With the impending release of The Wallflowers new album, it seems only fair to review their last offering that I didn't review and I had every opportunity to review. Maybe the reason I didn't was because it was Collected: 1996-2005 (2009), a greatest hits collection through the band's Interscope years, and there wasn't much else to report on it. That being said, there's no time like another release to review a compilation...
... that makes no sense whatsoever, but here we go, and in a brief way:
Collected: 1996-2005, as the title suggests contains songs from seminal Bringing Down the Horse (1996) to the almost as excellent Rebel, Sweetheart (2005). So there is nothing from the band's eponymous 1992 debut, which is too bad but makes sense. The Wallflowers belonged to Virgin Records and exuded a far more alt-country twang as opposed to the more polished roots-rock of subsequent albums. Collected contains all of the official singles from the albums in range, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it makes for few surprises.
Fortunately, the compilation does contain a few extras to bring in those that own everything else already (like me). These are the surprisingly progressive "Eat Your Sleeping" from the superior (Breach) (2000) era, and the touchingly mellow demo version of Rebel's "God Says Nothing Back." Both tracks are actually excellent and do make this collection worth it for hard core fans, but it would have been nice to have a little more (maybe just one more). That being said, a certain addition of Collected exists with a DVD of all the bands videos, and that's a lot of fun (they have some pretty solid ones) Anyway, there it is, Collected, and soon... what we've all been waiting for...
McS
