In with the old

Despite the continued decline of music sales, best-ofs and box sets by “classic” bands and performers continue to proliferate.

Some of the releases signal obvious commercial desperation, so often have their contents been recycled and repackaged over the years (Universal’s The Who Hits 50!). And some of it is simply beside the point, bundling portions of an artist’s long-available output without adding much in the way of perquisites (George Harrison’s The Apple Years [CMG], Bruce Springsteen’s The Album Collection Vol. 1 1973-1984 [Legacy]).

But in at least two cases, Queen and David Bowie, the powers that be have shown an imagination that makes the collections they’ve come up with worth assessing on their own merits or lacks thereof.

Queen and Bowie will be fused in pop music’s collective memory if only because of their collaboration on the 1981 hit “Under Pressure.” They did, however, have something else in common: namely, a particularly British theatrical inclination that opened them and their audiences to a broader-than-usual array of influences, what with the “play” being the thing and all.

Admittedly, 2014 is an unusual year for Queen to be the subject of archival releases in that the group essentially came to an end 23 years ago with the AIDs-related death of its iconic frontman Freddie Mercury. Yet, from the two-disc-plus DVD Live at the Rainbow ’74 to the historically revisionist, two-disc edition of the career-spanning compilation Forever (both Hollywood), the quartet’s singularity has never been easier to appreciate.

Live at the Rainbow ’74 proves that, long before Queen had a slew of hits on which to fall back amid expensive light rigs and dry ice, the quartet could hold its own as a no-frills, borderline-heavy-metal act on the small stage without losing sight of its capacity for mythological flights of fancy.

Forever is both more redundant and more ambitious. Omitting the band’s signature “Bohemian Rhapsody” and anything resembling heavy metal, it seeks to reconstrue Queen’s 20-year run as an exercise in an agnostic, romantically tinged fatalism from which even Gustav Mahler might have drawn inspiration had he been born a century later than he was.

Some of Forever’s more anachronistic segues feel forced. It takes more than mellowness and existential resignation, after all, to make songs as stylistically disparate as “Lily of the Valley,” “Spread Your Wings,” “Friends Will Be Friends,” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” feel of a piece. But on the whole the project provides a compellingly alternative narrative to the prevalent one that Queen was nothing other than a prolific hit machine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The three-disc version of David Bowie’s Nothing Has Changed (Legacy) attempts to do a similar favor for its subject. But by including an overgenerous 51 tracks (practically every Bowie single) and programming them in reverse chronological order, all that the compilers have managed to achieve is a gimmicky Benjamin Button effect while sandwiching hits from Bowie’s golden years between selections from his dud-strewn last three decades and first half-decade, respectively.

Some of the duds deserve a second chance (the three cuts from 2001’s never-released Toy, for instance, and “Seven” from 1999’s ‘Hours …’). But the sole new recording, “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” which veers dangerously close to the semi-operatic pretensions of Scott Walker, is not among them. And ultimately the ratio of misses to hits will try fans’ patience, making them wish they’d remained content with Rykodisc’s definitive 1990 hits-and-nothing-but compilation Changesbowie.