Ice Ice Baby! Extra Helpings! You Want Some? Come And Get Some!

Ok, ok, I lied a bit in my write-up for The Best Of Both Worlds, when I said that with that you have all the Icehouse that you'll ever need. You don't! You also need this! As a matter of fact, you might like this more than the big anthology I posted saturday. After all, 37 tracks and more than two-and-a-half hours of Icehouse is a lot, though I'm happy that after a slow start some of y'all have turned up at the Icehouse. But if you just want some cool music from Iva Davies, The Best Of All Worlds will do it. The album was conceived as a sort of bonus disc to the two-disc anthology, the kind of thing you would get back in the day where normal fans would buy the two-disc version and super fans would get the three disc limited edition version for remixes and rare stuff. 

If you have checked out The Best Of Both Worlds, you've maybe realized (or not) that it ends in late 1993, because that's where for all intents and purposes Icehouse's official recording career stopped. But, you know, not really and entirely. So, The Best Of All Worlds collects the best moments of the afterlife of Icehouse, meaning remixes, live tracks and tracks from The Berlin Tapes, which was credited to both Davies and Icehouse, but anyway we established that Davies *is* Icehouse for all intents and purposes. So, once Icehouse's ongoing career more or less ground to a stop with the relative flop of the Big Wheel album, Davies got involved again with the Sydney Dance Company, with whom he already worked in 1985 for an original  production called Boxes. The company was putting on Berlin, a production by choreographer Graeme Murphy, scored with music from Berlin-related artists like David Bowie and Lou Reed, but also, among others, XTC, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Psychedelic Furs, The Cure and Simple Minds. Davies worked with pianist Max Lambert on adapting these songs for the project. 

The Berlin Tapes make up a good third of The Best Of All Worlds. Davies' re-readings of Bowie's "Heroes" and "Loving The Alien" - a song whose overproduction even Bowie himself despised - are simply spectacular, and for good measure I've also thrown in a rocking live cover of "The Jean Genie". But he also did excellent takes on Talking Heads' "Heaven", Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" and, perhaps surprisingly, Simple Minds' "Let There Be Love". I feel like that track is one of the best of Kerr & Co. who are generally not in grand standing with serious music fans, and Davies' reading of it is again, absolutely splendid. It also makes sense that Icehouse would cover Simple Minds, considering the very similar paths both bands went on in parallel throughout the 80s. 

But there's more! You already get your money's worth (ha!) with the first track, Bill Laswell's monstruous remix of "Great Southern Land", which for me is in its original form one of the best Icehouse tracks. But Laswell reworks the thing from the ground up, starting with a traditional aborigines chant, drafted in Bernie Worell and Buckethead to create completely new soundscapes, and let's Buckethead loose on a rock version of Icehouse's central riff, that turn the song into a true rock song in the second part of it's mammooth 15 minute plus running time. Nothing compares to that, though the remixes for "Crazy", "Electric Blue", "Big Wheel", and "Man Of Colours" are very fine additions as well. 

And finally, a teaser of Dubhouse! In December 2013 Davies fulfilled a dream of his by staging two concerts as Dubhouse, proposing reggae-styled versions of Icehouse songs and reggae classics. Not all of these worked, as some songs and medleys came out completely flat, but I included two songs, medleys of "Walk On The Wild Side- Heartbreak Kid" and "Exodus-Great Southern Land", which I think worked best. Lead vocals on "Exodus" are by Tony Kopa from Bigger Than Jesus and The Truth, who Davies hired as hypeman and co-lead vocalist for the Dubhouse experience. 

And in order to go along with the other two discs, I also wanted to end this 'bonus disc' with a short slice of moodiness, so as a special bonus track I added "The Desert" from Iva Davies' score to Russell Mulcahy's excellent outback creature feature Razorback. 

So, The Best Of Both Worlds gives you more cool Icehouse stuff, but also a bit of a different look on Icehouse and its songs. So, warm up to Icehouse once more with some great byways off the band's highways.