Castle
309
1992
Rather than standardly compile Cheap Trick's few chart hits, this Collection concentrates on the many more-entertaining chart misses. With all great bands, every LP in the oeuvre is an important, idiosyncratic piece of the full picture. But by including deep album tracks, the schizo-personality of the maniacally frantic Cheap Trick shows through. You know how great "Surrender" and "Dream Police" are (If you don't, shame!), but check Petersson's slacker turn at the mike on the brilliantly basic "I Know What I Want." Live the violent socio-swing of "The House Is Rockin' (Nielsen throws in a Yardbirds chaser)." Cruise the playground with the Rockford pedofiles in "Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School" (unfortunately the lone representative of Trickıs warped first record, itıs still a twisted way to kick off this comp.). Chase the yuppie dream in "Next Position Please." Catch two of the band's best, most under-celebrated classics in "Stop This Game" and "Standing on the Edge": the former swirls skyward with transcendent production by Sir George Martin and never sounds the same twice; the latter turns trash-pop into visionary paradise through an angelic blow-job chronicle. This faux-live version of "Day Tripper (yea)" used to be hard to find; Nielsen soups-up the sterling Harrison riff, and throws "Shapes of Things" into the solo. The metal machine "Good Girls Go to Heaven (not the Jim Steinman song)" is a clanging oddity from the career suicide note, The Doctor. Sure, "The Flame" sucks, but chicks dig it, so it's worth something (I liked it for a time, but that's just between us; copy?) This disc sequences the cuts pretty close to chronologically so let it run, because the best stuff is when the hits just keep getting harder to find.
-STONE, Cheap Trash NYC
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