For a band that came out of the late-'70s British punk scene and stuck around (with a few extended breaks) long enough to make a towering stack of records, the Monochrome Set still have a remarkably low profile in the U.S. One explanation might be that they're a very British act: songwriter and frontman Bid (born Ganesh Seshadri) has always loved ridiculing the class system, making puns about London landmarks, feigning embarrassment about sexuality, trilling when he's expected to snarl. He's a wit, but he rolls his eyes at clowns.
You could say the same about the Smiths, of course (and Morrissey and Johnny Marr initially bonded over their shared admiration for the Monochrome Set). But it's also true that the Set's early lineups, especially, tended to channel their instrumental muscle and cross-chattering guitar lines into pastiches of intensely uncool kinds of pre-punk music: easy listening, country, bossa nova. 1985's jaunty fuck-you-pay-me "Whoops! What a Palaver", on this collection, even flirts with Gilbert & Sullivan: "I quote in the vernacular/And edit speech oracular/To seek a phrase spectacular/Like 'piss off, you cunt'/Or 'I hate the queen'/Or 'I am one.'"
Still, the clearest reason that the Monochrome Set have never caught on over here is that their studio albums often overreach and under-deliver. The best record they released during their original incarnation was 1983's Volume, Contrast, Brilliance..., a cherry-picked miscellany of singles and radio sessions with a promising "Vol. 1" in its subtitle. Its 33-years-later sequel—shockingly, almost as good—is a set of demos recorded between 1978 and 1991. Some of them were abandoned, others reworked for more-finished records (although only "Black are the Flowers" substantially improved on the version here), and a couple were stripped for parts: the music and lyrics of "The Greatest Performance Artist in the World" ended up in two different songs more than a decade later.
Like the first one, Vol. 2 is a delightful mess. The casual recording quality of some of these demos serves them well: treble and wobble and drum machine play up the sense that even the minor ones have been rescued from the void, and highlight Bid's dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity. (One thing he picked up from his fondness for unfashionable music was a gift for croonable tunes.) "The Greatest Performance Artist," the liner notes claim, was initially dropped because "the band were unhappy with the lack of a real orchestra"; it's almost certainly better for sounding like it was whipped up in an afternoon.
The album's highlight, "I Want Your Skin," was originally intended to be a centerpiece of their 1990 album Dante's Casino, but not actually recorded for it. It's an elaborate and very clever joke, a headbanging riff-rocker with a lengthy, triumphant twin-guitar solo, in which Bid's lyrical persona feints first at being a macho Casanova who adores blue-eyed blondes, then at being a skin-collecting serial killer, and finally reveals the awful truth: the refrain we've been hearing as "I want your skin, honey" actually goes "I want your skin on Eve." (The song's stylistic allusions to Thin Lizzy underscore its punch line; Bid and Lizzy's Phil Lynott were both among the British Isles' very few nonwhite rock performers, and for that matter, the Monochrome Set's name could be a joke about race too.)
Maybe more than any of the band's other albums, this one focuses on their pop-as-commentary-on-pop songs. "Something About You" crouches on the opposite side of the room from the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday", exaggeratedly miming its every gesture; likewise, it took a certain kind of chutzpah for a punk band to write original songs called "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Fly Me to the Moon" in 1978. At times, Vol. 2 is even self-commentary: the opening riffs of "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Cilla Black" are close variations on the ones from Vol. 1's "He's Frank (Slight Return)" and "The Jet Set Junta". The Monochrome Set has always thrived on combing the discarded past for jewels; it's only fair that they should find some in their own.
