Get Therapy?

Credit to Cardiff's own Russell Todd for resisting the temptation to select nothing but Troublegum tracks for his recent Toppermost post on Therapy? I'm not sure I'd have that willpower. As it is, he limits himself to blackly comic tone-setting opener 'Knives' and single 'Trigger Inside', plus a re-recorded version of 'Die Laughing' featuring the Manics' James Dean Bradfield. (Oh to have seen Bradfield accompanying Andy Cairns on stage at the Full Moon...)

For a band with a back catalogue as extensive as Therapy?'s, narrowing it down was always going to be challenging. 'Teethgrinder' was practically a dead cert, but Babyteeth's 'Loser Cop' is an astute choice - the fact that, on a debut mini-album full of "spiky, grubby noise", it "freewheels into avant garde, Zappa-esque jazz" was indeed an early indication that Therapy? "were going to be difficult to pigeonhole". (This, I think, has also been to their detriment to an extent, in that they've never been fully embraced by the metal community, or indie types, or noise rock enthusiasts.)

More controversial still is the selection of the orchestral cover of Husker Du's 'Diane' from Infernal Love. The song's creator (and one of Cairns' heroes) Grant Hart detested what he saw as a grotesque perversion of the original, and the band now play a version that is much closer to Husker Du's - but I would agree with Todd that its shock value (musically and lyrically) endures three decades on, even if it makes most sense in the context of that baroque, overwrought LP.

Todd is also quite right to describe Therapy?'s most recent album Hard Cold Fire as having "no right to sound as good as it does" (something implicit in my own review). All of which makes me take seriously his suggestion that Crooked Timber - a record that had passed me by - is a late-career highlight worthy of investigation.