I note in way of passing that obviously the clutch of releases Creation put out in the fall of 1991 seems to have had a long lasting impact on me over the moons. There was Swervedriver's Raise, I just talked about Slowdive's Just For a Day and now there's this one. There'll be more. And I'm not talking about Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque either.
So this album. Pretty much all the singles had already been released in the heady days of 1990 and maybe the early bits of 1991, so this was actually much more of a compilation than anything else -- in fact, looking at the track listing again, yeah, over half the album had popped up in other contexts well before it came out. It's all pretty nicely sequenced and arranged as a unified piece, though, so that's one reason why the darn thing holds together so well. Not the only one, of course.
There's the music, for instance. Well, duh, may be your answer. But as the jokes about Bobby Gillespie ran at the time, he did have an unfeasibly large record collection, and while at points you almost wish he would have had a broader mind with it, that's where Andrew Weatherall comes in. And quite who exactly to blame or credit the album on is sort of unclear after a point. Given that Jimmy Miller handled two of the songs (specifically the ones that sounded exactly like the Rolling Stones, like "Movin' On Up" and "Damaged," as opposed to generally resembling them after having been fed through a computer) and that the Orb got up to its games with "Higher Than the Sun," and to brilliant effect, sampling Tones on Tail, knowing exactly when to let loose with the clattering drum loop and where to mix in the exultant "whooooooooo-hoooo!" with it, the album isn't totally Mr. Boys' Own's deal. Just mostly.
And you can thank Roky Erickson in spirit, since "Slip Inside This House" was covered here, and given a wonderful shuffling beat that's more hip-hop than most realized at the time, albeit shaggier -- the sitars helped immensely as well. No doubt the purists complained, but so? I yawn in their faces. And I like the fact that Gillespie just absented himself entirely from "Don’t Fight It, Feel It," and while Denise Johnson isn't the most distinct of divas, necessarily, she rides Weatherall's crisp, proto-Chemicals beat slam with disco whistles pretty damn well, knowing when to hold back at points and let the noises do their fun work. Actually, nobody really sang at all on "Inner Flight," and it's all very pretty harpischord/flute floatiness for the modern ambient chillout rooms of today whose denizens wished they were smoking hash in 1968. Very sweet.
Gillespie, meanwhile, plagiarizes with glee, gobbles everything up and for one brief semi-moment almost seems like he's saying all music everywhere is equally good. Which it is, of course, but sometimes this is forgotten. So he rehashes Can lyrics on "Movin' on Up," talks about being "stone in love witchoo" on "Damaged," strings together a bunch of song titles on "Come Together" and pretends it’s a big statement, just adds some "aw yeahs" to "Loaded" while Weatherall has fun turning a drum sample from Edie Brickell into something that, unsurprisingly, sounds like it was sampled from a Rolling Stones track. All the post-drug-high tracks appear at the end of the record, and they're all quite tasteful and organic,' and thus an evening's debauchery and enjoyment is complete, I guess. I know I liked it.
The 'real' band is in all this somewhere, but who knows where and who cares? I almost wish it was a bunch of session musicians. Maybe it was. Works for me!