Very Best Of The Farm, The

To be bluntly honest, a true The Very Best of the Farm would be a 7" single of their admittedly charming 1990 hit "Groovy Train," with either the follow-up, "All Together Now," or maybe their Pop Will Eat Itself-derived cover of the Monkees' "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone" on the flip. Released a full decade after the Farm's brief moment of Top of the Pops glory, The Very Best of the Farm shows only how poorly the group's aping of the far more interesting Happy Mondays and Stone Roses has aged in the meantime. Although Blur's first album was a similarly bandwagon-jumping affair, the Farm never could move away from their debut's stylistic debts, and the later tracks are merely increasingly less-inspired retreads of what wasn't particularly interesting to begin with. In its favor, however, The Very Best of the Farm does feature the usually much-improved single mixes of the band's hits, unlike the previous The Best of the Farm release from 1998, making this probably the better choice if one really must own a Farm album. ~ Stewart Mason|