Mother Love Bone - Shine [CD]

Mother Love Bone were the first of the new Seattle bands to land on a major label, and Shine was the shot heard around the scene. Released March 6, 1989 on Stardog through Mercury, recorded that previous November at London Bridge Studios with producer Mark Dearnley, it arrived before Nirvana had a proper album out and before anyone had settled on a name for what was happening in that city. It also turned out to be the only release issued during Andrew Wood's lifetime. He died of a heroin overdose a year later, days before the band's debut LP was due.

The music is mostly the band's rawer side. "Thru Fade Away," "Mindshaker Meltdown," and "Half Ass Monkey Boy" are swaggering, glam-inflected rock played by a group with Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard in it, two years before they formed Pearl Jam. Wood sings in a soaring tenor that draws obvious comparisons to Robert Plant, and he is the whole show. Then there is "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns," over eight minutes of piano ballad blooming into one of the most devastating songs to come out of that city in any decade, later used to gutting effect in Singles.

Charles Peterson, who shot half the defining images of the era, took the cover photograph. The EP sold well and stoked the hype that eventually broke Seattle wide open, and it remains the purest surviving document of a frontman who never got to see any of it happen.

This remastered CD edition includes all five tracks with the bonus cut "Capricorn Sister," which conceals the hidden track "Zanzibar," a song that appears nowhere else in the catalog. The one Mother Love Bone release that has never been fully absorbed into the compilations.