5 out of 5

Label: Alternative Tentacles

Produced by: Nomeansno (Sex Mad); Greg Reely (You Kill Me); Cecil English (compilation remix)

Rating for value of the comp – check the links to the individual releases for the music.

Beyond the purity of hearing the original mixes, this is the way to own Sex Mad and You Kill Me, as you get kind of an optimal presentation of the first version of the trio-sized Nomeansno, plus both the US and Canadian/UK tracks from Sex Mad – a bit of distinction I feel like a lot of compilation discs of this variety would ignore.

My argument for the sequence: While chronological order might seem “correct,” I can’t help but feel like You Kill Me wouldn’t fare well as an opener – it’s packed runtime is very loud, and there’s not really a great single, so it would kind of be a slow lead-in to a full album, whereas placing it last acts as kind of a set of bonus tracks to Sex Mad. Also, it makes the placement of the US vs. UK tracks easier to figure out (between the two releases); otherwise these would likely be stuck at the end of the disc, and they’re not good enders – YKM’s Paradise is the best track on that EP, meanwhile.

Content-wise, all the lyrics are here, and most of the artwork – definitely all the main stuff; just some interstitial things from You Kill Me are missing, I think. And Cecil English’s remix does what I think the right task was here: it really feels like you’re hearing the original productions, “just” mixed to the same levels so that it all sounds cohesive, i.e. this is the original vision, fiddled with so that doing it as one 17-track album makes sense.