4 out of 5

Label: Conspiracy Records

Produced by: Pleasure Forever

This doesn’t feel like a collection of odds and sods, though it is: four rare tracks (early tunes, compilation tunes) and four covers, all pretty well representing Pleasure Forever’s swagger. It admittedly lacks the kind of tonal feeling of an album – there is a sense that you’re listening to a set of singles, and some of them are relatively slighter than others – but at the same time, the songs work together very well, giving us the loud and blustery and musical and swoony sides of PF’s sound.

Some of the tracks veer a bit more toward a “typical” punk sound, but that might be fitting given the source – one such culprit is Capricorn Blue, for example, which comes from a GSL comp – and even considering that, all of the songs are pretty identifiable to the band. Blue and the short Right Back Down in the Middle arguably make less of an impact than openers King Cobra In the Guts of Valhalla – as sprawling as that title suggests, and an excellent tune – and the hard-edged Miles Underneath, which gives further reminders of the group’s prior-band pedigree. But it’s honestly the covers which give this set even more of a must-have edge, as each tune helps highlight some aspect of PF’s style, whether it’s the operatically grim imagery of Alice Cooper’s Black Juju, or the pop basis of Abba’s Honey Honey, here twisted into something sinister sounding but maintaining that core beat.

Recorded between 1999 and 2003, an after the fact mastering by Peter Lyman does an excellent job of brining all these tracks up to a similar spec, and highlighting the intensity of the original recordings perfectly. While not all the songs are necessarily The Best Ones Ever, this is a really impressive batch of tunes, especially given that they weren’t recorded together.