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The suits at Heavenly/EMI must be wondering where it all went wrong. In 2002 they had a band who sounded like a perfect hybrid of the grunge snarl of Nirvana, the guitar lyricism of the Pixies and the pop melodies of the Beatles, and they watched them disappear in a Paul Gascoigne-like sinkhole of self-destruction. Instead of taking over the world, the Vines are reduced to quoting fans like Alex Turner, Lightspeed Champion and the godawful Killers (who invited the Vines to duet with them in Sydney earlier this year) to convince people how vital they once were. In a way their fall is unsurprising; when we were watching the band’s first UK shows at the Barfly and similar dives at the start of 2002 we saw Craig Nicholls gurning and hollering his way through their best songs, effectively sabotaging them. Of course, he was later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome but it was clear to everyone from the outset that he was constitutionally unsuited to the music business treadmill; too bad people didn’t do a better job of protecting him from all the bullshit.
This ‘best of’ isn’t quite the cash-in that it appears since the band have a fourth album recorded for release in summer 2008. The title is definitely accurate: it collates the best moments from all three of their albums. The songs from Highly Evolved come out on top: the mix of ecstatic frenzy in songs like ‘Get Free’, Outtathaway’ and the title track are mixed with more pastoral pop like ‘Autumn Shade’ and the haunting ‘Homesick’. This album, as much as the Strokes, could have been the template for guitar bands in the Noughties. However, the follow up album Winning Days repeated the formula to lesser effect; the wistful title track was a triumph but the aggressive ‘FTW’ (“fuck the world”) plus an “explicit lyrics” sleeve warning showed that Nicholls had developed an unhelpful Tourettes Syndrome as well. Vision Valley in 2006 had few standouts (the psych-pop of ‘Spaceship’ was one) but suggested that Nicholls’ talent for noisy melodic pop wasn’t exhausted.
All those tracks (plus an unnecessary bonus ‘4Eva’) are included on this compilation, a neat summation of a career so far that is well worth hearing (my only regret is that they couldn’t license the Vines’ version of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, recorded for a Beatles tribute record). But it does conjure a time that’s now passed; guitar music took another course and left the Vines in a siding, to the extent that NME’s latest weaselly review effectively denies they ever liked the band, despite giving them 4 covers in a year when it looked like they were the new Nirvana. But that’s a side-effect of having the talent without the temperament, timing or maybe just the luck to ride the wave that takes you to fame or wipes you out. These songs are too good to be reduced to a footnote in someone else’s career.
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