All three are superb. "Ice Cream Smile" is a gentle lament with a seductively interwoven fabric of steel-string, nylon-string and octave-shifted acoustic guitars. The high guitar plays a keyboard-like part, sketching arpeggios against the rhythm/solo interplay of the lower instruments while Tony and Mark contribute an understated rhythm track, and Stuart's vocal is soft and tender. "Magic in Your Eyes" is edgier and folkier. The drums speed up, the guitars switch to insistent fingerpicking, and Stuart and Tony switch into their trademark harmony formation. The verses are almost country in their loping twang, with Stuart letting his voice slip into an unforced drawl. Both of these songs sound complete as is, but both could easily pass for acoustic versions of electric anthems. Perhaps some day we'll hear electric versions in some other guise.

The single only explodes in earnest, though, on the last song. Stuart and Tony's previous collaborations have tended to be among Big Country's hardest rock songs ("One Great Thing", "The Selling of America", "Chester's Farm", "God's Great Mistake"), and "Bianca" follows the pattern, with concussive cymbal crashes battering against vicious rhythm guitar and a bucking solo line. The text is uncharacteristically personal and vicious, with the bitter chorus "Bianca, you're funny because your folks have money. / You want it, they buy it. I think your hair's a riot. / Bianca, you're stupid, you think I came from Cupid, / But me I'm still lucid, and I did more than you did." It's a rousing finale for the triptych, and its vehemence makes a fitting end to the build-up in "Ice Cream Smile" and "Magic in Your Eyes". Three more eloquent arguments for a great big Big Country Complete box set.

Tony Butler takes falsetto lead vocals for "On the Road Again", which is stripped of its original blues fitfulness in favor of a stompingly imperturbable beat and a seething overdriven solidity that reminds me a little of Mechanix-era UFO. Mark Brzezicki's escalating drumming as the concluding solo wends its way home is bone-rattling, and the whole treatment manages to take a song I would switch off after three seconds and turn it into four minutes that I'd gladly put on repeat. These tracks are eminently worth additions to Big Country's unlikely cover-catalog, joining songs by Smokey Robinson, Roxy Music, the Rolling Stones, Eddy Grant, Neil Young, Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell. Now I'm just waiting for the covers of "More Than a Feeling", "Kayleigh" and "Reap the Wild Wind"...

The first side provides "Hardly a Mountain". This is, quite simply, vintage Big Country. If you can imagine a sped up "Seven Waves" being recorded around the time of Steeltown, that's about what this sounds like to me. I tried to A-B compare the two songs to assess this as an actual theory-of-origin, but I kept not wanting to switch off the one I was listening to, so I eventually gave up. The theory is bolstered, however, by the extent to which "Golden Boy Loves Golden Girl" sounds like a very early demo for "The Selling of America", complete with some of the references to "mother" that survived into the final draft.

Talk about vintage Big Country, though, the spare "Can You Feel the Winter" is a minor epic, complete with a break that leads to a completely different section of music, in the manner of "The Sailor" and "The Red Fox" (though this time the A section returns at the end). "Have you any measure what just one of us is worth?", Stuart asks, a very early-Big Country question. But if this song too is related to something on The Buffalo Skinners, the connection eludes me. Having heard every song Big Country has ever recorded more times than I care to admit, though, it may just be that I'm actually too familiar with songs' final forms to spot what to a casual observer would be obvious structural similarities. Whatever the case, and whatever this song's history is, it gives me the same sort of chills that hearing "Wonderland" the first few times did, eleven years ago. I adore the new album (I suspect I've made that clear previously), but every stage in the band's development is precious to me, and hearing new bits of what sound like an era I thought we'd exhausted is a profound experience in its own way, like discovering a hidden room in your house that you'd lived there in ignorance of for a decade. Tentatively I enter the room, wondering whether I'm dreaming or near-death, afraid to admit that there might be another possibility. There's a window, but I'm too scared to look out, unwilling to face the possibility that it opens on a different outside as well. Turning away from it, I scan the room. There's a chair. There are two speakers. There's a stereo. And there's a stack of records beside it. They're all Big Country records, and I've never heard of any of them before. In a daze I pick one up at random, and put it on the turntable. I press Start.

At this point in the dream I usually wake up. Now I can sleep for three more songs.

