Search - Talk Talk :: Missing Pieces

Disappointing pieces

F. Ceric | Amsterdam, Holland | 09/13/2007

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The songs on this CD were obviously collecting the dust in the secret archives of Polydor, after they released "Laughing stock" and discovered that Mark Hollis and the crew can not be categorised as "pop music", and certainly not as high potential marketing product. Obviously some smart people decided to earn some money by adding three "new" tracks (they are not new, it's clear that they are all recorded during LS sessions, and in my humble opinion, the are not as good as already released songs from those sessions) and try to earn some money anyway. Real fans (including myself) will probably buy it anyway, so at the end of the day we can say that this complete marketing swindle worked well(at least in my case), because "Missing Pieces" is not the real enrichment in my music collection. Four songs can be found on LS, and the missing pieces we can certainly affort to miss (it doesn't suprise me they were "undiscovered" for almost ten years), so this CD should be better called LS revisited."

After this, what's left to release?

Josh M. Slifkin | Pittsburgh, PA | 11/26/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It's quite interesting to hear the edited versions and alternative takes of the LAUGHING STOCK selections. Even in their shorter and variously edited versions, they still sound quite amazing. Mark Hollis's songwriting is tremendous and Lee Harris's drumming is quite effective. The instrumental B-Sides are nice cut-and-pastings of various selections. The odd piece is "Piano," recorded by Mark Hollis for the Allison/Brown's AVI release. It's quite long, and save for moments that resemble the works of Erik Satie and Arvo Part, it goes mostly nowhere. (How's that for a veiled compliment?) Still, it's quite a worthwhile collection of their later work (and hopefully the last one I'll have to buy for a while)."