Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K, because in the quarter-century since they splintered they've been so diversely mythologized, lionized, and revered you might believe there were actually four or five groups on Scotland's early 80s postpunk scene who just happened to share the same name. For starters there was the Postcard version, label boss Alan Horne's vision of the group as the neat Edinburgh spirit to spike the sparkling Glasgow pop of Orange Juice. Then there's Paul Morley's account (reprised in his sleevenotes here): If OJ were a New York band who formed in Glasgow, then JK were a Manchester band who'd been dislocated to Edinburgh-- troubled heirs of Joy Division, stylish peers of Magazine. Then, of course, there's the sharp-suited puritans you might read about in the works of Kevin Pearce, the mod missing link between the crooning Vic Godard and the shambling June Brides. And that's just a step away from the twee indie-pop slant: Josef K as the jagged romantics who essentially invented the Wedding Present. And more recently there's been the Franz Ferdinand angle: Josef K as the band who dreamt up the smartly spiky pop that married the stark expressionism of CBGBs to a suave Frank Sinatra sigh before the Strokes were even struck.

Domino have profited greatly from the success of this last invocation, so it's to their credit that they've issued this terrific 22-track introduction to Josef K-- remarkably, the first time the group's work has been properly available in the U.S. It takes us from the 1980s Postcard single "Radio Drill Time" through generous selections from the abandoned album Sorry for Laughing and the actual debut The Only Fun in Town, before concluding with their parting 1981 Peel Sessions and a strangely successful cover of Alice Cooper's "Applebush". In part, it's the misfiring brevity of their career-- barely two years from debut to farewell-- that encourages the proliferation of Josef K myth. Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.

On the two Postcard singles released in winter 1980 you can hear a young group trying to struggle out of the shadow of Joy Division, away from the post-punk abyss of Ian Curtis's suicide earlier that year. "Radio Drill Time" is an urgent, slightly gauche stab at a Martin Hannett soundworld, all martial drums, a reverbed scree of guitars, and startling electronic bleeps, with the usual suspects of JD iconography-- trance, radios, motorways-- rounded up one last time; as Paul Haig wails nervily, "it's the wrong place to start." "It's Kind of Funny", issued just two months later, shows real progress and the beginnings of a distinctive Josef K voice: Haig now croons swoonily of existential futility-- Sinatra meets Sartre via the Subway Sect-- while Malcolm Ross and the band hit on a groove like Tom Verlaine slashing through "Pale Blue Eyes".

But the real draw here are the six selections from Sorry For Laughing-- the debut album that should have been released at the start of 1981 as the momentum of The Sound of Young Scotland hype built to a head, but was instead mysteriously shelved, apparently after thousands of copies had already been produced. You could easily believe this was one of Horne's gloriously perverse, self-defeating bids for pop immortality-- an instant great lost classic (and a steady income stream from supposedly rare test pressings). More prosaically, it's possible that the group were intimidated by the furious energy and intensity brewing within fellow Edinburghers the Fire Engines and felt their recordings now seemed too prim, poised, and proper in comparison. As it survives, the album sees the group expanding into a kind of postpunk art rock: "Heads Watch" is a kissing cousin of Magazine's "Shot by Both Sides" while "Variations on a Scene" unfurls into a low-slung and slinky arrangement for piano, flute, and arcade game electronics. But it also suggests a possible New Pop future for the group, producing the kind of kosmische kabaret that kindred spirits the Associates were to take briefly and brilliantly to the top of the charts (as it happened, the closest we would get to this ideal was Propaganda's stately synth-pop cover of "Sorry For Laughing" in 1985).

The eventual debut, The Only Fun in Town, was recorded in six days in a Belgian studio in an attempt to capture their live clangor but released in July 81 to abysmal reviews from their most ardent fans: Morley wrote in the NME: "I am appalled…Josef K have cheapened themselves and cheated the world". Heard now TOFiT is certainly no disaster-- there's an unhinged vigor to "Fun'n'Frenzy" and "16 Years" that has proved incredibly influential over two decades of British indie-- but there's an inescapable falling off in intrigue, with all the mystery, wit, and languor reduced to bright, brittle blasts of alienation.

This most abstemious of groups was to split within the year, after a taste of the promotional treadmill beat any remaining idealism out of them: Haig to an intermittently fascinating solo career on the dark side of the croon, Ross to a more commercial incarnation of Orange Juice, and Weddell and Torrance to join a youthful Momus in the Happy Family.

The cover and insecty title of this anthology alludes to the source of the group's name in Kafka, but also carries an elusive allusion to Manny Farber inventing Termite Art back in 1962: "the concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it …forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin". Entomology is exemplary termite art: A brief moment and a handful of songs that have burrowed industriously through the soil of the last twenty years, while so many white elephants have fallen ponderously away, and now finally come triumphantly to light.