Pitchfork

In the past year, Orange Juice have enjoyed a well-deserved and long-overdue re-examination. Recent mentions of the early 1980s Scottish band are generally shaped around the notion that they're the most direct ancestor of fellow countrymen Franz Ferdinand, and that they also did bands like Belle and Sebastian no small favors. Some have even suggested that they're one of the key antecedents for the indie pop/rock aesthetic-- in particular, the strain that trades in jangly, shambolic guitars, a healthy obsession with the Velvet Underground, and self-deprecating lyrics. While Mission of Burma and Hüsker Dü were laying the groundwork and setting the bar high for the U.S. indie rock sound and style of the 1980s, Orange Juice and fellow Scots Josef K, Aztec Camera, and the major-label Altered Images were shaping the decade's UK model.

The Glasgow School collects Orange Juice's first four singles-- all recorded for Alan Horne's fabled Postcard label-- and what was to be the band's debut LP, Ostrich Churchyard. That album wasn't issued until 1992. Instead, they suffered one of the first indie backlashes when they scrapped that record's low-rent guitar-pop and released a re-recorded and far more polished version of it for major label Polydor. They also got burned in the process when the label selected their Al Green cover "L.O.V.E. Love" as a single rather than one of the band's original and more representative compositions. (That Green track would get a second life as a Scots indie pop bellwether almost 20 years later when it inspired the key lyric to Belle and Sebastian's "Legal Man".)

The pop kid in me slightly favors that Polydor release, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, which has long been one of my default answers when queried for my favorite album of all time. And yet, The Glasgow School is in many ways a more welcome and fitting introduction to a band whose early, almost uniformly excellent material has not only languished in out-of-print limbo but is difficult to acquire even via file-sharing services. This new Domino compilation is a more complete document and a better re-telling of a story that, if rock's history writers had more imagination, a better ear, and dug further beyond what charted, would rate a few pages rather than a few footnotes.

History (and ideas about what's "important" or "seminal") aside, the main reason this disc is so necessary is because of the songs themselves, nuggets of fey, quirky, smart indie pop. It starts with the band's earliest singles, A- and B-sides laid next to one another. The A's ("Falling and Laughing", "Blueboy", "Simply Thrilled Honey", and "Poor Old Soul [Pt. 1]") and the standout B-side ("Lovesick") have a robust charm-- chugging guitars and galloping beats, all played with an innocent enthusiasm and wide-eyed romanticism. Of course, Orange Juice seem as confused about how to go about being pop stars as frontman Edwyn Collins' lyrics can be about how to win girls, but in each case they're so disarmingly charismatic that their faults are forgiven. A pair of rave-up near-instrumentals, the slight, too-precious stumble of "Breakfast Time", and a reprisal of "Poor Old Soul" that alludes to the Subway Sect's famous lyric, "We oppose all rock 'n' roll"-- fill out Glasgow's first half.

Inspired by punk, incarnations of Orange Juice had existed since 1976, although they approached that Year Zero with constructive rather than destructive tendencies. OJ was buoyed by the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, etc., and the music press (OJ co-founder Steven Daly first approached Collins while waiting for a schoolbus upon noticing Collins reading an issue of Melody Maker) to go out and do something. "Leapt onstage, though we couldn't play/ Furthermore, we had nothing to say," they claim, but what they shared with Britain's first-wave punks was a desire to democratize the UK music industry and a healthy distrust and disgust toward contemporary and arch-American rock clichés such as blues-based, rootsy guitar.

That's not to suggest that OJ weren't students of American culture-- far from it-- but they preferred pre-Beatles or soul-boy models, moving over the course of the 1970s from Teddy Boys to wearing Davy Crockett hats to budget mod looks-- all with an increasing acumen for playing pop with hints of Stax soul and disco. They perfected all of this on their aborted debut, penning ball-of-nerves blends of CBGBs and Studio 54 and effete proto-indie pop alongside the narcotic VU-like ballad "In a Nutshell", for which they even (unsuccessfully) approached Nico to provide vocals.

Collins himself often wore his broken heart on his sleeve, but unlike other more diaristic or shoulder-slouched writers of his kind (Morrissey, Stuart Murdoch, Sufjan Stevens), he shrugged or laughed off his troubles. Collins' confessionals aren't a liturgy of woes, but of what he may feel is either sage advice or honest self-examination: "Avoid eye contact at all costs," "Only my dreams satisfy the real beat of my heart," "I'm not afraid of saying I'm close to tears." Collins' mixture of indie woe and soul/disco sonically matched his desire "to take the pleasure with the pain"-- he'd already had the pain in his life and songs, why not seek out the pleasure as well?

Those instincts peak on "Consolation Prize", where unrequited love and the faintest hope of romantic payoff are preferred to moving on, which would potentially mean actually engaging with romance and risking true heartbreak. He attempts the worst serenade this side of Joseph Cotton in The Magnificent Ambersons before almost euphorically admitting, "I'll never be man enough for you." Running yourself down never sounded so good.

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