PENTAGRAM — First Daze Here Too (review)

PENTAGRAM — First Daze Here Too album cover Boxset / Compilation · 2006 · Doom Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Warthur
It seems that the original First Daze Here collection did pretty well for itself, because it was followed up by this subsequent selection of 1970s Pentagram material. First, the good news: unlike the previous collection, which only had one song from the band's 1976 demos, this has a substantially greater proportion of songs from that period, giving a bit more of a balanced view of the band's development during the era. And whilst the inclusion of two cover songs on here might suggest that the bottom of the rehearsal tape barrel had been hit, at least the version of the Rolling Stones' Under My Thumb is a fun, fast-paced metal reworking which manages to recapture the sneering leer of Mick and Keef's version.

Now the bad news: first off, the set is bafflingly split into a two-CD collection for absolutely no good reason that I can see. Granted, some of the material on the second CD has a markedly worse production quality than the first CD - in fact, most of the tracks here are slightly rougher around the edges than the material on First Daze Here, which presumably represents the cream of the crop - but even then there's some nicely-produced tracks on there that are on a par with the material on CD1, so it can't be an attempt to partition tracks into one high-quality disc and one "bonus disc" of shoddier recordings. Equally, the recordings aren't presented in chronological order at all - or, indeed, any date order which makes any sense to me - so it's not a matter of separating early 1970s material from late 1970s material or anything like that. A simple blunder, or a blatant attempt to slap a 2CD price tag on a single CD's worth of material? You decide.

Secondly, as I've already alluded to, the production quality of the demos here is - to my ears, at least - markedly more variable than on First Daze Here, which had a consistently decent sound. I'm not taking raw kvlt black metal demos recorded in a forest during a blizzard bad here - you can at least more or less pick out each individual instrument and hear what the musicians are doing - but it's distracting enough to make the listening experience markedly more of a chore than listening to the preceding collection.

Those who are major Pentagram fans and want to collect as much of the band's early material as possible will probably find First Daze Here Too a decent enough collection, though I suspect even they will be bugged by the bizarre 2CD presentation. The rest of us, however, would be better off listening to the band's studio albums, on which most-to-all of the best tracks on here have been re-recorded at one point or another.
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