After the SFA thread, I listened to RATW and thought how I liked alot of the b sides better than tracks that made the album. So this thread is for b sides/ bonus tracks / off cuts ep tracks ,you would have put on an album and the song(s) you’d replace.
I’ll start:
SFA RATW
IN: Happiness is a worn Pun/Edam Anchorman / Shit you do
OUT: Miniature , No Sympathy /Side walk Surfer Girl
Art Brut Brilliant Tragic
IN: Unprofessional Wrestling
OUT: Dog eared
FOTL How to stop your brain in an accident
IN: Bisexuality of Distance
OUT: Something Happened
This is really hard for The Smashing Pumpkins, Modest Mouse, and Elliott Smith since their B-Sides are perfection but so are the albums. Starla would be the best song on Gish and The Last Song might be the single most perfect embodiment of Mellon Collie, but substituting them for anything would be jarring.
Taking into account flow / tone of the album, the best one I can come up with is
Modest Mouse - The Lonesome Crowded West
IN: Baby Blue Sedan
OUT: Out of Gas or Long Distance Drunk
Replacing the other of those two songs with pretty much anything off of Building Nothing Out of Something would make it a stronger collection of songs but hurt it as an album. Positive/Negative being the best song, A Life of Arctic Sounds being the best fit, and Grey Ice Water splitting the difference.
As far as I know they were outtakes rather than b-sides so this is cheating a bit, but if you replaced Dose of Thunder and Lay it Down Clown with Nowhere is my Home and the Tim version of Can’t Hardly Wait, Tim by the Replacements would be massively improved.
If we’re talking Oasis, that Standing on the shoulder of giants album is pretty terrible, but had a couple of decentish b sides that I could never understand why they’d been left off. Let’s All Make Believe and As Long As They’ve Got Cigarettes in Hell, them are the ones. You can stick them on it in place of literally any two other songs, they’re better than anything on the album
