88 Cds

A trawl through the wonderful career of the hugely underrated Harry Nilsson takes a chronological look at his back catalogue. Pretty much every classic you would ever need is here - Everybody's Talkin', Me and My Arrow, Without Her, Without You, One… the list goes on. Naturally there is a concentration on Harry's most successful work Nilsson Schmilsson with all but one track of the entire album included. There are some delightful hidden classics too with hard to find tracks included, but perhaps too little concentration on his later career. Nevertheless, this is a superb retrospective.

Sanctuary's mammoth triple-disc Pentangle overview poses a bit of a dilemma. First of all, it's called Pentangling, which is already the name of a 1973 compilation, and secondly, while not deliberately misleading, it focuses more attention on the solo careers of John Renbourn and Bert Jansch than it does on the entity that supplies the collection's title. Despite these petty gripes, Pentangling is filled to the brim with some of the finest recordings the British folk movement had to offer, and hearing the group as a whole, followed by an entire disc – one apiece – of two of the genre's most gifted guitarists, is rewarding in more ways than one: both men, as well as the band, released material well into the 21st century, but Pentangling focuses only on their treasured late-'60s/early-'70s output. Listeners looking for a more comprehensive take on Pentangle would be better off with Castle's excellent Light Flight: The Anthology, and Renbourn and Jansch both have lovingly packaged retrospectives that fare better than the ones offered here, but as far as entry points go, Pentangling does more than skim the surface.