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AOdds & Sods albums (the name the Who gave to one of the first rarity compilations, released in 1974 in an attempt to short-circuit bootleggers) are often more interesting than best-of collections.
While the latter are usually predictable roundups for an artist’s casual fan, outtakes, B-sides, and stray albums are for the diehard. Done right, they’re a glimpse into a parallel career, the songwriting process and what it could have been.
Powderfinger was a Democratic band with five stubborn members who all brought ideas to the rehearsal room and didn’t always agree with each other. Songs were cut, rearranged, and drifted in and out of the conversation for recording. They were both prolific and fussy, so it’s no surprise that in a twenty-year career there is a lot of material in the archives that never saw the light of day.
That said, it’s extraordinary that a solid song like Day by Day, the lead single on this hip-shaking album, was left out of the 2003 album Vulture Street. Singer Bernard Fanning says he is amazed they haven’t found a place for this; drummer Jon Coghill told me there were too many similar songs on the album. Maybe so, but Day by Day is probably better than half of them. It would have stood up to any better record, no matter this discarded album.
It would be unrealistic to expect the rest of Unreleased: 1998-2010 – the band’s first record in more than a decade – to maintain the Day by Day standard. If that were the case, the band’s judgment on their work would have been seriously flawed. Only two other songs here were recorded during the formal album sessions. The rest are demos, recorded in various home studios in Brisbane in the final stages of the band’s career.
These necessarily have a coarser quality, despite being polished an inch from their lives by band producer Nick DiDia. Some of them are refreshingly raw: Lou Doimand’s jagged attack demonstrates the embarrassment of the harsher riches the band was working with during the Vulture Street era. Diamond Ring, recorded in 2009, sounds like a throwback to the band’s early grunge years.
There are four more tracks from that year, the period of the band’s last studio album Golden Rule, when interest in Powderfinger was starting to wane. Happy bounces along with hand claps and an almost funky John Collins bassline, and the band sounds like they’re having more fun than they did on the actual album. Daybreak has moved closer to inclusion but is less compelling, falling victim to its own seriousness.
It’s easy to hear these songs, to understand why Powderfinger called it one day after the golden rule. They had become victims of their own success and were getting trapped in an idea of how the band would have to sound to support him. A decade later, they’ve been gone long enough for a resurgence of interest.
Like most widows and orphans albums, it’s for fans only, but it’s more than worth checking out the back pages of Powderfinger.
• Unpublished: 1998-2010 it came out on Friday
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