It's often unfair to compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles but in the case of the group's mono mixes, it's instructive. Until the 2009 release of the box set The Beatles in Mono, all of the Fab Four's mono mixes were out of print. That's not the case with the Rolling Stones. Most of their '60s albums – released on Decca in the U.K., London in the U.S. – found mono mixes sneaking onto either the finished sequencing or various singles compilations, so the 2016 box The Rolling Stones in Mono only contains 56 heretofore unavailable mono mixes among its 186 tracks…

In front of 1.5 million people, one of the biggest free concerts in history, The Rolling Stones' performance on February 18, 2006, in Rio de Janeiro was a historic event. Fully restored and remastered from their A Bigger Bang World Tour, this includes 4 unreleased tracks: "Tumbling Dice," "Oh No, Not You Again," "This Place Is Empty," and "Sympathy For The Devil."

Universal's 2018 set The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2016 isn't the first time the Rolling Stones] post-Decca catalog has been boxed up. Back in 2010, all the albums up to 2015 (which means it didn't include 2016's blues record Blue & Lonesome) were offered in a set that was a companion to the similarly limited-edition box The Rolling Stones 1964-1969. In a sense, the 2018 set functions as a cousin to ABKCO's The Rolling Stones in Mono – a 2016 box containing mono mixes of all the material the Stones officially released on Decca – but where that set was issued on both CD and LP, The Studio Albums Vinyl Collection 1971-2016 is, as its title suggests, explicitly designed as a vinyl package…

The Lost Sessions Vol. 2 is the second (obviously) Rolling Stones outtakes on Empress Valley. Similar to the first volume the material here is not collated in any strict fashion but rather takes bits and pieces from various sessions. The subtitle of this release is The Auction Reel since this is the tape that was auctioned at Sotheby’s several years ago. The tracks here are all in excellent quality and present some interesting insights…

The late '60s and early '70s didn't yield many (as far as we know) unreleased studio recordings of completed, otherwise unavailable Rolling Stones songs. But it did produce a wealth of fairly interesting alternate/working versions and song embryos that never got polished off, sixteen of which are presented on this compilation. As the title Sweet Black Angel implies, many are from that murky early-'70s period when the Stones were working, in fits and starts, on Exile on Main St., and several of these tracks are different versions of songs that ended up on that album…

Barb Wired Tour Vol. 2 is the second of two volumes of Empress Valley’s ambitious nine disc compilation of important tapes from Ron Wood’s New Barbarians side project in support of his solo album Gimme Some Neck. Picking up where The Drug Dealer Tapes Vol. 1 (Empress Valley EVSD 196/200) leaves off, Vol. 2 contains four discs with another hour of the tour rehearsal tape along with two complete shows…