Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – B-Sides and Rarities Part II – Album Review

 Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com 

The Cure - Join the Dots: B-Sides & Rarities

FOUR CDs of b-sides from The Cure, great!  The set is broken up chronologically, and not surprisingly the first disc 1978-1987 is by far the most essential.  Any self-respecting Cure fan (Cure-head?) should already have creepy kitchen sink drama 10:15 Saturday Night already and the rest is a bit hit and miss.  The stronger tracks are earlier on the disc, with I'm Cold sounding like the darker moments of their debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, while Another Journey by Train is like early single Jumping Someone Else's Train ran through a 17 Seconds blender, ie, pretty damn good.  Descent is like cast-off riffs from their Faith album and Splintered in Her Head could soundtrack a descent into hell.  After this the mood changes abruptly with the quirky likes of The Dream and The Upstairs Room, though the second version of Lament is a brooding slab of glorious misery.  What else?  Further into the first disc sees Robert Smith get looser and looser with his vocals, not always to great effect (the piercing wails on New Day).  The pacy guitar strums of The Exploding Boy are quite fetching though.

After this things get a bit wobbly.  On the second disc, A Chain of Flowers has some gorgeous, if very Goth-y, ringing guitars.  They turn their hand to poppy moments such as 2 Late and To The Sky is the Cure's very own John Hughes soundtracking moment, it wouldn't have been out of place in a mid 80s coming-of-age movie.  Other highlights include the Eastern flavoured Fear of Ghosts and two different covers of The Doors' Hello I Love You. Elsewhere, we could do without remixes of Icing Sugar, Hey You and Just Like Heaven, and the dance-infused Harold and Joe comes across as trying a bit too hard.

The third CD is by and large, accessible intelligent pop like This Twilight Garden and Halo, and darker brooding numbers like Play and the gentle grower that is The Big Hand.  We also get a couple of novelty covers, Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze and Bowie's Young Americans, along with Burn, taken from the soundtrack to The Crow.  The fourth CD isn't great really, some dreadful remixes (A Forest) and dodgy covers (World In My Eyes).  But overall, a decent collection.

Album Review: The Jesus and Mary Chain - The Power of Negative Thinking: B-Sides & Rarities

In 2008 the Jesus and Mary Chain released a 4 CD box set of B-sides.  It's wonderfully packaged in a book-like case, full of notes and photographs.  You have to ask yourself though: does anybody need nearly 4 hours and over 80 tracks of this?

The answer is, of course, yes.  The first CD contains early demo Up Too High, the extraordinary assault of their first single Upside Down and many, many more. The hilarious, deadpan, expletive-laden Cracked is included here, but on the other hand, there are acoustic versions of some of the Psychocandy material, for those who can't take the feedback.

The second CD is almost flawless, full of exuberantly bored tracks like Kill Surf City, Everything's Alright When You're Down and TWO versions of the Beach Boys' Surfing USA.  The late 80s/early 90s covered on CD3 saw some dodgy synth & drum machine experiments, though they still found time for the triumphant Something I Can't Have.

On the final CD the preponderance of acoustic-based Primal Scream-style strums (Little Stars, New York City, Taking It Away), along with covers of the Pogues (Ghost of a Smile) and Prince (Alphabet Street) sound like a band running out of steam.  However, the material remains of high quality across this hugely comprehensive collection, sure to provide months of enjoyment for the Jesus-heads amongst us. 

Album Review: The Jesus and Mary Chain - The Sound of Speed

The Sound of Speed was released in 1993 and is a second helping of Jesus and Mary Chain B-sides, or non-album tracks, following on from Barbed Wire Kisses.  So just what we all need then.  It opens with Snakedriver, a bit like a slowed-down Ramones meets the Ronettes but then explodes into life with Reverence.  It sounds kind of quaint now but it attracted considerable controversy over Jim Reid’s lyrics: “I wanna die just like Jesus Christ, I wanna die on a bed of spikes” etc.  What’s overlooked is that this noisy, abrasive single reached the upper reaches of the singles chart.  It takes a vaguely hip-hop beat and overlays it with sheets of William Reid’s guitar, with a neat reference to the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog.  Equally noisy is Lowlife, which is excellently described by its title.

 
Elseswhere, they display their sunnier, almost hippy side with the lazy strums of Why’d You Want Me and Don’t Come Down.  These tracks work, but an attempt at an acoustic version of Teenage Lust is less successful, neutering the original.  They turn cover versions of Guitarman, Tower of Song and Little Red Rooster into their own standard issue black holes, the gloopy version of the latter is almost unrecognisable from the original.  They take a different tack with My Girl, turning in a hopelessly bored, acoustic cover.
 
Something I Can’t Have showcases their exuberant side, bursting from the speakers with Jim Reid making lyrics like “you’re in my house, you’re in my face, you made me hate the human race” sound triumphant over ringing guitars.  Sometimes, which follows, is similarly upbeat.  Later, Shimmer is more subdued, with shades of the Velvet Underground thrown in, while Penetration is a pretty awful experiment with keyboards and a dance-beat.
 
It’s the sound of the band branching out and trying new things (relative to their older output) so it’s pretty hit and miss, but it’s quite fun to listen to.