VD Featuring the first ever official live film, from Brixton Academy + all BBC performances from Top of the Pops and Later… with Jools Holland, plus the “Nobody Cares When You’re Gone” documentary.
Recorded at various performances on her 1997-'98 tour, this live collection features Bjork backed only by her collaborator Mark Bell (on various electronic instruments) and the Icelandic String Octet. This relatively spare instrumentation allows Bjork to take her songs down slightly different paths, while retaining the heart of the studio recordings…
Pablo Honey in no way was adequate preparation for its epic, sprawling follow-up, The Bends. Building from the sweeping, three-guitar attackRadiohead that punctuated the best moments of Pablo Honey, Radiohead create a grand and forceful sound that nevertheless resonates with anguish and despair – it's cerebral anthemic rock. Occasionally, the album displays its influences, whether it's U2, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., or the Pixies, but Radiohead turn clichés inside out, making each song sound bracingly fresh. Thom Yorke's tortured lyrics give the album a melancholy undercurrent, as does the surging, textured music. But what makes The Bends so remarkable is that it marries such ambitious, and often challenging, instrumental soundscapes to songs that are at their cores hauntingly melodic and accessible. It makes the record compelling upon first listen, but it reveals new details with each listen, and soon it becomes apparent that with The Bends, Radiohead have reinvented anthemic rock.
The Very Best of the Human League is a DVD by veteran British Synthpop group The Human League, containing most of the band’s music videos recorded up to that point, digitally re-mastered. The only music video missing is Filling up with Heaven from 1995 which was excluded due to a licensing fee dispute between Virgin Records and EastWest. The DVD also contains as bonus material 4 notable appearances on UK BBC 1 flagship music program Top of the Pops and two songs from a live set performed on BBC 2 program Later with Jools Holland in 1995.
A generous sampling from a generous box, The Best of R.E.M. at the BBC culls 34 highlights from its parent eight-disc/single-DVD set. This means this double-disc is swift, passing quickly through the group's various incarnations, as it offers a disc of sessions accompanied by a disc of BBC broadcasts.
Released three years after Chorus, I Say I Say I Say found Erasure for the first time fully interested in essentially staying in place. The album as a whole is at base an attractively redressed version of what the duo had already done, the occasional slight surprise notwithstanding. While Clarke in particular shows some virtuosity with his performances, helped by Human League/Heaven 17 veteran Martyn Ware's production, I Say lacks any real novelty (certainly Bell's singing isn't going to change any earlier perceptions, positive or negative). It's not as experimentally indulgent as the self-titled album or unfortunately unmemorable as Cowboy, but it's still not quite the group at its sharp pop finest track for track. When it does succeed, though, it has plenty of the flash and verve of old…