4 out of 5

Produced by: Steve Albini, Various

Label: Matador

This is a danged mean promo.  I mean, it was an easy used bin find, and cheap to purchase online, but let’s suppose this disc only resided in the “radio / retail” hands which were intended (I guess?) to spin it as a ‘sampler’ of Silkworm: 12 tracks from the group’s releases up through Developer – some or which aren’t on Matador, and would not, in their original form, have been easy to track down – with half of those tracks coming from various EPs and singles.  “What is this?” you’d ask, intrigued by the rootsy, Albini-recorded rock playing through he speakers, as it slings between kickass, on-a-whim solos and grinding riffs and a booming bass and beat, capped with soulful and cynical embattled lyrics on tourin’ and livin’; and your friendly radio / retail person responds Silkworm, and so you scrabble off to purchase… but, eh, sorry, maybe only 3 or 4 of these songs are actually on an album you can buy right now?  And you can’t legally buy this sampler because it’s promotional?

Yes, yes, this is in a now long-gone world of CD / vinyl brick-and-mortar shopping, and imagines a mystical customer who actually listened to music and not NPR recommendations (ah, my old music store snobbery, still intact), but still: this is one of those rare promos that’s more like an actual, separate release, and thus one that’s definitely worth being in your collection.

Unlike the (also excellent) Blind Chicken set, while New School / Old School does bring together some B-sides, it also – as it’s title implies – goes through several years worth of styles, from the loose jangle of L’Arje / Libertine to the punky aggression of In The West, up through the group’s duo of proper Matador discs – Firewater and Developer.  Sequenced, generally, from most recent to earliest, this ends up being a fantastic introduction into the group’s variations on bluesy bar-rock, starting off with their more tightly honed offerings and then slowly leading into the open-ended, sprawling stuff.  There does seem to be favoring toward the very riff-centric, ear-grabbing stuff, though, and while that makes sense for a sampler, it does makes the disc one of the few SKWM releases to become somewhat exhausting by its conclusion, due to the majority of the 12 tracks keeping the energy amped up the whole while.

Still, despite owning most of this stuff, I love things that make listening to better bits from scattered recordings easier, and when they’re given a bit of thought into their presentation, you get something nigh-essential like New School / Old School.