HATTITUDE

This is something of a companion piece to Hatwise Choice, with a similar ethos - offering the cream of the Hatfield and the North vaults, helping to fill out the missing pieces in the story of a band who were crucial to the mid-1970s development of the Canterbury scene (containing former members of the likes of Caravan, Khan, Arzachel/Egg, and Matching Mole, and acting as a forerunner to National Health) but whose studio output only consisted of two albums.

Derived from live recordings, radio sessions, and demos, you might expect this to have fairly patchy sound quality, but actually it's much more consistent than you'd expect from such a diversely-sourced collection. As with Hatwise Choice, some of the compositions here may have new titles but prove to be different takes or interpretations on familiar tunes, but there's also enough improvisation and whatnot and sufficient variations from the studio renditions that this doesn't feel redundant.

There may well be more in the vaults than this - but the fact that the Hatfield camp has been satisfied to leave this archival series at two releases suggests that the cream of the crop is already represented here. As with its predecessor, this is in no way as essential as the band's original albums, but once you've digested those it makes an excellent next stop.