Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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Black Box Recorder included Auteurs main man Luke Haines, former Jesus and Mary Chain member John Moore, and vocalist Sarah Nixey. Like the Auteurs, Black Box Recorder's songs commented on the state of English affairs, both social and personal, often using character sketches that exposed the less-than-pleasant with sharp frankness and simplicity. Domesticity and childhood themes often ran through their albums. Coming together in 1998 as Haines kept his primary vehicle operable, the trio introduced themselves with their first single ("Child Psychology") being banned from U.K. radio for the line "Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it."

The full-length England Made Me followed later in the year, establishing Moore and Haines as a songwriting team that excelled at getting its points across with the least amount of instrumentation necessary. Raw and minimal but still perversely pop, Nixey's detached and fragile-yet-rich voice (usually kept up front in the mix) provided the ideal characteristics for their songs. Imagine a sober, somber, dub-influenced version of the Velvet Underground with an elegantly smooth Nico singing on top.

Jumping ship from Chrysalis to Nude for 2000's The Facts of Life, the first single from the album surprisingly went Top 20, providing Haines with the highest chart position of his career. Despite this, Haines made no bones about his disdain for Nude within a week of the chart placement, feeling that they dropped the ball after being handed it on a silver platter. Artistically, The Facts of Life was a superb follow-up, incorporating electronic elements without sounding anything like a trip-hop or Garbage-style dance-rock group. The Worst of Black Box Recorder, a collection of the trio's B-sides, came the following year.

After a lengthy break aided by Nude's downfall, as well as two solo releases from Haines, the group landed on One Little Indian for 2003's Passionoia. WIthout forsaking their knack for subversion, the group returned with their most ornate batch of songs yet, several of which were as poppy as anything recorded by Saint Etienne. Prior to the album's release, Nixey and Moore tied the knot.

Biography by Andy Kellman, Allmusic.com

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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With the gentle acoustic-electric guitar mix, metronomic drum beats, and Sarah Nixey's lovely breathy vocals, England Made Me does not seem on the surface to be a sardonic comment on anything, but rather an exquisite, even upbeat, bit of pop. The more one digs, however, the more one unburies. Black Box Recorder are harshly critical of life in England, the bland, dull mundaneness of daily living as well as the stale political world, and their debut album touches on issues ranging from teenage sex and single mothers to repressive family life and wife swapping. Such topics are seemingly impossible to weave into listenable pop music, but the songs that multi-instrumentalists Luke Haines and John Moore write are cleanly stylized in a way that conceals the raw-nerved lives their characters exist in but are also reflective of the internalization of such relentless barrenness. External appearances often belie the reality, the gnawing discomfort in the gut. Whereas you would expect a song called "Girl Singing in the Wreckage" to be malevolent, it is instead sweetly affecting, but also world-weary and reflective, making it sound less cynical than innocently aware of the inconsistency in which it exists. Black Box Recorder seemingly approach their subjects without judgment; the band, though, does not shy away from cynicism. Many of the songs on England Made Me are, at least lyrically, severe, naked reminders of a bloodless existence. The title song is a funereal lament, and songs such as "It's Only the End of the World" and "Hated Sunday" are sad-sack gloomy tunes that are capable of inspiring open weeping in two ways – with their base bleakness and with the beautifully brittle music. Even when Black Box Recorder do inject a bit of pop cheerfulness into the music, it is seemingly done ironically. Each song sounds sparse because it is infused with a spatial quality that suggests beneath it all there is only emptiness, and nothing good comes from emptiness. In "Child Psychology," Nixey repeats the couplet "Life is unfair/Kill yourself or get over it" like a mantra. One gets the feeling that the way Black Box Recorder get over it is through their music, which can make England Made Me a suffocating listen if experienced in more than short spurts.

