I've Got a Preacher's Mouth and Rock 'n' Roll Heart -- Okay, Mostly Rock and Roll, If We're Honest: The Murder City Devils

The principle purpose--so far as I can guess--of compilations and split releases is often lost on me. I avoid compilations as a general rule, as I find them difficult to follow, or so unrepresentative that they might lose me on an interesting artist by sampling too little and too wrong a part of their entire repertoire. Most splits, at least those I know of are singles with a song per band, one on each side of a 45 7" record. Sometimes, too, they are gimmicky ideas or peculiar thoughts, which are most interesting with bands already familiar to listeners. Mudhoney and Sonic Youth each played the other band's song on the "Touch Me, I'm Sick/Halloween" split. Braid covered the Naked Eyes' hit version of the Bacharach/David song "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me" and Burning Airlines backed it with Echo & the Bunnymen's "Back of Love," so there was even disparity in use of existing songs as hooks. At the Drive-In did one in-character track and one peculiar pseudo-dub track, which fits their experience and tastes but not the band in general, when they did a split with Sunshine--so on and so forth.

So, I often excise the side by the band I'm already interested and let the other pass, in the interest of not writing them off over a weird experimental track. It's not always the case, as I'll go with it given the entire split for some reason, via legitimate MP3 or CD release (as I did when acquiring the Burning Airlines/Braid split). Once upon a time, I ended up with the MP3s for the split that leads me to today's entry:

That is the ultra-limited blue issue, though the less limited gold pressing out there. Interestingly, it violates the same "rules" I approach most splits with: they are both remixes by The Latch Brothers. At the Drive-In I knew and loved, which was the reason for snagging the tracks in the first place. Each is represented on the clear sleeve packaging: At the Drive-In's Vaya EP had that angled boombox on an orange field for its cover, and the skull and crossbones image was the Murder City Devils' emblem for a time. The Latch Brothers remixed ATDI's "Rascuache" (from Vaya, the apex of the band, for me), and MCD's "Press Gang." That track comes from the Murder City Devils' third long-player, In Name and Blood, and it's a doozy, even when tweaked by outsiders.