Compilation
Noah’s Barks pages relating to media compilations.
Noah’s Barks pages relating to media compilations.

First Utterance is an essential album, and the remastering of it on Song to Comus: The Complete Collection is very tasteful and enough for me to consider it an improvement over the original (apparently the first CD issues of First Utterance had terrible sound quality, so there’s another reason to get this set). There are… (read more)

Wipers Box Set compiles almost all of Wipers’s best work—certainly their best albums. Wipers produced some of the catchiest punk tunes of the ’80s. Greg Sage is a wonderful guitarist who mixes melody with aggression in a way that predicted the alternative rock movement to follow. His voice is deep and rough, making him sound… (read more)

Disc one of March to Fuzz contains a lot of Mudhoney’s fan-favorite songs. For the most part, it’s pretty comprehensive, though there are plenty of fantastic tracks missing, primarily from Superfuzz Bigmuff Plus Early Singles, Mudhoney (self-titled album), and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. The compilation spans their first five albums up to Tomorrow Hit… (read more)

Rough Trade are two independent record stores (Shops!) located in the UK. For a little over a decade now, these stores have compiled several albums of varying genres with song selected by the staff. Eventually, the record chain opened a label to their name, Rough Trade Records. Though typically a minor label, it was home… (read more)

Lost Tracks and Rare Cuts is an unauthorized collection of My Bloody Valentine (MBV) rarities. Among these are “Sugar,” one of the B-sides to the Only Shallow single and a longer version of the track “Glider” from the Glider EP. “Cowboy Song,” “Good for You,” “Just Like Us” (more commonly known as “Kevin Song”) and… (read more)

Sex, America, Cheap Trick is a rather half-assed, unfocused box set. Primarily has rare and unreleased tracks/demos, but also seems to be trying to make a case for Cheap Trick by including some (but certainly not all) of their biggest hit songs. However, this is pointless because due to the haphazard track selection and random… (read more)

With Kurt Cobain having tragically passed away, Courtney Love continues to cherish his memory by building and spending the fortune he amassed for his work. With the Lights Out is a posthumous release compiling a bunch of rare and/or unreleased Nirvana tracks. The bulk of these are made up of live recordings and demos of… (read more)

Incesticide is the Nirvana album I tend to listen to the most these days, since I’m not overly familiar with it and it has the most variety out of any of their albums for obvious reasons. As a fan, I wouldn’t throw away any of the songs here, but at the same time there’s a… (read more)