It begins, appropriately enough, the same way the real album does, with "Wake Up Boo!", the album version exactly. After this effervescent, gleaming and inspirational beginning, though, the anti-album quickly steps into the wings. "Janus", the first b-side, is distracted, bleak and ragged, with oddly processed guitar harmonics sighing mournfully amidst the soft chords and delicate brushed drums. The backstage narrative then quickly becomes strange, as it passes into the eight-plus-minute evolutionary epic "Blues for George Michael". The first section of this finds Sice singing in a waiflike falsetto over some bizarre reversed accompaniment. Drums, guitar and some trumpet arrive in time to underscore the part of the song that clearly pertains to the title, a short admonition to George to remember that his music will outlast his record label tormentors. That's all over by two minutes into the song, though. There ensues a short section of muted chanting, followed by a sort of oceanic stretch of atmospheric meandering. The calm, drifting parts of this eventually fade away and are replaced with some very beepy synthesizer gurgling. This gets increasingly ominous and arrhythmic for a while, until a resolute trumpet (or keyboard facsimile thereof) returns to usher the song back toward sensibility. It stops a little short, however, and Sice proceeds to repeat "I've drunk the stuff down; / I feel better, I feel stronger" for a while. The chorus, such as it is, flutters through briefly, and then gives way again to a trio played by choppily echoed electric guitar, determinedly nuanceless trumpet, and some unexplained and muted siren noises.

This clamor finally subsides, and is replaced by "Friendship Song", an amiable guitar-pop outing that plays something like a rough low-fi draft for a song that would have made the album if they'd ever found time to clean it up and finish it. In parts this song reminds me of both the Posies and the Three O'Clock, with Sice singing in a particularly Michael Quercio-like whine in several places. This, too, drifts off a little, though, and the last two minutes or so of it find the chorus repeated listlessly over a wandering bass line and some oblique synth-strings. The world behind the scenery is much less ordered than the one in front of it.

"...And Tomorrow the World", the first b-side here, starts out like it's going to be a sweet pop gem, all a cappella echo-round harmonies. After a verse of that, though, it transforms into some semi-psychedelic rambling, from which it is rescued only temporarily by a verse sung in such a silly voice by Sice that it almost sounds like Ween has made an unanticipated appearance in the studio. This single then concludes with the semi-documentary audio-collage "The History of Creation Parts 17 & 36". The raw material for this is the band being interviewed about their experiences with Creation Records, but this text is subjected to so much processing, editing and other mutilation that it ends up sounding rather like the animals from Creature Comforts performing their own version of Frank Zappa's "Porn Wars". Fascinating, if only slightly informative.

For b-sides this part first offers "The Only Word I Can Find". An unhurried anthem, this song is full of guitar squall and cymbal splashes, with only airy vocals and some keyboards keeping it from sounding like Radiohead. "Very Together", the other track, is catchy in parts and becalmed in others, and echoes the "Like some outmoded sixties throwback" part of the album's "Joel" in a couple places.

It is also, of course, misleading. No sooner have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern been summoned out into the lights to play their roles than they find themselves in the dark once again, no clearer on their fate than before. The musical manifestation of this here is "This Is Not About Me", a slow acoustic song that seems somehow uncomfortable with its restrained pace. The vocal duet is shaky and unpolished, and to me sounds like it wants desperately to break into something more heroic, if only the musical accompaniment would oblige.

Our uneasy heroes' curiosities then get the better of them for a bit, and we are treated to somewhat obscured views of what is going on meanwhile, back in the album. There's a High Llamas remix of "Reaching Out From Here" that I like even less than their reworking of "Find the Answer Within", and a Stereolab mix of "Martin, Doom! It's Seven O'Clock" that mostly expands on the original by extending the slow passages with some vaguely ambient burbling noises. The point of these exercises is not at all clear to me, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's resultant perplexity is, I think, wholly understandable.

At this point, the backstage narrative casts off from the main one entirely, never to rejoin it. The first proper b-side here, "Tambo", is a short song full of extraterrestrial-creature noises, placidly oblivious acoustic guitar strumming, and a vocal part that goes nowhere in particular. The other one, "Donkey", with some country-ish guitar plonking and silly lyrics about indifferent personal hygiene, is almost entirely from another world than Wake Up!.

And then, right at the end of it all, just when things seem to have spiraled hopelessly out of control, comes an unexpected moment of pop redemption. "Almost Nearly There", with sparking acoustic guitar, warm electric, enthusiastic handclaps, harpsichord, melodica-ish keyboards and a sweet vocal from Sice, is unforced and delightful. I think that, although I appreciate having had this inverted perspective on the Boo Radleys and Wake Up!, unlike with Shakespeare and Stoppard the parallel narrative is really most useful to make me better appreciate the original. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to hear it get a happy ending.

Irony is good, too, and you'd be hard pressed to call it anything else when Justin Currie writes a song called "The Last Love Song". I'm so amused by this conceit that I can hardly pay attention to the words. Of course it is the narrator saying that this is the last love song, not Justin himself. He is only playing a character. Mournful slide guitar sighs along with his character, as he laments not the death of a relationship, but its entrance into a phase where it is no longer sufficient to hum empty endearments. The gleeful nonsense syllables the band sings are then actually part of the story, which is rarely true of nonsense syllables in pop music, and the cheer with which they are sung is actually fitting, and yet impressive, reflecting the singer's determination to squeeze a few more joyful minutes of fluff out of life before turning to face his soberer future.

The remake of "When You Were Young" is fine, I guess. It's a little more upbeat than the original, but I didn't think there was anything wrong with it to begin with.

The remake of "Learn to Cry", originally a b-side to "Always the Last to Know", seems just as unnecessary to me as the one of "When You Were Young", but if you're going to reuse a b-side, at least remaking it is more interesting than just printing it again.