While the musical content differs somewhat from previous releases, lyrical madness is still to be found in all of the Lips' numbers.
The album meanders in with the pleasing Flight Test, a tune which sees the trio exploiting their newfound melancholy radio-friendliness with a spacey semi-acoustic tune. The album then ventures into previously unexplored territory with the Lips using analog synths and warbling bass lines to take listeners into Yoshimi's world: a place where robots are seeking emotion. While the album is great listen from start to finish the choicest moments are the bittersweet tunes All We Have Is Now and Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell. The track that really makes the album, however, is Do You Realize -- a whopper of a tune with cynically biting lyrics backed by a hodgepodge of mild pop and angelic backing vocals.
It probably won't take long for devout followers of the droning guitar-laden white noise of the Reid brothers to workout that the second Jesus and Mary Chain "best of" to hit record store shelves since the Glasgow band's 1998 demise isn't quite what it claims to be.
As any fan will tell you, from between 1984, when the Jesus and Mary Chain first hit the UK music scene with its Velvet Underground inspired brand of feedback to its passing in the late 90s the band only in fact released 17 singles. Not that this boring piece of triviality should stop anyone with a passion for bubblegum rock-loaded amorphous guitar discord from enjoying the entire 74-minutes of this titanic, although mislabeled piece of plastic.
Blasting in with the band's 1984 feedback and distortion loaded debut single, Upside Down -- a tune that made the band an overnight sensation in the UK -- the album takes listeners on a noisy guided tour of one of Scotland's greatest exports.
Following the musically crass material of the band's early days, the album moves onto the band's more pop-orientated, but still buzzsaw laden tunes of the late 1980s and winds down with the band's more euphonious numbers. The later tunes include Sometime Always, a moody duet with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, and the band's slightly hypocritical swan song, I Hate Rock `n' Roll.
Mislabeled it might be, but 21 Singles remains an album that proves that the Jesus and Mary Chain was a unique musical phenomena.
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