Greatest Hits, Guilty Pleasures

To be honest, I always feel like a bit of a cheater when I purchase a 'Best Of' or a 'Greatest Hits'. It's like watching a ten-minute 'Chang's Funniest Moments' compilation on YouTube instead of sitting down with a Community boxset and watching each episode properly. When you purchase a Greatest Hits compilation, you're effectively saying:

"Wait, you've released HOW many albums in your career? Eighteen?!  No thanks, Mr Springsteen - just gimme the songs that everyone knows and I'll be on my way."

But I'm not trying to claim some kind of moral high ground here - I buy Best Ofs as well. In fact, only yesterday I listened to three Best Ofs in a row: 

Mercury Rev & The Haunted Album

Today, I'm going to tell you a ghost story. 

Deserter's Songs is a pretty important album. It marked a massive sea change for its creators; where Mercury Rev's first few albums had been psychedelic and fuzzy, this release had swooning strings, musical saws, and songs that your parents could tolerate. It was the band's big breakthrough moment, the album that introduced them to a much wider audience and established them as a major force on the alternative circuit.

It's also haunted.

S&M (An Introduction to Metallica)

I had my first taste of Metallica at the age of 13. My ginger friend, Tim, sent me Enter Sandman over MSN and, well, I rather enjoyed it. Several other songs followed, including Master of Puppets and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and they were even better - I even wrote a (dreadful) parody version of the former song, changing the title to 'Master of Muppets'.

And yet, in spite of my fondness for those few tracks, I never bothered to buy a Metallica album. I'm not sure why - perhaps they were too expensive*, or perhaps my inner metalhead was content with the Iron Maiden CDs that I already owned. Whatever the reason, it took Metallica the best part of a decade to finally find a place on The Album Wall.

The album that finally broke my duck was S&M, a double-disc live document of Metallica's collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. It was given to me a couple of weeks ago by JR, another ginger friend of mine, who insisted that no collection was complete without it**.

How I Plan to Spend My Birthday Money

Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. I received a whole bunch of nice presents, but for the purposes of today's blog, this was the big one:

That is a £40 gift voucher for Spillers Records (thanks mum and dad!) All I need to do now is decide what to spend it on. It's been a while since I went for a SpillerBinge, and so my New Music wishlist has started to look a little bloated:

Pictured: 9 of 28

Do To The Beast

So here's a brief account of my Afghan Whigs experience to date:

• Having heard the band's named bandied about in all the right circles, I picked up a copy of 1965 from The Record Shop on Inverness Place. It cost me £4.


• 1965 was all right but not all great, and so I didn't revisit the Whigs until a book told me to do so. It was Gentlemen's entry in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die that finally convinced me to revisit Greg Dulli and Co, and I'm glad I did - their fourth album is an altogether darker and more rocked-up affair than 1965, which of course meant that I found it altogether more appealing.


• In 2012, I attended the Optimus Primavera Sound Festival in Porto. Here, I braved the rain (typical - you fly all the way to Portugal and it rains) to watch TAW's set on the Super Bock Stage or whatever it was called at the time. They played a blinder, and later that evening, I chanced upon a copy of Black Love in one of the CD/record tents. That album proved not to be quite as good as Gentlemen, but it was still a wonderful blend of noise and sneery attitude.