Biffy Clyro – Singles 2001-2005
Are Biffy Clyro big? If the press release sandwiched into this singles collection is to believed (and why ever not?) the Scottish three-piece have exploded thanks to the catalyst of their latest album Puzzle, so much so that this compilation has been put out for newcomers / bandwagon-liggers that are too moral to download their older bits and bobs off the Hype Machine or Limewire. Last time I left the band, with 2004′s Infinity Land, they were receiving about the same MTV2 airplay as, say, the Futureheads. Having found them generally incompatible with my tastes of the day (say, the Futureheads), I shelved that album, and never deigned to pay attention to the band again.
It’s all change on the Biffy front these days though: they’ve bagged support with the Stones and terrorized the charts both single and album, and they are no longer solely admired by that disturbingly zealous circle of supporters they based their mammoth toilet-venue tours of old upon. While only the deaf will claim the band haven’t mainstreaminated their sound on Puzzle’s singles, the band have stuck with their quite-loud-quite-loud-veryfuckingloud dynamics (as perfected by Fugazi and Pixies and their most common touchstones, Nirvana) throughout their career. While this allows a sense of continuity to this tacked-together retrospective, the quality of the band’s output is decidedly more patchy.
The included older tracks, from the band’s debut, contain about as many good ideas as a lemming’s day out at the beach. They do a good impression of sounding like Seafood, if Seafood were superfluous and snooze-inducing. The more enjoyably jerky mid-era numbers are all old school Idlewild with their big-as-the-Scottish-Highlands choruses and warped lead riffs (Toys Toys Toys Choke, Toys Toys Toys being the most entertainingly screamy song on the album). Infinity Land big hitters “Glitter and Trauma” and “My Recovery Injection” are accessible, and nigh-on danceable, without sounding compromised. Fun videos too, if my memory of the NME Chart Show hold true.
The real reason this album has been pieced together, it seems, is to save new fans discovering the more tedious and derivative facets of Biffy Clyro’s back catalogue. In this goal at least, it succeeds.
