Stiff Box

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About Stiff Box

Amazon.com Understand from the get-go that label retrospectives are spotty affairs. Rare is the label that's free of stiffs, and Stiff Records' raison d'état was to serve as a refuge for castoffs, including a fair share of flaccid acts. The off-center likes of Nick Lowe (having recently fleed the misbegotten Brinsley Schwarz), Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis, and a very young Elvis Costello found a home with Stiff in the '70s. It wasn't a punk label, though it boasted the Damned; it wasn't a ska imprint, though Madness and Desmond Dekker recorded for the company; it wasn't a power-pop or pub-rock haven, though a number of Stiff's leading lights (Dury, Lowe, Costello, Dr. Feelgood, Dave Edmunds) fell into those categories. And it wasn't terribly long-lived. This imaginatively designed four-disc overview definitely loses momentum toward the end, but there's a humble enchantment to an overwhelming percentage of tracks here from label mainstays, the semiacclaimed (Devo, Graham Parker, Lene Lovich, the Pogues), and uncelebrated (Mickey Jupp, Mick Farren, Jona Lewie). -- Steven Stolder