Within his liner notes for his 2020 collection
Martin Green Presents Super Sonics: 40 Junkshop Britpop Greats,
Green says
Lush guitarist
Phil King coined the term "Junkshop Britpop" to cover "the genre's forgotten B-sides, promo CD singles, and limited-edition coloured vinyl 45s." It's no coincidence that "junkshop" is a term that's also been applied to neglected recordings from the glam and glitter era: its use here suggests that
Super Sonics: 40 Junkshop Britpop Greats will be filled with the same kind of trashy pop discoveries, only taken from the swinging 1990s, when the U.K. was so happening it was dubbed "Cool Britannia" by certain wags of the '90s. The exploitation industry was considerably different in that decade than it was in the 1970s, so the analogy doesn't quite scan -- there aren't quite as many crass cash-ins among these 40 tracks as there are on any junkshop glitter comp you can find -- but
Super Sonics does manage to conjure the heady times of 1993-1997, when every sound that flitted through the U.K. charts could be conceivably called Britpop. Case in point: the great synth rock trio
Add N to (X) are here with "Inevitable Fast Access," a dense, paranoid cut that has little to do with the big guitars and big hooks that run rampant through the rest of the set, but for a brief time, such futuristic sounds were gobbled up by the Britpop monster. While most of the rest of
Super Sonics does sound a bit like Britpop as defined by
Blur, that London combo isn't included -- instead,
Duffy's "London Girls" is. A few of the names would be familiar to anybody who perused the music weeklies in the '90s --
Powder,
Kenickie,
Shampoo,
Menswear, and
Rialto are all here, but maybe not with the song you're expecting -- however, the pleasure of
Super Sonics is discovering also-rans who barely registered on the cultural radar. While many of these aren't very good -- the delightfully named
Sexton Ming and Steady attempted trip-hop and failed -- they are charming and help make this comp into a gaudy, endearing time capsule. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
![The First Two Records [Bonus Tracks]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0851647004087_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg "The First Two Records [Bonus Tracks]")
