The Cravats - The Complete John Peel Sessions (2022)

Just when you think you have as much Cravats as anyone could ever possibly need, they prove you wrong wrong wrong, again! Wrongy McWrongface from the wrong side of Wrongtown - that's you!

I had every track here, or at least the album or single versions as vinyl, compact disc, download, wax cylinder, sheet music, and runic instructions carved on traditional Arizona sandstone. I didn't really need another double album, but it's four entire Peel sessions which - admittedly - I wasn't sure I'd heard, at least not all of them. I stopped the nice man and bought one, knowing I'd otherwise only spend the rest of my life wondering.

It's strange how easily one forgets just how massive and fundamental the Cravats were - still are, if we're going to split hairs. Everything here is ingrained within my skull to such a depth that I suspect the ridges running around the inside of my cranium bear a more than passing resemblance to the grooves found on at least one side of The Colossal Tunes Out; and yet these versions were played and recorded at just enough variance as to sound fresh, not unlike hearing everything for the first time - and in hearing it all for the first time, or experiencing an illusion of the same, you notice how - really - there was never anyone like the Cravats. It's a bomb going off in a jazz factory, wrenching metal slipping oiled tracks, honking sax skidding from the overhead walkway, everything that ever happened in a cubofuturist painting happening all at once, over and over with the Shend sounding as though he's losing it, and this time for real. This was never one of those grunting eighties bands with a horn section who insisted there had always been a dance element to their sound, even back when they were called the Snot Sandwiches. The Cravats sounded like the creation of the universe, or at least of a universe, a universe which divides into those who get the Cravats, and then the rest.

You may have told yourself that you have as much Cravats as anyone could ever possibly need, but you're wrong. You need this one too.