2. K.I.M, Miyagi (Tigersushi)
OK, yeah, as a mix this really is as great as its press insists, but that's not what I'm interested in: plenty of other people will be willing to explain just how crucial this strange little mix-CD is. (You can keep the album-closing electro version of "Meat Is Murder," though, and I say this as a card-carrying vegetarian.) What I'm interesting in is the way the Gun Club's "Sex Beat," one of the best songs of all time, just sorta shows up toward the end of the mix, when K.I.M. has pretty much run out of things that they wanna play for you besides their own stuff. Track 19 is a K.I.M. original; so's track 20; then, naturally but still surprisingly, young Jeffrey Lee Pierce is back from the dead, his Baptist-preacher's-son urgency as shocking and frightening today as it was twenty-odd years ago. People talk about music being "classic," but I usually take that to mean "permanently comfortable." This ain't like that. It's permanently new because it's always gonna have a problem. Incredible. >>