THE BEST OF THE REST OF MUTINY IN JONESTOWN

"The Best of the Rest of Mutiny in Jonestown", is the bands' 9th and final compilation album. This one is made up of tracks pulled from 8 albums long out of print and not suitable for uploading to public sites like Bandcamp. In some cases, this is because the recording quality of the album is not the best due to the available home studio technology of the day. This specifically refers to the 3 albums recorded before 1990's "Lost in Line", where an upgrade of studio equipment provided a much appreciated jump in recording quality. Even still, these early songs appear here as flawed gems representing quality compositions realized on lesser quality technology. Another major factor is that 7 of these albums contain cover tunes which would infringe copyright considerations if made public or the albums were presented online in their entirety.

The exciting thing about this compilation is the tracks do not appear on any other album currently available or previous compilation so are unveiled here for the very first time - thus making the metaphor presented by the cover image of "milking it" not exactly true (or at least no more true than any compilation album). The songs are presented in the order of most recent to oldest so in a way, besides being a compilation of some of my favorite Mutiny in Jonestown songs, the album can be experienced as a historical time capsule of the band, beginning with where they ended up and ending where they started. In fact, the final two songs, "AllHallows Eve" and "In the Walls of Eryx" are pulled from the very first Mutiny in Jonestown album, recorded live in the studio back in December 1987. These two songs represent the first recordings of the band about 6 months after forming on 7/28/87.

I never rate compilation albums very highly because they always sound like a disjointed group of songs with no concept or underlying theme. This compilation is no exception, though the fact that it moves chronologically backwards by design through the history of the band (beginning with a song released in 2014 and ending with a pair of songs released in 1987) allows me to overlook that point.

My initial inclination was to give this album 2 stars as it will be most appreciated by those already familiar with the band and interested in it's historical evolution. However, after listening to the album a couple times last night in it's entirety, I decided this is a 3 star effort as the songs do stand apart from the historical significance of the band, and could be appreciated especially by those interested in the more guitar heavy style of prog rock, or at least rock prog!