Happy post-Record Store Day, everyone! If you partook in RSD 2025 like I did (and, if interested, you can read about my RSD adventures over on our sister site Analog Planet here), I hope you found what you were looking for on wax in person, and/or found copies of any/all of those elusive, treasured discs that were on your list through reputable online sources that didn’t cost you an arm and a leg (or two).

Anyway, as I promised in Part 1 of my end-of-year multi-part “Best Music Box Sets” series—which posted here on S&V on November 24, 2025—I’m getting right back to it with a post-Turkey Time heaping helping of great music box set offerings for you to consider for holiday gift giving and/or personal collection coffer-filling. Let’s get right back into this latest round of five more fabulous box-obtainment recommendations, shall we?

THE SMASHING PUMPKINS

MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS

30TH ANNIVERSARY SUPER DELUXE EDITION

Head Pumpkin Billy Corgan is a music aficionado nonpareil, and ever since he established Madame Zuzu’s—his own homegrown shop/label nestled in some friendly confines near his hometown of Chicago—he’s overseen a gaggle of great reissues and box sets from both his own solo ventures and his ace band’s storied canon alike, and this one may just be the fairest (and greatest) of them all.

Lavishly feting the 30th anniversary of The Smashing Pumpkins’ groundbreaking October 1995 double release Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, this super deluxe edition, released just last week on November 21, 2025, via Martha’s Music/Capitol/Virgin/UMe (SRP: $345), puts most, if not all similar expanded collections to shame. Mellon Collie 30 includes 6LPs on 180g vinyl pressed in the Czech Republic (likely at GZ), a hardbound book with new liners from Corgan, a custom tarot card deck, and seven frameable lithographs, all of it being housed in a velvet slipcase with a cloth carrying bag. The front of that cool cloth bag sports, in reverse-gold (as I’m calling it), one of the album’s prime front-facing images: illustrator John Craig’s collage of the female face from Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s The Souvenir (Fidelity) atop the top-half of a body culled from a portrait of St. Catherine of Alexandria by Raphael emerging from an angled star, and it’s absolutely perfect. I love every aspect of this box set, both inside and out.

The bonus audio offerings include 80-plus minutes (on LPs 5-6) of previously unreleased live material from the 1996 tour that supported Mellon Collie. Having first seen the Pumpkins blaze up and blow away a packed, elbow-to-elbow, soaked-shirt sweaty crowd at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, on August 3, 1991, I instantly had a feeling that this band could scale the heights of the alt-rock pantheon—and hearing the extra aural muscle added to these 1996 performances only reinforces what I knew all those decades ago. “Bullet With Butterfly Wings (2.4.96, Los Angeles)” (LP5, Side B, Track 1) punishes with relentless intensity and repeated buildup payoffs on every raging chorus, as does the full headbanging sneer framed by a few dreamy interludes that is “Siva (6.30.96, Detroit)” (LP 6, Side B, Track 1). “Siva” is, of course, one of the breakout tracks from the Pumpkins’ debut LP on Hut/Caroline, May 1991’s Gish. (“I just wanna get there faster,” indeed.)

Besides the beautiful version of Mellon Collie 30 that’s housed within the lavish velvet box—a standard of unmatched excellence that has inspired me to begin including ratings for packaging from here on out—there is also a 4CD edition ($49.99) available on the interwebs, as Madame Zuzu’s is currently out of stock of that physical digital offering. As a Pumpkins completist, I made sure to get mine already, but I much prefer spinning the contents found within that sensational velvet box, all of which will now be shelved right next to my Mellon Collie 180g 4LP box that was reissued via Virgin in December 2012—itself lovely in its own right, to be sure, but clearly second string to the new edition bar “Zero,” er, none.

Incidentally, a lot of cool Mellon Collie 30-related events, such as the seven-date Lyric Opera of Chicago performance/presentation dubbed “A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness” that concludes tomorrow night, November 30, 2025, have also been swirling around the celebration of this defining music of the mid-’90s, and you should wholly partake in its festivities whichever way(s) you and your holiday budget can afford. Can I have some more, please?

