Any recording artist who has been around for awhile, especially in our current fragmented music scene, collects odds and ends over time. A culled album track here; a tribute album cover there; and dusty demos everywhere. Eventually a critical mass of them accumulate and out comes the Rarities Collection no one except die hard fans was clamoring for.As I said.... we all know the drill.
Luckily, no one informed P. Hux of this, as his Tracks & Treasure Vol. 1 rises above the usual fate for these kinds of albums. In fact, Tracks & Treasure sounds more like a planned album than most efforts you hear these days. Some of this has to do with the consistently high quality of the songwriting, but there is also the continuity of sound P. Hux has employed since at least the late 1980's.
The 10 listed tracks contain a good half dozen songs which will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed P. Hux's long players. "Things Could Be Worse" is a rocker which could have easily fit in on P. Hux's classic 1995 album Deluxe. "My Girlfriend" and "Kifissia Girls" are brash loud tunes, fully realized recordings of the sort you rarely find amongst odds and ends and leftover bits. Huxley even revisits his earliest days in a terrific reworking of "The Air Gets Colder" by his early band The Blazers - he even tacks on the original as a hidden track just so we can all hear how he has always had it.
On the album only the classy Badfinger cover "Perfection" and the cheery 30 second throwaway "Pop Dreams" lets the listener in on the varied origin of the material here, but they are so well done they simply fit in perfectly.
All in all, this is a very solid effort. And you don't even have to be a Parthenon Huxley fanatic to get it.
Grade: B+
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