Matt Johnson's always been a hard guy to pin down, taking his ever-shifting lineup and smart-ass bandname over a wide range of oddball ground in a career that's going on 25 years now. The The first crawled up from the periphery of England's post-punk scene, though they ultimately ended up walking territory that had more in common with acts like Oingo Boingo than Gang of Four and Wire. Johnson's first records were more oblique, though, with the debut single "Controversial Subject" and full-length Burning Blue Soul espousing a dark, paranoid sound run through with hissing tape collage and murky, impenetrable production.
For this compilation, though, Johnson and Epic Records have opted to ignore those early recordings, and instead jumping right into 1982, when The The was already four years old and had moved into a much quirkier, more danceable sound. The production values on most of this stuff are almost painfully dated to the 1980s, with cavernous echo on the snares, thin digital synth sounds, and massed female backing vocals, but the sound is also clear enough to reveal Johnson's inventiveness as an arranger and composer.
The zylimba (sounds like a drunk marimba) that opens "Uncertain Smile" (originally released in 1982) makes for a very off-balance intro to what turns out to be a fairly down-to-earth jangly rock song, albeit with some cockeyed little saxophone bits laid carefully around the edges of the melody. Johnson's voice is a pretty decent tenor, but there's always a slightly affected edge to his delivery that highlights the themes of isolation, war, religion and human behavior that are his lyrical stock in trade.
As the decade wore on, Johnson's arrangements became more ambitious, incorporating orchestration and moving a bit away from the heavy programming that colors his early work. 1986's Infected turned up the lushness a bit, as well as the danceability quotient, though the title track hasn't aged terribly well. Ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr joined The The for a several years in the late 80s and early 90s, and his soulful harmonica played an important part in Johnson's move toward a more organic sound, beginning in 1989 with the Mind Bomb LP.
The two Mind Bomb-era songs included here illustrate the extremes of the synthetic and the organic in his work, with "The Beat(en) Generation" playing with a rootsier (though no less heavily produced) sound and a fairly basic arrangement. But the other offering, "Armageddon Days (Are Here Again)", is unforgivably cheesy, an adjective that I try to apply sparingly, but just can't avoid here. The cartoonish, "menacing" chorus vocals, a mob of pitch-shifted Johnsons, Marrs, and a few other co-conspirators, and ridiculous lyrics like, "If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today, he'd be gunned down cold by the CIA," make for a few good chuckles all these years later. The chorus refrain of "Islam is rising/ The Christians mobilizing" might seem chillingly prescient in today's world if the delivery was a little less self-consciously dramatic.
Also included on a second disc is a fairly inconsequential compilation of twelve-inch remixes that add little to the overall package-- most are simply longer versions of the songs on the first disc. It would have been much more gratifying to get some sort of selection of rare tracks from the band's three unreleased albums or perhaps their debut single, "Controversial Subject". The liner notes do trumpet a volume two to this set slated for next year, though, so it seems as though some of those holes may yet be plugged.
