4 out of 5

Have trouble picking out your favorite iteration of Panoply Academy?  Well, good news: Concluding (?) compilation “Everything Here Was Built To Break” has you covered, picking up 7″ and compilation and even unreleased material from the few years and millions of styles during / in which Panoply operated, from their earlier post-rock sounds to the latter day indie-mathy jams.  Interestingly, it slots all together amazingly well, someone doing a bang-up job of sequencing, as the order doesn’t really appear chronological so much as grouped by what sounds best together.  Or maybe it’s releases descending?

I should dig out the booklet to tell you and… Geez, fine, I will.  Hold on.

Hm, no exact order, but roughly from newest to oldest, I suppose.

Anyhow, the results are 15 songs of anarchic glee, with fascinating arrangements and a level of depth that was easy to overlook on album, when the sounds – by dint of not all being parts of, essentially, singles – were more spread out.  This is especially true on opener Nom De Plume and the tracks that follow, making it especially disappointing as those were apparently from a session for a “next album” that never materialized.

Less strong, but still interesting, are the covers of Country Joe and the Fish (I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag), Nick Drake (Harvest Breed) and Supertramp (Dreamer / Crime of the Century).  The songs are significantly Panoply’d,, they just don’t necessarily come across as motivated as the remaining fare.  And some of the earliest bits toward the disc’s last third are quite clearly a band still in the defining process, sounding closer to demos in comparison to the newer stuff, but the band had so much creatively fueling their sound even then it’s not exactly a hindrance, just a looser version of thing.

I don’t know the details of the band’s dissolution, but during their small few year run, every release and bane change wad something of an event, and they were forever the quirky band I was sure I could get others hooked on but was unsuccessful.  Its nice having this retrospective that makes it very clear that the good stuff I was hearing wasn’t just a random flash in the pan.