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Box Set)
Talk about truth in advertising – the cover for this box set features a ‘Colorforms” type design of a middle-aged guy with attachable punk attire, and it perfectly symbolizes the target audience for this splendid, diverse collection (that is to say, guys like me). Back in the eighties, few independent labels were better equipped than Sire Records to represent the zeitgeist of the times. Most music from this God-awful decade has been rendered dated and unlistenable, but Sire had a pretty good track record for signing bands that survived, and all of them appear on this four-disk set. Madonna, Depeche Mode, Madness, the Tom Tom Club and Seal are perfect representations for a decade characterized by computerized overproduction and androgynous imagery, but this collection goes deeper than that. Sprinkled among flavor-of-the-week offerings by Erasure, Blancmange, and the Mighty Lemon Drops are truly historic birth-of-punk offerings by the Ramones, the Dead Boys and Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Mixing it up even further are really great bands from the ‘80s, like Echo and the Bunnymen, the English Beat, the Replacements and the Talking Heads.
If you think you have the collection sussed as punk/new wave memorabilia, think again. Uncle Tupelo, Lou Reed, k.d. lang, Wilco and Ice T. provide more than enough evidence for Sire’s diversity, not to mention their good taste to sign acts with some longevity. That’s not to say that there isn’t a fair smattering of one-hit wonders, though, like Modern English (“I Melt With You”), M (“Pop Muzik”), and Plastic Bertrand (“Ca Plane Pour Moi”). If you went club-hopping in the ‘80s, then you’ll appreciate them anyway, even if they were (and still are) completely silly and/or dated.
Most record label collections suffer either from a lack of diversity (the independent, boutique labels) or too much diversity (like the Columbia/Sony behemoth). Sire walked a fine line between either extreme, and it seems like a fair assessment to say that most of these acts fared quite well from their tenure on the label. For the same reason, most listeners will fare well, too.
Grade: 
 
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