The Vines
Winning Days
Capitol
After storming onto the international scene in the wake of alt/art-rock acts The Libertines, the Strokes and the Hives, The Vines scored a hit with its 2002 post-grunge debut Highly Evolved. The album featured powerful hooks and riffs and heaps of post-grunge antipodean chic.
Two years on from this initial success comes Winning Days, an album that sees the revamped combo veering away from its rough-and-ready early days and venturing dangerously into the land of concepts albums.
Lacking the zeal of Highly Evolved, the Aussie combo's latest effort falls rather flat. Opening with Ride, which is the album's only genuine hybrid alt-rock tune with any trace of the band's former glory, Winning Days is vastly too over reliant on complexity for its own good.
Instead of going for the throat, all of the tunes' structures are too complicated and numbers such the title track and Sun Childsound far too much like early Oasis to warrant more than an ephemeral listen.
10,000 Maniacs
Campfire Songs
Elektra/Rhino
From 1981 to 1992, Natalie Merchant's soulful, yet off-center vocals helped 10,000 Maniacs soar from an obscure blue-collar American college rock band based out of Jamestown, New York, to a festival-headlining combo capable of filling venues throughout Europe.
The band continued to record after Merchant's departure, but never managed to achieve the same degree of popularity and finally called it a day after the death of Maniac's lead guitarist and founding member, Robert Buck, in 2000.
Just the second official collection of Maniacs' tunes to be released since 1990's Hope Chest, Campfire Songs features 31 songs on two discs and makes for a concise "best of and the rest" styled compilation. The double CD set captures the true essence of a working class US music scene before grunge came along and sullied the waters.
Although the tunes on CD 1 are predictable, they remain fresh and faultlessly plot the band's musical development. Laid out in chronological order, the CD includes favorites like Hey Jack Kerouac, Poison in the Well, Eat For Two and Because the Night, taken from the band's MTV Unplugged album as well as earlier alt-rock/punk oriented tunes like Planned Obsolescence and My Mother the War.
The second CD features a selection of B-sides, out-takes and previously unreleased demos. Highlights include an unissued version of Poppy Selling Man, a live version of Lulu's To Sir With Love, on which Merchant is joined by REM's Michael Stipe, and an interesting cover of David Bowie's Starman.
Sid Vicious
Too Fast to Live
EMI/Virgin
Whatever your opinions of John Simon Ritchie, or Sid Vicious as he became known, nobody has ever better encapsulated the true spirit of punk rock -- anarchy, nihilism, outrageous excess and early death.
Making his live debut on drums for Siouxsie and the Banshees, Vicious' pre-Sex Pistols days are remembered more for his violent outbursts rather than for his musical ability or lack thereof. Vicious' antics included blinding a young female fan in one eye with broken glass and attacking a well-known music journalist with a rusty bicycle chain.
Officially joining the Pistols in early 1977 after the band sacked original bassist Glen Matlock, Vicious was such a bad musician, both drunk and sober, that manager Malcom McLaren was forced to re-hire Matlock as a session musician to record the Pistol's vinyl legacy, Never Mind the
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