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" There&amp;#039;s been a lot of nonsense written to mark the 20th anniversary of the retrospectively-assigned birthday of Britpop. Released before the storm (New Wave - 1993) and in the eye of it (Baader Meinhof - 1996) these reissues show up a lot of the false folk memories of the talking head crew for what they really are - &amp;#039;I Swear I Was There &amp;#039;- posturing masquerading as genuine nostalgia or real affection for the past. First New Wave. What sounds like a lifetime of resentment/hope quietly explodes into 13 tracks that stretch way beyond the relatively slender means of their recording. Taking on the man (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sick of parking cars&amp;quot;), the long hard slog of overnight success (&amp;quot;Hanging around by the back door/ One foot in the stage door&amp;quot;), pure self-belief/self-determination (&amp;quot;Take heed, small talk / Don&amp;#039;t trust the stars&amp;quot;) - there&amp;#039;s a confident swagger and arrogance to The Auteurs&amp;#039; first album spilling out from every track. Luke Haines knows just how good these songs are.      The album apparently lost out on the 1993 Mercury by a single vote (though who really knows?). Would winning it have changed the singularly awkward path that Haines would stumble through over the next two decades? I doubt it. New Wave has a guileless melodic simplicity and lack of songs about child murder, Gary Glitter and the like, but there&amp;#039;s enough off-centre needle in every track here to hint at the sort of turns that would be taken in the future. In this swanky two-disc package, you get original hidden track &amp;#039;Subculture&amp;#039;, a clutch of contemporaneous B-sides, Rough Trade versions of &amp;#039;Housebreaker&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;Valet Parking&amp;#039;, the mail order Live Acoustic EP and a full BBC Radio session, opening with &amp;#039;New French Girlfriend&amp;#039;, which wouldn&amp;#039;t be released for another 16 months on Now I&amp;#039;m a Cowboy. Even then Haines was a constantly-moving target. For the most hardcore, there&amp;#039;s a clutch of 4 Track Demos. These rickety, home-recorded takes prove that even when completely lacking in spit &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; polish, these songs are untouchable.  Three years and two albums (...Cowboy and After Murder Park) later, came a ridiculous, wonderful, obscene sidestep. Stuck in time between the Oslo Accords and Al-Aqsa Intifada... between the first World Trade Center bombing and the destruction of the Twin Towers, Luke Haines takes some time out from the day job to make a concept album about international terrorism. As you do. This reissue collects the original ten-track Baader Meinhof LP, outtake &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve Been A Fool For You&amp;#039; and a couple of remixes by Haines, one from Muziq, and the Confrontation remix of the title track of unknown origin. It&amp;#039;s stupid and attention-seeking, maybe, but it&amp;#039;s also pretty brilliant. Recorded with producer Phil Vinall and a low-key supporting cast on strings, claps and clicks - including The Cellist James Banbury and Kuljit Bhamra on tabla - it&amp;#039;s so far removed from the rest of 1996 that it might as well be from a different planet. After three albums in three years it&amp;#039;s probably quibbling, but at a couple of moments in the middle it feels like an absolute stone cold killer of a six-track EP slightly stretched out, rather than a properly-realised full-length LP. But the first three songs especially are up there with anything Haines has done before or since.      The lyrics are a mashup of first-person concept and wilfully messy/confused sloganeering (&amp;quot;I was walking around like a crazed cop / With a head of full intent&amp;quot; \u00E2\u20AC\u00A6 &amp;quot;Do it for God / Do it for Allah / Put your faith in Captian Muhmad - and Al-Fatah&amp;quot; ). It&amp;#039;s easy to look at the title and artwork and pretend to be offended, but there isn&amp;#039;t anything in the words that really upsets. It&amp;#039;s more a foreshadowing of Haines&amp;#039;s conceptual leanings that he&amp;#039;d properly explore 15 years later. Both reissues are packaged in lovely cardboard slipcases (FACT: While the MP3 has finally destroyed music as an artifact, the damage was already done the first time the plastic teeth shattered on the inside of a jewel case in testing). A round of applause for 3 Loop Music for showing that someone still cares. There are new candid liner notes from Haines. While the same period was covered in his own bilious Bad Vibes a few years ago, that was written through the voice of the bratty, floppy-haired Haines of the time. This time around we get the views of the much more pleasant - genial even - Haines of 2013. These reissues aren&amp;#039;t going to do much to force The Auteurs up the tedious Britpop lists doing the rounds, or front and centre of the next TV talking heads show. Good. Like all great bits of art, these albums embarrass the desire to rank, list, categorise, collect and define for the reductive waste of time it really is.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/music/album-reviews/review/a551561/the-auteurs-new-wave-baader-meinhof-review-the-mood-of-the-times/>