Heavenly - Operation Heavenly

By most accounts, Operation Heavenly is the best album Heavenly ever made. It's also the one nobody got to properly celebrate. Sarah Records, the band's spiritual home for their first three albums, had shut its doors for good in 1995, so Heavenly found a new UK home with Wiiija Records while keeping their longstanding tie to K Records in the US, where label founder Calvin Johnson turns up on guest vocals for "Pet Monkey." The result was a brighter, more confident record, one built for the charts. Then, shortly before its release in October 1996, drummer Mathew Fletcher died. The promotional tour was cancelled, the band quietly ended, and one of the most purely enjoyable records in the Heavenly catalog arrived to near silence.

Operation Heavenly finds the band folding the tougher, riot grrrl edge of singles like "P.U.N.K. Girl" and "Atta Girl" into something glossier and more Britpop-inflected, without losing an ounce of wit. "Fat Lenny," "Trophy Girlfriend," and "Space Manatee" are as catchy and fully realized as anything the band wrote, and Fletcher's playing throughout is effervescent, funny, and completely alive, the sound of a drummer at the absolute peak of his powers.

Nearly thirty years later, Skep Wax is treating this reissue less like an archival footnote and more like the album launch that never happened. Time has done what it can for a record that deserved so much more the first time around, and Operation Heavenly finally gets to sound like what it always was: a great pop record, unclouded by grief, ready to be heard on its own terms.