Family Fodder — Savoir Faire: The Best of Family Fodder (Director's Cut)

Record Store Day Drops October 2020, Jungle Records release.
Includes Inner sleeve with lyrics and liner notes by Dominique Levillain.
Pressed on translucent pale blue vinyl; Limited to 500 copies in the UK (1000 copies worldwide).

Family Fodder released two extremely obscure but oddly delightful albums in the early '80s, Monkey Banana Kitchen and All Styles. With the blessing of the loose-knit London-based group's leader (and sole constant member), Alig Pearce, the New York indie Dark Beloved Cloud gathered the best of those two discs, plus some singles and previously unreleased tracks, onto the 16-track Savoir Faire: The Best of Family Fodder. Kicking off with the title track, a brilliant organ-based pop song with bilingual verses sung by Dominique Levillain, the album proceeds to try to encapsulate this collective's curiously wide-ranging pursuits (that album wasn't called All Styles for nothing), but ends up sticking mostly to the group's quirky pop songs rather than its dub or musique concrète experiments. Of course, it takes a certain artistic fearlessness to cover Blondie (a weird and ultimately unsuccessful deconstruction of "Sunday Girl" with coy electronically processed vocals and a middle eight sung by a child), Franz Schubert, and Erik Satie (done inna reggae stylee, yet) on the same album.

This is an edited and remastered vinyl version of their 1998 'best of' CD, issued on Douglas Wolk's Dark Beloved Cloud label in the USA, with newly concise versions of some lengthier tracks.

*New concise versions: A2, B3, B4, B5, B6
*A1: Savoir Faire is album version. (Original CD is single version.)