The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Strangely executed, but the songs don't lie.
You don't see a lot of greatest hits compilations in my review section because I generally don't collect them--the weird album cuts are my bread and butter. They're also weirdly anachronistic in the streaming age. At least albums generally stand as a solid piece. A compilation was made for the folks who wanted to hear "Bohemian Like You" without having to skip through "Muhammad" and "Sleep" to get there, and now YouTube is even more convenient than that. The Capitol Years: 1995-2007 is a confusing (for one thing, the Dandys' Capitol years actually start in 1997) collection held together by its top-shelf songs, proving the Dandys' approach to pulling stirring tunes out of rumbling sonics is no bullshit.
Despite the surface-level differences in "Good Morning"'s somnolent shoegaze, "Godless"' rootsy trumpets, and the scampering synths of "Plan A", these songs sit really nicely next to each other because they all come from the same sonic blueprint--big melodies, grubby fuzz, and a disappointed sneer. The mastering is where things start to get weird. I'd grudgingly expect a greatest hits to be blown out to shit, but there's actually a variety of mix differences and altered vocals here that range from "neat" to "pointlessly schizophrenic" (half the Monkey House tracks are taken from a noticeably alternate mix, for example). Consider it something for everyone, I guess: huge tunes for the casuals and a game of spot-the-difference for the dyed-in-the-Dandy.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Every Day Should Be a Holiday", "Get Off", "Holding Me Up" | "The Last High" | "This is the Tide" |  |
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