Review by Stanton Swihart, Allmusic.com

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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Make no mistake: Black Box Recorder are malevolent scoundrels. Their debut album – England Made Me – was a distressing, vacant eye staring over the unspoken horror of everyday England, so one wondered where they could go from there. With The Facts Of Life, they moved that voyeuristic, cynical stare away from suicide and car crashes and focused it on small-town dating and disenchanted sex lives. Strangely enough, the horror feels the same. Songs like the utterly menacing hook of "The Art of Driving" will chill even the most neutral of listeners, while the John Barry-influenced "Weekend" strolls along with such desolate grace that it's just subtly elegant. Vocalist Sarah Nixey sings with impassioned distance that serves up the disparagement nicely. Lines such as "Don't even look at me 'till we're alone," "Careful not to touch, we've drunk enough/Just another weekend falling," or "Read the message on the bottle/Go and drink yourself to death" probably won't become national anthems anytime soon. All the better for it, then. As in BBR's debut, the same barren instrumentation and distanced vocals are still here, but this time around, there seems to be a pop sensibility that evokes far more seditious strengths than ever before. This produces a delightfully sinister contradiction. "Straight Life," for instance, has Nixey chiming, "It's a beautiful morning," and only BBR could make such a statement sound truly sardonic. The closing "Goodnight Kiss" is also brimming with beauty, yet – at heart – still a song with pained regret. All this doesn't even begin to get near the marvel that is the title track, either. "The Facts of Life" is found nestled in the album's core and it still glares at you like a Stanley Kubrick-directed All Saints production. Simple, gorgeous, chart-friendly, and just plain evil, it is undoubtedly one of the most subversive singles ever written. Indeed, clocking in at just under 40 minutes, The Facts Of Life is a precise, meticulous, deeply disturbing experience. The album is proof that there's still life in pop music. Subversion has rarely sounded this startling.

Review by Dean Carlson, Allmusic.com

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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Hip hip hooray. Maybe someone up there likes us after all. The Worst of Black Box Recorder is a rare instance where restraint in buying a band's singles has paid off. Compiling all the B-sides from Black Box Recorder's first four singles (two of which were two-parters), a handful of studio extras that were included on the U.S. versions of England Made Me and The Facts of Life – including the stinging "Lord Lucan Is Missing," a take on Rod McKuen's-via-Jacques Brel's "Seasons in the Sun," the Bowie-worthy "Start As You Mean to Go On," and the equally spiky "Brutality" – and also throwing in the band's videos for the A-sides ("The Facts of Life," "Child Psychology," "The Art of Driving," and "England Made Me"), the whole package adds up to an LP that's just as worthy of your hard-earned scratch as the trio's two proper studio albums. Outside of the obvious space/time constraint, it's hard to imagine how most of the songs weren't able to find a way on the original incarnations of England Made Me or The Facts of Life. There isn't a weak moment to be found here, not even on the remixes; both the Chocolate Layers' (Pulp's Steve Mackey and Jarvis Cocker) mix of "The Facts of Life" and BBR's own versioning of "Uptown Top Ranking" don't fail to impress. If that's not enough to rope you in, the disc concludes in perfect fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion with an ultra sultry cover of the Thin White Duke's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide"; if you close your eyes tight enough, you can envision vocalist Sarah Nixey working her magic onstage for the drunken patrons of the Roadhouse, clad in a funny leather hat.

Review by Andy Kellman, Allmusic.com

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Black Box Recorder - Albums Collection 1998-2003 (4CD)

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One thing Black Box Recorder has going for them is that one needn't "get" them in order to enjoy the records they make. They work on many levels. On the cover of Passionoia, bikini-clad singer Sarah Nixey blissfully reclines poolside on a sunny day with a drink in hand. A lifeless body floats in that pool. For those who don't realize it's a reference to a party gone wrong that was thrown by English television celebrity Michael Barrymore, it still alludes to what can be expected from the record: Increasingly ornate arrangements as a significant move toward making contemporary dance-pop, but, as always, a fly is in the ointment. Just the same, one needn't consider whether Nixey is being personal or ironic when she confesses her love for Wham!'s other half in "Andrew Ridgley"; on a purely musical level, it's a heavenly pop song akin to Saint Etienne, though lyrical elements that follow make it more like that group's wicked stepsister. John Moore and Luke Haines continue to write the group's songs with themes about childhood, English culture, and observations of the mundane aspects of adult life – and their knives haven't dulled in the least. (Come to think about it, they're often not writing about mundane aspects; they just have a way of making them seem that way, which comes across doubly so, since the songs are filtered through Nixey's iciness.) Black Box Recorder have developed a great deal across their three studio albums. If England Made Me was their stark guitar record and The Facts of Life was their frozen electronic-pop record, then Passionoia is their full-blown dance-pop album – full of buoyant arrangements, meaty rhythms, and glitter-specked choruses. It's just as full-bodied and upfront as "Child Psychology" is sparse and distant. A greater combination of accessibility and subversion would be nearly impossible to imagine.

Review by Andy Kellman, Allmusic.com