At their early apex, The Beatles exuded a tremendous confidence manifest in the tuneful material they wrote, played, sang and recorded with irrepressible gusto. Little wonder the group made such a lasting impression on culture at large, but particularly in the realm of pop music, where their two guitars, bass and drums plus voices lineup created a template that has inspired countless bands all over the world in the interim. Badfinger and the Posies are just two such groups, the former something of the Fab Four’s proteges from their own home in Great Britain, while the latter emerged out of the Seattle scene dominated by grunge (but not limited to it). Both bands display as much flair as they do ingenuity as they exhibit not just the superficial stylistic traits of The Beatles’ best work of the mid-Sixties era, but an emotional complexity in keeping with the times in which these respective groups emerged, roughly twenty years apart. Despite drawbacks of greater and lesser proportion, the groups remain active through the perseverance of their surviving members, meeting the demands of their fanbase with a loyalty commensurate to that of their followers.
The Posies –
Dear 23: Founding Posies members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow endure as keepers of the flame for their much-loved band and they oversaw a PledgeMusic campaign to subsidize these reissues in all their practical and lavish splendor. Like this expanded DGC debut, all are triple-fold digi-paks within which twenty-page booklets offer extensive recollections on each of the main tracks and brief notes on the bonuses from the artists themselves (and Craig Dorfman’s introductory essays are equally informative and effusive). Some listeners may find the music so potent on its own terms the additional material comes off as overkill (or redundant), but these titles can become interactive in a wholly infectious way: hearing “My Big Mouth,” for instance, offers the chance to luxuriate in the abandon of the band playing while absorbing its backstory. Like the best such archival projects, these Omnivore packages reaffirm how the Posies have maintained such devotion over the years, no less from the aforementioned duo than their followers. But then, thirty largely high-quality bonus tracks per set, like “Saying Sorry to Myself, ” is the output of those with much to be proud of!
Frosting On The Beater: Like its counterparts, this package is all the more valuable for the relative rarity of the 2003 limited edition Posies box At Least, at Last. While there is some overlap with these individual selections, roughly a CD and a half of outtakes etc on each of the three titles, offers almost as much material as on that now potentially expensive set. Plus there’s additional discerning hindsight of Stringfellow and Auer relate in their notes to highlight an emotional component in line with the arc of the Posies’ career. The two composers put the emphasis on the power in ‘power-pop’ when recording, so guitars, bass and drums are of almost equal prominence with vocals in songs like “Solar Sister.” Given the generally high quality of the demos and alternate versions here, such as “When Mute Tongues Can Speak”and “Depression Child,” it should come as no surprise that the formal albums, a quarter century since original release, sound just as liberating (and liberated!), if not more so: though the fidelity of the extras may vary, as with “Burn & Shine,” the final recordings are clearly 
distillation of multiple good ideas.
Amazing Disgrace: Befitting the Great Northwest scene from which they emerged in the Nineties, there was always a readily discernible sweetness to noise ratio evident in the sound of the Posies and perhaps never more so as their disenchantment escalated, not just with the record label they shared with Nirvana, but with the very odyssey toward acclaim upon which they had embarked. Still, the acoustic-based likes of “Golden Blunders” reinforce the discipline of Auer and Stringfellow as songwriters even as, with shuffling of personnel in the group, they became more than just titular bandleaders. Yet, within the tumult of business and personal conflict, the Posies did not avoid their circumstances: leading a new rhythm section into the fray, the titular duo brandished their guitars with even more muscle than in the past and utilized the singing of lyrics such as those on “Sad To Be Aware” for psychic impact almost equal to the visceral force of the musicianship. Perhaps not wholly the definition of catharsis at the time, this record has become so, permeated with its principals’ reflections upon the period, not to mention tracks like “Everyone Is A Fucking Liar”!
Badfinger-
Eponymous: Expanded like the previously-issued Apple releases of 2010, the two albums Badfinger recorded for Warner Bros. Records after their dissolute departure from the Beatles empire(sic) in the Seventies come in jewel-boxes rather than the glossy digi-paks of the earlier, more stylized design. But the packaging hardly reflects the music itself, the most obvious selling point of which (and also its greatest drawback) is the similarity to the middle-to-late period sound of the Beatles (not all that surprising as McCartney mentored the group with its initial hit “Come And Get It”). The first of the dozen official tracks here, a piano-dominated “I Miss You,” almost sounds like an outtake from Revolver in that regard, but Badfinger never ventured into the deeply experimental realms the Fab Four explored on that album: the horns on “Andy Norris” represent one of the few embellishments to the simplicity of their four-piece lineup. To their great credit, however, Badfinger usually evinces the unity of a band, even on multiple tracks-in- progress like “Shine On,” appended to the song sequences as initially released, the material more diverse than it may have first sounded.
Wish You Were Here: With extensive essays and song lyrics included in the twenty-page booklets, but more importantly, a bountiful harvest of early mixes in addition to the albums as originally released, these Real Gone reissues somewhat belie their otherwise conventional superficial appearance. Likewise, the sound of the band, which if parsed a bit too finely in the writing of essayist Dan Montovina, remains rightly distinctive after all these years, including lush arrangements on two medleys, “In the Meantime”/”Some Other Time” and “Meanwhile Back at the Ranch”/”Should I Smoke.” Such logical but nonetheless ambitious progressions offset any erroneous preconceptions about Badfinger engendered by covers from Nilsson and Mariah Carey over the years and wholly reaffirm the quartet’s attraction beyond just Anglophile music lovers (only a more broad and confirmed fanbase would supporting reissuing as presented here. The aforementioned essayist and band biographer is credited with ‘studio work’, and as a result of the technical efforts by the biographer of this band, loyalists can savor audio quality of the instruments that befits the clarity of the material, the hard-hitting drums (“Your So Fine”) balanced with hard-strummed acoustic guitars (“Got to Get Out of Here”).
