This year, as it's been hard not to notice, marks the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Alongside the usual tributes, a few articles and commentators have pointed out that Presley doesn't sell like he used to. In fact, his total album sales last year would end a boy band's career. Given his position atop the rock canon, it would make sense if Elvis fans, like Beatles fans, were a self-regenerating resource, but that seems not to be the case. It doesn't help that RCA waited until the last decade or so to begin packaging his catalog with any discernible intelligence, with box sets that encompass whole decades and two-disc sets that capture the best moments. A forthcoming 30-track greatest-hits album hopes to do for Presley what 1 did for The Beatles, and it just might. Meanwhile, however, RCA is addressing the other sort of Elvis fan: the kind that would buy Today, Tomorrow & Forever, a four-disc set of previously unreleased rarities and alternate takes released just five years after Platinum: A Life In Music, another four-disc collection of different rarities and alternate takes. Compiled by Mikael Jorgensen and Roger Semon and annotated by Colin Escott (each a go-to guy for this sort of project) and consisting of 100 unheard tracks, Today, Tomorrow spans Presley's recording history. But what emerges is less an alternate career–à la the ones heard on Bob Dylan's remarkable bootleg series or Bruce Springsteen's Tracks–than a shadow history. The set has its standout moments, but there's a reason so many of these tracks became alternate takes: They're just not as good as the masters. And Presley's dead-ends, unlike Dylan's or Springsteen's, just sound like slightly off, often-inferior versions of the finished product. Escott's note for "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" sums it up: "This alternate version allows us to hear a very familiar recording in a slightly different light." This is a set for those already indoctrinated in the Presley cult of personality, and it has more than a few merits: studio weirdness, some early live material, and the occasional revelation, such as a version of the late-career "Pieces Of My Life" that sounds only two degrees removed from a suicide note. It's the same tale, told again for those who've heard it before—one of early glory, exile, laziness, comeback, excess, and death. It's a great story, too, even if fewer people hear it now than heard it before.