Wedding Present

Saturnalia
$29.99
I am a huge WP fan and currently this is my favorite WP album. It is half way between the gritty punk of WP and the lovestruck pop of Cinerama. The only other album that comes close is the Live in Belfast album, but, I still prefer Saturnalia.

If you like WP, this will likely be your faovrite WP album of all time, I know it is mine. Gedge really outdid himself on this one.

Mike C

Watusi
$14.98
With Watusi The Wedding Present have produced a surpricingly upbeat album with an amazingly ugly cover. What can one expect from a Wedding Present album with songs titled `yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah', `shake it', it's a gas' and `hot pants'? Utter feeling of betrayal and despair of course. Each hapless girlfriend that has courted Gedge and gotten away has inevitably become infamous in the mind of every fan as his frustrations towards the female (and the new boyfriend) find release in a new song. But here Gedge is swinging like an adolescent, dipping only in `spangle' implying that his predestined history with the opposite gender hasn't strayed from the path. Never too complex, never abandoning a winning formula (the guitarriff never gets boring even though it's used in every single song on every single album) The Wedding Present is never short of great.

Bizarro
$14.98
Wow. I listened to this for the first time in years, and I was floored by not only the sheer speed & energy, but the ahead-of-its-time use of distortion, song structures, and rhythmic sound. So many bands today owe these lads a debt of gratitude, whether they know it or not. Listen to the opening rhythm guitar of "Crushed" ...It's hard to imagine any human alive can strum a guitar that fast.... and then they keep it going! "Brassneck", of course, is a favorite, but this is one of those rare entire albums that's so good, it's almost like a greatest hits!

El Rey
$15.98
I've been a fan of TWP going all the way back to George Best. Seamonsters was a high point, so this one being recorded by Steve Albini perhaps gave me inflated hopes. But there is no new ground tread here, and little to inspire in the way the old ground is covered.

Gedge's lyrics used to be endearing, as he always seemed on the wrong end of a relationship gone bad and we could feel for him even in his bitterness. Then with Cinerama he became something of the happy womanizer and frankly hard to like (his two main themes seemed to be, "She cheated on me and it feels awful" and, "I cheated on her and it feels great," with no apparent sense of contradiction). Finally I thought perhaps he'd grown up when he gave us these lines in the lovely closer to Cinerama's last album: "I was jealous and mean, you were fragrant and flirty / It's strange just how innocent it all looks today / We tried to imagine being together at thirty / but that always seemed such a long way away." This sounded like an adult. But now he's regressed to, "And that's when I pretend that I don't have a girlfriend." Where are we now, high school? There are other embarrassing clunker lines like this, and I agree with the comment about, "No soup for you." Sheesh.

I still like them, and there are some good musical moments here, but it's very far from their best.