This is reposted from the Sing-Songs//Remote luxury// Persia thread I started a few weeks back. For you Fraulein. I actually love this period from the Church's output. The innocence is awesome.

This is perhaps by far the best possible release in all the Church's potential compilations. It perfectly brings these flawed beauties onto one perfect release. Whoever was in charge of this project deserves the highest acclaim. Even the packaging is sublime in its attention to detail and I for one cannot thank them enough. Checkout the scans of the original master tape sleeves, the hand written lyrics, the covers in all their glory and the daft quote on the part of the CD that was, in vinyl days, a place to discretely write nonsense.
The overall sound is crisply enhanced and as full bodied as possible without ruining the dreamlike quality of the original releases. A Different Man (The Church's most perfectly conceived slice of pure pop, Crystalline in sound, shape and structure and almost too good to be true) all the way through to Shadow Cabinet displays a band in touch with many hidden things, and not all of them legal. I honestly don't remember the vinyl editions of these sounding as fresh as this 18 years ago and it is good to hear the tracks back in the right order again. The muddled compilation of "Persia" and "Remote Luxury" Arista released some years back pales into insignificance (the mix of "No Explanation" with it's glued on folk-worked intro being the exception).
I'd do a track by track breakdown but you'd all get pissed off with the pathetic drooling (Apart from "Maybe These Boys" perhaps which, although sounding better here, still doesn't sound better).
Cheers,
Altres