The Brit Box
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"The Brit Box In Stores 11/20/2007"
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| Member Since | 6/28/2007 | | Band Website | rhino.com | | Record Label | Rhino |
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| About The Brit Box |
THE BRITS ARE ALRIGHT!
The First Comprehensive Survey Of U.K. Indie Music,
Rhino’s 4-CD The Brit Box,
Hits U.S. Shores November 20th
Though the British Invasion of the 1960s has been well ..ed, the wave of U.K. bands that followed in the wake of ’80s post-punk hasn’t – until now. Rhino’s 4-CD set THE BRIT BOX: U.K. INDIE, SHOEGAZE, AND BRIT-POP GEMS OF THE LAST MILLENNIUM is the first collection anywhere to chart the rise of cool Britannia.
Due November 20, THE BRIT BOX gathers key recordings from 78 U.K. performers spanning the last 15 years of the 20th century. While many of these artists enjoyed superstar status in England, with just a handful of exceptions few dented the American charts – for the most part, only the pasty-looking outsiders and college kids willing to dig through their local import bins got to hear this stuff on release. THE BRIT BOX will be available at all physical and digital retail outlets and at www.rhino.com for a suggested list price of $64.98.
Independent record companies have always been the lifeblood of alternative rock, but what makes a disc “indie” goes far beyond the label it’s on. Unlike punk groups, indie bands don’t reject mainstream music so much as co-opt it for their own ends. On the first CD of THE BRIT BOX, seminal artists like The Smiths, Jesus & Mary Chain, and The Stone Roses take good old fashioned guitar-pop and turn it into something fresh, while groups like Happy Mondays and Primal Scream borrow gleefully from hip-hop to give birth to acid house.
By 1990, the British press was up in arms over acts that spent more time looking at their feet than their audiences and, for better or worse, disparate bands like Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and The Telescopes were lumped together as “shoegazers.” Disc Two of THE BRIT BOX looks beyond the performance style to show that their records did have sonic similarities, emphasizing introspective soundscapes, hazy guitars, and dense production – a style currently enjoying a (typically understated) revival.
Disc Three of THE BRIT BOX opens with Suede’s “Metal Mickey,” a shot across the cultural bow heralding the arrival of Brit-pop. Another term bandied about frequently (and often derisively) by the U.K. rock press of the mid-’90s, “Brit-pop” reflected a newfound confidence in the English music scene, and bands like Oasis, Blur, Pulp, and Elastica reveled in the highlife as hit singles seemed to pour forth effortlessly (a tuneful bacchanal immortalized in the 2003 ..ary Live Forever). The final CD of THE BRIT BOX shows that even latecomers to the party like Ash, Super Furry Animals, Mansun, The Verve, and Placebo had some smashing songs in them.
There are enough art school refugees peopling these bands that Rhino’s design team felt compelled to go bonkers. THE BRIT BOX is housed in a 6”x12” box depicting a traditional English phone booth illuminated with a battery-powered flickering light bulb! The photo-filled 80-page accompanying book includes a foreword from Creation Records founder Alan McGee, an essay by Select scribe Andrew Perry, interviews with producers Stephen Street and Alan Moulder and influential deejay Rodney Bingenheimer, plus remembrances from more than a dozen artists on the box.
A labor of love years in the making, THE BRIT BOX follows such previous collections as Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era and Left Of The Dial: Dispatches From The ’80s Underground in the proud Rhino tradition of dicing up pop music’s past four CDs at a time. But more than mere history lessons, these anthems for Anglophiles remain incredibly catchy today (and offer proof that the recent American success of groups like Coldplay, Keane, and Snow Patrol didn’t occur in a vacuum).
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