Steve Taylor The Best We Could Find (Plus 3 That Never Escaped)
CCM Magazine
December 1988 Volume 11 Number 6
© 1988 CCM Publications, Inc.
Pages 26, 28
Various Producers
Sparrow Records
Sometimes it takes one of those "Best Of" just-in-time-for-Christmas releases to remind us just how significant a contribution an artist has made to music over the years.
The Best We Could Find, a compilation of Steve Taylor's albums on Sparrow records, does just that for the artist that brought alternative music into the Christian mainstream.
Not only does The Best We Could Find chronicle the finest musical offerings of an outstanding artist, it is the sound of doors opening for Christian punk, new-wave and progressive artists who used I Want to be a Clone, Taylor's 1982 six-song debut, as an entre to larger exposure.
That all six tracks of that first groundbreaking EP find their way on to the CD version of this product, makes it the format of choice for Taylor collectors. Welcome to the '90s.
Other highlights include many of the obvious tracks: the tender tunes "Hero" and "To Forgive" and rock/wave classic "This Disco (Used to be a Cute Cathedral)," "Meltdown (At Maame Tussaud's)," "Guilty by Association" and "On the Fritz."
Three new tracks make The Best We Could Find desirable for those who have all the Taylor albums, although only one is necessary. "Under the Blood," an angry declaration against America's cheap grace, provides a sort of theological summation of Taylor's often humorous slant on the socio/spiritual foibles of popular and Christian culture.
The exclusion of the live rendering of "We Don't Need No Colour Code" being the one miscalculation, The Best We Could Find is indeed the best of Stee Taylor, a personality and talent that has given much to modern Christian music. All of which is to answer a question posed in the final track, "I Just Wanna Know." Yes, we were always catching what he had to say.
Brian Quincy Newcomb
