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Review: The Flaming Lips' 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is being reissued as 6CD and 5LP 20th anniversary box sets - with both featuring demos, B-sides, radio sessions and more. Containing a godlike 100 or so tracks on it, it includes lost rarities like 'Psychedelic Hypnotist Daydream (Demo)' and 'The Deterioration Of The Fight Or Flight Response" (B-side Fight Test UK CD 1)' and Flaming Lips fans surely have their work cut out for them. A must for all obsessive collectors of the UK psychers' work, hoping to salvage their most obscure sonic trips - the ones that never came back.

Review: If a single compilation can be attributed to beginning the oldies revolution, it is easily the original 1972 double LP Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. Compiled by Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman with assistance and input from guitarist and music historian Lenny Kaye, this deceptively haphazard 27-track aggregate became the cornerstone of the serious appreciation of '60s underground music. One important factor that unifies and likewise levels the playing field for all 27 sides chosen for the first run of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 is that they were all issued as singles. There are both US Top 20 charting pop hits - "Dirty Water" (Standells), "Liar, Liar" (Castaways) and "Psychotic Reaction" (Count Five) as well as several inspired sides that never made the Top 200. Each track is also given a brief bio, which was researched & penned by Kaye. His comments go beyond the facts & figures of the typical discography, relating to the music as the personal experience that it was.

Review: It's hard to believe there was a time when a band as culturally important as The Doors were still trying to make it, but even after their debut album came out in January 1967 there was a brief patch where they were still little known outside their stomping ground in LA. A couple of months later, they held a three-night stint at The Matrix in San Francisco playing to threadbare crowds, but luckily the sound engineer had the foresight to properly mic up and capture all of the performances and the recordings have since become a massive part of the band's legacy. As well as the classic tracks from the first album, and a few of their later hits, there are a generous dose of covers and obscurities which get a first-time airing thanks to this new expanded and authoritative five-LP edition, with the generous inclusion of an extra 7" with a hidden gem that will blow the minds of lifelong ardent fans, of which there are more than a few.

Review: The ninth studio album by the Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station came after a two-year hiatus by the band, who afterward returned to live touring and high-concept jazz-rocking. Something of an achievement in defining the more mathematic elements of prog at the time, several of the songs heard across the album deal in time signatures less common to the Westernized ear, with perhaps the most enduring of them all, 'Estimated Prophet', having been recorded in septuple time. Perhaps mirroring this sense of rhythmic ambition verging on megalomaniac grandeur, the album, seemingly springing forth from this central song, deals throughout with themes of false-prophetic grandiosity - cultic self-aggrandisement - that seemed to emanate from California and the West Coast at the time, especially in the immediate aftermath of the counterculture and in the more musical annals of history in the then-unfurling latter half of the 20th Century.