COMPLETE

This is a pretty solid collection of the original three National Health albums, though it's worth raising some caveats. Firstly, the bonus tracks are highly pointless: Paracelsus offers only a small snippet of the track in question, and the Missing Pieces collection is where you will want to go if you want to hear the material the band cooked up before their debut. The other bonus is The Apocalypso, a Dave Stewart solo synth remake of The Collapso... er, which was already provided on disc 1. What was the point?

Another quibble is that the split of three albums into 2 CDs means that Of Queues and Cures, arguably the band's masterpiece, gets cut in half. At least the split is where the end of side 1 of the vinyl will be - but half the convenience of CDs is not having to turn the disc over!

Still, it's a good collection, though it has to be said that only two of the three albums here are truly essential - D.S. al Coda suffers from a badly dated synth sound - and both of those got nice rereleases on Esoteric more recently, rendering this set redundant unless you absolutely, truly must own D.S. al Coda. (...why?)