THE COLUMBIA ALBUMS COLLECTION

This is basically your one-and-done Blue Oyster Cult collection, spanning their entire career with Columbia Records from their debut album to Imaginos. (Yes, in theory they have produced some material since then... but none of it is particularly significant compared to their 1970s and 1980s work.) You get the studio albums, you get the official live albums, you get a nice rarities collection, you get Radios Appear: the Best of the Broadcasts (a collection of 1980s live material which is a decent fourth live album - early editions of the set came with a code to download a now-pulled collection called Harvester of Lives of four live shows, but these are just the shows from which the songs on Radios Appear were selected and you don't really need more than that single disc in terms of that material).

As far as the first five studio albums plus Some Enchanted Evening go, the editions you get here are the standard remasters that have been around for some time, with the same bonus tracks. Other albums are present in new remasters, giving them a long-overdue tidy up, but don't have bonus tracks (one suspects that much of the material which would have served as such ended up on the Rarities and Radios Appear discs anyway). All of this is served up in a selection of cute little cardboard LP sleeve replicas - which breaks some of the gatefold artwork in some cases, but eh, when the value's this good that's no big deal.

Even superfans will want this collection for the rare cuts on there - and those who are less keen on BOC but still enjoy them enough to want a selection of their albums will find there to be plenty to explore here. If you are going to do a cheap and cheerful collection of a big fat chunk of a prolific band's discography, this is how you should be doing it.