Big Star
Keep an Eye on the Sky [box set] - Rhino
FILTER Grade: 93%

It’s possible this first-ever box set of Memphis’ short-lived, intensely-beloved, unarguably-brilliant Big Star is titled with knowing irony. For a band that named its first full-length #1 Album and whose compact discography is continuously rearranged with most reissues, Keep an Eye on the Sky echoes not only high aspirations but also the dizzying effect of losing one’s bearings. Encompassing in some form or other the band’s three albums—the 1972 debut, 1974’s Radio City and the posthumously issued Third aka Sister Lovers  from 1978—this box mingles an abundance of demos, alternate takes and other previously unreleased iterations of Big Star tunes amid sparsely retained original album versions.

The brief span of Big Star’s recorded output documents a band quickly disintegrating. Discs one and two cover the spunky, vividly simple two albums released during the group’s brief existence: the first as a quartet with tortured co-songwriter Chris Bell, the second as a trio led by the no-less tormented Alex Chilton. Combined, with a boost from all the newly unearthed tunes, they encompass a raucous, muscular and heartrending suite of melodious pop as elegantly streamlined as a tail fin. Disc three adds a few unreleased odds and ends to the already cemented sequencing of Third/Sister Lovers, a largely Chilton-only masterpiece equal parts rhapsodic jingle-jangle (“Jesus Christ”) and bottom-of-the-bottle despair (“Holocaust”). The box’s name comes from the dazzling “Stroke it Noel”; the titular phrase tellingly followed by “Will they come?/Oh, the bombs.” On “Downs,” Chilton has an almost proto-Lydon indignation. As a whole, it’s a lucid reinvention of Big Star’s often barreling, often languorous but always bittersweet and tortuous sound.

Finally, the fourth disc brings a touching postscript snapshot. After an hour-plus of a solo Chilton lucidly shooting off flares of genius in the darkness (“I want to white out!”)—all start-stop rhythms and encroaching oblivion—we get a 20-track opening set (!) by the 1972 trio version of the band with a prolonged acoustic interlude, drum solo and an all too indifferent if polite audience. Indeed, rock and roll is here to stay.