Talulah Gosh – Was It Just a Dream?

Superseding the increasingly hard-to-find Backwash compilation, Was It Just a Dream? is the complete Talulah Gosh: 29 tracks encompassing every EP, single, radio session and demo that the twee-pop icons committed to tape in their brief but influential mid-eighties existence. For died-in-the-wool fans already in possession of Backwash and the 2011 Demos EP, there’s nothing here you haven’t already spun to death; no new archival discoveries, just a welding of the two into one package.

But for anyone too young or otherwise engaged to have enjoyed the band at the time, Was It Just a Dream? contains compound delights. Tracks like Bringing up Baby wear their quarter-of-a-century so well a newcomer might swear they’d been knocked together moments earlier by one of Amelia and co.’s numerous disciples, and it’s this long-term freshness that makes the album far more than a niche nostalgia hit for the Sarah/K Records appreciation societies. [Chris Buckle]