This is, of course, a really stupid reason to buy a single, particularly an expensive imported one, particularly an expensive two part imported one. Fortunately, there turn out to be other reasons to recommend both these disks. This first one includes two non-album songs, "India Rubber" and "How Can You Be Sure?". "India Rubber" is a lurching, muted song that trails off into a tense sample collage at the end. It's a very cool song, but it would have been bizarrely out of place in the transcendent context of The Bends, which makes it an ideal b-side. "How Can You Be Sure?", on the other hand, would have been completely in character on the album (and from the production credits it's clear that it's an outtake from those sessions). With the deft guest backing vocals from Dianne Swann, in fact, I think it would have been a standout track on the album if they'd included it. I can only imagine that they were set on having an even dozen tracks on the record, and swapping this for any of the songs they kept would have disrupted the flow in some way they didn't like. Whyever, this single is easily worth its price for rescuing these two tracks from the abyss.

The master stroke, though, is the delirious performance of "Anyone Can Play Guitar", the studio version of which was on Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey (and was also on the This is Fort Apache compilation). Slurred and cacophonous, the playing here can't hide the fact that this is one of my favorite world-ending songs since Ultravox's "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" (and "standing on the beach with my guitar" in many ways strikes me as an even more enviable reaction to the apocalypse than the earlier song's tragic dancefloor stand, though maybe I'd feel differently if I hadn't learned to play guitar myself, after a fashion, in the years between the two songs' releases), and in a way the intentionally sloppy delivery just makes the strength of the underlying structure even more apparent. I've come to like Pablo Honey pretty well, after putting up some initial resistance, but it may be that this one live track conveys its spirit better, and a whole lot more concisely, than the album itself actually manages to.

As with "Fake Plastic Trees", this second part is again housed in a bigger cardboard sleeve, and this time offers the added incentive of "two free postcards exclusive to this release". Uh, thanks.

The single also includes a short, wordless song called "Emmerdale". I can only assume this is intended to further confuse potential buyers of Cardigans material, as their 1994 album, whose track listing overlaps Life's by five songs, is also called Emmerdale, but doesn't include this track. Luckily for them, I'm a Big Country fan, and so have long since stopped being fazed by the tactic of removing the song you named the album after, and putting it on the b-side of a subsequent single.

The new song is the rousing guitar anthem "It's Been Too Long and It's Too Late Now", whose galloping drums, strained lead vocals and smooth harmonies make it one of my favorite things the band has done, actually, even though it doesn't quite fit the sepia nostalgic tone that the band mastered so completely on the album. The remix is a Mitch Easter reworking of "Time Wraps Around You", which was one of three songs on the album that Scott Litt mixed instead of him. I'm sure this version is different than the original. I mean, why would they bother doing a remix if it wasn't different? So, like I said, I'm sure it is. If I put both versions on, I'm sure I could tell a difference. But life's so short... Oh, okay, damn it, I will; if reviewers don't have the patience to investigate these things, who in the world is going to? Hold on.

Okay, I've played the two versions side by side now, and I can report that Mitch's advance over Scott's mix appears to consist mainly of cleaning the heads of both the tape decks and their operator. Compared to the clear, balanced version here, the album's mix is murky, lost in reverb, and generally indistinct, as if it was done at the end of a long day of production, and nobody could tell whether they were doing a good job any more. This one is much better. It's a shame we can't just slip it into the album, but I suppose getting it as an update is better than living on, as I had been, enjoying the original just fine, thank you. Probably.

The last song is a concert recording of "My Blank Pages", and is the reason I bought this single, as for the purposes of touring the band had recruited a temporary second guitarist, perhaps emulating REM's tour tactic of sporadically drafting Peter Holsapple. The guy they got, though, is one of the few icons of American guitar pop even dearer to me than Holsapple (and more important to me than Velvet Crush themselves, truthfully), Tommy Keene, who I consider a criminally underappreciated songwriting genius, and a national treasure. Here, mind you, in the middle of a Velvet Crush concert, there's not really much call for somebody else's songwriting, so he just plays guitar. This produces a killer live track, but no dramatic evidence of Keene's presence in particular. Now, if only Velvet Crush would return the favor and act as Keene's backing band on his next album, then I'd really be pleased.