his full-length albums, he decided to add new ones, too. The jumble of past and present suits a songwriter who (collaborating with his wife, Kathleen Brennan) has long abducted vintage Americana — blues, ballads, rockabilly, hymns, saloon songs, Tin Pan Alley — and dragged it into sonic dark alleys of his own.
The three discs of “Orphans” group songs by style. With distorted guitars and loose-limbed drumming behind the wheeze and cackle of Mr. Waits’s voice, “Brawlers” collects rocking tall tales that contemplate love, sin and the road, and it could stand alongside Mr. Waits’s best albums. Most of the songs are blues, a few tuck romance behind the clatter, and one, “Road to Peace,” is as journalistically detailed and bluntly political as anything in the Waits catalog.
“Bawlers” has the slower songs, teetering between gruffly sentimental and existential. They can be touching one by one — particularly “Long Way Home” and “Tell It to Me” — but all the lurching waltzes tend to run together. “Bastards” leans toward spoken word and includes versions of material by Mr. Waits’s idols Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Brecht and Weill. It’s atmospheric and gallows-humored, but Mr. Waits sounds even better with a melody to growl. (Anti-. Three CDs. $49.98.)JON PARELES
The Complete 1936-1940 Variety, Vocalion and Okeh Small Group Sessions
In 1936 Duke Ellington had been leading a big band for a little more than 10 years and he was an international star, possibly the highest-paid black entertainer in the United States. At this point he undertook a series of small-group sessions. Some of the standout tracks: “Tough Truckin’,” “Indigo Echoes,” “Love in My Heart,” “Pyramid” “Chasin’ Chippies” and “Delta Mood.”
None of them are very famous; most are based on the templates of better-known Ellington songs. They are all marked by Ellingtonian arrangement methods, and in many places the band just flies. Most of these weren’t issued as Ellington records. The most prominent of his sidemen — Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Barney Bigard — were listed as bandleaders; on one session, the trumpeter Rex Stewart, new to the Ellington organization, was drafted as leader. (He ended up spending nine years with the band.) Why did this happen? To keep great, underpaid, underrecognized musicians with him for the long haul, Ellington needed strong diplomatic skills. And, it seems, making cheaper list-price records that could be aimed more directly at jukeboxes was also a factor. A hit kept the experiment going: “Caravan,” from 1936, the first and very widely heard version of it.
Ellington’s music tends to be consumed on CD these days either by canonical collections of his early music or by his later, more carefully programmed LPs; this is a giant serving of early work, with unreleased alternate takes, offering the real truth from a great period of a great band. (Mosaic. Seven CDs. $119. Available only at mosaicrecords.com, or 203-327-7111.) BEN RATLIFF
A LIFE LESS LIVED: THE GOTHIC BOX
Instead of chronicling a career or a record label or a genre, this boxed set chronicles a sensibility. For more than a quarter-century, fans of moody, theatrical post-punk have been calling themselves gothic, or goth; the term was often wielded as an insult, but it survived and flourished, and so did the sensibility it described. (Patricia Morrison, a former member of Gun Club who also performed with Sisters of Mercy, describes her bands’ aesthetic as “dark and glamorous.”)
But what does gothic mean? This set wisely dodges the question. The essays are conjectural (mentioning the influence of 1970s horror movies and the importance of the London club the Batcave, which opened in 1982) rather than definitive. And the discs contain a respectable sampling of bands (many of them British and many unopposed to spiky bass lines or atmospheric keyboards) that were associated with the scene — not always happily. In the liner notes, Daniel Ash, who played in the influential band Bauhaus, declares, “I think gothic doesn’t really exist”; Wayne Hussey, from the Mission UK, shrugs, “I’ve been called a lot worse than ‘goth.’ ”
