3 out of 5

Label: Virgin

Produced by: Dennis Herring

The main CVB albums (prior to their Tusk resurgence) were pretty easy finds in the used bins.  Back in the days when such things would happen, a “cool” uncle gave me a mix tape that had a couple of classic Telephone Free Landslide Victory cuts on it, and my ska-approving ears (yes, back in the days…) took to it, finally finding something made before 1995 that didn’t sound like the Toasters.  And so I snapped up those used bin finds quite quickly – excepting II & III, which I didn’t own until the later spinART rerelease – and spent a lot of time with them.  Enough so that the tracks on Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart – the group’s first major label release, and their first with producer Dennis Herring – are instantly recognizable at this point, but also enough to realize that it got the least playthrough of those discs.  Returning to it now, it’s a bit clearer why that was the case: while OBRS has several classic tracks, it very much suffers from a split identity: between old-school snark and latter-day cynical maturity; between genre mash-ups and slicker blends; between jams and singles.  It’s by no means a sell-out effort, but it is clearly an attempt to sound different, whether by Herring’s glossy, beat-based production, or the group’s erring toward some to-the-point pop, with less weed-baked lyrics; as such, a lot of it comes off as either reworked elements from previous albums, or practice tracks for a style that fit much more comfortably on Key Lime Pie.  Extending that, the album is most memorable when CVB isn’t leaning in to new production tricks and gets to be itself, and to the group’s credit, examples of that are scattered pretty equally over the disc.

And so Eye of Fatima (pt. 1), O Death, Never Go Back, Life is Grand, and others, all have the ability to get stuck well in your head, though it might end up leading you to replay other standout albums from CVB’s catalogue instead.