Various Artists - Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era - 1976-1995 (CD)

All Music Guide

As its title makes clear, Children of Nuggets is the first Nuggets release to stretch beyond the '60s heyday of garage rock and psychedelic music. Instead of once again returning to that seemingly bottomless well which has not only brought the original 1972 doubleLP Nuggets, but such imitators as the Pebbles and Rubbles series, plus Rhino's expanded fourdisc 1998 box set Nuggets and its 2001 sequel, which focused on singles from the UK and around the world the fourdisc box Children of Nuggets is devoted to bands from the '70s, '80s and '90s (but primarily the '80s) who were inspired by the original Nuggets LP, along with other trashy, intoxicating rock and guitar pop from the '60s. They weren't just inspired by this music they patterned themselves after it, from the sound to the look of classic garage psych. This might seem like a dodgy proposition, either as music or for the subject of an exhaustive retrospective like this, but the garage and psych revival of the '80s which also e...ncompassed such diverse but related movements as power pop, British C86 indiepop, the Paisley Underground, punkblues, cowpunk and surf rock was a surprisingly fertile scene, as this absolutely terrific box set proves. Far from sounding monotonous, Children of Nuggets has a tremendous variety of sounds, styles and attitudes. As producer Alec Palao states in his introductory liner notes, the idea was to adhere to Lenny Kaye's idea for the original Nuggets LP which was to "compile together the good tracks from all those albums that only have one good track," not caring whether the featured songs adhered to a strict definition of what was or was not garage or psych. Of course, Palao and his coproducer Gary Stewart and their assistants on this project do have a template to follow and not just because there are bands that were tagged at the time as '60s revivalists. They have Kaye's work to guide them, plus they have the work of Greg Shaw, the journalist and record label head who championed this music at first in his fanzine Who Put The Bomp and then on his Bomp and Voxx labels. Stewart salutes Shaw at the conclusion of the booklet for Children of Nuggets and, in a way, this set does function as a tribute to the music Shaw helped shepherd during the '80s, since it celebrates all kinds of '60sinspired guitar pop made in the postpunk years music that arguably wouldn't have existed without Shaw's input. Read more Less