Music: Pop: This Week's Album Releases

ELVIS PRESLEY Sunrise RCA

JUDGING BY Elvis's fate, death is not the end - just the start of an eternal reissue campaign. At least Sunrise is worth its position in the schedule, being the original Sun Sessions bulked out with an extra CD of out-takes, scratchy live cuts, and the couple of soupy Inkspots-style croons he recorded at Sam Phillips's studio for his mother in 1953. The formal sessions in July 1954 likewise began with limp ballads such as "I Love You Because" and "Harbor Lights"; but when Elvis started horsing around with Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right, Mama" during a coffee-break, the astute Phillips pricked up his ears and wound up playing midwife to rock'n'roll.

It's impossible to imagine a world without Elvis, but within songs such as "Mystery Train" one catches glimpses of the youngster whose taste for black artists such as Junior Parker and Rosco Gordon spurred him to that first, epochal blending of country and R&B. As he says after a false start to "Milkcow Blues Boogie", "Hold it fellas - that don't move me; let's get real, real gone for a change!".