Rough Trade Shops: Counter Culture 03 (CD Album)

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Esteemed music emporium and legendary label Rough Trade have been doing their own compilations for a couple of years now, with uniformly excellent results (check out "Electronica" and "Post Punk" for fascinating round-ups of either genre), and now they have decided to give us last year in a handy take home version.
Needless to say, however, that this being Rough Trade, their version of last year(handpicked, apparently, from a mixtures of staff faves, customer raves and shop top sellers), is completely different to mine - I admit to never even having heard of half of the artists here.
Two discs, arranged in chronological order, one with more introspective stuff, the other the "full-on rocking party" record, and both are alternately brilliant, hilarious, fascinating, frustrating, awful, amazing, each track a swerve somewhere else across a vast musical terrain. Both prove, however, that indie rock's out there, alive and pogoing.
With 45 tracks in all, it'll take most of 2004 to digest, by which time we can hope the next volume will be upon us. Standouts, however are John Fahey's spectral blues on "Remember" (even more poignant as 2003 was the year he died), Iron&Wine's gorgeous, intimate take on Stereolab's "Peng! 33", Seelenluft's smooth "LA Woman", (The Real) Tuesday Weld's barmy "Bathtime in Clerkenwell" and the Rev. A.W. Nix's "Black Diamond Express to Hell" - a hellfire sermon describing a train ride to the underworld that manages to sound genuinely terrifying and yet strangely appealing at the same time.
The second disc, interestingly, for the year in which dance music allegedly died and rock'n'roll became the new rock'n'roll, it's old dudes like LFO who rock the hardest (represented here by the mighty "Freak"), and the other standout tracks come from the more "dance" end of the spectrum (though, thankfully, such distinctions blur throughout). T. Raumschmiere, Dizzee Rascal and Peaches rock the party hard, while our new rock'n'rollers (The Kills, The Futureheads, C.Arme, The Boggs) reheat rowdy guitars, stroppy vocals and big choruses to enjoyable but hardly revolutionary effect. Even Franz Ferdinand (represented here with the very fine "Shopping for Blood") use prime Fall Simon Hanley drums and an Iggy "Passenger" swagger. Colder do a wonderful impersonation of largely forgotten bands like Music for Pleasure, the Comsat Angels, Section 25 or Crispy Ambulance (and if you're old enough to remember them you will know how good this is). Meantime, future musicologists and sociologists will no doubt one day be delighted to find the historical curio that is Selfish Cunt's "Britain is Shit", and marvel over the fact as many as a dozen people somewhere in Hoxton actually thought this was quite good for about ten minutes.
The 2003 zeitgeist that this disc encapsulates, then, is decidedly curious. We could deduce that in the USA it's 1993 (all the US bands on the first disc are still in love with Mazzy Star and Madder Rose), while on CD2 it's 1983 - shouty voices, power pop and lo-fi synths, the Birthday Party.
Moreover, packaging fans, this all comes in a slimline, round edged jewel case which is a handsome thing to hold. (Rock'n') roll on 2004.