I haven't done a single round-up since issue 16, and they're backed up to the point where I'll need two weeks to get through them, so let's make a start. Big Country, as I've documented amply elsewhere, is my favorite band. They're also a pretty good b-sides band, which I can say with some shards of objectivity, as their singles reliably contain non-album songs that are as strong as any of their work, and they've put out an impressive shadow catalog of material that way.

The second single (they aren't labeled "one" and "two", but the first one is TRAX 1009, with the Big Country logo in blue, and this one is TRAX 1010, with the logo in yellow) does a little better. The first track is the obligatory reprise of the title song, here the single edit again. Track two, though, is a sinister Adamson composition called "Crazytimes", which sounds like it could have been an upbeat square-dance sing-along if it weren't played at a grinding half-speed that reminds me of Neil Young. This one strikes me as a much more significant piece than "Monday Tuesday Girl".

Marillion's record on singles has been somewhat uneven lately. The first three singles from their last album, Brave, featured only nine tracks, total, with five of them from the album, one a long improvised jam that appeared on two different singles, one an underwhelming orchestral version of an album track, and the last a short and forgettable instrumental. The "Beautiful" set gets off to what looks like a better start. Besides "Beautiful" here, there's the non-album track "Live Forever", and demo versions of "Great Escape" and "Hard as Love", two Brave tracks. This turns out to be less impressive than it sounds, however. Calling "Live Forever" a "track" is almost over-generous. It's a four-and-a-half minute improvisation that doesn't go much of anywhere, either instrumentally, vocally or lyrically. It sounds like the band played it once, and that's about how many times I recommend you listen to it.

The second part of the set slips down into low-yield again. There are only three songs, and two of them are album versions ("Afraid of Sunrise" joins "Beautiful"). The third, "Icon", is another meandering improvisation. The band has now established their fondness for including improvised bits on their singles, so I'm not surprised by it, but the fact that they've now done it three times doesn't keep it from seeming like a pointless cop-out every time they do. When Marillion actually sets out to write a song, they put a lot of work and craftsmanship into it. These improvisations, to me, ache from the absence of those qualities.

I reviewed the first half of this pair months ago. This part backs up "Here and Now" with three live tracks recorded at "'T' in the Park" (an Edinburgh outdoor music thing, I believe) in 1994 for a BBC broadcast: "Stone Cold Sober" and "When I Want You" from 1989's Waking Hours, and "Always the Last to Know" from 1992's Change Everything. I have mixed feelings about Del Amitri live. I've seen them twice here in Boston, and while they put on a great show, there's this magical melancholy atmosphere on their studio albums that they either can't or won't replicate in concert, and so while I like their live incarnation, it's a fondness that pales greatly compared to how much I adore their albums.

"Driving with the Brakes On" is the second single from Twisted, and this first part adds three non-album b-sides. The first one, "Life by Mistake", is a mid-tempo rock song with thickly distorted guitars and dry drums. The second, "In the Meantime", is a slow, sad, organ-driven ballad. The third, "A Little Luck" (not to be confused with the album track "Never Enough", which has the line "A little love is never enough"), is a dark, echoey meditation that sounds to me like Del Amitri's version of Halloween music. Fans won't want to miss these songs, but I doubt they'd make my Del Amitri b-sides honor roll.

The second part is a peculiar exercise in pointlessness that the British engage in at times, when their imagination fails them at single-assembly time, a "mini greatest hits packages". Translated out of marketing-speak, this means that this single is simply filled out with songs from earlier albums. What they think the audience is for such a disc, I don't know, especially one stamped "Limited Edition" for good measure, as this one is. The only reason its audience happens to include me is that for circuitous reasons I was forced to order this disc from an importer without knowing what its contents were. If you had, for some reason, to summarize Del Amitri in four songs, then "Driving with the Brakes On", "Nothing Ever Happens", "Kiss This Thing Goodbye" and "Always the Last to Know" aren't an idiotic set, but anybody who likes the music enough to sit through four songs of it would almost certainly be better advised to buy one of the three albums, and get a large enough block of the band's music to sit back and actually appreciate, before some other disc in your changer whirls it away.

