Sometimes you anticipate listening to a new record so much, pre-emptively aggrandizing its greatness, making sure it sits comfortably with the much-loved back catalogue, that if the dread reality emerges that said new record falls way below expectations then the result is not only disappointment, but resentment and bitterness at such a cruel juxtaposition - as if fate has somehow cheated you out of an experience rightfully and wholeheartedly yours. It’s like missing your last train because you’re misdirected at the station and end up on the opposite platform, watching your ride home go up in smoke. There’s a kind of lapse in your experience of time as you adjust to the actuality and slowly, painfully let go of the dream, each new track a new hope now destined to be dashed one by one. This new Arthur Russell compilation, made up of unreleased material recorded between the mid-seventies and 1990, should have been great; the review had almost formed itself as I unwrapped the packing, felt the digipak’s smooth print, gazed with proxy nostalgia at the photos and read the simple, sweet liner notes by Russell’s former partner Tom Lee. But it isn’t. It’s alright – it’s ok, sometimes it’s good – but by some law of inversion this makes it almost worse…

The result of this whole process is that you spend the time listening to the album desperately cataloguing each consolation whilst keeping in the back of your mind that over-riding fact that It’s Still [Whoever] which means it’s great on some level – in this case by sheer dint of Russell’s baroque melodic manoeuvring, his voice like velvet and his naÔve depth of feeling that infuses all his work with a passion that’s impossible to ignore. Maybe it’s because I fell in love with Arthur Rusell on cello, with “Another Thought” and “World of Echo”, and then with the disco joy of Calling out of Context, that I find it so hard to get along with “Love is Overtaking Me”. Most of the tracks are guitar driven, sometimes bedroom demos, sometimes studio takes with backing bands, and most jangle and clang with a kind of ok-R.E.M. song feeling that just doesn’t cut it. Some are terrible, which is great because it means I can love them for being so; the wonderfully shoddy “Time Away” features of some Russell’s least inspired moments I can think of and could well have been penned by any of millions…but as Lee implies in the liners it’s the sheer contemporary unpopularity (none were ever released in Russell’s lifetime, who died in 1992) of these essentially popular and populist songs that gives them a such a clarity of empathy in the present…can you tell I’m clutching at straws? All fuss aside, there are some genuinely nice moments – the slow waltz of “I Couldn’t Say it to Your Face”, the candypop electro-bounce of “Your Motion Says” and the weird lament for a unpopular dog called “Eli” – but the overriding blandness of most of the songs here, clearly intended to be the popular breakthroughs they never were, takes over with gruelling persistence. The last few songs on the album make some amends again - the album’s eponymous track has that quality of superabundant emotion, at least lyrically, that permeates Russell’s great works, “Love Comes Back” has a lazy, loungy, late-night resignation to it, and “Don’t Forget About Me” at least sounds like a good R.E.M. song…

A key element of most of Russell’s music, but most emphatically pronounced in these songs, is the ultra-subjectivity of the subject matter – his love was always personal, always directed at someone, which grounds the songs in an immensely powerful sympathetic desire. Kyle Gann noted in the Village Voice that towards the end of his life, almost bedridden and with AIDS and throat cancer killing him he “simply vanished into his music” – but he was always living there, utterly existing through song. Maybe that’s why I feel so much of the record fails – that the hyper-subjective artistic vision was diluted into populist anthems whose very deliberate shallowness seems anathema to what Russell was so good at doing (there’s a fine line between shallowness and poignant simplicity, Russell always essentially wrote pop songs, and it’s completely possible I’ll listen to the album again next week, regret this entire diatribe and see “Love is Overtaking Me” as a wonderful continuity of everything that was so good about “This is How We Walk on the Moon”…stay tuned yeah). This album might not be the best introduction for anyone new to Arthur Russell’s usually inspired, frail, flawed and loving pop songs, but at least it’s an Arthur Russell album. 7/10 -- Evan Rhodes (3 December, 2008)