Ratings (on our goes-to-5 scale): Music: 4.5. Sound: 4.5. Packaging: 5—though, if our scale went up to 10, this one would rate an easy 11!

The mondo Mellon Collie box set is pretty hard to top, so I’m going to now cover four more boxes in this installment that each have their own merits—all of which should appeal to one, if not more, of your aural senses, as it were.

DAVID LEE ROTH

THE WARNER RECORDINGS 1985-1994

Released back in February 2025 via Rhino/Warner Records, Diamond Dave’s The Warner Recordings 1985-1994 appeared in both 5LP and 5CD configurations (the latter of which’s array I’m showing above). Though currently not available at Rhino’s official site store, you can find the 5LP set via Discogs starting around $110 as its median SRP, and the 5CD set through Amazon and other online retailers for about $50 (or maybe even closer to $40, given that we’re in the midst of holiday discount season).

The 1985-1994 collection is actually a nice refresher/reminder that David Lee Roth did indeed keep his creative juices a-flowin’ after leaving the Van Halen fold following the massive success of their January 1984-released, chart-topping 1984 LP. Dave’s own four-song, covers-only, lounge-lizard January 1985 Crazy From the Heat EP (LP1/CD1) has its own never-replicated charms, with the endless summer fun of “California Girls” opening Side 2 and the song-and-dance-ariffic “Medley: Just a Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody” closing Side 1. (Yes, the two “Dave TV!” of-era-perfect MTV videos for both of those tracks didn’t hurt either.)

From there, Dave went on a brief hard-rock roll, backed by the powerful trio of guitarist Steve Vai, bassist Billy Sheehan, and drummer Gregg Bissonnette fueling July 1986’s Eat ’Em and Smile (LP2/CD2), most especially with the punishing pleasures of “Yankee Rose” [Side 1, Track 1]), and January 1988’s Skyscraper (LP3/CD3). The latter record was a bit too keyboard-heavy for most (myself included), but I can still dig the undeterred positivity of “Just Like Paradise” (Side 1, Track 2). The other two LPs in this collection—January 1991’s A Little Ain’t Enough (LP4/CD4) and March 1994’s Your Filthy Little Mouth (LP5/CD5)—have their own respective limited appeal (and are both admittedly hard to find on their own these days), but this box is worth seeking out if just my typing out “Diamond Dave” makes you want to (wait for it) eat ’em and smile.

Ratings: Music: 3.5 (though Heat is a 4.5, and Eat is a 4). Sound: 3.5. Packaging: 3.5. (The outer box’s design essentially replicates some of Dave’s stage wear of the time, but I wish they could have come up with something, well, more clever.)

DWIGHT YOAKAM

AND THEN I WROTE . . . THE FIRST THREE ALBUMS OF THE ’90s

This here is another fine case of the power of Record Store Day, and its ability to entice/fuel labels to put together box sets of albums from artists whose catalogs many of us simply don’t have in full on vinyl. Case in point: Take Rhino/Reprise/Via, and how they’ve been treating the canon of country whippersnapper-cum-acknowledged statesman Dwight Yoakam. Last year, they began with their inaugural 4LP RSD Yoakam set The Beginning and Then Some: The Albums of the ’80s. This year, on November 28, 2025, they continued the thread with the wittily dubbed 4LP followup, And Then I Wrote . . . The First Three Albums of the ’90s. An RSD Exclusive capped at 2,475 copies (and currently sporting suggested SRPs around $100 or more), Wrote boasts October 1990’s If There Was a Way on LP1, March 1993’s This Time on LP2, October 1995’s Gone on LP3, and 12 bonus gems on LP4, which is appropriately titled . . .And Beyond. “Suspicious Minds” (LP4, Side 1, Track 1) and “Golden Ring (With Kelly Willis)” (LP4, Side 2, Track 2) sold this box’s merits to me.

