In the nineties, Cracker were one of dozens of American grunge-tinged yet radio-friendly bands that dipped briefly into the charts with songs like ‘Low’ and ‘Get Off This’. The years since have seen them fall out big style with their former label, Virgin, and while their ex-bosses are planning to release a best of compilation later this year, Cracker – now on Cooking Vinyl – have preempted this by re-recording their most popular songs and releasing them all together as ‘Redux’. So what we have here is art as revenge – luckily however, the songs are infused with vigour rather than bitterness, allowing us to rediscover one of the previous decades little big bands.
Their two most well known songs are also arguably their most interesting. ‘Low’ has a darkness to it that must have made it the obvious choice for a single in the days when UK audiences’ love affair with all things Nirvana-ish were at their peak. In ‘Low’, a heroically relentless two-note guitar riff drags us into an impassioned chorus:
“Being with you girl/ It’s like being low/hey, hey, hey it’s like being stoned.”
‘Get Off This’ is the other side of the band, a thin white jangle, upbeat and catchy and in a similar vein to The Spin Doctors and maybe a hungover Hanson.
Elsewhere in the album, we have ‘Sweet Thistle Pie’, a cross between the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Bohemian Like You’ by those mobile-phone tarts, The Dandy Warhols, and The Big Dipper sounds like Springsteen singing Perfect Day.
The rest of the album is more of a hybrid of college and bar room rock that affects a studied bohemian demeanor whilst never really straying from the mainstream. In fact, ‘I See the Light’ sounds like Tom Petty and Teen Angst could be a lost Travelling Wilburys recording.
Amongst this album’s many saving graces however, are intelligent, often poetic lyrics laced with black humour (“I see the light at the end of the tunnel now/ Someone please tell me it’s not a train”), undeniably catchy choruses; honest performances and not least, the sheer pissed-offness with Virgin Records that surrounds the whole endeavour, from the press release to the sleeve notes, to the lyrics of ‘It’s Not Gonna Suck Itself’, which is an hilarious account of the theft of some Rolling Stones master tapes by band members, out of sheer frustration.
Which brings us to the moot point of ‘Redux’. The likely story here is that while the company own the rights to the specific recordings of the songs, Cracker own the songs themselves and so have simply produced new recordings of them. They are close to the originals but with some variations in arrangement and atmosphere and this makes the album a curious beast – if we somehow view it all as simply another studio album it makes a kind of sweet and simple sense, however, as a Greatest Hits, it is lacking something…
Albums unavoidably reflect where a band is at any particular point in its career and consequently ‘Best Ofs…’ usually have a deeper texture to them, a patina, a sense of development, of sell out or burn out, a sense of journey. Early tracks are often more raw (and sometimes more potent because of it); bands go through line up changes which are reflected in the sound; certain songs will fill a listener with nostalgia, and other tracks will represent artistic wilderness years – it’s the story that these disparate tracks tell, and the cumulative effect of time passing that provides that extra dimension that perhaps ‘Redux’ is lacking.
That said, it is still a great celebration of the band’s most popular tracks and an accessible act of musical sabotage that should appeal to newcomers and die hard fans alike.
Cooking Vinyl should be happy with the album – but also careful not to piss the band off.