Double Entendre

As ever, the French have a word for it. Or in this case, two. The phrase means "to listen in Dolby", or something. Who cares? It's just a way to avoid typing the Great Artist's name. There's an abandoned mill outside Ballygawkeycolleen where hundreds of sunlight-deprived orphans hunt down every internet reference to their Employer, and a team of rottweiler lawyers unleashed on the evil-doers. They're not going to find this. Oh no.

Anyway, to the discs at hand. It's not exactly a biblical revelation that Mr Ivan intended Difficult Proboscis The Freeway to be a double album, and recorded all the tracks only to have Warner Brothers [Curly, Moe and Larry Warner - Ed.]  insist it be hacked back to a single. Nor is it particularly difficult to gather the tracks together from various sources, and there have been attempts at assembling the original album made available on this very same internet. But this is the best one, and I'll tell you why.

The album as issued [HNTH - Ed.] was never quite the artistic success it should and could have been. It's inconsistent, perhaps over-rich, and the more you think about it the more it seems like it was edited down from a double album. Which it was. Or, if you are poetically-minded, you might liken it to a fruitcake with too many cherries and not enough cake. Okay, you come up with a better simile, you're so smart. Restoring the tracks that were cut from the double allows the HNTH songs to breathe. Gives them a bit of context. But you can't just shovel them all in at the end as "bonus" tracks, you have to sequence them over the four imaginary album sides so the thing works as it should. Which is, if you can summon up the energy to click the link in the comments, what you'll find here. It flows nicely from beginning to end, with a possible single kicking off each side.

Add a contemporary and fashionably brown cover shot featuring a nice pullover, and you finish up with an album which - if you have as much taste yourself - you will agree is better in every sense than the compromised original. Cheaper, too. Free, in fact.