I do hope there’s more collected Dwight Yoakam canon content to come next year—and they can call it I Wrote Tomorrow’s Sounds Today: The First Three or So Albums of the ’00s. (No charge, since part of that name comes from one of his early-aughts album titles anyway.)

Ratings: Music: 4. Sound: 4. Packaging: 4. (That’s a 3-4 for 4, in other words.)

LOVE

THE COMPLETE ELETRKA ALBUMS

Speaking of great RSD 2025 box set ideas, Rhino did it again by setting their reissue sights on one of L.A.’s coolest ’60s outfits from the Elektra label stable—Love, who now get to receive all the love in the world with The Complete Elektra Albums 5LP box set, also released on November 28, 2025 (RSD Exclusive, 2,000 copies; and currently going for circa $200 online). Love leader Arthur Lee was an oft-misunderstood visionary, but Rhino has been doing right by his band’s output with a number of sharp, upgraded and sometimes expanded reissues of individual LPs from their core catalog in recent years—but this new box is where you can now find March 1966’s Love, November 1966’s Da Capo, November 1967’s seminal Forever Changes, and the late-blooming August 1969 offering Four Sail housed together in one sturdy white-framed box (replete with a curved, all-lowercase title, a la Forever Changes).

The fifth disc, Rarities, shines with lovable Love gems like “Andmoreagain (Alternate Electric Backing Track)” (LP5, Side 1, Track 4) and “Your Mind and We Belong Together (Single A-Side)” (LP5, Side 2, Track 1). If you only know of this band’s output via sporadic exposure to tracks like “Alone Again Or” (“the greatest fun!”) and “Seven & Seven Is” on FM and/or satellite radio, getting Complete in your hands and ears is a damn good way to get a full treatment of Love in the best way possible.

Ratings: Music: 4.5. Sound: 4 (some are closer to 3.5, some are 4.5). Packaging: 4.

PHIL COLLINS

NO JACKET REQUIRED (FULLY TAILORED)

Finally, I must admit I was a latecomer to Phil Collins’ February 1985 juggernaut of an album, No Jacket Required, and that was mainly because of its (and his!) overexposure that year, truth be told—so much so that I only began my re-assessment of the music via a reissued CD after the century had turned.

Eventually, I got around to getting Jacket on vinyl many years later, due in part to Phil’s own personal blessing to me regarding the 2016 180g Atlantic LP reissue he had overseen (story for another time), but this newly expanded 180g 4LP edition—nicely parenthetically subtitled (Fully Tailored), released via Craft Recordings/Atlantic on September 12, 2025, and going for an SRP of $124.98—is a pure vinyl winner. LP1 features the original album remastered and cut at half-speed at Abbey Road Studios, while LPs 2-4 includes B-Sides, demos, of-era live takes, and rare performances appearing for the first time on vinyl, including “Long, Long Way to Go” (LP3, Side 1, Track 5) from Phil’s pre-cross-continent appearance at Wembley Stadium’s portion of Live Aid on July 13, 1985. (You should be able to easily identify the second golden-throated voice supporting him there, sans peeking at the credits.)

A separate Blu-ray release of Jacket ($24.98), with an Atmos mix done by (who else?) Steven Wilson, gave me even more appreciation for the breadth of tracks like the Prince-like shuffle of “Who Said I Would” (Track 7) and the percussion layers of “Take Me Home” (Track 10). That said, (Fully Tailored) is technically missing an important button by not including the Atmos BD as its fifth disc, imo, but c’est la vie. I say get each version of Jacket if you can, and take ’em both home.

Ratings: Music: 4.5. Sound: 4 (though the BD’s Atmos mix gets a 4.5). Packaging: 4.5.

And there you have it—five more quite worthy physical-media holiday blessings. More music box set recommendations to come in the following week, so, in the meantime—happy obtaining and happy listening, everyone!