My '80s Remastered - Kaleidoscope

The second round of Siouxsie & The Banshees reissues hit UK shelves in May, and I finally got around to picking up a couple of them. These are not the 2 disc sets, but they are remastered and expanded with extra tracks. I picked up Kaleidoscope and Ju Ju. They sound fantastic, and some of the extra stuff is pretty interesting too. Today's offerings come from 1980's Kaleidoscope, the first album to feature the new boys in the band, drummer Budgie and guitarist John McGeoch. It also marked a new approach to music, which the title of the album reflected - "we were discovering we had a lot of sides to ourselves and we were multifaceted in our aproach to making it." This is immediately apparent on the album's first single Happy House (Polydor Demos), which is lighter and more upbeat than anything the band had done before. This version is one of the bonus tracks, and is far more harder edged (and obviously less produced) than the final single version - I love the gritty guitar and tumbling drums on this a lot. The second single was the equally memorable Christine, an acoustically strummy tune about a girl with 22 personalities. Fantastic stuff, and it has aged remarkably well too...


My Best Week Ever!
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the folks over at VH1's Best Week Ever blog for linking to my Cure post from earlier this week - I'm getting the mad hits today as a result. And greetings to all of you new readers - I hope you like what you see and hear and come back for more.