The Scream

Nick Cave finally gives the dedicated fans what they've desired for years (and have probably amassed in various guises in shoddy bootlegs): an official career-spanning cataloging of the various Bad Seeds odds and ends on three CDs. There are 56 tracks compiled here…

This collection brings together tracks from the Elevators 1966 performances in San Francisco and Houston, plus bonus tracks from Roky’s solo performances in the early ‘70s.

THE DEAD DAISIES had an unbelievable last year. From the moment they dropped their first single “Long Way To Go” ahead of their European Festival Summer in June, the hits just kept on coming. The 2nd single and title track “Make Some Noise” ramped up the release of the third studio album for the band in August at which point they were well underway touring the USA with KISS, a tour that finished with a sold-out headline show at LA’s prestigious “Whisky A Go-Go”. “Song and a prayer”, released as a single with an accompanying short-film, refocused attention and rang in the final, massive touring phase of the year which saw the band go to Japan for the first time, where they immediately became media and fan darlings and went down a storm at the world-famous “Loud Park”-festival.

A live document of the Brian Jones-era Rolling Stones sounds enticing, but the actual product is a letdown, owing to a mixture of factors, some beyond the producers' control and other very much their doing. The sound on the original LP was lousy – which was par for the course on most mid-'60s live rock albums – and the remasterings have only improved it marginally, and for that matter not all of it's live; a couple of old studio R&B covers were augmented by screaming fans that had obviously been overdubbed…

Writing on the Wall's only album was theatrical heavy blues-psychedelic-rock that, despite its power and menace, was too obviously derivative of better and more original artists to qualify as a notable work. The organ-guitar blends owe much to the Doors, Procol Harum, and Traffic, though the attitude is somehow more sour and ominous than any of those groups. The vocals are sometimes pretty blatant in their homages to Arthur Brown, particularly when Linnie Paterson climbs to a histrionic scream; Jim Morrison, Gary Brooker, and Stevie Winwood obviously left their imprints on him too. Throw in some of the portentous drama from the narrations to the Elektra astrological concept album The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (particularly on "Aries") as well…