One record at a time: 522. Electronic - Get The Message - The Best Of Electronic

The decision to reissue this compilation on vinyl in 2022 made perfect sense. Unfortunately, the people tasked with making it happen made a complete hash of it. Exhibit A is the artwork. The sleeve is so badly pixelated it looks as if the record company pinched the image from the original CD booklet, blew it up, and hoped nobody would notice. It practically howls corner-cutting. Or, if we are being charitable, incompetence. The paper used for the inner sleeves is so flimsy that a stiff breeze could finish it off, and mine look as if they were assembled by someone wearing a blindfold and one oven glove. The records themselves sound OK but they aren’t going to win any awards.

To be honest I am not too enamoured with the track selection on this compilation either. When it first appeared in 2006, I found it underwhelming, and time has not exactly rushed to its defence. Yes, all the singles are here, but so are b-sides and a rather generous helping of tracks from the disappointing "Twisted Tenderness" album. Electronic’s career was a story of diminishing returns. They started in a glorious sweet spot between commercial appeal and artistic freedom, then gradually drifted back into the same frustrated territory they had seemed so keen to escape. For me, any compilation that ventures beyond the singles should lean heavily on the superb debut album and show a little less affection for the later material. That is not just personal preference talking. It is also a fairly plain reflection of how the records connected, or failed to connect, with the wider world.

Pixelated sleeve

Things begin pleasingly enough with "Forbidden City", a wonderful song that found the band at their peak. From there we move through terrific singles such as "Get The Message", "Feel Every Beat" and "Disappointed" before running headlong into a rather baffling choice at the end of the first disc. "All That I Need", the b-side to "For You" from 1996, is a guitar-driven indie rock excursion that does very little for me. It is perfectly competent and does at least contain a melody, which already puts it ahead of some offenders in this genre, but it still hardly qualifies as part of the band’s finest work. 

The second disc opens with "Prodigal Son", which was not a single, although there was a promotional 10” release that somehow transformed a mediocre album track into a small pile of deeply dubious remixes. That still feels like a fairly weak case for rolling out the welcome mat here. Then there is a "New Edit" of "Imitation of Life", which lops more than two minutes off the original b-side for no obvious reason beyond perhaps a general hostility to patience. The song came from the same sessions with Karl Barton that produced material for "Raise the Pressure", yet it did not make that album, which rather raises the question of why it has been dug up for this set. We then stagger to the finish line with a cluster of songs from "Twisted Tenderness" that, title track aside, simply do not land for me. I would much rather be listening to "Idiot Country" or "Try All You Want", because those songs capture the band at their best, whereas this closing stretch feels like the compilation putting its shoes on the wrong feet and insisting everything is absolutely fine. 3/5