Strawberry Story Gravy * (2-CD)

Strawberry Story were a favorite of the extremely fertile late '80s/early '90s British indiepop scene, putting their Talulah Gosh-inspired twee-crash-pop out on a variety of 7"s, flexis and cassettes on influential labels such as Woosh, Vinyl Japan and Heaven as well as their own Dasiychain Records. A few years back, the band began stirring again, even releasing a pair of EPs on Cloudberry and Anorak, and last year, they compiled pretty much EVERYTHING they had ever released (as well as over a dozen previously unreleased live tracks and demos both old and recent) onto a double-disc set. They only made 100 copies of this and it sold out pretty quickly, so while in discussion with the band about getting more copies for the Jigsaw mailorder, I half-joked that I should bootleg it since they were out. Well, one thing led to another, and voila! The comp is back in print! And as an added bonus, we have included a bonus demo from 1988 (taken from an mp3 of a long-lost cassette; yeah, a bunch of these songs are really lo-fi, coming from decades-old cassettes...), AND slightly more informational liner notes (which the original issue lacked). With 54 tracks in over 2O hours, there's a lot to take in here, but at least you have the band's entire output at your disposal - and what a lot of fun it is!