Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great introduction to Stereophonics, November 18, 2008
Stereophonics have been churning out albums (and singles) pretty much like clockwork since their 1997 debut album: every 2 years fans get a new album, and after 6 studio albums (and one live album), the band finally gets the greatest hits treatment.
"Decade In the Sun: Best of Stereophonics" (20 tracks; 79 min.) brings the greatest hits of the band, and rightfully, this compilation focuses on the first 3 studio albums. The very promising 1997 debut "Word Gets Around" has 4 tracks on here (Local Boy in a Photograph; Thousand Trees; Traffic; More Life in a Tramps Vest). The band's best album ever, 1999's "Performance & Cocktails" also gets 4 tracks (Bartender and the Thief; Just Looking; Pick a Part that's New; I Wouldn't Believe Your Radio). And 2001's "Just Enough Education to Perform" also gets 4 tracks (Have a Nice Day; Mr. Writer; Step On My Old Size Nines; Vegas Two Times), plus this includes the non-album single from the same sessions, the Rod Stewart-cover "Handbags and Gladrags". The rest of is filled out by singles from the last 3 albums, with the 2005 "Language" album getting 3 tracks (including "Dakota", the band's biggest UK charting single ever). 2003's "You Gotta Go There To Come Back" is represented by "Maybe Tomorrow", and 2007's "Pull the Pin" features "It Means Nothing". There are also 2 new tracks, the so-so "My Own Worst Enemy" and the much better "You're My Star".
In all, this is a very generous serving of Stereophonics' greatest hits (and they've had plenty of hits in the UK). I don't like the sequencing of the tracks, to be honest. There is no rhyme or reason to it. A chronological sequencing would have served the listening experience better. While the band's output after "J.E.E.P." never equalled their first three albums, they did put out a lot of great music in the late 90s/early 2000s, and this compilation is proof of it. I had the good fortune of seeing the band live a couple of times on the "J.E.E.P." tour, and they were outstanding in those days.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
excellent choices for a best of album, November 25, 2008
They have chosen all of my favorites that I've been collecting over the years from their multiple albums!
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7 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Enter the Fireless, Gummy, Whiny Dragon., November 19, 2008
Stereophonics are one of those cynical and unenlightened bands, that leave you flabbergasted that they've achieved ANY success at all.
They have nothing about them.
They're from Wales for one thing, and there's not much you can point to on that woefully tiny country's honour's list during the last 50 years- in fact it's been a disaster.
Lousy football team, dreary anthem, beautiful but dying language and in the face of all this, appalling rot dished up by futile nuggets like Tom Jones, the unbelievably talent-less Cerys Matthews, drab Funeral for a Friend, embarrassing Goldie Looking Chain and finally, at the top of the tree, overcast, bland, disinterested Stereophonics.
You know you're in trouble when 'A Decade in the Sun' is the best they can come up with by way of a greatest hits compilation, and, as sure as day follows night, it's completely worthless on every front.
Banal, sub-Rod Stewart MOR, car music, (or at least, the nodding dog in the back window) cover versions, slow, untimely grinding; 'Have a Nice Day', 'Handbags and Gladrags', 'Mama Told Me Not To Come' (with Tom Jones, a genuine contender for the Worst Single Ever Released.) - petty, listless background tomfoolery. Synthetic, demoralizing and grey.
Their biggest problem is that there's not much talent anywhere in the group. Basic song writing skills are sadly AWOL; no hooks to snag you, no witty or clever lyrics to engage you. They seem to get by using the well suspect, and monstrously overused deceit of the obscene 'Rock Anthem' - the final bombed-out residence of pop 'musicians' who transparently have nothing at all to say. Mosh-pit diving, fist clenching standards - but even here, the last refuge of the truly non-descript, they dismayingly fail.
They're not even truly awful,(that'd be a blessing - it would make writing about them much easier) they're not really worth words, emotions, any depth of thought or argument. They're just sort of there, plant-pots to a man, peripatetically moseying around, solidly locked into the music genre cliches feared most.
Yes, shades and black leather vests are back - clinging to the voluble, insignificant bonces and torso's of clueless, safe, Welsh rock-being's. With a conformist non-style that makes a nest of tables look dynamic and a sound thats almost cylindrical - Stereophonics are getting away with a heinous amount of cultural crime.
They are the Norris Cole's of modern pop, the Vauxhall Vectra's of rock. They make the similarly perfidious Super Furry Animals (and I think I'm beginning to twig why they all have naff names...) sound like Oscar Wilde.
Ten years of these par-boiled leeks then - ten years of the orthodox and the ordinary.
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