Review Summary: You'll Like This, Not a Lot, But You'll Like It
B-Side compilations are a strange proposition; a sample of songs that were likely deemed too unrepresentative, experimental or just plain weak to make the cut as full album tracks roped together and given a belated second bite of the cherry. It's no surprise that classic examples of the form are thin on the ground; 'Incesticide' leaps out as one of the best; perhaps you could add 'New Moon' by Elliott Smith to the list; maybe even 'Building Something Out of Nothing' by Modest Mouse at an absolute push. For this type of venture to be deemed viable an artist would surely have had to have reached a certain stature, if not a mega seller then at least a cult act with a loyal following. The late Nick Drake ticks that box and seeing as he was in no position to object it was inevitable that those dusty vaults would be prised open eventually.
What immediately works in this enterprise's favour is that Drake barely changed his musical approach or lyrical themes over his brief career; he was quite possibly the most typically English artist ever to step inside a recording studio. A shy, skinny wisp of a man, there's not an ounce of rock n' roll swagger, Latin fire or Gallic sensuality to be found in Nick's music. No, this is the sound of taking afternoon tea on the village green with Grandma...on that fateful day she choked on her last ever clotted cream scone. An interesting game to play with lyricists is working out which words they use most frequently in their work; with Nick you'd expect 'rain', 'black' and 'cold' to feature prominently. You're left to conclude that compiling this track list must have been the easiest job in the world as whichever songs you selected it was always a dead cert they'd mesh as seamlessly as grey clouds in an overcast sky.
Of course just because you can easily do something it doesn't mean you necessarily should and for this collection to be worth anyone's time it would need to contain at least a couple of great songs, a fair few more good ones and hopefully some intriguing curios to boot. 'Made to Love Magic' just about hits it's quotas but only by a gnat's whisker. 'Joey' is the jewel in the crown, the only song to pass the real test in so far as it would have held its own had had it appeared on 'Five Leaves Left'. It's reflective, sad, Nick's lyrics falling somewhere between genuinely disheartened and a more distanced philosophical introspection.
Of the remaining originals the opening 'Rider on the Wheel' and 'Time of No Reply' feel the most substantial, though neither would have been an album standout had they appeared on say, 'Bryter Layter'; they're exactly what you'd expect second tier Drake cuts to sound like. More interesting are the oddities; 'Magic' features whimsical flute melodies that are unceremoniously usurped by doom laden strings, making for a compositionally awkward yet nevertheless still semi successful experimental offering; meanwhile 'Black Eyed Dog' goes down as possibly the bleakest tune Nick ever penned, one that would've stood out on the uniformly depressing 'Pink Moon' for being overly grim.
The rest of the material included here falls into one of the regrettable, if unsurprising, categories of either sounding unfinished ('Hanging on a Star'), underwritten ('Tow the Line'), unremarkable (the alternative cuts) or just honest to goodness pretty darn awful ('Mayfair'). What you're left with is a strange mix of songs that flow reasonably well and certainly feel representative of the artist at hand...yet rarely offer up anything particularly noteworthy. All told 'Made to Love Magic' is a bit of a rainy Bank Holiday Monday in Margate; a very English brand of disappointment.