After piles of UK Del Amitri singles, A&M finally decided to give the band a US single release, making this the only disc in this issue that US audiences can buy for a reasonable price. You even get some of the authentic British-single experience, with three non-album b-sides. Okay, the bluesy "Scared to Live" appeared previously in the UK on the 1990 between-albums EP Spit in the Rain, and the galloping "Long Way Down" was on the first UK single for "Here and Now". But the quiet hymn "Someone Else Will" is unique to this single -- unless it appears on one of the three even newer UK singles that I don't have yet, which it probably does. But anyway, making these songs available in the US is a nice gesture, especially since Spit in the Rain is nearly impossible to find any more, and anybody who has two or more of the band's albums ought to go out and get a copy of this before they disappear. And no, Justin Currie does not have a candle stuck up his nose in the cover photograph; that's just the white background visible through the gap between his body and Ian's behind him. See?

The first part of the UK set for "Roll to Me" adds yet another non-album song, the liturgical "In the Frame", on which nice harmony vocals blend with acoustic guitar and quiet organ. The other two tracks are acoustic versions of two Twisted songs, "Food for Songs" and "One Thing Left to Do". The version of "Food for Songs" is grim and forbidding, with a rumbling bass-drum part providing ambient turbulence throughout. The version of "One Thing Left to Do" is a more conventional acoustic rendition, soft drums supporting acoustic guitars and a hushed, unprocessed vocal. Del Amitri's album work rarely approaches overproduced, but it does tend to be polished enough that hearing these acoustic versions provides an interesting insight into the structure of the underlying compositions.

Buttergut is effectively the single for the Houdini track "The Lamberton Lamplighter", which opens this disc. Its b-sides here are three songs that didn't make the album, "Suki", "Boy Racer" and "Butterbelly". "Suki" is a jerky, sawing piece of mania that reminds me a bit of the Gang of Four, with a keening violin fixating on particular notes for measures at a time. "Boy Racer" features total bowed cacophony over a doleful, stolidly intoned bass part, which all gives way periodically to quick "chorus" thrashing of guitar harmonics. What the text concerns I do not know, and given the band's lyrical predilections elsewhere, I think that this title is perhaps best left unexplicated. "Butterbelly" turns out to be an impressive nine-minute mini-symphony, reminiscent in form of the "bonus" tail end of the album's final track, "Unconscious Gangs of Men". It opens with a repetitive guitar (or mandolin?) introduction, which eventually adds some echo processing and heavily reverbed textural vocals. Drums join this further on, and as the drums pick up their pace a bass comes in, and the reverb gets progressively thicker, until the arrangement reaches a raging boil, at which point everything but the processed reverse-echo backs out, and the reverb feedback pulses on its own inertia for a good minute before the song finally shudders to a halt. This single stands on its own the most solidly of any of this week's subjects, I think, and also makes a very worthy twenty-three minute prequel to Houdini.

This one adds less. "Hollywood Gem" and "The Heads of Dead Surfers" are great songs, but they're on the album, which you should have gotten by now (you've had a week since I reviewed it, what's holding you up?). "Flaccid Tabloid" has an interesting lyrical diatribe, but I can't listen to its flatulent horn-section eruptions with a straight face. "Stacked" is solid, but it's short, and I doubt I'll care to hear it badly enough to drag this disc out very often.

And lastly, Runrig put out a new single recently. They don't have another new album or anything, but "An Ubhal As Airde", a song from their 1988 album The Cutter and the Clan, was used in a Carlsberg TV ad in the UK a while back, and this did what ten albums over nearly two decades had failed to do, giving them their first genuine hit outside of Scotland. Hoping to capitalize on this small window of opportunity to drive a wedge of exposure into a broader audience (what an unpleasant metaphor), Chrysalis reissued the song on this single, accompanying it with a song apiece from the band's last three albums (a tactic that I don't resent here, where the lead song is a reissue to begin with). They pick "Abhainn An T-Sluaigh", from The Big Wheel, a fitting Gaelic bridge from the atmospheric "An Ubhal As Airde" toward the less-traditional rock songs that are really Runrig's current stock in trade. "The Greatest Flame", from Amazing Things, is an exemplar of this, a ringing anthem with much of the power of Joshua Tree-era U2. And last, to give casual listeners a glimpse of the grandeur of Runrig's live show, they include the live version of "Flower of the West" from Transmitting Live, a rousing and epic performance with a distinctly Big Country-like "cha" interlude at the end.