Sly and the Family Stone – The Collection [$69.98]

Legacy gave the long overdue re-issue treatment to Sly and the Family Stone’s catalogue this year. The Collection is for anyone who loves great music. Fraudulent transcendence is one of pop music’s prime currencies — a contemporary band such as the Polyphonic Spree, for example, may share the Family Stone’s gimmick of fashion and embrace of community, but their supposedly ecstatic music lacks any sense of mortal urgency. Understand this: Sly & the Family Stone’s music is not just a feel-good grandiosity, but a bid for higher things, once-attainable things of irregular power, things that would prove more vulnerable to humble truths than musical fantasy.