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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this is you want a "remastered version" of this album..., June 10, 2004
if you want an upgraded/punchier/clearer/louder sound, you cant go wrong here. it is the best sounding version of this album to date. i also have the new uk boxset and this sounds identical to disk one of the boxset (both are mastered from the analog master to my knowledge!?).
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The record that changed it all, January 23, 2009
This is still a great record after more than 30 years. It is the album that really launched punk music. Although the Sex Pistols were not really the first punk band, they were definitely one of the first and they were also the ones who really put punk on the map.
This record above all has some great music -- much better than a lot of the punk that followed it. It's not just guitar distortion, crashing drums and shouting by any means. The songs almost all have strong melodies with memorable hooks that grab you from the start. (The only real exception is "New York", which I still wouldn't recognize in a lineup today, although I've heard it hundreds of times.)
Steve Jones' guitar playing is remarkably tight, and really is brilliant in many places. His style is minimalist, but you don't immediately notice that through the power and distortion. Where he does use flourishes, they are melodic and memorable.
Johnny Rotten (now John Lydon), the vocalist, creates a thoroughly misanthropist persona simply using his voice -- the sound says "I hate everything." He created the mold for most punk singers after him, including a way of delivery phrasing that lets you know he doesn't care what you or anyone else thinks.
The Sex Pistols were far from a perfect band. Image got in the way of the music quite a lot -- in part because the project was launched by Malcolm McLaren, who wanted a band out there that would let him sell more clothes at his London shop, called "Sex", dealing in what would become punk fashion.
Unfortunately for the band, the image obsession and the desire of Johnny Rotten to change the balance of power in the band led them to replace Glen Matlock, who could actually play his bass and who also played a key songwriting role, with Sid Vicious, who had little musical ability. But Sid looked appropriately nasty, and didn't have Matlock's feathered, Bay City Rollers-style hair. In the end, Vicious proved to be a disaster, and he met a disastrous end.
Fortunately none of that really interferes with this record -- Matlock plays bass on much of it, and where he doesn't, guitarist Steve Jones fills in. No Sid here.
It would be a mistake to view this album as relevant to punk alone. This album changed everything, including the music business itself. The attitude and some of the fashion ideas of punk were very soon domesticated and repackaged into New Wave, which very quickly turned into the industry mainstream.
So without the revolution brought by Sex Pistols, we would not have had most of the music that drove the late 1970s and 1980s -- the Police (and later Sting), U2, Duran Duran, the B-52s, etc etc. In a very real sense, "Never Mind the Bollocks" set the stage on which the musical background of the entire Reagan Era was played out.
The Sex Pistols were one of the great paradigm shifts, up there with Elvis, the Beatles and Grandmaster Flash in changing music and the music industry. And this is their only real album of studio material.
I saw the Sex Pistols in 2008 in a concert in Slovakia, of all places. They are very different today. Glen Matlock back on bass, still with his feathered hair. Steve Jones was bearing baggy khaki pants and a t-shirt, and Lydon, in chi pants and a collarless button-down shirt, has been completely transformed. He no longer hates everybody and everything, but actually seems to really enjoy himself and to genuinely like people in his own "in your face" way. He pulled up his shirt, waved his naked paunch at us like a belly dancer and told us: "We love ya." This was not the Pistols of 1977.
I say this just to point out that the people on this record, who seem to make nastiness and destruction their livelihood, are warm and fuzzy middle-aged guys today. They weren't actually hateful, they just seemed that way.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The album sounds great!, December 12, 2008
"Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols" is one of my all time favorite rock n roll albums.
As such, when I found out that the UK actually DOES have a remastered version of the album out, I imported it and now have two copies, the other being the one released in the US.
The differences?
1. The UK version's cover is pink and yellow, the US is green and red.
2. For some reason my import copy has "God Save The Queen" at track 5 and "Problems" at track 6, instead of it being the other way around like on my US copy. I have no idea which track listing is accurate to the original release.
3 (and most importantly). The UK remastered version is a step up on the US version sonically. While the US mastering sounds decent enough, listening to it side by side with this version, I find this one is a crisper, slightly louder sound. Overall it sounds less muffled than the US release and the bass lines seem a bit more distinct. Its not a HUGE difference from the domestic version that I've been enjoying for years, but it is different enough to my ears to make me very glad I bought this import.
If you're a HUGE Pistols fan from the US like I am, you'll probably appreciate the sonic upgrade you'll hear on this version of the album. Either way, if you've NEVER heard this album, you need to. Its absolutely essential to any rock n roll/punk music collection.
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