ShelleyDevoto - buzzkunst - Cooling Vinyl COOKCD230

Sunday Times 2002-02-24 - by DC

TWENTY-FIVE years after the seminal Spiral Scratch EP, the founding Buzzcocks are reunited on an album so bristling with invention as to shame many a young pup with the right record collection, but no means of interpreting is.

For Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto have produced a minor classic that is both utterly of the moment, and (gloriously) indebted to the past. The pair can't help but sound spookily like their youthful incarnations; yet, for the listener, this is the icing on a complex cake.

So what if the opener, Can You See Me Shining?, gets your nostalgic muscles twitching. or if Self-Destruction provokes the full knee-jerk? Nor would it matter if this was the only type of response provoked. As it happens, on instant gems such as the electro-punk battering ram of 'Til the Stars in His Eyes Are Dead, past and present meld into a convincing future as radical as anything else currently around.