Orange Juice - Coals To Newcastle (2010)

The Scottish post-punk band's new box set isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice.

By the time Orange Juice released an album-- 1982's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever-- their early 45s were already the stuff of frustrating legend. Their first home, Postcard Records, had come and gone and left the band in the unfortunate position of having a stellar reputation based on material few could now hear. Everything they subsequently did was judged against those initial releases-- four lost singles which defined lovelorn, literate indie pop. Combined with their sputtering commercial fortunes, it gave Orange Juice an air of underachievement. Come the CD age and those first blasts of inspiration were well served-- compiled and recompiled, most recently on 2005's The Glasgow School. For most of the last decade it's been the group's later career that's fallen into shadow.

This is a band long defined by unavailability. But no more: New box set Coals to Newcastle isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. More complete than complete, in fact: As well as The Glasgow School, a radio sessions CD, and a DVD, each of the group's four albums gets an expanded disc to itself, which means the six-song Texas Fever is saddled with barely different alternate mixes. But most of the wealth of extra material is worth a play-- Orange Juice were never shy of throwing experiments onto B-sides, and tracks like "Tongues Begin to Wag" are droll sketches of their working process. The most treasurable rarity here, from a 1981 John Peel session, is "Blokes On 45", a medley of those early singles set to a faux-disco backbeat and a vision of proto-indie as an oldies' circuit variety turn.

That was the essence of Orange Juice: They were always self-conscious, and they were usually very funny. The former came with the post-punk territory-- at the end of the box set there's a radio interview where Edwyn Collins talks about being "into" something then chastises himself for sounding like a hippie. The latter was more unusual, but wit and self-deprecation are what links the jangle and rush of their first releases with the louche pop-soul precision of their final ones. That and Collins' immediately recognisable voice-- a plummy, permanently amused croon.