Kirsty MacColl

Kirsty MacColl's fourth album was a long time coming -- three years separated it from its predecessor, the disappointing Electric Landlady, and the distance between these discs always threatened to become monumental. Despite a career that had spent far more time off the rails than on, MacColl was at the peak of her songwriting game, with the breakup of her marriage (to producer Steve Lillywhite) bringing a whole new dimension of autobiography to the table. The result, indisputably MacColl's masterpiece, also ranks among the finest albums of the entire 1990s, and -- up there with Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Peter Hammill's Over, and (enter your own favorite here) -- one of the best breakup records ever made. The mastering of the original CD was always a little ropy, however, which means that this remastered reissue is worth picking up, even if you don't care for the disc's worth of bonus tracks that has been appended to it. Guitars are crunchier, orchestration is fuller, MacColl's voice sounds fuller and more expressive than your old copy ever led you to expect. And, if you're feeling even the remotest bit vulnerable, the sheer intensity of the closing "Tomorrow Never Comes" will destroy you. Of the bonus tracks, the most attention has been lavished upon the demo of "Dear John," a song so firmly rooted in the collapse of her marriage that MacColl refused to even consider placing it on the album. Elsewhere, the outtakes "Fabulous Garden" and "Touch Me" and a couple of live tracks were drawn from promotional releases around the time of the album's original appearance; "Irish Cousin" was a B-side the following year, and "Angel" is a pretty little song that really did not need to be sent out for five separate remixes -- but was. Their inclusion here will please completists; for everybody else, however, the package proved its worth back at the end of the first disc. ~ Dave Thompson, All Music Guide