Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond

by

Various Artists

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I don't get where some of the last few critics are coming from. Yes, sadly some of the members of the bands featured on this album ossified into prog-rockers come the '70's -- just like some some punk generation musicians ossified into lounge singers, fake rockabillies, world-music twerps or pop acts. So what? It doesn't take an iota of energy away from the music they and their cohorts played when they were young. The great songs here are too many to list, but include the incredibly catchy and riffy "Sorry" by the Easybeats; a maximum R'n'B "I'll Keep Holding On" by the well-named Action; the incredibly produced and jubilantly trippy "My White Bicycle" by Tomorrow; the aggressive "Making Time" by the Creation; the too-wonderful-for-words "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke (just check out that opening guitar!); "How is the Air Up There?" by the La De Da's, who out-Stone the Stones; and "Social End Product" by the Bluestars - proto-punk if I've ever heard it. And these are just the English-speaking groups: "Your Body Not Your Soul", "I'm Just a Mops", "Break it All" and "Get Down from the Tree" are performed by groups from the Netherlands, Japan, Ecuador and Spain, if I'm not mistaken - not countries generally known for rock - until now, maybe. Most of the songs on here remind me of punk - generally, everything is fast, loud, furious and clearly made by kids looking for rules to break, and you can just about picture these bands sweating out their songs in garages. Its great, essential music - I got it two months ago, and I'm still absorbing it, like a great book or complex movie. Its not a perfect collection - for example, I don't like a good chunk of disk 2 - and the pricetag is high, no doubt. Nevertheless, you're not going to find most of this stuff anywhere else, and this colletion is worth the price because there are a lot of new sounds to enjoy here, even if the music is more than thirty years old. Highly, highly recommended.

Nuggets II will appeal most to the guys who endlessly troll record swaps for painfully obscure historical artifacts. Like everyone else who bought this the day it came out, I'd had the original Nuggets two LP set, and then the Pebbles series, and Highs In The Mid-Sixties, and the first Nuggets box set, and so on. Typically with those series, the first few volumes would be indispensable (e.g. Pebbles 1-4), and the remainder would grow increasingly spotty. So too with this box set. It's got a lot of good stuff, but the music here leans less toward the Standells and more toward the Ides of March. More toward the '67-68 psychedelic sound, less '65-66 "punky" sound.

It really shouldn't matter whether a record was a hit or not, but when you get a box set from this era that loudly proclaims "no hits!", you begin to suspect that the track listing was designed with built-in blinders. I don't care if early Pink Floyd is well-known or not, "See Emily Play" would have been good to hear in this context. Or a couple more tunes by Them. But that would cause the purists who are hung up on obscurity itself to bristle. Hey Rhino - those guys are gonna buy this thing anyway.

A third of the tracks here are top shelf "shoulda beens", the remainder are of varying interest. I'll buy Nuggets III when it comes out, but I hope that Nuggets III returns more to the balance of the original two record set. All in all, the anglocentric style of Nuggets II will especially appeal to music fans who thought that "Ride My See-Saw" was special.