Simple Minds - Silver Box

This exhaustive trawl through demo, session and concert detritus traces Simple Minds'25-year career from 1979, when they were still a Magazine supplement, through to the 1988 stadium bombast of "Mandela Day"and beyond. Yet it's likely to be of interest mostly due to the inclusion of Our Secrets Are The Same, recorded in 1999, yet stuck in contractual purgatory until now. It finds Kerr and Burchill still a bit in the slipstream of '90s U2—tastefully epic, techno-fringed and extravagantly exasperated (on "Death By Chocolate"and "Neon Cowboys") with the wickedness of a world gone wrong.

Rating: 3 / 10