THE WEDDING PRESENT SINGLES (Part Thirty-Eight)

The third EP inside the How The West Was Won box set contained an edited version of the opening track of El Rey along with three previously unavailable songs – in essence, this particular EP was what most likely made fans go out and buy the box set.

Santa Ana Winds is one of the strongest and most memorable songs on the new album, which is no doubt why it was selected as its opener.   It is a pounding rock number, one with a great bassline courtesy of co-writer Terry Di Castro as well as sorts of Albini trademarks throughout; the fact that a few songs afterwards failed to reach similar standards is very much a contributory factor as to why my overall reaction to the album was one of disappointment  – at this point I should add that I gave El Rey a fresh listen a few weeks ago when preparing these run of posts related to 2009, and there’s certainly more to like about it than I had been thinking all these years….but it’s still low down on my list of favourite TWP albums.

The edited version cuts out the 40 seconds or so from the album version, omitting the morse-code style intro and gradual build-up.

mp3: The Wedding Present – Santa Ana Winds (edit)

The other three tracks make for decent enough listening, but at the same time didn’t really offer too much in the way of truly memorable tunes. 

mp3: The Wedding Present – Hulk Loves Betty
mp3: The Wedding Present – Drink You, Eat You
mp3: The Wedding Present – Twenty Jackies

The box set, of which there were just 1,000 copies pressed, was released at the end of October.  EP#4, or at least most of it, would end up receiving a digital release before the year was out.

JC