Get On With It: The Best of Cracker

Album Review

Arriving about six years after the first Cracker compilation (2000's double-disc set Garage d'Or), 2006's Get on with It: The Best of Cracker is a bit more hits-oriented than its predecessor — which means that it isn't quite as idiosyncratic and it has "I Hate My Generation," the one modern rock radio hit missing from Garage, plus an edit of (bizarrely billed as the "album edit," even though the original album contained the full-length version) of the epic "Euro-Trash Girl." But to call this a pure hits collection is a little misleading, since two of their charting singles — 1992's "Happy Birthday to Me" and 1996's "Nothing to Believe In" — are absent, meaning this is no closer to being an all-hits comp than Garage d'Or. Of course, that doesn't mean this isn't worthwhile. Those missing hits are minor, and the rest of the comp is well-chosen, slightly emphasizing their biggest album (1993's Kerosene Hat) while giving equal weight to their eponymous 1992 debut and 1996's The Golden Age, and adding two tracks apiece from 1998's Gentleman's Blues and 2002's Forever (2003's Countrysides was not recorded for Virgin and consequently is not represented). It's a track shorter than the first disc of Garage (whose second disc was devoted to B-sides and rarities), but for most casual fans, that may not matter since Get on with It: The Best of Cracker serves up the band's best-known songs in a concise, entertaining fashion. (Side note: In his liner notes for Get on with It, producer Don Smith — who helmed Cracker, Kerosene Hat, and The Golden Age — says that Cracker "embraces the greatest-hits collection," which isn't exactly true: the band was so unhappy that Virgin was proceeding with the release of this compilation that they re-recorded a bunch of their songs and released these versions under the name Greatest Hits Redux the same day Get on with It hit the stores.)