Pitchfork

There's something incredibly bittersweet about this reissue of Kirsty MacColl's penultimate album, 1994's Titanic Days. It's not just that MacColl was killed in a mysterious scuba diving accident six years later, although that is incredibly tragic. Nor is it that she mentions death in every song, although that too is part of the album's sad new context. The bittersweetness of Titanic Days lies in the fact that in the 11 years since its release, MacColl's legacy hasn't really come to much: I'd be hard-pressed to think of any artist she has strongly and directly influenced (although I like to think that Neko Case has most of MacColl's albums on her shelf), and she has yet to be rediscovered by a new generation or to experience a resurgence of nostalgia for either her early output on Stiff Records or for later albums like Kite and Electric Landlady.

To American music fans she's perhaps most renowned for singing with the Pogues ("Fairytale of New York" should be a holiday chestnut by now) and for her rendition of Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets" on that quintessential 1990s benefit album, Red Hot & Blue. To most people she's probably just a name they've read somewhere or remember only fleetingly.

But Titanic Days is immanently memorable for its sense of humor and serious expectations. MacColl possessed a songwriting wit as sharp and as humorous as Elvis Costello's, but she was vulnerable and generous where he was often caustic, as if she just couldn't commit to being the curmudgeon. On the jazz-noirish "Bad", she spits verses about finally breaking free of her "token woman" existence: "I want a brief encounter in a stolen car/ A hand on my buttock in a Spanish bar." And the raucous pub-country rumbler "Big Boy on a Saturday Night" gleefully deflates the boasts of "a silly pseudo lager lout with nothing much to shout about."

The general consensus, however, is that Titanic Days is a divorce album, which isn't a stretch: both MacColl and collaborator Mark E. Nevin (who writes the reissue liner notes) were both enduring the ends of their marriages. That painful alienation informs almost every song here, but especially "You Know It's You", "Don't Go Home", and the title track, which ends in a cinematic coda of Technicolor strings that manages to be both melodramatic and utterly devastating. Remarkably there is no self-pitying animosity here, but plenty of adult resignation and the acknowledgement of indescribably messy emotions. "And about all the pain," MacColl sings so defiantly on "Tomorrow Never Comes", "Well, you know it was worth it/You could do it again/ But I just don't deserve it."

Despite the somewhat dated production, Titanic Days manages to sound both dreamily optimistic and realistically down-to-earth, measuring the distance between the hoped-for life and the lived existence. Songs like "Soho Square" and "Angel" are shot through with a anticipation for something enormous and life-changing, whether good or bad-- something, as the title proclaims, titanic. MacColl has the perfect voice for this expectancy: It's light but never ethereal, grounded but never guttural. She remains permanently rooted in the here and now, but sounds like she won't settle for that.

This reissue adds to the album a second disk of twelve bonus tracks, all of which are either contemporaneous recordings or session outtakes. In addition to two b-sides, two live cuts, and three demos, there are four versions of the first single "Angel", which seems like overkill. The Into the Light and Apollo 440 remixes reinvent the song dramatically, but to little effect, while the relatively stripped down Piano Mix nearly bests Lillywhite's album version.

Titanic Days, unfortunately, was not the big thing MacColl was waiting for. Upon its release, the album received modest praise and disappointing sales. It took MacColl six years to release a follow-up, Tropical Brainstorm, which produced a minor posthumous hit with "In These Shoes?" In the meantime, Titanic Days went out of print and became a sought-after rarity among serious fans and critics-- a situation now remedied by this reissue, even if it doesn't really constitute a happy ending.