Item: Return the Gift
Rating: 5
Author: rollingstone

5.0/ 10

“Is this really necessary? Reunited post-punk giants Gang of Four rerecord fourteen of the best tracks from their early albums here, and as you'd expect from their powerful recent live shows, Return the Gift sounds great — the guitars squawk viciously, the funk-fascist rhythm section skitters like an aural anxiety attack and the vocals are […]”

Is this really necessary? Reunited post-punk giants Gang of Four rerecord fourteen of the best tracks from their early albums here, and as you'd expect from their powerful recent live shows, Return the Gift sounds great — the guitars squawk viciously, the funk-fascist rhythm section skitters like an aural anxiety attack and the vocals are equal parts sneer and melody. But the same is true of the classic, just-reissued original albums (1979's Entertainment! and 1981's Solid Gold), so it's hard to see Gift as anything but an exercise in redundancy. A live album would have been a much more welcome present.