Listening to the new 30th Anniversary edition of this…what an album! Still stands up as a great achievement after all these years. Anyone else like it? Anyone see them live at the time of this album?
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Loved and saw them a few times at the time.
More mixed feelings about a lot of their stuff now but Giant Steps I think absolutely stands up as a genuinely great album.
Didn’t realise it had been reissued. Presumably has some bonus stuff?
Yeah great record, but never saw them live unfortunately
It’s an all-timer for me, just a wonderful mosaic of ideas & influences. Is the 30th Anniversary edition significantly different to the expanded edition from (more than) a few years back?
Didn’t see them live until the Wake Up! era: they still played a good few Giant Steps tracks then, though iirc they brought it more to the fore again when they were touring C’mon Kids.
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I saw them around the time of ‘Icabod and I’ when Sice had long hair - they were pretty unremarkable.
Seems to have been quite a low-key re-release. It does have some extra stuff…but not much! My CD has a couple of Saint Etienne remixes of ‘Lazarus’ & ‘Rodney King’ added at the end. I think the LP also comes with a bonus 10" with these on it. There was a 3-CD reissue in 2010 with ALL the b-sides and remixes but that one seems quite hard to get now.
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Agreed! It is such a melting pot of ideas…just a really ambitious record for an ‘indie’ band to make. Well, i never bought the 2010 re-issue so i just bought the new 30th Anniversary CD to replace my original 1993 CD…and the new CD does sound much better. Might get the LP version as well.
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It’s a great album, although the production has dated quite badly. However, if this is a remaster, I’ll certainly listen to it again.
Saw them live at the time and they couldn’t quite put the enormity of the album across.
A mighty album. On repeat for me back in 1993.
Not listened to it for quite awhile so will have a blast this afternoon.
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absolutely insane to me that the 12’ version of Lazarus isn’t on it. It’s so good!
Wonderful treasure trove of an album. Lazarus, I Hang Suspended, Wish I Was Skinny, Barney were all great singles. I played it to death for about 6 weeks, then started university and strangely didn’t really play it again. But still love it.
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You’ll be pleased to hear that the original edited version of ‘Lazarus’ has been replaced with the 12" version on this 30th Anniversary edition (on both CD and vinyl)!
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ah, so it’s in the original track listing in place of the edit is it? I just had a look at the bonus tracks.
One of those LPs of that era that I absolutely caned at the time of release (see also DogManStar) . Haven’t listened to it in years though. I think it won loads of album of the year polls too, which was well deserved. I saw the rerelease, but I’ve gotten jaded by these recently so will probably just dig out the original.
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Can’t really comment much on the album, but I saw them live in June this year and they were really good.
Giant Steps is a bit like The White Album, just quite unafraid to go out on a limb. Rodney McQueen, or the Beatles pastiche of The White Noise Revisited… they just threw everything at it. At the same time, they were blossoming that ability to write sweet melodious pop. Its a lovely transition point between what came before and after (and divides their fans)
Im in a minority who loves late era Boos (c’mon kids is a masterpiece and Kingsize is flawed but a really under-rated attempt to re-do themselves as a pop band), but Belvedere and Giant Steps are where I got on the bus and they are very evocative.
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With you all the way for C’Mon Kids, not sure I could choose between it and Giant Steps
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It’s a great record, one of the best British guitar albums of the decade without doubt. I remember being amazed by it at the time - the breadth and variety of its influences, its wild ambition and the joyful brilliance of its tunes, the crazy attention to every detail throughout - it sounded like a modern record stand alongside all those sixties and seventies classics that people a few years older than me raved about (and that I eventually ended up loving too).
I’ve really enjoyed the reissue - it stands up really well and like all properly ambitious things it hasn’t aged at all.
I always found the rest of their career a bit of a disappointment. They carried on being able to write great tunes but I don’t know where the ambition and experimentation went - they ended up sounding like just another vaguely Britpoppy guitar band.
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Yeah, that’s right, they have put the longer 12" version on the album in place of the original shorter version.
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Also, the B-side ‘Peachy Keen’ was supposed to have been added to the CD as a bonus track (according to early track listings i saw), however, it doesn’t appear on the one i’ve got.