Saturday, November 13, 2021

Unmasking Information Society's ODDfellows bonus tracks

I recently got the physical CD copy of Information Society's latest album, ODDfellows, for which the bonus tracks are rather shrouded in mystery. Unless they were described in some "social media" comment thread, there is / was literally no information about them online, except that they are limited to the CD, which appears to only be on offer through bandcamp. So, this is a public service to identify and briefly describe the bonus material:

Track 11 - Might Have Been 4:13 // This is the reason to get the CD. "Might Have Been" is arguably better than most of the proper album; it's got a piano bit that lodges in the brain, and the song is one of the sort of mid-tempo grooves they do so well. It's also a tad dark, as if a pinch of Don't Be Afraid was thrown into the recipe.

Track 12 - World Enough (Phuzzed Up Mix) 5:13 // An unremarkable remix of one of the better tracks.

Track 13 - Escape from Murderapolis 1:02 // An instrumental trifle that seems rather pointless to include here at just a minute in length. Quite possibly from one of the guys' soundtrack work.

Track 14 - Slow-Scan 72 1:40 // This is one of their on-line scavenger hunts that I was never hacked enough to pursue.

Back in 2018, they sort of declared the album format dead and started chucking out a string of singles — "Nothing Prevails," "World Enough," "Room 1904" and "Bennington." These ended up being four of the 10 tracks of the new album, so it feels more like getting an EP's worth of new material here. The romantic rumination "World Enough" is the best of the bunch, another of those mid-tempo toe-tappers. Their 2014 return with _hello world remains the jewel of their late active period and, with Information Society (1988), is one of their two best albums.