Collection
The U.K. punk/new wave explosion of the early 1980s offered up a slate largely clean of both expectations and artistic preconceptions. A few young musicians were brave enough to use it for something other than constructing a new set of clichés, including Newcastle's Paddy McAloon and his band, Prefab Sprout, who became cult faves in the bargain. This generous double-CD set offers up a well-balanced chronicle of McAloon and company's endearingly quirky, ever-literate pop concoctions, dividing its discs between the band's singles (including the privately pressed debut "Lions in My Own Garden") and cuts from a decade's worth of iconoclastic albums. Freely using a delightfully unpredictable palette that included jazz (especially the spare, gorgeous "Couldn't Bear to Be Special"), cabaret, neo-skiffle ("Faron Young"), lounge, and even Broadway--sometimes all in the space of three minutes--Prefab Sprout might well have anticipated much of what became the alt-rock clichés of the '90s, though delivered with a sense of genuine wit and virtually no overweening irony.The Collectionis a great way to (re)discover one of the great hidden musical treasures of the '80s.--Jerry McCulley