Out This Week 11/10

You call yourself a Pixies fan? Bought tickets to their reunited Doolittle tour, yeah? For multiple shows even? Well, you’re not a real Pixies fan until you’ve plunked down two hundred and something bucks on the Minotaur box set, collecting 5 remastered CDs of their studio albums, also contained on 6 Blu-ray and 6 DVDs in 5.1 surround, plus a 54 page book set, all packaged by Vaughan Oliver, the designer of all of the Pixies album artwork. Come on, pilgrim — show your love.

Under the shadow of that monster, the rest of the week’s releases are fairly low key… but certainly not to be ignored. British brat rockers The Cribs let loose their fourth studio album, while Snow Patrol continues on their path with Up to Now, their sixth, and a new band fronted by a seasoned veteran, Bad Lieutenant, with New Order’s Bernard Sumner, releases in CD form their debut. Local (and former local) acts Big Spider’s Back, Loch Lomond, and deVries have new ones out today, as do Ola Podrida and Pants Yell!. Iceland rings in with two new releases, both quite different but equally excellent (what else would you expect?): the ambient experimental By the Throat by Ben Frost from the Bedroom Community, and Ólafur Arnalds’s Found Songs, which collects 7 songs of chamber strings and piano recorded in as many days, out on Erased Tapes — both well worth checking out!

And now that Halloween has come and gone, well… ’tis the season. Box sets, mostly less ambitious than Minotaur, and holiday albums begin to proliferate on the shelves. This week, AC/DC weighs in with a 2 CD/DVD box, and of course you’ll find the requisite Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald collections. Tori Amos has recorded an album of Christmas classics along with a few originals, called Midwinter Graces, and if you’ve ever wondered what “Waterloo Sunset” sounds like in choral version, Ray Davies has put The Kinks to the 65-piece Crouch End Festival Chorus for The Kinks Choral Collection. Maybe a little less in the holiday spirit but certainly to make great gifts nonetheless: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Robyn Hitchcock have new live DVDs for fans. So prepare to gather ’round the Festivus Pole, but not before you create your list from Largehearted Boy and enjoy these kind gifts courtesy of the bands and their labels: