Album Review: Bis - The Anthology - 20 Years Of Antiseptic Poetry

Unfairly maligned in the annals of ‘90s indie, Bis were a Scottish punk-pop three-piece fuelled by hand-written fanzines, manga and cornershop candies.

Briefly feeling as though they were the first teenagers ever to pick up a guitar, with pseudonyms (Manda Rin, Sci-Fi Steve, John Disco) and a canny ear for an instant radio-friendly hook, their short-fast-loud sensory overloads were akin to being blinded by a massive neon Coke sign feeding dangerous amounts of sugar directly into your eyeballs. The Anthology tries valiantly to condense all this energy into 42 whippet-fast tracks which ends up as exhilarating as it is exhausting. Wisely kicking off with Eurodisco (one of the best pop singles of the ‘90s: fact!), disc one rampantly shouts and pogoes around with lo-fi kitch abandon in Kandy Pop and School Disco but the keyboards take centre stage over the guitars often and pesky seriousness intrudes a little too awkwardly meaning for every k’powing Starbright Boy there’s a sleepy Sound Of Sleet; for every School Disco, a Silver Spoon.

By the end of disc two, it pretty much balances out, but for an anthology, there are some glaring omissions. Where is superb 1999 single, Detour, for example? Frustrated at not maintaining popular momentum, the three members went extracurricular with Rin’s superbly cutesy My DNA and Dirty Hospital’s squelchy-techno Space Me seamlessly assimilated. With no big messages or wankery art-statements, this anthology is a fun playbox of youthful daft punking.