It’s hard for me to write about The Smiths. There so much I would like to say and so lit­tle tal­ent to say it, at least to honor to the sub­ject. But any­way, for this time I’ll keep it short and sim­ple and I hope to come back to the sub­ject on future posts.

The aes­thetic of The Smiths album cov­ers is very par­tic­u­lar and unique, and watch­ing the cover of their lat­est com­pi­la­tion below you can see they kept the tra­di­tion. Good things do not have to change. The nos­tal­gic imag­i­nary is the best pre­am­ble for the music that’s inside.

The com­pi­la­tion box has newly remas­tered edi­tions of The Smiths’ albums and it came out last year. I has four stu­dio records, three com­pi­la­tions of the sin­gles and one-offs and one live per­for­mance. You can lis­ten below to a com­men­tary by Ed Ward that was aired on Jan­u­ary this year on NPR’s Fresh Air show. If you have the dough, it would def­i­nitely be a nice com­pi­la­tion to buy.

[jwplayer mediaid=“1378”]

Noth­ings Changed, I Still Love You. Oh I Still Love You. Only Slightly, Only Slightly Less Than I Used To. My Love.