U2’s earliest recordings – their debut EP U23, several non-LP singles and B-sides – haven’t exactly been buried, but they have been orphaned, never seeing an official reissue until they popped up on double-disc deluxe reissues of 1980’s Boy, 1981’s October and 1983’s War in 2008. Prior to this, these stray tracks did leak out on the iTunes exclusive release The Complete U2 (tied into the 2004 release of How To Dismantle and Atomic Bomb, discontinued by the time these reissues showed up) but apart from “Trash, Trampoline and the Party Girl” – which surfaced on the B-sides compilation that was added as a second disc to deluxe editions of 1998’s The Best of 1980-1990 – they never appeared on CD. So, this group of reissues is a major archival release, as they unveil the rarest released recordings from one of the world’s biggest bands, music that should be available for historical reasons even if it’s not very good – which often it is not, at least not on the bonus disc of Boy. On these 14 tracks, U2 sounds impossibly green, working out their fetish for Factory bands while occasionally taking a stab at the barbed punk of the Undertones or Buzzcocks, as on the coiled “Boy-Girl.” Rhythms are leaden, the Edge has yet to learn how to paint with his effects, Bono yelps far too often and they not only lack the majesty that is such a key part of their mystique, they sound slack even on the live tracks from a September 1980 show at the Marquee in London (including the previously unreleased “Cartoon World”). These live tracks are admittedly the closest this music gets to kinetic, but that’s not for lack of trying. U2 did attempt to really rock, as on the flatly bizarre unreleased “Saturday Night,” which plays like un-ironic arena rock and shows that this is a band that’s always been better with big ideas than they were with small ones. Here, they were surely striving for something huge but they had little idea of how to execute their ideas. Based on these rarities – which contains all of their first EP U23, distinguished different, early versions of “Out of Control” and “Stories for Boys;” the B-side “Twilight,” different from the LP version; both sides of the “11 O’Clock Tick-Tock” single, including the flip “Touch” – it’s hard to believe that this quartet could ever conquer the world, but that’s exactly why they’re worth hearing: these 14 tracks provide a useful lesson that sometimes early recordings aren’t harbingers of what’s to come.

Compared to the gangly, green early songs that comprise the bonus disc of Boy, the bonus disc on October is a great leap forward – which is a bit ironic, as the album proper is often considered a holding pattern for U2, containing the great “Gloria” but finding the group uneasy in the studio. Based on this bonus disc, the place where U2 was growing with leaps and bounds was on the stage, as this 17-track collection contains no less than 13 live cuts (including three tracks from Richard Skinner BBC Sessions), eight of them reprising songs from October that all sound bigger and better on stage. They have muscle, might and majesty, the earliest indications of U2 developing their seemingly effortless command of melodrama. That illusion of effortlessness is of course merely a mirage. It took them a long time to sound so at ease, but their constant road work in the wake of Boy not only tightened up the band, it gave them focus, something that’s evident here on the clutch of live material from Boy. Just over a year after the album’s release, U2 now sounds vigorous and dramatic with these song and this authority helps give the non-LP single “A Celebration”/”Trash, Trampoline and Party Girl” intrigue. U2 could still stumble into the ridiculous, as on the “Fire” B-side “J. Swallow,” but overall they were beginning to gel, to learn their strengths and how to use them. That makes October the best bonus disc out of this trilogy, even if Boy remains the most fascinating and historically relevant.

Sadly, the bonus disc that accompanies War could not be called either fascinating or relevant. War is easily the best album of U2’s first three records but the album had very little in the way of noteworthy B-sides and based on this reissue, there wasn’t much in the vaults either. There’s the amiably atmospheric but quite slight instrumental “Endless Deep;” there’s the unreleased, seemingly unfinished, “Angels Too Tied to the Ground,” which has an intriguingly jazzy lilt; there’s the “New Year’s Day” B-side “Treasure (Whatever Happened to Pete the Chop),” which is slight but appealingly energetic; live versions of “I Threw A Brick Though a Window/A Day Without Me” and Fire. And then, there are four remixes of “New Year’s Day” and three remixes of “Two Hearts Beat As One” – all released as B-sides, so it’s nice to have them out for the sake of history and collectors, but none are great and the attempt to shoehorn this early earnest U2 into the club via Ferry Carsten’s 12-inch extended mixes on “New Year’s Day” is just awkward. So, there’s not much to dig into here – only “Treasure” and maybe “Angels” qualify as must-hears for diehards – but it is still nice to finally have all these rarities get reissued (and to have the albums proper remastered), as a band like U2 should have all their B-sides and stray tracks available, even if all this unheard music might not be among their best work.