4 out of 5

Produced by: Vicki Bennett

Label: Sucata Tapes

The time range offered by the album title should already give you an idea, but just browsing PLU’s discography – and sourcing the various albums this compilation pulls from – is eye-opening: Vicki Bennett has released a lot of material. And while I don’t have nearly enough of her output to say I own anything near “most” of it, I think I have a representative sampling from across PLU’s decades of existence; not everything is gold, sure, but everything I’ve touched has been worth my time.

That said, I tend to prefer PLU albums that are albums, as the band / concept works in shifts, not necessarily singles. It chops up and mixes pretty damn well, but when a set is curated to go together, and can be slotted in to overarching stylistic preferences / tics Vicki has exhibited over time, it’s that much more of a compelling story; compilations like Recyclopaedia Britannica still astound for how much fun all this randomness can be when it’s stewed semi-randomly together, but you also get clusters of similar sounds and a ping-pong feeling between tracks that betrays the cohesiveness a great PLU disc can have.

Top down, early PLU, which gets representation here, is much more vocal sample collage based. The recordings can be purposefully a bit harsher (more repetition / annoying effects), and it’s much more experimental in that regard, like an audio zine. As we start to get into the late 90s, humor becomes a more defining factor: it’s a lot of pokey melodies and sound effects. This stuff is funny, but I also find it to suffer the most out of context; or rather, it’s not as relistenable. Finally, at the turn of the millennium, PLU starts to exhibit some melody, threading the smash-cut vibe of early stuff to more smoothed out melodies for the mid- / late-90s era. I started here, so I have a fondness for it, but I think these kinds of works are also ones that function well in isolation (and perhaps are why they tend to pop up on different PLU compilations…).

Covering these three modes, RB has inevitable ups and downs, also owing to many of the tracks being excerpts in order to stuff more material in there. It’s sequenced thoughtfully to break up the chronology, and if you’re going on cassette, the track list is quite perfectly split to end side A on a kind of mindless parade of voice samples, and start side B with some effective ambience; side B does also lean slightly more on the later material, so if your preferences align with mine, the end of the album picks up a bit.

In the grand scheme, older PLU is harder to track down, and I do think this comp gives a pretty comprehensive take on the changes Vicki’s sounds have undergone in the band’s first ten years. For anyone with a passing interest in this style of music, while it leans a bit more into the goofier side of PLU, it’s a great intro; for followers, it’s a good way to sample quite a bit of discography without shuffling through LPs and other formats.

Note: This was initially released on CD in 2002; I’m listening to the 2018 tape version. However, digitially presents them both, and it may just be the bandcamp recordings, but I found the mastering on the CD versions to be very uneven, with the older material jacked up super loud. Both digitially and physically, the cassette is much more consistent in that regard.